Night Shift

Tom Riddle is a bundle of careful, tightly wound perfection, and he just has a weird energy. Though his coworkers are about evenly split on the issue, Harry, for one, doesn’t trust him at all.

“You just have issues with authority,” Hermione says with a roll of her eyes when he tells her. Maybe it’s true that Harry has issues with authority, but she doesn’t work the night shift with them, so she doesn’t know. Maybe the guy is different in the day, but he’s a real asshole at night.

He’s a control freak who began implementing bullshit rules right from the start, limiting their smoke breaks and making them wear polos.

Stag Mart isn’t even a nice store. It’s dirty and it’s on the bad side of town. Harry’s never worked a shift during the day, but from what Hermione says, the customers are crazy. He believes her because he often finds the strangest things pushed to the back of shelves, cigarette butts, and used cups, and even a needle once. Not to mention the power failures they kept having, and the dead rats they kept having to plunge out of the toilets. London’s finest.

He’d been hoping that Riddle would at least change these things, that he might make it a little bit safer to work there, but he was wrong.

Harry remembers the first time he was introduced as their new manager by the blonde corporate shill from the head office, acting chummy with him. The way he smiled at them, wearing a suit jacket in a grocery store, too perfect. Who comes to work at a place like this looking like that?

“He’s hiding something,” Harry tells Ron, who is rubbing the sleep from his eyes as they walk through the desolate parking lot from the rust trap they call a car. Harry had to kick the door three times in order to get it to close properly, and there’s a dent in it that just keeps getting bigger.

Ron nods, hurrying alongside him so that they aren’t late again. “Probably. Aren't they all? I mean, everybody knows you can’t trust management.”

Harry agrees, but secretly, he feels it’s bigger than that. Something is off about Tom Riddle, and he’s going to find out what.

Riddle sits in a little office in the back all night doing god knows what while they do inventory, though he does occasionally grace them with his presence. He likes to watch them work, and make unnecessary and irritating comments about their pace every once in a while, especially if he hears too much talking.

Harry has, right away, been singled out for talking too much, though everyone knows he’s the fastest night stocker on the floor. It’s just that most of it gets done the hour before open.

“Aim for a steady pace,” Riddle tells him, and Harry just manages to prevent himself from biting back with a scathing reply. Riddle can probably tell from his body language, his clenching fists and scowl, but Harry can hardly be asked to perform miracles, can he? It’s enough that he has the wherewithal to stay quiet with the four hours of sleep he gets during the day.

“I hate him,” Harry confesses to Ron later, once they’ve gotten back to the shitty apartment they share. It smells vaguely like cat piss outside and an old mattress decorates the little overhang where the mailboxes reside. Half of them have been left open and are groaning on dirty hinges as a cold breeze passes by. Light is beginning to creep over the horizon, casting the entire atrocity in an odd shade, that familiar stage where night clings on and morning hasn’t quite come yet.

“I think you’ve mentioned that before,” Ron says sarcastically, digging out his set of keys and wrestling with the front door.

But Harry isn’t sure he’s said it enough. He doesn’t even know how to express it as fully as he feels it, and Ron doesn't understand. He only wants to talk about how great he thinks Hermione is, and frankly, though he’s trying to be supportive, Harry doesn’t care. Something is wrong. Harry can feel it in his bones, burning under his skin. He’s pretty sure he knows what it is.

It’s whatever is masquerading as a manager lurking around at the back of the store.

Another night, four hours into the graveyard shift, under buzzing fluorescent humming along with the sounds of his coworkers humming or huffing, and Harry is feeling pent up. He needs a break, though hes got another thirty minutes until the next one. He throws a bag of rice at Ron’s face when he finds him nodding off, sitting in the ethnic foods aisle surrounded by boxes, and motions to the back.

Riddle’s office door is right next to the back door and the loading docks. Though it is never closed, Harry is reasonably sure they can get away with sneaking past if they stay quiet. His sneakers make almost no sound on the concrete, and Ron follows his lead perfectly. He’s an excellent accomplice, which is only one of the reasons why they’re such great friends.

Back here, the light gets yellow and strange, and the floor is stained with chemicals. It’s oddly silent, besides the occasional echo of someone hefting a box into the front, or the sounds of rats scurrying along the walls.

Harry turns the knob to the back door with careful slowness, and opens it the same way. It hardly even creaks, though he knows the hinges are squeaky from years of use.

Then they are free, breathing cold air into their lungs, surrounded by a distant tree line and the occasional sound of a car passing on the nearby road. Mostly, it is just quiet, the kind one only gets to experience at night when most of the world has retired to their beds to sleep.

In a city like London, of course, there are nightclubs and bars filled with drunks and escorts and vagabonds, but not this far out. This far out, there is nothing but biting wind and stars.

Though there is a buzzing light back here, the blue black of night is all encompassing, swallowing up everything beyond the little patio at the door. Ron digs out the carton of fags they share and offers one to Harry, who takes it gratefully. He lights it with the pass of a lighter, fingertips and teeth already stained with nicotine. His parents, were they still alive, would be appalled. Luckily they can’t be heard complaining from the grave.

Smoke curls around them, and for a few minutes there is nothing to say. The bags under Ron’s eyes have been getting heavier, and Harry doubts he looks much different. He knows their brains are running at half-capacity, if that, but the job market is rough for a couple of kids who come from poverty. And Ron is happy for the work, he knows, happy just to have something. Though Harry personally has thought about leaving and finding some other way to make a living, he won’t leave Ron behind. Not here, and especially not now that Riddle is in charge.

Something on the ground catches his eye, something that shines in the light when he turns to snub out the butt of his cigarette along the concrete wall. When he goes to investigate, he finds it is a silver coin sitting innocently on the pavement. Though, it is not a coin he has ever seen before, not any currency he knows. There are words embossed in some other language and a snake curled in the center. Cradled in his palm, it feels warm, electric even.

“Huh,” Ron says somewhere behind him. “Must have been dropped by one of the guys in the trucks who made the delivery yesterday.”

It must have. Harry pockets it before they return to work, and decides he’ll examine it more later.

They do have a lot to do before sunrise, after all.

Before the night is up, Riddle asks to speak with him, and Harry is led to the back, to the office decorated in cheap furniture and an old computer monitor, electronics chugging away atop a desk that’s seen better days.

Riddle sits behind it and steeples his hands like some kind of shitty supervillain and Harry burns with rage.

He knows what this is about. He’s been waiting for it for half his shift. He clenches his fists in his lap, sitting on one of the plastic leather chairs that’s spilling out stuffing through a slit in its side like white clouds of guts.

Riddle sighs as he looks at him. “You seem angry, Harry. I can’t imagine why. We are a team here. Would you like to share your grievances?”

Harry thinks that’s all very rich coming from a guy who decided he was going to pull him into the office for taking a smoke break. He says nothing, as he’s found it’s often the safest option when in these kinds of scenarios. He’s fairly sure that Riddle won’t fire him over it; his work output is too good, and he doesn’t show up drunk, but opening his mouth could get him written up. It probably will, even.

Riddle stares at him for another few seconds, perhaps trying to get him to feel intimidated by the silence. Harry doesn’t care. He stares back between narrowed eyes.

There’s a poster on the wall that their old manager had put up, that says “hang in there.” It features a guy with a silly expression on his face hanging from a tree branch by his pinky. Harry breaks their staring contest to glare at that, too. He’s always hated it.

“You know, when I first met you, I thought, now there’s someone with ambition. Someone who seems devoted to his coworkers and to the work, who does it correctly the first time. That’s rare to find these days. Hiring at a store like this?” He shakes his head.

“Wow, yeah,” Harry says, because he can’t help himself, and his tone comes out a little too flat for plausible deniability. “Must be tough for you.”

Riddle continues as though he hasn’t heard, though his expression grows a little tighter.

“Harry, I’ve laid out simple rules. They are not difficult to follow, and I know you are intelligent enough to do so. Don’t—“

“Don’t go out on smoke breaks randomly in the middle of the shift, I know.”

“Correct,” Riddle says, in a hard tone. “Consider this your warning.”

Riddle smiles at him, and it looks fake.

“Heard,” Harry says. He stands, rolling his eyes at the wall when his back is turned to the man. When he touches the doorknob to leave, Riddle’s voice floats over to him again before he can escape the room.

“It’s dangerous to be outside in the dark.”

“I’m going to need you to run that by me again,” Ron says.

They’re both holding cans of energy drinks, embossed with the brand name “Grit,” and standing under the buzzing of the lights outside, on their Manager Approved Break. They’re a little late getting back in, but Harry needs to speak with Ron out of earshot of their coworkers. Ron is on his second energy drink and he’s chugging it like it’s the elixir of life as he listens to what must be the most insane thing he’s heard all day.

“I’m just saying that we should investigate. See what’s really going on,” Harry says, though he’s gotta admit, it sounds a little stupid to him too at some level.

“By breaking into his office?” Ron says, in a flat tone. Harry watches Ron’s face contort into one of pain under the strange yellow light. “Listen, Harry… what do you think is gonna happen if we both get fired?”

“We won’t be able to pay rent. We’ll get evicted, probably,” Harry says evenly.

Ron winces, and it’s not from the cold, Harry doesn’t think. “Yeah. I mean, maybe. Is it really worth the risk to you?”

Harry is nodding before he’s even finished the question.

“We won’t get caught,” he says. Ron looks at him a little woefully, a resigned sigh slipping between another series of chugs of the energy drink.

“I have a plan,” Harry adds, in a useless bid to reassure him, though it’s not a fully formed plan, exactly. He doesn’t say that.

Ron shakes his head, squinting at him, a little unfocused. Harry gets it. It’s almost four thirty in the morning and that’s around the time all of them start to crash.

“We just need a distraction,” Harry says. “Someone who can help us lure him out. Wanker’s in there all the time.”

“Neville,” Ron says and Harry nods because he was thinking the exact same thing.

Something rustles in the tree line, the sound of movement, an animal scraping along the branches of shrubbery, and they both peer into the darkness to see if they can catch sight of it.

“Er, maybe we should go back in,” Ron says, and Harry follows him back to the door that leads to the warehouse. “Did you ever figure out what that coin was for?”

Harry shakes his head as they both reenter the building. “Forgot about it.”

“Well, it’s probably in the dryer now. I threw your stuff in with mine,” Ron admits.

Harry shrugs. It’s a coin. He’s washed plenty before. What could possibly happen?

Chapter 2: This is a Picture I Accidentally Took of a Lamp at a Party I Went to

Chapter Text

Neville Longbottom is probably the slowest employee at Stag Mart. He’s a nice guy and Harry doesn't dislike him, but that’s just a fact. No one does well working the night shift. Even night owls eventually start to lose it; that’s just the nature of the beast. But Neville seems particularly sensitive to it, and he probably shouldn’t have taken the job in the first place.

Harry and Ron find him in the frozen foods aisle, staring into a box of hamburger patties.

“Hey, I could really use your…” Harry begins, but Neville just shakes his head, his eyes widened in terror. “…help? Neville, are you okay?”

Neville looks back to the opened box and they both follow his gaze. It’s filled with maggots, white and eyeless and wriggling. There must be hundreds of them crawling around half-opened bags of meat.

“Gross!” Ron says, and he takes a few steps back. It is, Harry agrees, though it’s also rather excellent timing.

“I don’t understand,” Neville says, sounding a little more uneasy than Harry would expect, even for him. “It wasn’t like that a few seconds ago.”

Harry shrugs. “They probably came out when you opened it.”

“No,” he says, and Harry feels his brows furrow at Neville’s insistent, desperate tone. “No, it wasn’t like this.”

“Okay,” Harry says, though it’s clearly not. “I’ll get Riddle.”

He glances at Ron, who nods his understanding. Ron has always made an excellent lookout.

Harry knocks lightly on the half-opened office door, and peers inside. Riddle is holding something that he quickly places in a rolling drawer in his desk, and snaps it shut.

“Excuse me, Riddle? Uh, we’ve got a bit of an issue in the frozen foods aisle,” Harry tells him.

He stands, looking at Harry with nearly the same level of suspicion that Harry looks at him with. Harry doesn’t really understand that. It’s not like he’s done anything wrong.

“What did you do?” He asks and Harry blinks at the parallel in their line of thoughts.

“Nothing,” he says, holding his hands up defensively. “Neville just found a bad batch of meat. He’s really freaked out about it.”

Riddle nods curtly. “Fine,” he says, and he breezes past both Harry and Ron, clipping away to the front in shoes that have to be uncomfortable to wear all day.

“What do you think that was about?” Ron asks.

“Dunno,” Harry says. “But this is our chance.”

He slips into the office while Ron loiters near the bulletin board around the corner, pretending to read about his rights as an employee with such an exaggerated interest that Harry huffs out a laugh before turning back to the office.

Harry goes to the drawer first because he really wants to know what Riddle was doing in here, and because he probably doesn't have time to get into the computer, even if Riddle is stupid enough to have written the password down somewhere.

When he pulls it open, he stares at what he finds. Lying atop a bed of documents, with crumpled edges, sheets of reports with finance data, is a badge.

An FBI badge.

It’s in a black case, a silver chain looped around it. Harry picks it up, and opens it to reveal Riddle's grinning face on an ID card. He looks younger, in his early twenties, perhaps, his eyes a little less hard.

No way. It can’t be real, Harry thinks.

“Oh! Uh, Riddle!” Harry hears Ron’s voice from around the corner, nearly comically loud. “I have some really, really complicated questions about this poster,” he says.

Harry scrambles to put it back and forces the drawer shut with a spike of adrenaline that makes him jolt.

“Wait!” Ron says, speaking quickly, sounding a little panicked, and it sounds like it’s coming closer. Harry hears the familiar gait, the sounds of Riddle's footsteps echoing through the warehouse. Harry makes his way to the other side of the desk to the office door in a dramatic half-run.

“I have some concerns,” Ron continues. “I think you might be accidentally breaking a few of these employment laws. I mean, section six is um, just a lot, and—”

The door opens, and Riddle stands on the other side of it, glaring at Harry like he is perhaps the most suspicious person alive. Harry really hopes his face is arranged in some innocent manner, though he doubts it.

Behind him, Ron looks pale. He swallows. ‘Sorry,’ he mouths.

“Uh,” Harry says. “I just thought I’d wait in here until you got back. I need to talk to you about uh, about the poster too.”

Riddle looks even angrier somehow, though Harry didn’t know that was possible because he really thought that was as intensely as someone could glare at him.

“You,” Riddle says, turning to face Ron.

“Me,” Ron repeats, his tone somewhere between a question and a statement.

“Get back to work.”

Ron glances at Harry uneasily, but nods, and begins quickly walking the other direction, back towards the doors that lead to the front of the store.

“You,” Riddle says, turning back to Harry. “Sit.” He points into the office at the dreaded chair.

Harry isn’t sure why Riddle’s been reduced to one-word statements, except it’s probably a sign that he is on the verge of breaking something.

Harry does sit, in the same chair he was in just the morning before, though he feels a little like perhaps he should just run, get in the car, drive away and never come back.

Riddle shuts the door firmly, and Harry’s hopes of that happening are dashed right in front of him.

He watches Riddle move to the desk, but he doesn’t sit. He leans half-seated against the front of it, closer than Harry would prefer him to be, and crosses his arms. He’s really tall and Harry has to look up at him. He hates it.

“What’s this about the poster?” Riddle asks, his voice low.

“Er, it’s uh, it’s really condescending. I mean, it offends me,” Harry clarifies quickly.

Riddle’s eyes narrow.

“What about it offends you?”

“Uh, you know, just generally… the entire thing.”

“You don’t like knowing what your rights are as an employee?” he asks, and maybe he really is an FBI agent because Harry is beginning to get the sense that he is being interrogated.

“No,” Harry says, very resolutely, he feels, considering that it’s a complete and total lie, and he’s never thought about the poster before today. “I really don’t. I’m very anti-union, and I don’t appreciate you waving it around in our faces.”

Riddle hums. “It sounds like you’re very knowledgeable about this subject. Which part of the poster talks about unions?”

Harry winces because this is the killing blow for him and his paltry argument and he knows it. “Um, well… I’m not sure, exactly, but I know it’s on there. Probably.”

“Probably,” Riddle agrees, in a sudden change of tone that Harry doesn’t even begin to try to understand. He watches Riddle uncross his arms.

“What were you really doing in here?” He asks, more conversationally, his shoulders relaxing.

Harry grimaces. He knows he’s a bad liar, but he still kind of hoped it would work. “I was just curious, I guess,” he admits carefully.

“About?”

“Uh, about you,” Harry says, and Riddle’s brows shoot up. He makes some kind of expression that Harry can’t place.

“I thought… I don’t know, something seemed off about you,” Harry admits.

Riddle nods slowly.

“You have good instincts, Harry. You found my badge?”

“Yeah. Sorry.” He presses his lips together, trying to look thoroughly chagrined.

“Maybe we can help each other, then,” Riddle says after another long moment of looking at him. He glances somewhere behind him, where Harry thinks he remembers there being a clock on the wall.

“It’s time to clock out,” Riddle tells him, with another careful glance at his expression. “We can talk more tomorrow.”

Ron looks more awake than Harry has ever seen him when they meet at the metal box near the office to punch out. He grabs Harry’s shoulder, eyes wide. “I thought I was never gonna see you again. I mean, I thought Riddle was gonna kill you. He was so mad and you were in there with him. Are we fired?”

Harry shakes his head, feeling very distracted. “I think everything’s okay, actually,” he says under his breath.

Ron shakes his head. “That’s insane. You’ve gotta tell me everything, mate.”

Harry thinks about the FBI badge and he isn’t really sure if he can.

They punch out. Harry’s the last to do so, and his punch is a minute late. He knows he’s going to hear about it tomorrow because they’re all supposed to punch out at exactly 6 am, on the dot, even though there’s only a single machine to do it at, and there are six of them working overnight, lined up at it every morning.

Riddle’s such a dick, even if he is actually an FBI agent working undercover.

Neville looks a little sick still, and Harry debates saying something, but decides against it. Without the excitement of sneaking into Riddle’s office to keep him awake, the exhaustion of the day is beginning to make itself known.

Harry and Ron get in the shitty deathtrap of a car, and drive the thirty minutes back into the city where their apartment is located. Ron interrogates him much less skillfully than Riddle did, while Harry tries to avoid the part where he’s an FBI agent.

“I found some kind of badge. I couldn’t tell whose it was,” he decides, on the spot.

Ron side eyes him like he can tell Harry is lying, but he only says, “that’s wild.”

“Yeah,” Harry says. “What do you think is...”

They both lapse into an uneasy silence as they see a plume of billowing smoke rising from a few blocks over. Harry turns onto the street they live on and they are stopped by the flashing red and blue of police cruisers blocking their path.

Harry stares out of his dirty, cracked windshield. Further down the road, their entire flat is alight with rolling flame.

Riddle is getting out of a black car with alternating lights flashing in his windshield before either of them have moved. Harry sees it in the crooked rearview mirror and any suspicion he once had that Riddle could be impersonating an FBI agent is promptly whisked away.

“We have company,” Harry says, and he sees Ron look too.

“Woah,” Ron says.

‘Woah’ is right because Riddle has been a phenomenal actor up until that point. His face is guarded now, a flatness to his expression that Harry hasn’t yet seen. He walks like he owns the street they’re on, and it’s true that he also acts like he owns the store, but this is different. This is clearly his actual domain.

“Of course,” Riddle says to himself, looking exasperated when he glances in the car and sees Harry and Ron sitting there shellshocked. He raps a knuckle on the glass and Harry rolls down the window the rest of the way hurriedly.

“Hey,” Harry says. “What a coincidence, er... seeing you here.”

“Yeah,” Riddle says sarcastically. He throws his arm in the general direction of the blaze, where firefighters are wrestling with giant hoses, and spraying gallons of water onto it. “This your building?”

Harry nods.

“Get out of the car,” he demands.

“He’s really grumpy,” Ron whispers before they both exit the car. Harry kicks the door shut until the latch takes and they all stand there waiting while he does. It takes four tries.

“Sorry,” Harry says quietly. “It’s finicky.”

Riddle looks like he might have a headache. He’s rubbing his hands over his face.

“Do you think this has anything to do with the coin you found?” Ron asks Harry, his face looking a little blanched.

“Coin?” Riddle pins Harry with a look that is, frankly, so intense that it might be considered harassment in a court of law. “What coin?”

“Oh,” Harry says, leaning away from him awkwardly. “Um, I found a coin and--”

“For fuck’s sake,” Riddle says, running a hand through his hair, clearly distressed. Harry blinks at him because it’s really unfair that he can do that, but only look better for it. “You should have turned it in! It’s one of the rules I painstakingly posted all over the store. Can you not read? Is that the issue?”

Harry doesn’t say anything, but Ron leans closer and his breath comes out in a white puff in the cold of the morning. “He’s got a lot of rules.”

Riddle glares him into submission too, giving Harry a momentary break from the intensity of it.

“You two are idiots,” he says, scathingly, and he walks away in a huff to speak with the small crowd of police officers that are watching their interaction, flashing the badge at them. They look afraid of him too.

“He’s really sassy,” Ron says, with a sly grin.

“Sassy?” Harry laughs, glancing over at his face, bathed in the alternating red and blue lights of the police cruisers, to try to read his expression. “You think he’s gay.”

“I know he’s gay," Ron says, smiling. "I’ve lived with you long enough to be able to pick up on repressed people, Harry. I’m familiar with the weirdos you keep around.”

Harry laughs again and shakes his head ruefully because Ron is his best friend, and he’s right. Harry has, in fact, brought enough men to their place and introduced them to Ron for him to know.

“I don’t know, Ron,” he says a little teasingly. “I don’t think you can just look at someone and tell if they’re gay.”

“You can,” Ron insists. “Remember that guy you dated last year?”

“Weird Texts Guy,” Harry says mournfully. Weird Texts Guy was the strangest person Harry had ever met, and they’d had a running bet on whether he’d ever realize half the things he said were flirtatious, or if he’d die in the closet. Eventually, he’d sent Harry a series of novel-length text messages about how he had “corrupted” him. Harry always attracts guys like that. That’s his curse.

“You’re taking this really well,” Harry tells Ron instead of forcing them to rehash his entire dating history again.

Ron shrugs, looking at the tower of flames. “It was a shitty place,” he says.

Harry knows that Ron feels the same way as he does, that he knows nothing good ever lasts, and that he is always prepared to lose everything.

There's nothing to be sad about. That’s just the way it is.

Chapter 3: This is the Dollar I Used to Get a Snack at the Vending Machine

Notes:

This chapter was inspired by the song “Minimum Wage” by They Might Be Giants. It’s a very deep song, with complex, nuanced lyrics, not unlike this masterfully created work of literary genius.

Chapter Text

“Please tell me you’re joking, Harry,” Hermione says, the next day, her voice tinny over the phone. Ron crowds around the handset Harry holds and listens with his head pressed close. They’re both sitting on a bed in a dingy little hotel room. It’s more of a motel, really, but Riddle paid for it, so Harry can’t really complain.

“I mean, do you want me to lie to you?” Harry asks.

“No, God,” she says, sounding a little annoyed with him already. “I just can’t believe that happened. I’m so sorry.”

Harry rolls his eyes with a scoff. “Everything’s fine,” he insists. “We got the night off.”

“Well, of course you did," she says, resolute in her understanding that everything in the world is fair. "Is there anything I can do to help you guys?”

Harry looks at Ron, sitting beside him, and frowns.

Ron is wiping his hands on his pants and looking a little nauseous. He's sweatier than Harry remembers him being last, too. It’s really cute and kind of sad because Harry is pretty sure he’s never going to be able to say more than a few sentences to her without giving himself heart palpitations. Also, they really can't afford a hospital bill. It's not like the store offers insurance.

“No,” Harry says, when it becomes clear that Ron can't answer. “I think we’re good. Hey, I uh... I was wondering if you wanted to get coffee with Ron and I sometime.”

“NO,” Ron whispers, and Harry isn't at all suprised when he lunges for the phone. Harry holds it away from his ear and bats Ron’s hand away. “Stop it!” he whispers back, grinning.

“Sorry, what was that last part?” Hermione asks.

“Nothing,” Harry says quickly, his voice coming out a little strained as he holds out an arm to combat Ron’s meltdown. “What do you say? Let’s all hang out.”

“Yeah, that sounds fun," he hears her say, though barely. It's a difficult thing to do when he's fighting a battle at the same time. "I’ve got Saturday afternoon free. We could meet at that coffee place close to work. Old Man Dumbledore’s Burnt Grounds. Does that work for you guys?”

Ron is getting more desperate, and his face is red. He’s standing now, and he looks serious.

“That’s...” Harry is kneed in the side, hard. He stifles a sound of pain. “That sounds great,” he finishes in more of a groan. “Sorry, I’ve gotta go. I think I’m having a medical issue. See you then!”

He hangs up, and turns to Ron. “I’m not going, and you are, and I don’t want to hear anything else about it.”

Ron buries his face into his hands and makes a tortured sound. “You’re such an asshole, Harry,” he says, but it comes out muffled.

“You’re welcome,” Harry says because he knows thank you is what Ron meant to say. He can’t wait to be the best man at their wedding.

“What makes you angry, Harry?” Riddle asks him. They’re back at work, and Harry hadn’t even gotten a chance to look at the schedule or stock anything from the back before he was pulled aside for whatever weird conversation this was.

Now, he is again trapped in the little office with Riddle, while he does the evil villain finger steeple. Harry thinks about advising him to stop because it’s pretty bad for his brand, if he wants his brand to be about seeming sane.

“I don’t know,” Harry says. He has no idea why Riddle is asking him this question. “Lots of things,” he decides, a little uneasily. He repositions himself on the chair, which has always been uncomfortable because there's almost no stuffing in it anymore. He feels like this meeting might last a while, if they're getting into what makes him angry.

“Did it make you angry that your apartment burnt down?” Riddle asks.

Harry shrugs. “I mean, it’s inconvenient, but... that’s life.”

Riddle hums thoughtfully, like he’s some kind of grocery store worker psychologist, and Harry sighs.

“What does this have to do with—”

“My rules make you angry, don’t they?” he asks, and it genuinely looks like he’s just learned that, the way he’s suddenly so gleeful about it. The lilt of his voice, and his slight smile gives it away.

“Well,” Harry says, hesitantly. “Yeah.”

Riddle's leaning forward now a bit, and he's really a strange guy, but there's something about it that especially bothers Harry. “Why is that?” he asks.

Harry thinks about it for a minute, glancing at the horrible poster behind the man’s head. “Because they’re restrictive,” he decides. “They’re not very helpful.”

“In your opinion.”

“Right,” Harry says, though he thinks that’s probably a lot of the workers’ opinions.

“Well, I’m going to make a bunch more, then,” Riddle says, and he turns to the computer and starts typing out, presumably, a bunch more.

“Oh my god,” Harry groans, alongside the clatter of key strokes. “Why?”

“Don’t worry about why. You’re going to have to follow them to the letter, Harry. These rules are very important.”

“It sounds like you just decided to do this on the spot, though,” Harry says. “What’s wrong with you? I mean, are you psychotic?”

Riddle doesn’t answer him. He just continues typing. It feels like a lot of typing, and his WPM is fantastic, admittedly.

“What if I just quit?” Harry says, desperately, watching him continue to hit the enter key again and again between each one.

“You can’t quit,” Riddle says. “That’s not an option for you.”

“You can’t stop me from quitting,” Harry says, laughing uneasily.

“Sure I can,” Riddle says, pausing briefly in his bid to make Harry’s life worse to smile at him. It is not kind. “I’m an FBI agent and the federal government is footing the bill for your living situation.”

After a handful of minutes, Harry watches the printer chug out five full pages of hastily created rules, and the paper probably isn’t even cool yet before Riddle begins reading them aloud to him.

“Everyone will require a bathroom buddy," he says. "Your bathroom buddy will be preselected for you. Bathroom buddies will be the reinforcers of rule sixteen, which limits bathroom breaks to three fifteen minute breaks per day.”

“There’s something really wrong with you,” Harry says, though this has been apparent to him for a while now. "We don't need to become the bathroom gestapo."

Riddle continues, like he hasn’t heard. “Rule eighteen states that we will start each day reciting the company cheer—”

“What the fuck is a company cheer?”

“I was just getting to that, Harry, if you’d be kind enough not to interrupt me,” Riddle says, looking at him with some kind of clearly false indignation. “The company cheer is ‘Hang in There,’” he says, very seriously.

Harry glares at the poster again and breathes deeply.

“Rule nineteen. We will be having mandatory team meetings every...”

It just keeps going on and on until Harry is numb with disbelief.

“So,” Ron says, during their next Manager Approved Break. “Riddle’s lost it, huh?”

“Yeah,” Harry says. He’s smoking a second cigarette now, even though he really shouldn’t be deepening his addiction since he has no money to keep it up at this pace. “He really fucking has.”

Ron grunts, shaking his head. Ron knows about it because Riddle walked out into the middle of the grocery store floor and announced that Harry had given him an excellent idea, while Harry just stood there with his mouth open. Then he read the entire list of new rules to their extremely uncomfortable, shocked coworkers. Harry just shook his head where he stood behind Riddle, his eyes wide.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” someone had said, and then they'd literally quit on the spot, but Riddle hadn't even spared the person a glance, even when they'd walked out.

“Yeah,” Harry repeats between intakes of smoke. “He’s lost it.”

“Do you think it’s personal?” Ron asks.

“Duh,” Harry says because this shit seems to happen to him all the time, though he’s never experienced this exact flavor of it before. He doesn’t get why it’s always him. He’s doing something wrong, though, to attract it into his life. He’s accepted that much.

“Do you think Riddle is going to tell us what’s going on?” Ron asks the next day, after they've slept through most of it. They have a few hours before the next shift, and despite the strangeness of living in a motel, Harry finds he doesn't mind it too much. He's used to Ron's snoring, and the motel is a lot closer to work. Their commute has been cut nearly in half.

“Probably not,” Harry says, thinking about it. He splashes some water on his face in the little sink, and tries to finger comb his hair. The bathroom is just a room with a toilet, and the vanity is facing the crappy motel room, which has only a single bed, a tv that doesn’t turn on half the time, and some really disgusting looking stain in the carpet by the door.

“I don’t think so either. Well...” Ron gives him a look laced with suspicion in the mirror. “Maybe he’ll tell you.”

“Why me?” Harry asks, but Ron only continues to give him a scrutinizing look. He's lying on the bed with a veritable island of snacks from the vending machine, the result of getting paid yesterday.

“Oh, come on,” Harry says, turning to face him. “You don’t seriously think there’s something going on, do you?”

Ron stops in his perusement of his snacks to give him the most incredulous look he’s possibly ever seen on his face.

“What?” Harry says, feeling a little defensive, though he isn’t sure why.

“Harry, I know there’s something else going on,” he says.

“No,” Harry says. He sits on the edge of the bed, watching Ron carefully. He is stricken with a bone deep terror that only a veteran of war might feel; the war being, of course, his dating history. “No,” he repeats, haunted. “You’re lying.”

Ron is carefully choosing between an array of brightly colored bags like this is the most important thing he’ll do all day, holding them up and squinting. “Come on, Harry,” he says, without even looking from them. “He’s confused, he’s got control issues, he’s got anger issues, he seems like he’d be borderline abusive, he’s objectively a good looking dude…” he makes a decisive checkmark sign with his hand in midair as he rattles each point off. “He meets all the criteria.”

“It’d be a terrible idea to fuck Riddle," Harry says. "I can see that. He can see that." And, Riddle seems to really hate him, or at least be angry at him, and that’s promising. The situation is complicated enough as it is without Riddle deciding he needs to try to figure out if he’s really into men or not.

“Oh, right,” Ron says, his mouth full of food now. He’s pulled the top of a bag open, in the time Harry was making his case. “It’s a bad idea. You love those. That was the last one I was missing.”

“You know what I miss? I miss when you just played a lot of chess instead of telling me what’s about to happen,” Harry grumbles.

“Pattern recognition,” Ron says, finding the remote and turning on the telly. This time it works, and the room is filled with the wavering bright light from the screen. “You can’t turn it off once you get good at it. Look it up.”

“It’s not chess though, Ron. You can’t predict life.”

Ron sighs, like he’s very tired. He mutes the laugh track on the show with another click of the remote. His attention is fully on the conversation now, and it's a bad sign. “Remember that dinner we had with Weird Texts Guy?”

“I don’t want to talk about—”

“Remember when he called you a disgusting freak, even though we were having a perfectly normal dinner?” Ron makes a face like it's painful to remember it.

“Yes,” Harry says, in a defeated tone. Harry runs his hand through his hair, even though he just fixed it. He gave up on it a long time ago, if he’s being honest.

“Remember when he stormed out of the restaurant?”

“Yeah! I was there, Ron.”

"That doesn’t mean much, Harry. Remember when you defended him in front of all those people?”

“Well, it wasn’t personal," Harry says, but he sounds unsure, even to himself. "That was the day after we fucked. He was dealing with a lot.”

“Harry, mate. You’re still doing it. You’re still defending him," Ron sits up a little, and he's put the snack down. That's how Harry knows it's serious. It's the nail in the coffin, really. "I know it’s some kind of fucked up reaction they have. I know it’s not personal. But why are you into dating people who feel they have to insult you in front of your friends to deal with their self-hatred? Do you think I haven’t seen this enough to know when it’s playing out? Like, you aren’t subtle, mate.”

“No,” Harry says, in a groan, thoroughly defeated now. He presses his face into his hands. “You’re right. I just have to stay on guard, you know? I just have to be aware.”

“That’d probably help, yeah,” he hears Ron say, along with the sounds of people talking on a sitcom as he unmutes the show. “And, I don’t know, maybe it’s not your job to fix them.”

It’s not, but Harry wants to. He wants them to live and do it freely more than he cares about being treated well. It’s a fatal flaw, but one that he can admit to himself.

Harry grabs the bag of chips from Ron’s hand and ignores the horrified sound of protest he makes.

“I need to stress eat more than you do,” Harry tells him.

The store has become something akin to a prison, and the workers that are left stand around the time clock like they are terrified that Riddle is going to restrict something else if they say anything. Harry hates it.

Harry just glares at him when they are forced to half-heartedly say the company cheer. Riddle just frowns at him in response, shaking his head, like he's the one who's being ridiculous and Riddle is disappointed about it.

"Your bathroom buddy for the day is Neville," Riddle tells him, after everyone else has been given theirs.

"I don't need a bathroom buddy," Harry says, through gritted teeth.

"We all need a bathroom buddy," Riddle says with an air of false sympathy.

Neville looks between them nervously. "Um. It's okay, if Harry wants to choose someone else. I don't mind, really."

"It's fine," Harry says, clapping Neville on the shoulder, and ignoring his resulting uncomfortable body language, the way he cringes away from it. "I need to go now, actually, buddy."

Riddle narrows his eyes. "Fifteen minutes," he says.

"What the fuck is his deal," Harry says, when he pulls Neville into the bathroom. He leans against the wall while Neville swallows nervously, looking like he isn't sure what to do, or what his purpose is.

"I don't know, Harry," he says quietly. "I mean, something's wrong with the store. Can't you feel it?"

"Yeah," Harry says, with the world's most sarcastic laugh. "Something's wrong alright. It's our manager."

"He's probably trying to make things safer for us," Neville says. Harry just shakes his head. Neville is the worst person to be his bathroom buddy, he decides. He doesn't want to stand around defending Riddle. That's his whole problem, and he's not doing it anymore.

"Fuck Riddle," Harry says, though he'd admit that might be a poor choice of words, if he wasn't so angry.

They hear a sound from inside one of the stalls, splashing water from a toilet bowl, and Harry watches all the blood drain from Neville's face. Harry pushes the stall door open with a creak, but nothing is inside. He peers into the toilet, and reels back in disgust.

There's a snake in the toilet bowl.

Riddle asked them to meet him at the broken rubble of their old apartment that Saturday, and when they pull up in front of it, it’s really shocking to see the blackened remains of the entire complex taped off, and people on their hands and knees sorting through what is left of their lives.

Riddle approaches the car, and holds up the coin as they get out. He's wearing an actual FBI jacket now, and his nice outfit is covered in what looks like streaks of ash. Harry doesn't bother closing the door to his car properly because he isn't planning to stand around and shoot the shit with an insane person who maybe also is attracted to him. The plan is to answer his questions and leave as quickly as humanly possible.

“This it?” Riddle asks, and Harry looks at the coin again, gleaming in the sun. Harry nods.

“Great,” Riddle says, but he doesn’t sound like he thinks it’s very great. He pulls out a little baggy and puts the coin inside of it, pressing the top closed. “Which one of you put it in the dryer?”

“I did,” Harry says before Ron can answer.

“Great,” Riddle says, sounding like he thinks this new revelation is even less great than the last. “Get in my car.”

“He’s bossy,” Ron says as Harry hands him their shared car keys. Harry glares at him for the suggestive undertones in his voice.

“Knock it off,” he whispers, though Riddle can probably still hear him, standing only a few feet away. “You’re not funny.”

“I’m super funny,” Ron says, not at all cowed by Harry’s glare. “George says it’s the only good thing about me.”

“Well that sucks, then, huh, since now you don’t even have that.”

Behind them, Riddle clears his throat, and Harry turns away to get in the passenger’s side of his car.

“What was that about?” Riddle asks when he slides into the driver’s seat. Harry laughs uneasily, glancing at his long, long legs and perfect jawline.

“You know what? It’s silly, and don’t feel like you have to answer, but I have a question for you.”

Riddle turns his head to look out the rear window of the car as he backs them out of the space he’d parked in, between two police cruisers. “Shoot,” he says, obviously distracted.

“Are you into men, by chance?”

The car idles for a moment as Riddle’s foot leaves the gas. He looks at Harry, a little like he’s been scandalized. “No,” he says forcefully. “Of course not.”

Harry nearly groans aloud because this is all very familiar to him, the tone, the cagey body language, the freeze response, the vehement denial. They’re all very bad signs that Ron was right. It’s not the end of the world, but it's certainly a major threat of extinction.

Riddle starts driving again, putting the car into forward gear jerkily, and he looks a little angry. “What does this have to do with anything? Is this what you were fighting about? Are you—”

“Yeah,” Harry says, glancing out the window. It looks like Riddle might be taking them back onto the highway where he just exited to get here in his own car. “I am.”

Riddle says nothing aloud, but he glances over at Harry, and the minute change in his expression and the heightening tension in the air is really all he needs to confirm it. Riddle looks at him like he’s reconsidering his life choices, though he's probably not aware he's doing it.

Harry sighs. This is going to be so messy. He’s like catnip to these people.

Chapter 4: This is a Postcard From a Vacation I Took

Notes:

What prevented me from editing this chapter and posting it in a timely manner? One sentence that I hated and couldn't fix. My point? Sometimes one sentence is all it takes to make your life very difficult.

Chapter Text

Harry imagined Riddle was probably taking him to some secret FBI building, so when he realizes they’re in the parking lot of the store they work at, it’s a bit of a letdown. The parking lot is nearly empty, which is odd. The store doesn’t close except on major holidays, and it’s a regular Saturday.

“I thought I had the day off,” Harry jokes. It doesn’t land well.

Riddle gets out of the car with the seriousness and aggravation of a man who is walking to his own death, and Harry reluctantly follows.

One of the only cars in the desolate parking lot is a sedan on the curb, and Riddle stops a few feet away from it. He puts his arms up, scowling at it, as if to ask it “what the fuck?”

Nothing happens. No one gets out.

Harry follows him and stops a respectable distance away watching his body language become more hostile.

Inside, though the windows are a bit more tinted than normal, Harry can see another young man, his head tipped back and his eyes closed. The guy is probably around his age, nearly as pale as Riddle, and blonde. He’s asleep.

Riddle reaches out and bangs a hand against the glass of the window, hard.

The guy jolts awake, blinking rapidly, and looking around. When he sees Riddle, he swallows exaggeratedly. He hurriedly rolls the window down, though notably, not enough for riddle to reach inside. Harry thinks he might start crying by the look of absolute horror on his face.

“Draco,” Riddle says, very calmly. Too calmly.

The man closes his eyes. He might be praying, Harry thinks.

“You’re fired. If I ever see you again, I’ll shoot you.”

“No, Riddle, sir.” The car door opens and the man stumbles out of it. “Please, don’t.” Harry watches the guy literally grovel at Riddles feet, feeling his brow furrow. Draco clearly works for the FBI, but don’t these people have any self respect? No job could possibly be worth doing this for.

Apparently it is for this guy, because he’s actually sniffling a little. “My father,” he says, pathetically, while Riddle looks like he’s considering kicking him.

“Get up. You’re pissing me off,” Riddle tells him, and Draco scrambles upright. “You’re the most incompetent piece of shit I’ve ever met, and I’m running a store of minimum wage employees!”

“Hey,” Harry says, and they both look at him. “We’re not incompetent just because you won’t pay us well. That’s your problem.”

“Yes, you are,” Riddle says, turning the full force of his glare on Harry, who has to admit, it’s pretty dramatic. If Harry hadn’t seen it every day since Riddle started, he might even be nervous. As he has been the recipient of it at a near-constant rate, Harry only rolls his eyes.

Draco looks terrified for him, which is touching, he supposes. “I’m sorry,” the blonde-haired man says, recapturing Riddle’s attention and cringing under it. “I’m just so tired.”

That was apparently the wrong thing to say, because Riddle looks like he’s vibrating with rage. “We’re all tired! When do you think I’ve been sleeping?”

Draco shakes his head. He stares straight ahead, his gaze faraway. “I-I I don’t know,” he says, with a haunted, thousand-yard stare. He’s leaning over his car door now, like he could pass out at any moment. “I didn’t think you needed sleep. I thought you, like, you trained yourself out of it or something. I don’t know.” He laughs and it sounds a little hysterical. “I mean, it’s not normal.”

They both look tired, if Harry’s being honest, and maybe that’s why Riddle is so angry. Harry does understand something about sleep deprivation and what it can do to the mind. He’s certainly experienced it. Maybe Riddle would be more stable if he slept. Maybe he wouldn’t threaten to kill this person, who apparently works for him. Harry considers suggesting they all take a nap, but decides that probably won’t go over well.

“Fine,” Riddle snaps, after a long stare down. “Take the fucking afternoon off, then. You’re useless to me.”

“Oh, thank you sir,” Draco says, sagging further over the door. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. I’ll be fine after I just sleep for a little while.”

“Quiet,” Riddle says. “Leave before I change my mind and decide you're no longer needed.”

Draco nods over-enthusiastically, like Riddle is a benevolent god, and he agrees that death threats are appropriate for this situation.

“Man, that’s sad,” Harry says, frowning. “Come on. He isn’t really going to kill you, I mean…”

Draco scrambles back into the car while Riddle is distracted yelling at him, but not before he glances at Harry like he’s the crazy one. Harry doesn’t listen to the barrage of insults coming out of Riddle’s mouth, something about him being an idiot or undermining him or being insubordinate. Riddle’s vocabulary would be impressive if Harry cared about sounding like a pretentious twat. As it is, he’s hardly impressed by that sort of thing.

“Alright,” Harry says, as he watches Draco peel away. He holds his hands up in what he hopes might be viewed as a placating gesture. “My god, can you stop? You’re actually, literally a nightmare of a person. I get it. Why are we here, on one of my only days off?”

“I don’t get days off,” Riddle says, vicious and mean. He kind of looks like he wants to hit him. “Neither do you.”

“I know,” Harry sighs, wincing in sympathy at how crazy he looks. “I can see that.”

Riddle blinks at him, squinting, looking a little like he doesn’t know what to do now that Harry doesn’t think he’s Scary™.

Harry imagines what it might take for Riddle to get some sleep, and he gets further into the thought process than he’d like before he shuts it down completely. He can't help but ache to see Riddle relaxed for once in his life, though he can’t really picture what that would look like on his tortured face. He can tell Riddle wouldn’t be able to either. Harry is beginning to suspect that Riddle was this neurotic from birth.

And man, when Ron is right, he’s really right. Harry keeps his mouth closed, the muscles in his jaw tight, to prevent himself from saying the dumbest thing he can think of, like ‘let me fix all of your problems,’ or ‘what hotel are you staying at? We should go there.’

"Just. Go inside the store," Riddle says. "We need to have a conversation."

Harry is starting to really hate the manager’s office in the back. He’d never particularly liked it, but he also hadn’t felt such vehement, intense bone-deep hatred for it either, as he finds he does now. Being lectured by Riddle in this office is the last place he wants to be on his day off. He can only hope that Riddle hasn't created more rules for them.

“Where did you get this coin?” Riddle asks him, setting it down between them on the desk. He’s using the falsely nonchalant tone that Harry recognizes from being interrogated by him about the poster, the one that really doesn’t mean anything good is going to happen.

“I found it outside by the loading docks,” Harry says, looking at it. The silver coin is still in its baggy, something they use to hold evidence. The word is printed into the plastic in stark, blocky letters.

“That’s impossible, Harry,” Riddle tells him, with more false, clearly sarcastic cheer. “Do you want to know why?”

“Sure,” Harry sighs. “Why not.”

“Because that coin,” Riddle looks down at it. “Shouldn’t be here.”

Harry nods patiently, though he wonders just how far gone Riddle really is. “Uh,” he says, gesturing at it. “But it is. I mean, it’s right here.”

“I’ve been on the phone all day with experts, historians. They all agree it’s an ancient currency of which we only have a few pieces. What we have is in special collections, in museums,” he says, and the chair creaks as he leans back in it. He tilts his head at Harry and raises his brows.

“So,” Harry says, when Riddle doesn’t say anything else. “Someone created it. It’s a forgery or something?”

“They say It’s probably real.” Riddle says. “None of the coins are available for public viewing. Only a few people in the world would be able to reproduce this, and I spoke to all of them in the last few hours.”

“Okay,” Harry says, not understanding why Riddle is talking to him like he’s sharing a foreboding omen. This is starting to sound a little bit like a conspiracy theory.

“So do you want to try that again?” Riddle pins him with the full force of his glare. “Where did you get this coin?”

“By the loading docks,” Harry repeats. “It was on the ground. I don’t know what to tell you.”

Riddle narrows his eyes. “Do you know it’s a crime to lie to a federal agent?”

“I’m not lying!” Harry says, a little too forcefully to be polite. He runs a hand through his hair. “Like, do you hear yourself? I work at a grocery store. I didn’t go to college. How would I know about any of this?”

“Yeah,” Riddle says. “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out too. But you’re by far the most suspicious person who works here.”

“Suspicious?” Harry laughs. “You sound crazy.”

To be fair, he also looks crazy. There’s a manic quality about his expression as he leans across the desk.

“Why aren’t you upset about your apartment burning down? Am I supposed to think that’s not suspicious?” he demands. “What evidence were you getting rid of?”

“Nothing,” Harry says. “There’s no—”

"Why don't you want to have a bathroom buddy, despite the fact that it would only help keep you safer? Is it because you're doing something you shouldn't be?"

"No," Harry says. "It's because it's ridiculous!"

“You tried to wash someone’s fingerprints off the coin, didn’t you? That’s why you put it in the washer and dryer, for plausible deniability.”

“That’s so stupid,” Harry says, but he has to admit, he can also understand the logic of that theory. Riddle is leaning over the desk like the force of his words will work better if he's closer.

“You don’t crack under pressure, even enormous amounts of it. Do you know how long it takes to train someone to be able to do that?”

Harry shakes his head, mute.

“You went through my office, and figured out I was an FBI agent immediately. You know something, or you’re working for someone who does, aren’t you, Harry?”

Harry blinks at him. “No,” he says. It comes out a bit quiet because he’s not sure what he can say to make a case for himself. He must be the unluckiest person alive because if Riddle was trying to convince him of someone else doing all these things to cover something up, Harry would probably believe him.

Riddle shakes his head, but his body language is a little more lax, and Harry can’t understand why. “If someone is threatening you, we can protect you,” he says. “But you need to start talking.”

“No one is,” Harry replies, and he’s beginning to think maybe he should actually just stop talking. Maybe talking is what got him into this mess in the first place. “It’s just a series of coincidences.”

“Then you’re under arrest,” Riddle says, giving him a flat, disbelieving look, and he stands.

“You can’t be serious,” Harry says, incredulously.

“I am,” he says, and he produces handcuffs from the pocket of his jacket. “You should have cooperated.”

Harry allows Riddle to put the handcuffs on him, gripping his arms and pulling them behind his back without resisting, and he rolls his eyes when Riddle tests them against his wrists, like he’s a dangerous criminal that’s going to find a way to get out of them.

“You’re being insane,” Harry tells him. “Frankly, I think you need to get laid.”

That makes him angry, as Harry expected it would. He can tell because he’s practically shoved out the door of the office. Harry really hopes that Ron is having a good time with Hermione because he lied to get him out of dealing with Riddle today. Harry wasn’t even the one who put the coin in the washer and dryer, not that he’s going to admit that now.

“Shut up,” Riddle tells him, in the warehouse now. “Keep your perversions to yourself.”

Harry sighs, raggedly. He isn’t sure which thing he did wrong to get here. It was a bunch of things, probably, he decides, standing there, listening to Riddle lock the office door behind him.

Then, all the lights go out at once, plunging the entire store into darkness.

Riddle has a gun out and he’s waving it around immediately. It takes him a second to recognize it in the dark, but then Harry feels it pressed against his back, and he realizes that has to be what it is.

“Is this your rescue party?” Riddle asks, and he’s breathing very close to his neck. Riddle smells good, it’s some sharp cologne he’s wearing.

“Uh,” Harry says, trying to ignore the feeling of having a gun to his back. “Probably not, since I’m not working for anyone but you, and you don’t seem to care if I die.”

“Just another coincidence then?” Riddle laughs. “Sure.”

They’re right by the back door, so Riddle pushes him forward with the gun until he hits it. Harry watches him reach out and try to open it, but he hears the metal hit something just outside, preventing it from opening. Riddle curses behind him.

Then they’re both freezing in place, because it sounds like a ton of water is coming from somewhere, like every toilet and sink in the grocery store is overflowing at once.

“I need you to get very real with me, Harry. How disposable are you to these people?”

“Extremely disposable, I’d imagine,” Harry answers, since he has no idea who Riddle’s talking about or what’s going on.

The sound of water running only grows more intense. It’s a little alarming how loud it is, even though it’s echoing through the store. Harry can’t figure out where that much water would be coming from. It’s beginning to pool across the entire floor of the store, and his shoes are on wet concrete now, when he moves. He sees Riddle trying to force open the door with a series of bangs, though he is just a blurry shape in the dark.

Riddles sighs, aggravated, and he flips out a cell phone, pressing it to his ear. “I need backup, you idiot.” he says, after a length of time that implies whoever is at the other end of it hasn’t picked up and he’s leaving a voicemail. Harry can guess it might be Draco, who might have turned his ringer off.

They both freeze because something is moving in the water, and it sounds close.

“FBI! Stay where you are!” Riddle yells, and Harry flinches at the volume because he’s right beside him. Whoever it is, they don’t stop moving.

It doesn’t sound like footsteps, either. It sounds like something is being dragged through the water, something heavy. Harry squints in the dark around him in the direction of the noise. The water is nearly up to his ankles now.

Nothing happens, so Riddle goes back to messing with the door.

Harry sees it first, because he's still peering into the dark uneasily.

The head of a snake pokes out of the water and stares at him with black eyes. It’s giant. It’s gotta be as wide across as his torso. Its tongue flicks out to taste the air. Harry scrabbles behind him to grip Riddle's arm as best he can with his hands restricted in handcuffs. No sound comes out of his mouth, though it opens of its own accord.

Riddle turns and looks at him from where he's still struggling with the door. Harry nods in the general direction of the animal, and Riddle turns to look at it too. The light from the cell phone falls across it, strange and dim. Harry hears Riddle breathe, though he can't tear his gaze away from it to try to read his expression. “What the fuck,” he says nearly too softly to hear over the din of water filling the store.

The snake begins whispering to them, and really, that’s the last of Harry’s belief carved away that he is still sane, or awake. Snakes don’t whisper in reality. For a moment, he thinks maybe he just made it up, but it keeps going.

It’s clearly not friendly. The shit it’s whispering is just a bunch of nonsensical words strung together; “kill, eat, give, murder, find, blood, death.”

Harry takes a few steps backward, sloshing in the water, which now nearly reaches their knees. He hears Riddle cock his gun, and sees him aim. Harry feels like something bad is going to happen because if this is some kind of shared hallucination, he worries the snake could be anyone or anything.

The snake lunges forward so quickly that all Harry sees is a blur of white. Riddle's gun goes off, unbelievably loud in the space between the exit door and his office, accompanied by the flash of it, and then there’s a struggle, movement and water and the light of the phone is extinguished. In the moments they're still enough for Harry to see, he can barely make out that the snake's large mouth is open and its teeth are firmly sunken into Riddle’s arm, and it must be strong, because it has begun to wrap around his body.

“Oh fuck,” Harry says, but there’s isn’t much he can do in handcuffs but watch and back away.

Riddle opens his mouth and speaks in a voice that is not his own. “Give me the coin.”

There’s another struggle, more freezing water sloshing in waves around them, and Riddle’s other hand is grasped around the snakes head, trying to pry it off. He hears Riddle fall into the water, and sees the white snake looping around his middle, hissing, a gurgling thing between between the wash of blood and water.

Harry feels around the ground for the gun with his foot, though he’s also fairly certain he can’t do anything to grab it without drowning. He doesn't feel anything. “What do you want me to do?” Harry asks, not at all very calmly.

Riddle doesn’t answer, of course. He’s busy trying to keep his head above water as the powerful muscles of the snake pull him further to the floor.

Then it all stops, and Harry is filled with dread. Riddle is just sitting there on his knees, and the snake has stilled around him. Only the sounds of the distant cascade of water echo between them.

“Haaarry,” Riddle whispers, drawing the word out, and it’s absolutely not right. It’s not his voice. It’s too cold and too high pitched. Harry staggers back again until his cuffed hands hit the door, breathing heavily.

The voice laughs.

“Reach into his pocket and place the coin into his mouth, and I will spare you,” the voice says.

“Um,” Harry says. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, and besides, I don't think I can.”

The handcuffs snap as they are unlocked, and they fall into the water behind him. Harry stands there for a few seconds, trying to figure out how that could be possible, but he can't. That's not something handcuffs do.

Harry swallows, rubbing his wrists where they’ve bitten into his skin. This is a horrible dream, if he's in one.

“What’s wrong, Harry?” whatever is possessing Riddle asks, teasingly.

Harry doesn’t even know how to begin to answer that question. There are so many things wrong with this.

“Do it,” it hisses, no longer sounding entertained when the silence drags on, “or you will both die.”

Harry forms an admittedly terrible plan as quickly as he can. He staggers forward into the water, and kneels down in front of Riddle, careful not to touch the snake. It’s too dark to see clearly, but this close, he can see that Riddle's expression looks eerily blank, his body lax. Harry shivers as he reaches down in the water, trying to find the gun with one hand, while also running his other hand over Riddle's pockets.

“I don’t think the coin is here,” he says carefully, in as neutral a tone as he can manage. “Maybe it fell.”

The thing says nothing, so Harry begins searching for the gun with both hands, sweeping along the concrete floor. His fingers are beginning to get numb, and the water level is rising. It's nearly to his waist, now that he's on his knees on the floor.

Riddle twitches beside him.

He feels his hand move over something, hard and the right shape to be a pistol. Harry doesn’t know how to use a gun, but this creature clearly doesn’t know that. He pulls the firearm out of the water with a slosh of motion, and holds it against the creature’s body decisively, angling it away from Riddle's body as best he can.

It laughs at him with Riddle’s mouth. “You can’t kill the dead, Harry,” it says, unperturbed. Harry swallows. That's pretty bad news.

Riddle jerks, and the thing stops laughing. He sees the mouth of the snake bite deeper into Riddles arm, shiny with another ebb of blood.

Harry pulls the trigger.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Harry says, because Riddle is slumped over him in the dark, and he’s going to drown if Harry doesn’t get him out of the building. Freezing water is nearly at his chest now.

The snake is nowhere to be seen. He can hear it moving though, the ripple of water echoing somewhere in the dark.

Riddle groans, and Harry shakes him by the shoulders. “Wake up!” he says. “Do your FBI agent shit or we’re both going to die.” Riddle only makes some kind of face, like he’s in pain.

“Agent Riddle!” Harry yells. “For fuck’s sake!”

Riddle opens his eyes, and their faces are very close together.

Because Riddle is the most melodramatic person alive, he says, “I’m dead.”

“Oh my god,” Harry says. “You’re not. Get it together.”

Riddle is breathing heavily and looking at his lips, and if Harry could just rewind time a little, if he could just stop it from happening this way…

He can’t, and he isn’t surprised when he feels Riddle’s lips against his. They’re both so cold that they’re shivering against one another, but Harry doesn’t care. The immediate danger of the situation only heightens his desire. It’s so good. Riddle is such a devastatingly good looking guy and his obvious hesitation in kissing him only makes Harry groan aloud, and press him closer in the dark. Riddle makes a bitten off, tortured noise against him, placing his freezing hands on Harry's neck, and Harry deepens the kiss, unable to help himself.

He feels out of control within a few seconds, all the very good reasons why this can’t happen right now, or ever, escaping his grasp. Riddle lets him touch, he doesn’t do anything to stop it or make his displeasure known, so Harry runs his hands over Riddle’s shoulders and sides and he wishes there were zero layers of clothing between them instead of what feels like at least twelve. He wishes they weren't waterlogged and that he had some feeling in his hands.

It would feel so good to feel Riddle’s lips on his cock. They’re so soft. When he pulls away with a string of spit, Riddle glares half-heartedly at him like he just ruined his life, but Harry is used to that. It barely phases him anymore.

“This is inappropriate, Harry,” Riddle says, and it comes out a little slurred. But Harry wasn’t the one who started it, and he doesn’t know what Riddle wants him to say. He just blinks at him.

There’s a sudden noise from behind them, metal scraping on concrete, and the back door opens, the light of day blinding.

“Woah!” someone says, and Harry hears water pouring out onto the back patio.

Draco checked his voicemail, it seems.

Chapter 5: This is... Starting to Become a Problem, Isn't It?

Chapter Text

Back to a general state of consciousness, Riddle begins to rapid-fire verbally harass Draco and then the EMTs that join them within minutes of their arrival.

“I know everything you know,” Harry hears him yelling from the back of an open ambulance. “I’ll tell you when I need medical care.”

“Sir, please,” he hears one of them say, and the woman sounds like she’s considering quitting. Riddle has a knack for inspiring that in people. “Allow us to look at—”

“You’re an idiot and even if you aren’t, which I’m not saying I think you aren’t, you’re just going to tell me what I already know.”

It just keeps going like that, more insults, more yelling, more begging, until it becomes background noise.

“He’s gonna fire me,” Draco says, listening beside him where they’re standing in the parking lot, perhaps twenty feet away from the ambulance. “I’m the one who called the paramedics.”

Harry nods. “Probably,” he says. “But it seems like a pretty terrible job anyway, and I know he’s horrible to work under, so, who cares?”

“It’s not,” Draco says, turning to him. “He’s the only person in the FBI anybody wants to work for, trust me. If you’re working with Riddle, you get the best cases, and if you’re any good, he won’t let you die. I once saw him give someone CPR while he succeeded at hostage negotiation at the same time.”

Harry stares at the way Draco’s face contorts into the most earnest expression he’s ever seen. Draco sounds like he has an almost unbelievable amount of loyalty towards the guy who also, just earlier today, threatened to kill him. Harry shakes his head.

“Sometimes he just takes people out of prison and gives them jobs, and they let him do it. Everybody trusts Riddle. He’s never wrong,” he adds, with a reverence that should be reserved for the sacred.

“Well, he’s wrong about me,” Harry says, mentally sidestepping the disbelief that entire statement draws up in him.

Draco looks at him, incredulously. “He thinks you’re embezzling tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise?” He laughs. “No offense, but you don’t look the type.”

“What?” Harry says.

“Yeah, why do you think we’re here? One of your coworkers is a thief. I think it’s Ron, personally. He’s too quiet.”

Harry blinks rapidly. “What? Ron’s not— No. What about the coin? What about all the shit that just happened in there? I mean, I think I saw—”

Draco shrugs. “No idea what you’re talking about. Maybe you just need more sleep. A couple of hours will do you wonders, trust me.”

“Oh my god,” Harry says. “Riddle lied to you. No one’s stealing that much. That would take entire trucks to move. You think I wouldn’t notice something like that? I mean, I’ve worked here for a year!”

Draco squints at him, looking confused. “Then what do you think is really going on?”

“There’s a fucking snake ghost in the store!” Harry yells, motioning behind them at the building in exaggerated gestures of his arms.

He watches Draco laugh again. “You sound insane,” he says. “You’re never going to get a job offer with that theory.”

“I don’t want a job offer!” Harry shouts. “I want to get out of this without dying! And it’s not a theory! I fucking saw it with my own eyes!”

Draco doesn’t seem to understand what he’s saying somehow because he’s patting Harry on the shoulder sympathetically. “Listen, I know that you’re ambitious. Riddle’s said as much, but you also have to be realistic, okay? Riddle is looking for level-headed people.”

“What is wrong with all of you?” Harry asks, very seriously, and in a manner he feels is very level-headed, considering the situation. “Does working for the FBI require you get lobotomies?”

“No,” Draco says, and he withdraws his hand, looking confused again. “You have a lot of wild theories,” he concludes.

Riddle is still arguing with the medical personnel in the background when one of them hops out of the ambulance and approaches them. “Harry?” she says.

“Yeah,” Harry says, his tone flat.

“He says, and I quote, ‘Harry is a suspect in a crime, and I’m not going anywhere without my suspect.’”

Draco stares at him, but Harry ignores it. “Fine,” he says.

The woman leads him to the back of the ambulance, where Riddle is sitting on the edge of a gurney, threatening the other paramedic, his fist in the man’s shirt.

“He does that when he’s tired,” Harry says.

“Sir, have you not been sleeping?” the paramedic asks, his brows knitted in concern.

Riddle’s face gets red and he takes a large breath to yell some more, though he does remove his hand from the man’s person. “Alright,” Harry says quickly. “We can go. Do you have something for a headache? Actually, never mind. I don’t have insurance.”

“Who is he to you?” the woman asks, as she closes the ambulance doors.

“He’s my manager, I guess,” Harry says because he can’t figure out how else to answer that question. It’s a question with at least three answers, each one crazier than the last.

The woman winces in response. Yeah, Harry thinks, feeling a sense of validation from her concerned expression. This is his life.

There isn’t much room in the ambulance for all of them between the equipment, but there’s a little metal bench welded into the back that Harry finds he can sit on if he does so uncomfortably close to the female paramedic. The ambulance begins moving, along with the muffled noise of the sirens.

“I’m not going to the hospital,” Riddle tells them.

“That’s literally where we’re going right now,” Harry says.

“Shut up, suspect,” Riddle replies, glaring, but he doesn’t have his handcuffs anymore, so he can’t really do anything about Harry being a suspect.

“You guys have ah, an interesting employee-manager relationship,” the woman says, laughing awkwardly.

Harry nods because there are so many ways that’s true that it’s nearly unbelievable to him at this point.

“Sir, I’d like to give you an IV,” the other paramedic says, and Harry can tell it’s not going to go over well because he’s talking to Riddle like he’s a child. “Would you let me do that?”

“If you touch me, I will hit you,” Riddle tells him, very seriously.

“Your… employee can hold your hand if you’re afraid,” the man says, and then Riddle actually does full on punch him in the face. The poor guy reels back against the side of the ambulance and holds his eye. He is definitely going to have a bruise with the impact from that kind of force.

“Alright,” the woman says, her tone steely. “Do anything like that again, and you’re getting a psych hold.”

“It’ll never work,” Riddle says. “I already know Harry can’t, but can you all also not read? I’m an FBI agent. It’s on my jacket.” He turns to show them the white letters on the back.

They blink at him, and Harry sighs. He’s getting really sick of hearing that used as an excuse for everything Riddle does.

Luckily, Riddle seems to accept his fate by the time they make it to the hospital, and he’s even fairly calm when he exits the ambulance. He got to punch someone, and maybe that calms him down, Harry thinks.

He’s a little wobbly, probably because blood has been continuously running down his arm the entire time he’s been in there. The puncture wounds from the snake ghost seem very deep to Harry. He isn’t sure how Riddle is going to explain to the doctors what happened without actually getting thrown into the psych ward, but he expects that Riddle will probably just expertly lie about it.

The triage nurses tell Riddle that Harry can’t come in with him unless he’s a family member, and Riddle seems too tired now to glare them into submission. They stand outside the door and Riddle waves away a nurse with a wheelchair who is trying to get him to sit in it.

“If you try to leave the country, I’ll know,” he tells Harry. “I have three trackers on you as we speak.”

Harry nods, unperturbed by this news, and not even really surprised. “I won’t. Will you call me if you need anything?”

“No,” Riddle says and then he’s ushered into the back.

Harry goes back to the motel and changes out of his unbelievably wet and dirty clothing into the only other set he owns. Ron isn’t back yet, but the conversation they’re going to have to have makes Harry exhausted just to think about. He crawls into the bed and takes a well-earned nap.

Harry is awoken by the phone in the room ringing, and he groans as he answers it, reaching out to the bedside table blindly.

“Yeah?” he says, his voice rough with sleep.

“Harry, Riddle’s out of the hospital and he’s… Look, I know it’s your day off, but could you come to the store?”

It’s Hermione. Harry closes his eyes and rubs a hand over his face, dislodging his glasses. “What do you mean he’s out of the hospital?”

Ron pokes his head out of the bathroom, his eyes wide.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t think he was treated. His arm is… He bleeds through like six bandages an hour. When he’s not yelling at everyone in the front, he just sits in the back and rewraps his wound. I know you were there. Maybe you can talk to him.”

Harry shakes his head. “Why are you guys even at the store? Why is it even open?”

She sighs over the phone. “Honestly, I have no clue. The water damage is really bad. They should really get a special clean up crew in here.”

“Alright,” Harry says. He hangs up.

“Come on, Ron,” he says, sitting up and trying to ignore the alluring comfort of the bed. “Your girlfriend needs you and I have to go try to talk Riddle down from some ledge he’s on again.”

The store is still full of water, though it only reaches their ankles, and the workers are sloshing around with buckets and cups, throwing it out the back door in an uncoordinated effort. The whole nightmare is only visible by the camping lanterns they carry, little beacons shining across wet linoleum. It smells vaguely of rotting food. It’s actually, completely insane.

Ron stares when he joins Harry a couple of seconds later, standing in the doorway. “I’m going to go… find Hermione,” he says slowly.

Harry nods. He turns the corner to Riddle’s office, where the door is ajar.

“We need to talk,” he says.

“About what?” Riddle asks, in a remarkably calm tone. His arm is covered in tightly wound bandages, unevenly splotched with stark red. There are six boxes of gauze beside him on the desk.

“Take your pick,” Harry says, and though he takes a deep breath, it isn’t much help in keeping him calm. “Maybe about you trying to arrest me, or your sexual problems you’re making my problem, or you leaving the hospital with an open wound, or the fact that we’re working when we have no food to sell, or, I don’t know, maybe about the snake that spoke to us?”

Riddle reacts to none of it. “This is a covert mission, Harry,” he says, frowning. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t yell details about the case with the door open.”

Harry goes inside the office and shuts the door harder than is necessary. He sinks into the chair and winces. It’s wet. He’s going to burn the chair someday, he decides. Maybe the whole office, though it’s in fairly bad shape already. Riddle’s desk is devoid of all electronics, and it looks like the desk is too warped at the bottom to hold much, anyway. Riddle sits behind it as though nothing is awry.

Harry glares at him. “Nothing about this is covert. This is overt.”

“It remains covert,” Riddle says, like Harry is a difficult child who needs reassurance. “And there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything that’s happened.”

“Yeah?” Harry says, seething. “I’d love to hear what kind of nonsense you’ve made up in your head about it.”

“Well, Harry, there was obviously a plumbing leak in the building that short circuited the lights. The back door, I’m told, was blocked by a wayward dumpster.”

“A wayward dumpster,” Harry repeats.

“Yes,” Riddle says, very seriously.

“And the snake?”

“The toxic gas from the sewers that came up through the toilets caused us to hallucinate about—“

“Are you serious?” Harry asks. It looks like Riddle also got a little sleep, and it did wonders for his ability to be patient, that’s for sure, but his coherence is somehow also worse because now he’s had time to justify what happened, and he does seem to believe what he’s saying.

“I am completely serious,” Riddle says, confirming the worst of his fears.

Harry crosses his arms, trying to maintain some sense of calm, though it doesn’t last long. “Well, I think whatever is going on here is unexplainable. We need to call an exorcist or something. And you’re clearly gay. And, we shouldn’t even be here. There’s nothing to sell and it’s a huge safety hazard.”

“Harry, please stop being inappropriate. My sex life is not open for discussion.”

“You were the one who—“

“I was experiencing blood loss,” he says, narrowing his eyes.

Harry laughs. “Okay,” he says. “Next time I’m bleeding out, I’ll see if I feel like making out with the nearest woman and get back to you on that.”

“Get out of my office,” Riddle says, anger finally cracking through his calm facade.

“No. You need to go back to the hospital and let them give you stitches. Tell everyone to go home before someone gets hurt.”

“This is obstruction of a federal investigation,” Riddle says, in nearly the same escalated tone that Harry is using. “Do you want to be arrested again? Is that part of your sick fantasy?”

It isn’t, but Harry’s beginning to suspect it might be Riddle’s. “Sure,” he says anyway. “Can we see how it plays out at the hospital?”

Riddle glares at him. “Get out. Of my office.”

“Is that what you really want me to do?” Harry asks because he’s pretty sure it’s not. He’s pretty sure Riddle wants Harry to press him over the desk and fuck him while he tells Harry he hates him. It might even be therapeutic for him.

Riddle looks at him like Harry punched him in the stomach, so he knows he’s right, but there’s nothing he can do about it. Plus, it’s not why he’s there. He has to firmly tell himself that to whittle down his excitement, but he does.

Riddle stands decisively, like he’s gonna arrest him again. It’s clearly a threat.

“Nothing is wrong. I don’t need to go to the hospital and I’m not gay,” he says in a severe tone, and some of the blood from his arm is dripping onto the waterlogged desk as he leans over it. That’s why it won’t stop bleeding, Harry realizes, because he keeps using it.

“Not that it’s any of your business,” he adds. “But I’m married. To a woman.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Harry says. “Does she know you’re gay?”

Riddle looks at him like he’s going to commit murder.

“I’m not your enemy," Harry says. "I just want to go back to having totally normal unresolved sexual tension, that we don’t have to act on, instead of watching you… do whatever this is.“

“There is no tension,” Riddle insists, looking deeply offended. “And you are my enemy, Harry. You are a suspect in a crime. You are all either my enemies or I have succumbed to manipulation. Get out of my office.”

“We’re fucked,” Harry tells Ron on the car ride back to the motel. “Like, I don’t know what to tell you except that you should probably quit, and maybe stop speaking to me.”

Ron laughs. He’s driving, and for a minute it looks like he might lose control of the car and crash, he’s laughing so hard.

“Harry, this kind of shit is exactly why I’m your friend. I’m not going to miss out on any of it.”

That’s touching, but it’s also concerning because this shit is very serious. Harry tries again. “I don’t know what’s going on in that store, but whatever it is, everyone’s lives are in danger. Right now, Riddle doesn’t seem to suspect you of being involved. Get out now before things get worse.”

Ron shakes his head, glancing over at him from the driver’s seat. “Do you remember when that one guy you were dating tried to stab you outside of that bar?”

“Handsy Stabby Guy,” Harry says, sighing. “Yeah, I remember him. He was so hot, but so crazy.”

Ron looks like he takes a deliberate breath before he continues.

“And what did I do?” he asks.

“You got a mob together,” Harry says, laughing, remembering it. “You rallied the drunk people outside the bar.”

“Right. I didn’t run away and leave you to get stabbed. I’m your friend, Harry. I mean, sure, sometimes you do some shit I don’t think is very smart, but if you’re determined to see this play out, I’m along for the ride. And so is Hermione. She’s pissed you didn’t call her immediately, by the way.”

Harry nods. “Alright, Ron,” he says. "How did the date go, by the way?" he asks because they haven't had time to talk about it.

Ron looks over again at him, sheepishly. "Er, I got nervous and I proposed."

"Wow," Harry says. "I guess the conversation went really well, then?"

Ron drums his fingers over the steering wheel, some nervous tick. "I did it before we had a conversation."

"So, what? You walked into the coffee shop and just immediately proposed to her?"

Ron nods, looking a little like he wants to throw up.

"Alright," Harry says, though he doubts that worked out, knowing Hermione. "What'd she say?"

"She said no. Can you believe that?"

"Well, yeah. I mean..." Harry stops because Ron is glaring at him now. "That's a little quick, you know? She probably needs more time."

Ron sighs. "I know," he says brokenly.

Chapter 6: This is a Problem and We're Going to Fix it

Notes:

This chapter is short because of reasons. Don't worry about it.
Side note: I am doing my best to edit this down, but I think this might end up being my longest posted work anyway. Getting Tom out of the closet I put him in was no easy feat.

Chapter Text

“Where are we going?” Harry asks, because although Riddle calling the motel and demanding he get in his car isn’t exactly surprising, Harry is a little worried by the way he’s dressed.

Riddle always dresses a little strangely, a little too formally, but lately he’s been wearing the FBI jacket more. Today, he’s wearing a suit jacket again and he looks like he’s going to a job interview.

“To the airport,” Riddle says casually from beside him in the driver’s seat. His hands are exactly at ten and two on the wheel, like Harry is a driving instructor, and he needs to prove that he can drive perfectly.

Harry closes his eyes and breathes. “Why are we going to the airport?”

“Because, Harry, we’re going to get on a plane,” Riddle explains, and when Harry looks again, it seems like he’s getting irritated. He’s gripping the stirring wheel tighter.

“Okay,” Harry says slowly, watching Riddle’s expression carefully. “Why?”

“Because I need someone to look at this coin,” he says, like that should be obvious. Like he’s beginning to get frustrated that Harry is requiring an explanation from him. “And I’m going to prove to you that I’m not gay.”

Harry sighs and stares out the window of the car at the scenery as they pass it on the motorway. He imagines that Riddle has convinced himself that spending time around him without them fucking is Riddle’s “proof.” Harry could start a fight about it, but he also has never been on a plane before, so he finds he isn’t too intent on convincing Riddle to turn the car around.

He would also like some answers, if he's being honest. This is gotten completely out of hand, and getting someone else to look at the coin is probably the best thing Riddle could be doing right now.

There is the problem of Ron, though.

“Should I… I dunno, maybe call Ron and let him know how long I’m going to be gone?” he asks.

Riddle looks genuinely baffled by that for a long moment, and then he seems to give up on understanding why that might be necessary. He’s not a particularly empathetic dude, and that’s not exactly news to Harry. He watches as Riddle pulls a phone out of his pocket with one hand, and flips it open, scrolling through the contact list and then pressing it to his ear.

“Ronald Weasley,” he says when Ron picks up, in an inappropriately serious and vaguely threatening tone. “This is your boss, Tom Riddle. I have Harry in the car with me. He is coming with me on a little trip for a couple of days.”

Harry winces and he sees Riddle hold the phone away from his ear as Ron begins yelling, audible from where Harry sits.

“Wow,” Harry says, taking the cell phone from Riddle’s outstretched hand and pressing it to his own ear. “It’s okay, Ron. I’m not being kidnapped. Everything’s fine. It’s just more coin stuff.”

“Harry,” Ron sighs, sounding relieved. “Can you please teach him social skills? Like, what the fuck was that? I thought he was going to start telling me he’s going to send me a finger a day.”

“I know,” Harry says. “I don’t think I can though, honestly. I think it's just how he is.”

Harry hears another voice in the background that sounds familiar. “He left Hermione in charge of the store, she’s saying,” Ron informs him. “Can you believe that?”

“Good,” Harry says, because that means it’ll be closed, and no one will get hurt. He doesn’t say that out loud though. She probably didn’t tell Riddle about any plans she had to do that. “I’ll call you later,” he decides with a sidelong glance at the source of nearly all of his problems.

Riddle glowers at him as he hangs up, and their fingers brush as Harry hands him back the phone.

“Draco said… I thought you were an expert hostage negotiator,” Harry tells him, exasperated.

“I am,” Riddle says, and he must enjoy this question or the implied compliment in it, because some of the tension leaves his shoulders. “I teach classes on it.”

“So, what was that?” Harry asks, baffled. “I mean, don’t you have to be good at keeping people calm?”

Riddle shrugs. “Not necessarily. If you threaten people and they believe you, they’ll give up their hostages to live. That’s my specialty, actually. The FBI calls it ‘weaponized psychopathy.’”

“Holy shit,” Harry says. “Are you telling me you’re a psychopath?”

“Harry, please,” Riddle says, with a huff, and it sounds like he’s correcting Harry. “It doesn’t mean someone is a psychopath just because they teach these methods, and it's a spectrum in any case.”

“Oh,” Harry says, feeling relieved, and sinking back down in the passenger’s side seat. He actually thought for a moment there—

“In my case, however,” Riddle says. “Of course I am on that spectrum. That’s what makes me an expert.”

Harry groans because that’s really not what he wanted to hear Riddle say while he is also taking him to an airport. “What… What does that mean? Do you feel anything?”

“Of course I do. I feel irritated by this conversation, for example,” he says.

“I need to get a book on this,” Harry says, though he never imagined himself uttering that, nor the next sentence that comes out of his mouth. “Do you think we could stop by the library?”

“We don’t have time,” Riddle informs him, looking over at him with a very firm expression. “The flight I intend for us to take leaves soon.”

“FBI business,” Riddle says, flashing his badge at the customer service desk. “I need two seats to New York.”

Although Riddle doesn’t have an American accent, Harry’s figured out that’s where he lives from the FBI badge. It’s an American agency, after all. Harry doesn’t even have a passport though, and Riddle is probably delusional. Definitely delusional, Harry decides, watching him make a distasteful expression at the poor woman working behind the counter. His claim isn’t even entirely true. Maybe he does need someone to see the coin, but how is proving to Harry he’s not gay FBI business?

The woman frowns at him from behind the desk as she types something into the computer. “I’m sorry, but the next available flight out isn’t until tomorrow,” she says.

“Kick two people off then, and give us their seats,” Riddle says, like this is a perfectly reasonable solution. Harry wants to die, or disappear, or for the snake ghost to bite him so that he can be free of his mortification. It can do whatever it wants, he decides, if he doesn’t have to listen to this.

He listens to the automated voice over the intercom system instead, talking about safety and rules and he tries to imagine he's somewhere else.

The woman is back to typing, and her frown is deeper now. “I’m sorry, sir—"

“If you won’t help me, find me someone who values their life,” Riddle says, escalating the situation unnecessarily, and he’s starting to sound increasingly hostile.

“Oh my god,” Harry whispers under his breath.

The woman does look afraid, and he supposes, that’s a pretty normal reaction to Riddle doing anything. They should all be afraid, really. Though Harry is deficient in some way and he can’t feel it, he still knows that fact.

“I’ll get you my manager,” she decides warily.

Her manager is a middle-aged guy in a USA Flights tee shirt, and Riddle shows him the badge too. “If you don’t get me a flight immediately, I’ll arrest you for obstruction of justice,” he tells him.

“You can’t arrest me,” the man says nervously. “The FBI doesn’t arrest people in the UK.”

Riddle smiles like the man has revealed a weakness to him, like it’s a gift he’s been handed freely. “I’ve been given whatever jurisdiction I need to accomplish my goals. I can make you do whatever I want,” he says. He looks a little manic again, like having unbridled power over others and watching them do what he wants is some kind of disturbing high.

The manager shakes his head, glancing at the trio of his coworkers who have come over to watch the commotion.

“Do you want to try your luck and see,” Riddle asks. “Or do you want to just give me what I’m asking for?”

Harry watches the guy’s face as he tries to decide. He’s looking at Riddle to try to figure out if he’s lying, but there’s no way to know. Riddle is, frankly, perhaps the most convincing liar on earth. Finally, he nods, and begins typing into the computer as quickly as he can manage, while Riddle laughs at him. The sound of it is unbearably cruel.

Harry numbly stares at the logo of the flight they’re about to take, hanging on the wall behind the workers, which features a big, blue star. He hears Riddle spell their names and give their birthdays, and the sound of their tickets being printed out, the churn of some machine under the desk.

They’re first class tickets, the man says, complementary of USA Flights, which is always pleased to serve their guests from the FBI.

“I don’t… I don’t have a passport,” Harry tells him, as he watches Riddle bypass airport security with a few words, like it’s also somehow the easiest thing he’s ever done. They don’t even try to search him after they see his badge, though he carries a leather briefcase full of who knows what, and Harry knows for a fact that he has a gun. One of the head security people nods at him reverently, like they’re taking his orders.

“Oh, right,” Riddle says, and he pulls a passport out of the outermost pocket of his briefcase, and pushes it into Harry’s limp hand, along with the plane ticket. “I got this pushed through.”

“What the fuck is going on?” Harry asks, once they've leisurely strolled through security, and he grabs Riddle’s arm to stop his forward momentum through the airport terminal, when it’s clear that he’s not going to explain further.

Riddle stops walking and rolls his eyes, tearing his arm away from Harry like he’s been burned. “Yes, Harry? What is it?” he asks, in a patronizing tone.

Harry broadly gestures behind them, where there’s a line of forty people waiting to have their identities confirmed. “I mean,” he says, unable to articulate clearly how strange this situation is. “Do you think this is normal? I don’t understand—”

“Yes,” Riddle says, and he looks like he’d rather be chewing on gravel than spelling this out to him. “It’s perfectly normal. It’s inconvenient that we have to deal with taking a commercial flight, but my people are busy, and they hardly have time to pick us up right now. Now, can we go?”

“Your people,” Harry says, like it’s some puzzle he can work out if he just repeats it enough. “Your people are busy. How many people work for you?”

“A lot,” Riddle says, and he begins walking again through the terminal at a clip that Harry has to move quickly to keep up with.

“People from the FBI,” Harry says, hurrying beside him, already out of breath. “Because you work for the FBI.”

“Harry, you know I do. I don’t—“

“I don’t trust you,” Harry says, and he’s beginning to feel hysterical. “Yesterday you called me a criminal and tried to arrest me, and you have to know something is going on at that store. You saw the same thing I did. And now you’re literally taking me out of the country! Why?!”

Riddle doesn’t answer him, though he does stop again, and he even sets his bag down on the floor. “I need you to calm down,” he says, turning to Harry, his tone very serious. “This is an airport. It’s not a good place to do this. Do I need to threaten you?”

“No,” Harry tells him, feeling uneasy at the expression he’s making. “I just need you to be honest with me. What’s going on?”

“Let’s table that. It would not calm you down,” Riddle says, narrowing his eyes. “I can clear out an airport, Harry, but don’t make me do that. It’s a huge pain in the ass.”

"You can clear out an airport," Harry repeats, and it sounds hollow.

He sweeps his arm around, where there are people walking past them, rolling their luggage, and keeping a good distance away from him. “Look around,” he says loudly, talking to Harry like he's the one who is being unreasonable, and now he's been forced to make a speech about it. “Do you see all these innocent people? Do you like seeing them alive? If you do, maybe you should calm down and listen to me. Now, do you want to go on a plane?”

“Um,” Harry says, completely lost. “I guess, yeah.”

“Good,” Riddle says, tone hard. “Let’s keep with that energy, shall we?”

They barely make the plane within minutes of it taking off, but the flight attendants also seem to be holding it for them.

Riddle gets liquor immediately. He doesn’t ask for it. They just give it to him, a bunch of little bottles of really nice scotch. Harry takes one of them and downs it all in a single go because he’s going to lose his mind if he doesn’t. It tastes unbelievably expensive. Riddle laughs at whatever expression he’s making.

“I need another one,” Harry says, and Riddle gives it to him without another word.

The flight is going to be eight hours, the pilot says over the intercom. Harry thinks he might have to get trashed to deal with it.

Admittedly, first class is really nice. There are privacy curtains and there’s a ton of space, and it’s probably why Riddle chose this airline. He’s tall and he looks like he apperciates the leg room as he stretches out in his seat.

“Are you just going to have me thrown in prison when we get there?” Harry asks him, because the day prior he told him that he is an enemy.

“That depends entirely on what I find out when we get there,” he says, with a calculating look. “I am not wrong about something going on, though I can admit that you seem to be a victim of it.”

“Well I’m not wrong about you being gay,” Harry says, and Riddle sighs, closing his eyes, collecting himself, it looks like. He twists open one of the bottles after a long moment and downs it too.

Five hours in and Harry is still unable to sleep. It’s daytime, and he’s on a nocturnal schedule, so he really should be able to. He looks at Riddle’s lax model-worthy facial features, his literally perfect, parted lips and the way his head is slightly bent.

He sleeps like he does it all the time on flights, and maybe he does. They could take a photo of it from any angle and put it in a magazine for an advertisement. ‘Get the best sleep of your life on USA Flights,’ it’d say.

Harry grinds his teeth a little and decides he needs to get up and walk around. He’s seated by the window, and of course, it was cool to see the earth from air as they passed over farmland and rivers, but there’s only so much looking at the ocean he can do. Harry has always needed to move, in any case. It's one of the reasons why he's a good employee at the apparently haunted, destroyed store they work at.

Luckily there’s a lot of room for him to do so. He unbuckles his seatbelt and carefully edges around Riddle’s outstretched legs, opening the curtain to the aisle slowly.

Getting up feels great as Harry stands to make his way down the center aisle of the plane. He isn't sure where he can go except to the bathroom on the plane, and that does make him feel a little caged in, but at least it's something to do.

For a moment though, as he looks, standing in the center of the aisle, something is wrong.

Every seat is empty. All of the other passengers are gone.

Harry backs a few steps away from it, but when he blinks again, it’s all back to normal. People are looking at him warily, at what must be terror on his face. His heartbeat is loud in his ears.

“What the fuck,” Harry whispers, and he runs a hand through his hair. “I really need to sleep,” he decides.

When Harry returns to his seat, Riddle is awake and he’s glaring again. It’s his default expression, but luckily it’s not directed at Harry. He’s got his sleeve rolled up and he’s trying to wrap a piece of gauze onto his arm using one hand.

Harry sighs, watching him from the aisle. “Do you want help?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Riddle accuses, sparing a moment to glare at him too. “You people and your sick ideas.”

“Woah,” Harry says, holding his hands up in mock surrender. “Okay, uh, I’ll just watch you struggle I guess.”

“Everything is sexual to you, isn’t it?” Riddle grumbles, and he's making it work, it looks like. It's sloppy, but he's winding the bandage so many times that it won't matter.

Harry laughs, moving around him and taking his place in his seat. “What about this is sexual?” He asks because he genuinely doesn’t understand.

“It’s touching!” Riddle says, so loudly that Harry is sure other people can hear them. “Touching and watching and all the other shit you’re into.”

“That I’m into…?” Harry asks.

“That’s how it starts,” he says, unbelievably seriously.

Harry’s eyes are watering, he’s laughing so hard, though Riddle does not look at all amused.

“Haven’t you ever… I mean, do you think platonic touch turns you gay? I don’t…” he says between errant peels of laughter. Harry literally shares a bed with a straight man every night in a motel and it doesn’t turn them gay for one another. He thinks about saying this, but before he can, Riddle says the most mind-boggling thing he can.

“It’s gay when it’s with you,” Riddle tells him, again, very seriously, and Harry is beginning to feel like he has to know he’s attracted to Harry. There’s no way he can be so self-aware and so confused at the same time.

“Okay,” Harry says because Riddle is narrowing his eyes and starting to look furious. “No touching ever. I’m sure that will help with your problem.”

“It’s not my problem! It’s your problem,” Riddle says vehemently, and Harry takes a deep breath to try to contain his laughter.

“Come on,” Harry says, but no one is there to commiserate with him about this, except Riddle, who is in such deep denial that Harry has never seen anything like it before. Not even Weird Texts Guy was this bad, and he was by far the most confused person Harry had ever met.

“It’s your fault,” Riddle says, with finality. “But I have perfect control over myself, luckily for us both.”

“Yeah,” Harry says. “We’re both very lucky people, clearly.”

Chapter 7: This is a More Serious Problem Than I Thought it Was

Chapter Text

They get into a taxi after they land, and Harry is stumbling rather than walking at this point. He got a couple of hours of sleep on the plane, but it wasn’t enough. He listens to Riddle rattle off an address to the cab driver, and closes his eyes, leaning his head back against the seat.

“How long is the taxi ride?” he asks wearily. He can’t believe they’re only staying a few days and then they’re going to have to do all of this again.

“At this hour?” He hears Riddle say. “Maybe thirty minutes.”

It’s difficult to sleep with all the stopping and starting, but Harry tries to clear his mind, and he ends up in a transient state, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. He listens to the rumble of the motor and the strange noise of the radio, playing songs that sound very old.

When he hears Riddle exchanging money with the taxi driver, and the car door opens, he opens his eyes to see that they’ve stopped in front of a house in what looks like a nice neighborhood. Harry gets out of the car and watches Riddle impatiently waiting for him. It’s late in the evening, but he can see that they’re somewhere in suburbia in America. There’s a literal white picket fence in front of the house.

Harry clears his throat, suddenly uncomfortable, standing outside the taxi, though he can’t yet articulate exactly why.

“Come on,” Riddle says, sounding tired. He walks to the front door and opens it with a turn of a key.

Harry follows, though he feels a sense of impending doom. Riddle flicks on the light to the entryway. It’s a nice house. Real hardwood flooring, expensive looking furniture. Harry stares at the painting in the entry way of a serene field of wheat. It looks mass produced, but it’s nicely framed.

“We’re staying here tonight. There’s a guest room upstairs I’ll show you,” Riddle tells him, and he tosses his keys into a bowl by the door.

“Is this… where you live?” Harry asks, as it’s beginning to become apparent to him. “Why the fuck did you bring me here?”

“What do you mean?” Riddle asks him, shrugging out of his suit jacket. “Of course it is. Why wouldn’t I bring you here? You need to see what’s going on. You need to face reality, Harry.”

Harry slowly nods because that all tracks, and he can’t believe he didn’t understand what was happening before right now.

“Is this… how you’re going to prove to me you’re not gay?” He feels the kind of distress that he can only attribute to intuition at this point.

“No, of course not,” Riddle says. “Seeing as telling you my dating history is obviously not enough to help you.” He reaches down and pulls something out of his briefcase to show Harry. It’s a book. The book is titled "101 Ways to Tell if You’re Gay."

“This book,” he waves it at Harry. “Advises me to do a series of tests. I am going to do them and then prove to you I’m not gay.”

As dumb as that sounds, Harry really can’t be too mad about it either. Maybe Riddle needs a poorly written self-help book to tell him something that is abundantly clear. Maybe that’d be good for him.

Harry hears himself make a noise that sounds a little like he’s dying. “Is one of the tests having sex with a man and seeing if you like it, because—“

Riddle rolls his eyes, so it seems that the book has not advised him to do the only thing that could prove or disprove directly whether Riddle likes having sex with men.

“I won’t need to do all that,” Riddle says. “There are easier ways to prove it. You know, for a gay person, you don’t seem to know very much about being gay. Would you like to borrow the book?”

Harry makes another sound like he’s being murdered, but then he nods because in all seriousness, he clearly needs to pour through it, to try to decode it like some kind of frenzied detective. It may be the only way to know what Riddle’s thinking.

“Riddle,” he says, very plainly. “Why are we here, then, at the house, where you said you live with your wife?”

Harry glances up the stairs when Riddle only laughs at him. “Is your wife here?” He asks in a low tone.

“Probably,” Riddle says, casually. “She will be soon, if not. She is always alive in my heart, that’s for fucking sure.”

Harry blinks at him, at the weird tone he’s using. He doesn’t even know if she’s home?! Maybe he’s just doing this to torture Harry. He doesn’t know anymore.

“Um,” Harry says. “Could you find out, please? I really don’t want to be in the middle of—“

She appears, as if on cue, though it’s the middle of the night, and though Harry can admit that this person is in fact dressed in a feminine way, there’s something odd about all of it… a couple of things, actually, if Harry is being honest.

The clearly fake wig hanging tilted from her head, the nearly translucent-white, dead-looking skin, the lack of a nose, the hairless brow... It’s just weird, and though Harry isn’t one to judge someone based on their appearance, he feels a little vindicated in doing so now, considering. Harry kind of has a bad feeling about some of the things he’s noticing.

She also has a snake around her shoulders, and, to be honest, Harry really wonders about that fact most.

“Oh. Hello, Tom,” she says, though she doesn’t seem particularly overjoyed to see him. “What a surprise.” She narrows her eyes at Harry. “And you brought a guest.”

Riddle nods. “I did,” he says simply. “This is Harry. He’s a suspect in a crime. He needs to stay with us for a couple of days so that I can keep an eye on him.”

“Of course,” she says, like that’s totally a normal thing, something that anybody might say about someone visiting their home. Neither of them move to greet one another like normal people and Harry is pretty sure he’s going to die if he has to keep experiencing the level of tension in this room.

Her voice is familiar to Harry, of course. He’s definitely heard it before, and he’s also, if he’s being honest, completely sure he knows where.

“Uh,” Harry says.

“You may refer to me as Voldemort,” she says, and she pets the snake around her neck with an admittedly graceful caress.

“Voldemort,” Harry repeats slowly. “Sure. Nice, um, really nice place you have here.”

“We have people who clean for us,” she informs him.

“Great, good. That’s great,” Harry says, laughing like he has a gun to his head.

“Would you like something to eat, Harry?” she asks. She stops petting the snake to smile at him and it is absolutely terrifying, wide and excited, and unhinged. Harry finds he can't respond because he can't stop staring at it and wondering what could possibly make her so happy about that.

“Yes,” Riddle answers for him, when the silence stretches on. He sounds perfectly composed. “Let’s have a late dinner.”

Harry doesn’t shove his fist into his mouth to prevent himself from screaming, but it’s a close thing.

It’s gotta be close to midnight, but that doesn’t stop the Riddles. They have an unbelievably nice dining room, bigger than the motel room he’s staying in back home, and Harry watches as Voldemort perfectly lays out fine dining settings like she’s been doing it all her life.

“Oh, you don’t have to do all that,” Harry says, swallowing.

“I don’t have to,” she agrees. “But I want to. It’s not everyday we have a guest.”

“Can I um, can I help?” Harry asks, and it comes out a little like he’s begging for his life. It’s so inappropriately strained.

“No,” she says. “Tom wouldn’t like that, I suspect.”

Harry is forced to just stand there, being useless and wishing the earth would swallow him whole.

“You know,” she says, watching him with knowing mirth. “You can sit, if you’d like.”

What Harry would like is for Voldemort to go ahead and just murder him, as she is no doubt planning to, but he doesn’t say that. He sits in front of a random place setting. It’s all very nice, shiny silverware and folded napkins.

She disappears into the kitchen with Riddle, and Harry can’t help but think he’s pretty sure he’s going to lose his mind. He tries to come to terms with that.

In the other room, where Harry suspects there’s a kitchen, he hears the noise of pots and pans being moved, and burners being lit. Riddle comes out after a few minutes to stare at him like he needs to do that every once in a while to make sure he’s still there, and that he isn’t dead yet.

“You’re not doing anything suspicious in here, that I’m missing out on, are you?” he asks.

Harry stares at him for a long moment. “Do you know about… I mean... are you doing this on purpose?” he asks, his voice low.

“Well, I’m not accidentally cooking you food, Harry,” he says, incredulously.

Harry squints at him to try to see if he’s being serious, but of course he can’t tell, because no one can. It’s not possible. Riddle lies as easily as he breathes.

“Are you calm?” Riddle asks, and Harry has no idea how to answer that question, so he doesn’t. He just stares at a painting on Riddle’s wall, which is beige. Everything in the house is a different shade of beige or white.

“Harry,” Riddle says, and his tone is sharper, his brows knitted. “Are you calm?” he repeats.

“Yeah,” Harry says, sarcastically. “Super calm.”

Harry thinks about all the things he did wrong to get here. There are so many of them that he doesn’t even know where to start.

“Pass the pepper.”

It’s nearly one in the morning. Harry can tell because he’s discovered that there’s a clock in here and he’s looked at it for the past half hour. The food has been served, and they're all eating.

Riddle is sitting beside him staring at him, and his wife is on the other side of the table, and that, on top of everything else, is so fucking strange that Harry wants to ask if he’s being pranked. He doesn’t.

Harry hands Riddle’s wife the pepper because Riddle is too busy to do it. He’s watching Harry eat like it’s the most suspicious thing he’s ever seen.

They’re both content, apparently, to sit in total silence.

“So,” Harry says. He’s caught between conflicting feelings of wanting to stay silent as well and wanting to try to ease some of the reality-warping levels of tension in this room. The latter eventually wins out. “What, uh, what do you do for work, Mrs. Riddle?”

“I’m in business,” she says simply.

“What… what’s that like?” Harry asks.

She hums. “It’s nice,” she decides, but that’s all she says, and Harry stops eating to stare at her.

Harry is beginning to feel like he’s being professionally gaslit by two of the most closed off people in the world.

Instead of saying that, Harry only eats the best eggs benedict he’s ever had in his life and tries to dissociate.

It doesn’t work. He isn’t Tom Riddle, who can apparently pretend that literally anything is fine.

As he makes his way through the meal, he finds a silver coin is revealed beneath it, embossed with a snake. Harry stares at it for a while, but he decides maybe this isn’t the right time to address it.

“The food was really… really great,” Harry says, when he looks up to see both of them staring at him with very different expressions. Riddle is glaring at him, and Voldemort looks a little sickly gleeful, disturbingly hopeful. He wonders if they truly think he’s stupid enough to put the coin in his mouth. Apparently so, he decides, looking between them uneasily. They can both agree on that, at least, it seems.

“I’m tired, though, and I think I need to get some sleep?”

Riddle leads him upstairs, and shows him to a guest room with a bed that’s larger than the one he shares with Ron in the motel room. “Bathroom’s across the hall,” he says.

Harry stands in the room while Riddle lingers in the doorway, staring at him.

“Why do you look like that?” Riddle demands.

“Like what?” Harry asks, with another terrified, fake laugh.

Riddle motions to his entire body. “Why do you look afraid?”

“Uh, I’m not,” Harry says, shaking his head. “I’m good. So good. Too good, really.”

“You’re the worst liar I’ve ever met,” Riddle says. “You need to calm down.”

Somehow, apparently, Riddle doesn’t think any of this is worthy of him freaking out about, the fact that his wife has a complicated and ancient sounding name, and she also has a snake doesn’t phase him either. Harry can’t tell at all if he’s serious or not.

“Okay, well, sometimes there are just…” Harry struggles to find the words. “Uh, conversations that we can’t have, that you apparently don’t want to let us have, so I don’t know what to tell you.”

Riddle looks, of all things, deeply amused by this. “We need to be on the same page, Harry,” he says, incredibly sarcastically. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

“I… don’t disagree,” Harry says. “I don’t know what you want me to—“

“I’m going to bed,” Riddle tells him. “When you can get your thoughts straightened out, let me know. Do you need anything?”

Yeah, Harry thinks, your gun. He can’t decide if he needs it to use on himself or if he needs it to protect himself from Riddle’s wife when she comes to kill him. He doesn’t say that though. He just shakes his head, and watches Riddle disappear from the doorway.

Harry closes the door and locks it. It isn’t a particularly solid looking lock, but he’ll take it over nothing.

Harry is awoken by movement inside the room in the morning, and he gasps awake like he is under attack, scrambling upright and grabbing a pillow to defend himself.

Riddle is staring at him from the foot of the bed.

“Why did you lock the door?” He demands, then he gets increasingly frustrated-looking when Harry takes a second to breathe. In all honesty, Harry is filled with bone-deep relief that it’s just Riddle.

“Harry, it’s very important that I have access to you. I’m watching you to be sure you don’t do anything suspicious.”

“Fine,” Harry says, sitting up fully. “Whatever you think is best.”

“I got you some clothing,” he says, like he’s unsure now if that’s going to land well. Harry looks down and sees that he’s laid out a shirt and pants on the bed.

“Oh, uh, thanks. That’s great,” Harry says, but he knows it doesn’t sound like he thinks it’s great. Riddle just frowns at him because he’s apparently a human lie detector. Harry wants to throw himself into a wood chipper, but there isn’t one in this room, so he can’t.

He doesn’t make the joke he might have otherwise, asking if Riddle is going to use his suspicions as an excuse to watch him change his clothes too. He doesn’t say anything, and for two people who rapid-fire talk at a near constant rate, insults and threats and theories flying between them, the silence is especially odd.

Unfortunately, Harry is going to have to go downstairs after he showers. He knows this, and he drags the shower out as long as he can to avoid it. There is a limit to the amount of times he can justify washing his hair though. Eventually, he is going to have to do it.

He spends some time trying and failing to manifest something optimistic in his thoughts. This might as well be hell. Maybe if he can get Riddle to let him borrow his phone, he can call Ron to ask if he should actually, literally run away.

“Why?” Harry groans at the shower head, as though it can help him. Harry isn’t upset with Riddle, who has been, to a certain degree, fairly honest with him about who he is. It isn’t like Harry didn’t know he was a control freak, or strange, or destructive, or in denial, or attractive. Harry is angry with himself, he finds, because like Ron told him, he does this to himself. He finds these people and throws himself into their paths and burns his hands trying to pick up the ruined pieces of their lives.

He’s now at the site of a potential, perhaps even unavoidable, nuclear blast, and it’s his own fault he’s here.

Harry wants to scream, but he can’t because he’s in a house with whatever the fuck is walking around downstairs pretending to be alive. He turns the knob to shut off the water, and he keeps turning it until it won’t move anymore, but water keeps pouring from the spigot. It won’t shut off.

Harry stands under it for a long minute and tries to justify that. Something’s wrong with Riddle’s shower, a leak, probably.

Like the one at the store, he thinks. But Harry doesn’t really believe that. He saw it and he saw the aftermath of it. The amount of water that filled the store left a ton of water damage, and it was a real, actual thing, that everyone saw. It was not possible for it to be attributed to a leaky pipe.

Someone knocks on the door to the bathroom, and Harry jumps, looking away from where he’s been staring at the spigot for the past minute.

“Fifteen minutes, I said,” Riddle tells him, firmly. “None of the rules have stopped applying just because you’re not at work. Do not make me come in there, Harry. As your manager, I can’t be your bathroom buddy.”

Harry sighs. “There’s something wrong with your shower,” he says. “It’s—“

Harry hears the noise of the lock popping open, and the doorknob as it turns, and he knows Riddle is in the room with him.

“What?” Riddle says, extremely seriously. Harry flinches as Riddle pulls the shower curtain open and the barrel of a gun is thrust into his line of vision.

“It won’t turn off,” Harry says, cringing away from the gun.

Riddle keeps his line of sight above Harry’s waist.

“Why?” he asks.

“I don’t… I don’t know,” Harry says. He glances behind the hard line of Riddle's shoulders at the open door.

“Why are you freaking the fuck out? Why are you looking at the door like that? Stop it. Calm down.” He waves his gun a little, like that’s calming. It probably is to him, Harry thinks.

Harry shakes his head, glancing back at Riddle’s face, at his hardened expression. He’s looking at the door because it’s open, and there’s something dead in the house with them, of course, but he doesn’t think he can say that.

“Why did you bring me here?” Harry whispers instead. “Please let me leave. I can’t do this. I don’t know how to help you.”

Riddle winces at him, taking a deep breath. Then he nods slowly, lowering the gun, perhaps deciding to take Harry seriously.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll take you somewhere else.”

The water stops flowing so intensely, trickling away, and then it stops and they’re both just standing in the bathroom awkwardly.

“Am I somehow doing that?” Harry asks, glancing at the last of the water as it swirls down the drain.

Riddle, predictably, doesn’t answer him. He only turns and takes one of the towels off the shelf where they’re folded, and hands it to Harry. “Stop forcing me to look at your body,” he says.

To Riddle’s credit, he isn’t fucking around. He gets Harry out of the house immediately, before he’s even ready to leave it himself. Harry sits on Riddle’s front porch, waiting for him to do whatever else he needs to do inside. Harry doesn’t feel great about that, but he does feel a little safer outside, himself.

It’s a nice day. It’s chilly, but the sun is out, and the neighborhood is peaceful and filled with slightly swaying trees and green lawns.

Harry watches a woman pass by with a baby carriage. She’s blonde and she’s wearing a pink track suit. Maybe in another life, Riddle would be able to do this. Maybe he’d be straight, and he wouldn’t be so odd, and he wouldn’t attract literal dead people.

The woman looks up and smiles at Harry forcefully as she passes the house, with a flash of white teeth. Harry stares at her because somehow, it feels threatening. She keeps eye contact with him for a strange amount of time as well, turning her head as far as it will go to continue smiling at him as she continues walking.

When Harry blinks, she isn’t looking anymore. She isn’t even there. He scrambles away, his sneakers sliding on the concrete in his bid to get away, when he realizes that she’s standing in the perfectly manicured yard now, only ten feet away. She’s still smiling eerily.

Harry reaches up to the knob of the front door, as he finds his back is now against it, and he opens it, crawling back inside. She’s begun walking toward him. He manages to shut the door just as she reaches the front step.

“Fuck,” he says, standing as quickly as he can and locking the door. He hears her trying the knob from the other side, and he watches it rattle.

“Harry,” she says, and it’s muffled through the door, but it isn’t her voice. It can’t be. It’s something else, something that sounds like the white snake, and Riddle’s wife. “Come outside.”

Harry backs away from the door. “Why is this happening?” he says to the empty entryway. The door knob stops moving, but somehow that’s even worse because now he doesn’t know where she is. Harry crosses the threshold to the dining room to look out the giant window in there, and he sees the woman walking back to her abandoned stroller. She picks something up from inside, something it takes a minute for Harry to make out. It’s not a baby, that's for sure.

It slithers up onto her neck, where it sits across her shoulders like a fashion accessory. She is still wearing that unhinged, perfect, white smile.

Something inside the house slams, a door, Harry thinks, and Harry turns in the direction of the sound. He hears Riddle speaking, saying something in an angry tone. His wife shoots back with something else.

They’re fighting, Harry realizes. He really doesn’t want to listen to it, but there’s someone being possessed outside the house, and there’s nowhere to escape to, so Harry just stands there in the dining room as they start to get loud enough that he can’t ignore it.

“—where this is even coming from? …know what I do for a living?” Riddle laughs, and it sounds a little forced.

“—wrong with you!” Voldemort says.

“—thought you could… I find that very funny—“

Harry hears something else happening, something he can’t easily identify, that sounds like something metal sliding in the kitchen, and then they’re both suddenly silent.

He hears the familiar clip of Riddle’s shoes and then he’s standing in the doorway where the dining room meets the kitchen, looking at Harry, his expression wary. He’s holding the gun. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

Harry turns to look out the window, to point out where there’s a possessed woman outside in Riddle’s front yard, but she’s gone.

Harry just stares at an empty, perfectly cut lawn, on a beautiful street filled with nice houses, on a sunny day.

Chapter 8: This is a Far More Serious Problem Than I Thought it Was

Chapter Text

Harry desperately doesn’t want to be outside because somewhere, there’s a woman with a snake around her neck who is trying to kill him. He doesn’t want to be inside with Voldemort, who is also definitely trying to kill him. There’s no winning move, really, he thinks.

Riddle ushers him outside anyway, choosing for him, and Harry listens, mute, as he calls a taxi on his cell phone. They stand on the curb, not speaking at all, for the five minutes it takes for the nearest one to get there. Harry’s nervous system is shot, probably, because he finds he is extremely jumpy. A bird landing near them makes his heart stutter. He expects something to attack them at any moment. Riddle is still openly holding his gun, so maybe he doesn’t disagree.

Harry is surprised when the cab pulls up, and they both get inside, and the creature in the house doesn’t follow them and try to murder them.

“Please tell me you understand what’s in that house,” Harry says, a little desperately, when he slides into the back seat beside Riddle and the door is firmly shut. “Please tell me you know what’s going on.”

Riddle sighs, like he’s exhausted, and he runs a hand over his face, saying nothing.

“Are you fucking serious?” Harry says, after it becomes clear he’s not going to tell him anything, feeling the sudden stir of anger in his gut. “What the fuck was all of that?!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Harry,” Riddle says, pinning him with a frankly, meaningless, steely glare. Harry is embroiled with rage. He leans across the seat and grips Riddle’s shoulders. He wants to shake him, but he knows it won’t help. Riddle is beyond help, apparently.

“You are in such fucking deep denial, Riddle,” he says. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

The taxi driver turns to them, then, smiling at them. It’s a very wide smile.

“Where to?” he asks, in a strange voice.

That’s hardly the worst of it.

There’s a giant snake on his lap and its open mouth is pressing into the man’s throat. Harry watches blood trickle down from the wound there, staining his shirt red. It’s a lot of blood, maybe too much to survive losing.

Harry freezes in place as Riddle casually rattles off an address. If he can see it, he refuses to acknowledge that fact. Harry, in that exact moment, is starting to understand that perhaps Riddle needs to pretend that he doesn’t know.

And, if that’s true, then perhaps everything that comes out of Harry’s mouth is a huge liability for him.

“I mean,” Harry says uneasily, and he lets go of Riddle, sliding back to his side of the cab. “That house is insane. Beige everything? You guys need to redecorate.”

Riddle looks at him for a long moment. “We really do,” he says, in a completely unreadable, deadpan tone. “I’ve been telling Voldemort that for years.”

The taxi begins moving.

“Red,” Harry says, decisively, though he doesn’t give a single fuck about it. “You should get some red accent pillows or something.”

Riddle hums. He looks out the window at the beautiful neighborhood as it passes by. “Maybe,” he says. Riddle is resting his gun on his leg and absently rubbing his thumb over it, like it’s comforting to him to touch it.

“Um,” Harry says, watching him do that from the other side of the taxi. “You’re an amazing cook. Maybe I could visit more often if, you know, if you got the chance to cook more.”

Riddle looks back at him, scrutinizing his expression between narrowed eyes. “I’d like that, Harry,” he says. “You’d make a wonderful completely platonic friend, and I enjoyed making you food.”

Harry nods. He thinks he might start crying, maybe because getting a grand total of seven hours of sleep over the past three days has left him completely unable to modulate his emotions, but he tries to get himself under control quickly. “I’m super sad about um, about the beige in your house,” he says, in a poor effort to cover up the embarrassingly obvious fact that he’s going to have to wipe his eyes.

Riddle just nods, looking back out the window. “As am I.”

“Where are we going?” Harry asks, once he gets ahold of himself, though he doesn’t expect Riddle to be able to answer that question. He’s surprised when he does.

“I need to check on some other suspected perpetrators in this crime,” he says. “To make sure they aren’t doing anything suspicious. I’d like to see how you all interact, in order to figure out if they’re actually suspects.”

Okay, Harry thinks. Back to the suspect talk. “I thought I was a victim.”

“You absolutely are,” Riddle says. “That is abundantly, obviously, apparent to me.”

The snake hisses from the front seat, and it sounds like it's coming out of the driver's mouth. Riddle adds, his expression tightening, “Though, who really knows? Not me, that’s for fucking sure.”

That wasn’t a very good lie, but Riddle looks like he’s spiraling a little. He’s an uptight guy, and Harry has seen him constantly tense and angry for so long that it barely even registers to him anymore.

He watches Riddle take out his cell phone and flip it open, scrolling down, selecting a number, and pressing it to his ear.

“Did Draco make it?” Riddle asks.

It sounds like the person on the other end of the line is yelling at him.

“I fucking know,” Riddle says, gripping the gun fully now, glancing to the front seat. “Shut up.”

More yelling and Riddle looks like he might be counting in his head, breathing and looking at the ceiling of the taxi the way he is. “You are a suspect in a crime,” he says, angrily. “I don’t want to hear any of your insane ideas. I only entertain them because it amuses me, but don’t ever forget that I can throw you in jail.”

Whoever is on the other end stops talking immediately.

“Also,” Riddle says, with a ragged sigh that’s starting to look a little like relief to Harry. “I’m bringing someone else.”

They stop in front of a building in the middle of the city, on a busy street.

Harry follows Riddle to a brownstone made of dark red brick, and watches him press his finger against the doorbell over and over with an overly-serious expression, like this is his childhood friend he’s pranking, but it’s somehow also not funny to him.

The door opens and an unbelievably pale man stands in the doorway, also looking very serious.

“Agent Riddle,” he says. He has some kind of Eastern European accent, it sounds like, though it’s very slight. He looks down his nose at Harry with narrowed, dark eyes.

“You and your… project should get in here,” the man says, and he glances around the street warily, like he knows people are running around possessed by snakes. Harry nods enthusiastically and kind of wants to hug him for his expression of absolute paranoia. He doesn’t look like he’d be very open to being hugged, though. He has a severe scowl on his face.

The house is wild, and it’s filled with some kind of odd energy. Harry feels it in his chest, something light and strange and freeing as he walks through the threshold, though perhaps it’s the smell of incense heavy in the air here, or his palpable relief that maybe someone can speak plainly to him.

There are a million things to look at. It kind of looks like an antique store, but one that is designed to sell to patrons who are into the occult. There’s so much to look at that Harry is overwhelmed with it; preserved bats hang from the walls, carefully labelled animal bones, bird nests and half melted candles, strange pictures that are only solid black, a giant bubbling aquarium filled with eels.

“Don’t touch anything,” the man says to Harry specifically, like he can tell Harry desperately wants to. Riddle is already doing it, and the man grabs the bundle of sticks that he’s holding out of his hand with a fervor that scares Harry a little.

“You know better,” he says vehemently. Riddle just rolls his eyes at the man’s glare.

The man crosses his arms, holding the sticks, standing in the long, narrow hallway with them. He’s wearing all black, and his hair is black too, and his entire house is dimly lit. Harry thinks he could probably disappear if he walked into a corner, except that he’s so pale that he’d probably still be a disembodied head.

“Is everything good in here?” Riddle asks him suspiciously, and the man squints at him with a comically similar expression.

“Yes, Riddle,” he says. “The shields are in place.”

The moment that sentence leaves the man’s mouth, Harry is suddenly pushed against the wall, and Riddle is aggressively pinning him in place, looming over him. Something gets dislodged from the wall and crashes to the floor and the man sighs behind them.

“I am so fucking sick of dealing with your shit,” Riddle says, more animatedly than Harry’s ever seen him. Their faces are unbelievably close together, and he looks very angry. “You’re a complete fucking idiot.”

Harry opens his mouth, bewildered, but he can’t say anything else because then Riddle is pressing their lips together. Harry gets on board with that immediately, shoving his tongue into Riddle’s mouth and stifling a groan. His back is digging into something sharp that’s hanging from the wall, and he can’t exactly forget that they have an audience, especially when the dude clears his throat.

Riddle stops kissing him to glare at the guy.

“This is our key, huh?” The man says, with a mean laugh. “I thought you said he was the most sensitive clairvoyant you’ve ever met.”

“He is,” Riddle says, and Harry watches the muscles in his throat move as he runs a hand over Riddle’s chest because apparently that’s okay now and he’s not going to ask a single question about it. There’s no blood in his brain anyway.

“He’s also an idiot,” Riddle adds.“It’s not mutually exclusive, apparently.”

“Everyone is an idiot to you, Riddle,” the man says, but Harry doesn't really hear any of that. He moves his hand to Riddle's neck and watches him shudder a little, fascinated.

“No,” Riddle says, and Harry feels the tension mount in his body under his hands. “You have no idea what I’ve been through,” Riddle tells him vehemently, and he’s starting to look unhinged with stress again. “It’s like he was born to undermine all of our progress. Voldemort is obsessed with him. I genuinely thought he was being possessed for months. He went on a personal fucking campaign to prove I’m gay!"

He takes a deep breath and lowers his voice, but it does little to stop him from sounding unhinged. It's just in a lower tone now. "Do you know," he says slowly, "how difficult it is to block off your thoughts from that thing for months? No, you don’t, do you? You sit in your little shop and everything’s fucking fine for you, Severus.”

The man winces a little at Riddle’s terrifying expression and the accompanying tirade he’s gone on. “Why are you making out with him in my lobby, then, if you’re so angry at him?”

“Because, apparently, I’m fucking gay!” he shouts.

Harry is starting to get the sense that he should be paying attention to this, but it’s tough because he is overwrought with need. He considers begging for a spare room from the Eastern European man, but he does have enough self-respect left to not do that. He’s looking at Riddle hoping he’ll decide they can continue, but although the long line of Riddle’s body is still pressed against his, Riddle still isn’t looking at him.

“Please,” Harry says, and it comes out very strained. “Can you give us a minute?”

The man shakes his head, like he can’t believe the shit he’s seeing, and he clips away, further down the hall somewhere else to another room. Harry hears him speaking, saying something that sounds sarcastic, but he pays it no mind.

“Please let me fuck you,” Harry says the second he’s out of earshot, far enough down the hallway.

Riddle’s face does a weird, conflicted thing. “You’re totally out of control,” he says.

“Yeah,” Harry admits, though he’d agree with just about anything that came out of Riddle’s mouth right now.

“Because you want to fuck me,” he says, sounding a little exasperated about it. He's letting Harry run his hands over his hips, and Harry can't believe it.

Harry nods. “You’re so crazy, and so, so hot, and—”

“Shut the fuck up. You sound like an idiot,” Riddle says, but Harry can’t unsee the slight upturn of his lips, the way his tongue runs along his upper teeth as he considers it.

Harry does shut the fuck up, regardless of Riddle’s obvious desire. He bites back whatever else he could say to convince Riddle. He is an idiot, sure. He’s whatever Riddle wants him to be.

“We can’t yet,” Riddle tells him, though he does initiate another open-mouthed kiss and it does literally nothing to help Harry’s addled brain catch up to the reality of the situation. Harry feels a little drunk, in fact. He moves his hands lower to Riddle’s obnoxious, perfectly pressed dress pants and rubs a circle into Riddle’s hard, and apparently very large cock.

Riddle has to break their kiss to rest his forehead on the wall beside Harry’s head, and he’s breathing heavily, his eyes closed. Harry begins gently sucking into the exposed skin he sees at Riddle’s neck and he’s pretty sure he’s going to win this battle because Riddle groans like Harry is physically torturing him. Harry’s lower stomach is tight with need, and he thinks he might actually be horny enough to die.

“You guys can’t fuck in my hallway,” the Eastern European guy, whose name Harry cannot remember and doesn’t care about at all says, sounding like he’s in a state of complete disbelief. Harry glares at him, where he’s staring at them at the end of the hallway with his arms crossed.

Riddle makes an exasperated sound like he wants someone to kill him. “We’re not—”

“I’m going to fight him. It’s fine,” Harry says, and he’s genuinely quite serious, he finds.

“No, you’re not," Riddle groans. "Calm down. There’s a bunch of shit I need to take care of, Harry, and he’s quite central to it.”

“None of that matters,” Harry insists, but that’s the wrong thing to say, and he knows that immediately, because Riddle glares at him and it’s super familiar, but it has a new depth of disbelief that he’s never seen on his face before.

“This is the shit I’m talking about,” Riddle says, more to the man at the end of the hallway than to Harry. Riddle extracts himself from Harry’s body, ignoring Harry’s frustrated noise of protest.

“Who cares! Why can’t we fuck in the hallway!” Harry yells, throwing his hands up, as he follows Riddle out of the hallway and into the next room. He stops short at the threshold.

He sees why.

There are at least twenty people gathered there, packed into the little room, staring at him. They look super uncomfortable about having to listen to all of this.

Riddle’s eyes are closed, when Harry glances over at him, and he hears an irritated sigh.

For a long moment, Harry does kind of think maybe he can disappear if he just wills it hard enough. That'd be great.

“Alright,” Riddle says, straightening after a long moment where it looks like he's trying to collect himself. “I’m tired," he says. "You’re tired. We’re all tired.”

Harry recognizes Draco among the small crowd gathered in the room because he is at the front of the group and he's nodding sadly now.

“I don’t have any big speech to make,” Riddle says, though he’s making one currently. “This has been three years in the making, but you see this person?” Riddle sweeps a hand out to Harry. “This person is key.”

“I am?” Harry says, and everybody in the room looks at Riddle with palpable concern, but that’s not exactly new. Harry is starting to really lose the little bit of hope he had left that he was going to get to have sex, but his mind is a bit clearer now too. He does begin to feel some shame, and he decides maybe it's time to stop speaking.

“Who’s still tied up?” Riddle says, ignoring all of the undertones of doubt and horniness in the room, as he is quite adept at doing. He seems to be addressing the question to Draco specifically, from the amount of eye contact they’re making.

“Honestly,” Draco says, a little hesitantly. “Everybody. It’s a mess out there. Every single person I called at every Stag Mart is experiencing unexplained phenomena now. I've been yelled at all day."

Riddle rolls his eyes. "Poor you," he says.

Draco nods very seriously and continues. "It’s probably best we don’t let you watch the news until this is over. The amount of coverups we’re going to have to do… I don’t even know how it’s going to be possible, sir. There are at least a hundred people possessed as we speak.”

Riddle nods wearily, like nothing can surprise him anymore. “This is our team, then. You may not be the best, nor are you the brightest, but you are available, and that’s what counts. This is an unprecedented event. We are all going to die unless you do exactly as I say.”

Harry watches the wide array of people in the room straighten. Some of them are dressed in plain clothes, others in formal suits. Some of them look reverent, and all of them look very serious. There isn’t a single person here who doesn’t believe him, it seems, regardless of what they know or don't know about the details of the situation.

“Severus, can you please try to help Harry get it together? He doesn't need to be here for this,” Riddle says, with a dismissive wave of his hand.

The Eastern European guy, Severus, apparently, looks like he’d rather be punched than agree to that. Harry does think that maybe he’s on the fence about seeing that play out for a minute, but then he seems to accept his fate because he motions to the next room and turns to leave. Harry follows him reluctantly. He kind of looks like a bat from behind with the way he’s dressed, and Harry wants to make fun of him for it in revenge for being such a huge cockblock.

The next room looks like an office, though it’s no less strange than the rest of the house. It has a desk stacked high with books and papers. Shelves of frightening things in glass jars that Harry can’t identify line the room. There's a giant skeleton of some winged animal Harry can't identify that's hanging from the ceiling.

The man sits behind the desk and there’s a couple of chairs in front of it, and Harry really hates the parallel he’s starting to see here. He sits in one of the chairs anyway and glares. At least it isn’t wet.

“You are a very angry young man,” Severus tells him. “Why?”

“Oh my god,” Harry says because he’s had this conversation before. “Seriously?”

The man narrows his eyes at him. “You need to figure out how to control your gift because the thing that you’ve just met is using you as a channel.”

Harry blinks. “Voldemort?” he says.

“Yes. You’re feeding it power,” Severus says. “A lot of power, in fact. You’re the world’s dumbest battery. You are indirectly responsible for a lot of deaths, Harry.”

“What?” Harry asks, horrified, thinking about the man who they’d just watched bleeding out in the front seat of the cab they’d gotten out of.

Severus narrows his eyes. “It’s been feeding from you specifically and you’ve made it very strong,” he repeats, like he needs to be sure Harry understands, and he isn't sure how good his English is.

“No,” Harry says. “That’s not my fault. No one told me.”

“No one could,” Severus says. “No one can speak about any of this outside of this building, and only a few people are trained well enough in occlumency to know about it.”

Harry stares at the closest weird, terrifying jar filled with black liquid. It’s undulating with something that kind of looks like a tiny squid, though the liquid is too dark to see it clearly. He really doesn't want to be involved in any of this, and it seems he is deeply, personally involved now.

“Your sensitivity to the other world, to the dead, has made you a perfect channel,” the man continues. “If you want to leave this building, you must learn to use it.”

Harry swallows, looking back at him. He is quite calm about all of this, but Harry feels he is on the verge of a mental breakdown. Luckily, there's only so much he can take in a single day, and he finds himself blessedly numb with disbelief.

“We will start formal training tomorrow,” Severus tells him.

He hears the sounds of people moving through the house, the sounds of footsteps on old, creaky stairs. Riddle walks in and collapses in the chair beside Harry.

“You are compromised?” Severus says, looking at him through narrowed eyes.

“Yeah,” Riddle says, running his hands over his face. “My arm is fucked.”

Severus glares at Harry, who just blinks at him, still feeling disoriented.

“It wasn’t his fault,” Riddle says, catching the not at all subtle expression of anger on his face. “This one is on me. I thought I could handle it, but his anger is…” Riddle shakes his head and laughs.

“Like yours?” Severus says.

“Alright, you aren’t my therapist!” Riddle says anger coloring his tone, inadvertently proving his point. Severus just sits there, looking pleased with himself.

“Are you going to help me, or do I have to suck your dick too?” Riddle asks.

Severus makes a disgusted face at both of them and Harry sinks lower into the chair.

Harry watches Riddle roll up his sleeve and unwind the bloody bandages covering the bite. Harry swallows when it is revealed to them. It’s splotched with purple and blue, and as deep as Harry feared it was, a giant arc of mangled flesh all the way around his forearm, deep holes in the shape of curved teeth.

“How long has it been?” Severus asks, after looking at it for a few seconds. His severe expression is more severe now, the harsh line of his mouth downturned.

“Maybe forty-eight hours,” Riddle says. “When am I going to die?”

Harry looks over in alarm at where he’s slumped in the chair, clearly exhausted. Harry is awash with dread and guilt, but he says nothing. Maybe he is an idiot, he thinks, or a bad person, because although Riddle dragged him across the country and lied to him, and was, in general, a pain in the ass, this is all clearly a serious situation. It is both for everyone, and for Riddle himself. The stakes seem very high and Harry finds he can't think of anything funny or optimistic to say about it at all.

Severus is quiet for a moment. He steps forward from behind the desk to begin turning Riddle’s arm and looking at it closer, considering it, his expression pinched. He shakes his head. “Only you could fight this,” he says ruefully, instead of answering. “I’m going to make you a paste. It’ll help slow it down.”

“So, have you been lying to me too?”

Draco looks up from where he’s sitting on the porch, enclosed in windowed screens. Cigarette smoke wafts into the air, and Harry would probably trade one of his fingers for a smoke, if this were a hostage situation. Luckily, he doesn’t have to. Draco hands him the pack along with a bright blue lighter without a word.

“Lying to you,” he repeats, shaking his head. “You mean working undercover? Yeah.”

Harry sits down beside him on the concrete bench that honestly looks like it was dragged in from a cemetery. It even has a name and dates carved into it. Harry ignores all of that, and lights his cigarette, with a little glow in the otherwise dim lighting of the porch. It's built into the upper hallway of the house, on the second floor, and it seems like a possibly illegal addition. Outside, the sun is clouded over with grey, coloring the back alley outside in tones of blue. Trash cans line the street and the apartment across the way has windows lit with yellow light.

He hands Draco back his cigarettes. “Thanks,” he says, feeling the sweet relief of nicotine easing through his blood.

“We all had to go into that house, Harry,” Draco says. “I know it sucks, but you don’t have to go back. You can’t now, in fact. You know too much.”

Harry thinks about that for a minute, taking a drag of his cigarette. He’s pretty sure he understands what that means. “Can the thing in that house, the ghost, or whatever it is… it can read our minds?”

Draco nods. “If you’re close enough to it, or anyone it is possessing. If it possesses you, you’re fucked. It can possess a lot of people at once. There’s probably no limit to it. I’ve had to kill a lot of people in the past month. There’s no saving them.”

Harry tries not to think about the fact that he witnessed Riddle being possessed a couple of days ago. Draco doesn’t seem bothered by any of this, and Harry thinks maybe it has something to do with Riddle’s training. Maybe he trains the empathy out of people or something, Harry doesn’t know anymore.

“If that thing finds out that Riddle is trying to kill it, we’re all fucked. I mean, probably a third of humanity will go down. If Riddle dies before this is over, humanity as we know it is over.”

Harry watches Draco breathe out smoke, as he says those mind-boggling facts like they're talking about the weather. Harry tries to come to terms with that without losing his mind. He groans, snubbing out the butt of his cigarette in an ashtray on the edge of a windowsill. “I need another cigarette,” he decides.

Draco hands him the pack and watches him light another cigarette and suck in smoke desperately.

“What I can’t figure out is if you guys are really fucking. I mean, I’m not judging, I just… I didn’t know he was gay.”

“Draco,” Harry says, and he’s beginning to feel a little hysterical. “Riddle is super gay.”

Draco laughs but it sounds a little like a scoff. “Well, I don’t know how he’s going to employ you if you’re dating now.”

“I don’t want to work with you,” Harry says, enunciating very clearly. “I never, ever want to be involved with any of this ever again.”

“Yeah,” Draco says, shaking his head almost wistfully, looking out the screened window. “I remember that feeling.”

“No,” Harry says, turning to him fully. “I’m serious. This is horrible.”

Draco only smiles at him like there’s some secret he knows that Harry doesn’t yet, and Harry is really, really sick of secrets.

“What?” he demands.

“You’ll change your mind,” Draco says, sounding very confident about it. “I may not be clairvoyant, but I’m seeing a lot of signs.”

Chapter 9: This is a Problem That Doesn't Have a Solution

Notes:

Editing this chapter made me temporarily lose my grasp on the English language.

Chapter Text

It’s nearly unbearably hot in the kitchen downstairs, when Harry finds his way inside. There’s a giant pot filled with bubbling liquid over a fire that takes up almost all of the space in there. The furthest wall is all exposed brick and a little window is propped open an inch. It does almost nothing to help with the stifling heat.

Riddle is standing at a kitchen island made of a large, unrefined tree trunk and he's chopping vegetables with the kind of sureness that implies he really knows his way around knives. Sweat dots his forehead.

“What are you doing?” Harry asks, from the doorway, in disbelief.

Riddle looks up at him and it seems like he’s trying to read his expression. “What’s wrong?” He slows his dicing of the onion.

“You’re a workaholic,” Harry says, in what he feels is a very reasonably horrified tone.

Riddle rolls his eyes and goes back to work immediately. He doesn’t deny it, at least.

“You can’t have someone else do this? I mean…”

Riddle ignores him, so Harry decides to try his luck at distraction. He moves closer to him in the room and watches Riddle get visibly tenser, muscles tight. Harry stops on the other side of the tree stump, frustrated that they’re back to this.

“Why are you doing this to yourself? Can’t you take a break?”

“No,” Riddle says, and he looks fairly angry about it.

“Why the fuck not?”

Riddle turns to throw the chopped onion into the boiling pot, and begins working on what looks like a strange root vegetable that Harry can’t identify. His arm looks like it’s been rebandaged, and it isn’t bloody anymore, though he’s still using it. Riddle clearly got the medical help he actually needed.

“Why do you think, Harry?” he asks.

“Because you’re insane?”

That’s not the right answer, clearly, because Riddle spares a moment to give Harry a look like he kind of wants him to die.

“Because you’re super paranoid about being fed a coin? I don’t know. Just tell me.”

“No,” he says, without looking up. “I’m doing it because it’s part of my job. And I’m not 'super paranoid' about the coins. I haven’t been given any, and I would never use them, but you’ve been given two, haven’t you?”

Harry blinks at him. “Yeah, but I’m not going to put them in either of our mou—“

“You are. You do shit like that constantly. You act as if being stupid is a competitive sport and you’re trying to win a medal for it.”

Harry stares at the tense line of Riddle’s shoulders as he works, as he refuses to look up from his task. Harry has absolutely no idea what the coins do, but that’s really not where his focus is. He’s not that much of an idiot, no matter how much Riddle is convinced of that. Voldemort wants it to happen and that’s really all he needs to know to not do it.

“What’s this really about?” he asks.

Riddle stabs the knife into the tree trunk, stained and pitted from what looks like years of use. He probably bent the tip of the blade with the kind of force he does it with, no matter how soft the wood has become with the years.

“You need to start listening to me,” he says, sounding unbearably dangerous. Harry is so turned on he feels a little sick with it. Riddle is a genuinely beautiful person, and his anger sharpens it to a point.

“Okay,” Harry says, swallowing. “Maybe, for some reason I don’t understand, I’d be tempted to use the coins. Maybe you really need to make sure that doesn’t happen. What do the coins do?”

Riddle narrows his eyes. “I can’t answer that question, Harry, or you’ll go try to find them and you’ll use them immediately.”

“Okay,” Harry says, though privately, he disagrees. “Fine.”

“My possession is progressing very quickly. We may only have another few days to get this right,” Riddle calmly tells him, prying the knife back out of the tree stump. “Go wait in the next room for me. I don’t have time to deal with you right now.”

“Harry,” Ron says, and he sounds about as shell-shocked as Harry feels. He’s on speakerphone, of course, as this is the only way Riddle agreed to allow it. “You are not going to believe all the shit that’s going on in this store. I don’t actually even know where to start.”

Harry nods, mute for a long moment, looking at a strange circular metal object on the wall in the room they’re in because he’s having a little bit of trouble staying grounded to reality. “Yeah,” he says. “I can imagine.”

“I don’t… I don’t think you can, actually,” Ron says, and it really sounds like he also thinks he’s going insane.

“What’s um, what’s going on over there, exactly?” Harry asks, wincing.

“Well, for a start, Hermione is acting really strange. It just seems like there’s a lot she’s not saying, you know?”

Harry nods, completely unsurprised by that because he is having trouble accessing the feeling of surprise at this point. Maybe Riddle somehow figured out how to tell her, or maybe she just figured out on her own that he’s been covering something up and it’s important to keep it that way. She’s always been smarter than both of them combined.

“Are you guys safe?” he asks, because that’s all he really cares about.

Ron laughs. “Well, we’re kind of in a hostage situation over here. We also kind of have a hostage. Some customer tried to kill all of us, and of course, we stopped it. But now he’s tied up in the bathroom, and Hermione won’t let any of us leave the store. There’s a bunch of snakes all over the place. It’s bad.”

Harry looks at Riddle, his chaperone for this conversation, who hasn’t even allowed him to hold the phone. Riddle’s thumb is hovering over the end call button like he’s completely sure Harry is going to fuck this up. They’re sitting together on the couch in the main room, what was probably intended to be a living room, but is now filled with shelves of oddities. It's a nice couch, velvet red and tassled.

“I’m really glad you’re okay,” Harry says, not reacting to that, though he’d really, really like to.

“Oh god,” Ron says, seeming to pick up on something being wrong immediately. “You’re in an even worse situation. I should have known.”

“Nope,” Harry says quickly, glancing at Riddle’s unreadable expression where he sits beside him. “Everything’s great over here, actually. Super great. I’ve been having a great time.”

“Er,” Ron says, and Harry can just about hear him swallow over the line. “That sounds really bad.”

“It’s like, the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” Harry says forcefully. “I’ve never been better, actually.”

“Oh my god!” Ron says, sounding terrified. “Are we all going to die or what?”

“Absolutely not,” Harry says nervously, though Riddle hasn’t hung up the phone yet and he’s actually looking amused now.

Ron is silent for a long moment, and it's clear he doesn't believe Harry from the silence that drags on over the line.

"I need to go, I think," Harry says, closing his eyes briefly. "We'll be back soon. Just hang in there, alright?"

"You too," Ron says.

Riddle presses the end call button with a decisive click, huffing. “So you’re officially the stupidest of your friends, then. Understood.”

“I don’t feel like that’s really very fair,” Harry says beside him, irritated. “I grew up with Ron. Of course he knows something’s off. Hermione is smarter than me, but she’s also smarter than most of the people I know.”

He watches Riddle put the phone away, leaning down to his leather briefcase and sliding it into the outer pocket. “She’s certainly smarter than a lot of the people in this building,” he says. “She gave me this book, after all.”

Harry watches in a state of near catatonic disbelief as he pulls out “101 Ways to Tell if You’re Gay” from the bag at his feet.

“Is this, like… are you trying to be funny right now?”

Riddle glares at him. “I have some additional questions,” he says defensively, flipping through it, though it doesn't seem like he's very serious about finding anything in particular. “I’ve never been gay before.”

“You were always gay,” Harry says.

“That’s not true,” Riddle says, and it looks like he’s starting to get agitated, his muscles tightening under his shirt. He sounds really grouchy and uptight, as per usual. “I wasn’t very interested in sex before I met you.”

“Right,” Harry says slowly, watching him get tenser on the couch beside him. “Why do you think that is?”

“Because you clearly turned me gay!” he says, inappropriately loudly. Harry knows there are a bunch of people ladling soup into bowls in the room over, so he winces.

“You try being turned gay while dealing with possession from a class E ghost,” Riddle says between clenched teeth, clearly very angry now. He slams the book on his lap. “And then you can talk to me about my experience.”

“Okay,” Harry says. “Fine. You’re going through a lot. But I didn’t turn you gay because that’s not how this works!”

Riddle sighs, looking exasperated. “Just tell me how to get over it, then, Harry. I’m not interested in dying while I'm gay.”

“Get over it?” Harry repeats because it really feels like every statement he makes is more unbelievable than the last. “It’s not a cold, Riddle. You’re not going to get over it! This is just the way you are! I’m not dating you,” Harry decides, running a hand through his hair in his distress. “I’ll gladly fuck you, but I’m not dating you. I can’t do it. You’re too fucked up.”

“I didn’t ask you to do either of those things,” Riddle says, setting the book aside and leaning closer to him. He's a tall, lanky, and looming presence, and Harry hates how it uncurls something in his gut, especially while he's being neurotic. “That’s, frankly, a ridiculous thing to try to manipulate me with.”

“To manipulate you with,” Harry repeats, and he feels his hands clenching into fists. “Are you fucking serious? There’s no way you’re serious.”

“You’ve been relentlessly doing everything you can to make me gay. I would consider that manipulation. It’s not been very helpful, Harry. Also, you need to calm down.”

Harry stands. He pushes Riddle down against the back of the couch and ignores the noise of surprise he makes.

“I’m so fucking done with this shit,” Harry says, and he leans down to begin undoing Riddle’s pants, and pulling his hips forward so that they’re closer to the edge of the couch.

The room they’re in is very public, central to the house, but Harry knows no one will bother them. Everyone on earth is terrified of Tom Riddle except Harry. They’ve also been shouting about being gay, so every person in the house is probably smart enough to stay out. Harry finds he doesn’t really care if they walk in and watch anymore. He's reached the end of his limit.

Riddle is glaring at him, but he doesn’t do anything to stop any of it as Harry removes his pants. The movement of his hands near Riddle's dick is getting him hard, and Harry stops for a second to glare back at him disbelievingly.

"You're unbelievably gay," he says.

Riddle glares at him even harder, but it's really, really undermined by the fact that he looks turned on. Harry hates Riddle’s clothing choices, and his perfect hair and his perfect face. He isn’t surprised that he has the kind of dick that would make most porn stars jealous. It all checks out, as Riddle is a fucking nightmare wrapped in surface level perfection. Harry ignores all of it, focusing on getting everything off his lower body.

He pushes himself to the floor and spreads Riddle’s legs open when he's accomplished it. He begins angrily eating Riddle out like he’s doing it to exact vengeance, spreading his asscheeks and running his tongue over his perfect, irritating asshole, and ignoring the cursing he begins hearing from the man, too.

He eases a finger to open Riddle up with spit and that makes him angry too because Riddle is unimaginably tight. He’s never had sex before and this is going to be so fucking good. Fuck him for all of it, Harry thinks, with a kind of drive and seriousness that he can only accomplish with his uncontrollable anger.

He feels Riddle’s hand resting on the back of his neck possessively and when he looks up, Riddle’s expression looks a little mean, and he’s smiling at Harry like he’s winning something. For a moment, Harry thinks maybe he’s been conned somehow, but he discards the idea quickly.

He finds Riddle’s prostate once he’s made it past the juncture of opening him up enough, and Riddle is making the kinds of fucked out noises that cause every last of his brain cells to cease functioning.

His dick is painfully hard, and it’s also at an odd angle, so Harry undoes his own pants with one hand while he slips another finger into his partner with the other and listens to the resulting absolutely debauched, pained groan that slips from his mouth. He doesn't touch himself because honestly, Harry is so pent up, it's a bad idea.

They’re definitely going to need more than spit to do this. When Harry says that, Riddle just groans. He releases his grip on the back of Harry’s neck to make an aggravated motion. “Pants,” he says.

Harry feels around on the floor with his free hand to the crumpled up slacks. He pulls out a travel size bottle of lube out of one of Riddle's pockets.

“Unbe-fucking-lievable,” Harry says, pumping harder into him angrily with his fingers. He’s completely unable to read Riddle’s expression because he’s tossed his head back onto the couch. Harry opens the bottle with his teeth and pours lube where his fingers are pumping into Riddle’s stretched asshole. “Did you bait me into fucking you?”

“God, Harry. Of course I did. This was the easiest thing I’ve done all day,” Riddle replies, lifting his head, looking at his expression and laughing at him.

Harry is actually going to kill him after he’s done having sex with him, he decides. He’s going to murder him and let the entire world end. Voldemort can win. He removes his fingers and ignores the resulting angry noise he hears. He joins Riddle on the couch, getting on top of him. He lines his cock up and begins pushing in a little.

Riddle is really a vocal partner, and he’s got a great voice for it. It’s making Harry, who knows he has frankly amazing stamina, struggle a little to listen to the absolutely tormented, frustrated sounds he’s making without coming immediately or pushing all the way in.

“God, Harry just move,” Riddle groans beneath the cage of his arms. “You’re so fucking irritating.”

“I can’t yet,” Harry pants, leaning down to run his mouth over Riddle’s pulse point. “I’m going to hurt you,” he says against his neck.

Riddles hand is suddenly around his throat, and he’s pushing Harry up to glare at him. Riddle is looking a little manic and insane again. Harry blinks at his expression, and a distant part of him wonders why it turns him on so much.

“Get over yourself,” he spits.

Harry presses in a bit more and groans.

“You’re so fucking worthless aren’t you, Harry?”

Harry presses his hands into Riddle’s hips and begins fucking him properly, fueled by his anger at all of the truth in that statement. The sounds coming out of Riddle's mouth are so guttural they’re borderline inhuman. That, the sound of wet squelching, and the unbearable pressure of the tightest fuck of his life are all cascading into pushing him over the edge really quickly.

Harry’s pretty sure he’s leaving bruises into Riddle’s skin as he’s gripping onto him like he’s the embodiment of the edge of his control. He must be easy to read because Riddle laughs at his expression. “I’m going to make you come, aren’t I? Do you want to come in me, Harry?”

Harry makes a strangled noise, only partly because he is being strangled.

“Beg for it,” Riddle says, running a hand over his dick, and squeezing his throat threateningly with his other. Harry can’t really even look at that because it’ll send him over the edge, so he just keeps his gaze on Riddle’s face.

For a long moment, Harry is caught between not wanting to beg and needing to do so. It looks like it will make Riddle manic with pleasure, so he knows which will win out.

“Please,” Harry groans, and he finds that the shame of it makes it addictive to him somehow. It's a lot easier to say than he expected it to be. “Please, I’ll do anything.”

“You will, won’t you? Anything I want."

Harry nods, his vision a little blurry from what must be him tearing up a little. His hips stutter a bit between Riddle’s legs. He's so tight it feels a little painful. “I’m gonna die if you don’t let me come,” he groans, closing his eyes.

Riddle laughs, and Harry feels him pumping his own dick harder. “I’m going to make you watch me do it first,” he decides.

Harry groans again, but it comes out horrified now. “I don’t think I—“

“Why can’t you do it unless I tell you to?” Riddle asks, but it’s a question devoid of curiosity. It’s obvious he’s just trying to get Harry to say what he wants.

“Because you own me,” Harry says, and in that moment, as gut wrenching as it is to say that, he feels it’s true. Riddle does own his pleasure. He somehow made that happen, and Harry doesn't know how.

Riddle nods at him, with a wildly sadistic expression, gripping his throat tighter. “Good, Harry.”

“Please, for fuck's sake! Can I come? Fuck.”

Riddle nods, and Harry can’t breathe because the hand at his throat is cutting off his oxygen supply, and it’s so good that Harry feels the pleasure of it resorting his brain into an entirely new configuration. He comes harder than he maybe ever has in his life, after being continually led on for the past few days.

Riddle gathers him close when he pulls out, and forces him to lie down on his chest on the couch with him. They’re both in chaotic half-clothed states, and they’re sweaty, but Harry feels Riddle running a hand through his hair, uncaring.

Harry’s breathing hard still, and Riddle's heartbeat is loud beneath his ear. Harry glances up at him, and he looks like some debauched representation of perfection. It's satisfying because, if he's being honest, from the moment he met Riddle, Harry has desperately wanted to ruin his life and shatter whatever weird, stilted box he's drawn around himself. It has nothing to do with the ghost or even Riddle being gay. It has to do with him as a person.

"Fuck,” he says because this has the potential to be very addictive. It's a problem, and even Harry can see that.

"I'm very possessive of my things," Riddle tells him, with one of his signature looks so intense they'd make almost anyone start begging for their lives. Almost. The exception to that is lying atop him.

"I'm a person, not a thing," Harry says, with a scoff.

Riddle squints at him like this is some serious problem he's going to have to work through and Harry puts his head back down on his chest, unable to look at it anymore. It's grade A psychopath shit.

"You guys better not have fucked on my couch," Harry hears a stern voice say from the doorway, though no one dares to come in and check. Harry feels Riddle laugh beneath him and he groans.

Chapter 10: This is Not The Problem

Chapter Text

The people that were left standing around in the kitchen look genuinely traumatized about what they just heard. The silence is so loud it rings in the air, a thing nearly alive, when Harry follows Riddle into the kitchen.

Harry understands because although he was a willing and active participant in it, the sex they just had was not normal. Maybe it would have just been a little embarrassing if they were having normal sex but it kind of sounded like they were murdering one another, so it’s solidly mortifying. If he was in any of these people’s places, he’d probably have called 911 or maybe a priest.

Riddle’s hair is sticking up at odd angles and his clothing is more disheveled than Harry’s ever seen it, though at least he put his pants back on. Everyone else is frozen in place in the kitchen as he casually gets a bowl from the stack of them sitting on the tree trunk, and ladles soup into it from the cauldron. He holds it out and when Harry doesn’t take it, he looks up to glare at him.

Harry walks further into the kitchen than he’d like to be and takes the bowl of soup, watching Riddle fill a bowl for himself like he doesn’t notice the unbelievably awkward tone in the room.

“Get back to work,” he simultaneously tells everyone and no one in particular, and he begins chugging the soup straight from the bowl like it’s something he has to mark off a to do list.

The kitchen clears immediately. He doesn’t need to make any threats to do it.

Harry watches him finish the soup warily. “Are you ever going to sleep again, or is that really something you don’t do?”

“We can get two hours,” he decides, setting down the empty bowl. “Then we need to wake Severus up and you need to start training your weird little power.”

Harry sighs. He takes a sip of his soup. It’s really good.

“This isn’t working,” Severus says, and he sounds like he’s getting increasingly frustrated.

Maybe that’s Harry’s actual gift; making people angry at him, because a lot of people seem to be irritated with him.

They’re sitting cross-legged on the floor in his office. Severus has just been saying a bunch of random words to him for the past hour, and asking him what they mean to him. He’s also handed Harry some objects that it looks like he’s very carefully selecting. He's wearing his little bat outfit and Harry still hasn't made fun of him for it yet. He's held off. The guy sits so straight it's like he has a permanent rod in his back. It makes Harry very aware that he's slouching.

“How are you feeling now?” Severus asks, though he can probably tell, Harry thinks.

“Bored,” Harry answers. He throws the metal ball that he's been given up in the air and catches it, ignoring the irritated scowl on the older man's face. “I’m probably not even clairvoyant," he decides. "I think Riddle’s just in love with me.”

Severus looks at him like these are some of the most ridiculous things he’s ever heard anyone say, and he snatches the ball out of Harry's hand.

“Which of these two false statements would you like me to address first?” he asks.

“Uh," Harry says, sighing. “Riddle, I guess.”

“Riddle can’t feel love. Now, onto—“

“Wait, wait, wait,” Harry says. “What are you talking about? I get that he’s… different, but why would you think that?”

“Because it’s a fact. He’s using you because you have something he needs.”

Harry blinks. “Is it…sex?” he guesses, though he knows that's the wrong answer because Severus looks amazed that he doesn't understand.

“No," he says slowly. "If I can train you, you can tell him what’s going to happen next. I’m genuinely not sure if you’ve noticed, but that would give him a level of control over his environment that would be extremely beneficial for this mission.”

“Oh,” Harry says because that kind of makes a lot of sense. “He likes control.”

“Yes,” Severus says, sounding a little relieved that this isn’t something he has to spell out as well. “His ability to control these kinds of situations is one of the things that makes him a valuable asset at the FBI.”

Harry presses his lips together and tries not to react weirdly to that because it’s also probably what he’s attracted to. Or maybe it's the thing he most wants to destroy, and he's attracted to the idea of doing it, he genuinely isn’t sure.

Severus watches his expression carefully for a moment, rubbing a hand over his chin. “Riddle is compromised. He could become possessed by Voldemort at any time. There’s no coming back from that once it’s fully taken hold. What do you think is going to happen?”

“I don’t know,” Harry says, biting back the urge to roll his eyes. “How would I know that?”

“If you'd stop thinking, maybe you would," Severus says, sounding sarcastic. "It makes you angry. Your anger is just a defense mechanism. Picture his arm as it is now and tell me how you are actually feeling.”

Harry tries to figure it out. He sits there and stares at the ornate pattern on the rug that covers the floor, considering it. It kind of feels like there’s a slowly widening pit in his stomach, one that’s going to swallow him whole.

“Um,” he says. “I feel unwell, I guess.”

Severus sighs, looking a little relieved to make some progress after an hour. “I do too.”

Harry squints at him. “Are you…?”

“Yes, I have the gift of clairvoyance. That’s why I am training you. A lot of us here have at least one kind of telesthesia, some gift.”

“Oh,” Harry says.

“Draco and Riddle are gifted in thought transference, in the mind arts. There are people in the building who can change shape, or who have telekinetic abilities, or who have the power to control the dead. Voldemort was once a necromancer.”

“Hold on," Harry says, and he straightens. "What do you mean 'thought transference?'" He hasn't really listened to any of that last part.

Severus seems to be either thinking very hard about something, or else he's uneasy. He's kind of a difficult guy to read, if Harry's being honest.

"Are you trying to say that Riddle can read my mind?" Harry asks, very calmly, and just to be sure.

Severus sighs and it looks like he's cringing a little bit, even. “I don’t really understand how it is for them, though Draco has tried to explain it to me," he says, a little reluctantly. "They mostly see images, I believe.”

“I’m so sorry. If you could excuse me for just a minute,” Harry says, again, very calmly and politely. He stands and holds a hand up as Severus looks at the ceiling.

Harry even has the decency to step outside his office and close the door before he starts yelling.

“RIDDLE!”

He hears a couple of doors shut upstairs, probably people locking themselves in their rooms, terrified they’re going to have to hear another satanic-sounding sex ritual.

He finds Riddle in the living room, where they fucked. He’s got Draco with him and they’re sitting around an object that looks like a ouija board carved out of wood. Draco’s lying on his stomach on the floor and Riddle is sitting cross-legged beside him. Harry stands a few feet away from them and he's distantly aware that he probably looks like he's going to be violent, he's so tense.

“You’re reading my mind?!” he shouts.

Riddle looks up with narrowed eyes. It's an extremely paranoid expression, but it only lasts for a moment before his face smooths out. “Severus,” he says incredibly darkly, sounding like he just identified his mortal enemy.

“Why wouldn’t you tell me something like that? Why wouldn't you tell me there are other people that do stuff like this! I mean, I thought I was a freak!”

“You are,” Draco says distastefully, looking up from where he’s lying on the floor. “We all know that now. I had a nightmare in the three hours of sleep I was allowed to get, Harry,” he says, very seriously. “I had to call my father about it.”

“What?” Harry yells, since he’s already yelling and it’s tough to stop. “Why would you call your father about that?! You're a grown man!”

Riddle sighs, aggravated, and speaks over whatever Draco was going to say next. “Harry, I know that you’re angry, but it's—“

Harry’s suddenly struck with insight that’s usually very rare for him, as he considers all the times he thought about fucking Riddle over his desk or he wondered about his sexuality. Once he’d had that initial conversation with Ron, it was mostly all he thought about, to be honest.

“Did me thinking about it all the time actually make you gay?!” Harry is yelling louder with each exclamation, and Draco winces from his place on the floor.

“No,” Riddle says in a lower tone, though still also clearly aggravated, as their anger builds from one another's like an out of control forest fire. “But it was certainly distracting and unhelpful, as I’ve said at least twenty times to you.”

The tone is familiar. It’s a little falsely defensive. It's the same tone that Riddle used to bait Harry into having sex with him four hours ago. Maybe Ron was right, when he said it’s hard to stop pattern recognition once it begins, because Harry is starting to suspect something. And maybe the full two hours of sleep he got really helped.

“Can you put thoughts into peoples heads?!”

Riddle winces like this leap is especially inconvenient for him for Harry to make. “Images, yes, but—“

“Are you fucking serious?!”

Draco nods absently, pushing the planchette around on the board like it’s a toy. “Wait til you find out he can doctor people’s memories. By the way, Riddle, could you maybe help me with that because it was actually very sickening to have to—“

“What?!” Harry yells.

“Draco,” Riddle says, dragging the name out in his aggravation between clenched teeth. “Go take a break!”

“Oh, god,” Draco says, sitting up and looking genuinely terrified. He's clearly seldom heard those words uttered before. “Are you going to kill me?” He pushes away from Riddle from his place on the floor.

“No! Get out!”

Harry watches as Draco scrambles upright and leaves the room.

“I didn’t do anything," Riddle insists, his anger making him seem to sit more rigidly on the floor, though he has not escalated to yelling. "You would know.”

“I don’t believe you," Harry says.

“I’ll prove it to you.”

Riddle drags him to the floor on his lap, and Harry narrows his eyes at him, but goes anyway.

“Maintain eye contact.”

Harry begins to get a very weird intrusive thought. It is an image, but it’s very dim, like picturing something with all the colors sapped out of it, too dark to clearly see, though nearly photographic in detail otherwise. It feels like he’s watching a movie on a destroyed reel. It’s also missing the depth of emotion that he’d expect to find when remembering his own life events. It’s Riddle’s own memory of meeting him, he realizes. He sees himself, glaring at Riddle in the grocery store. To be fair, Harry thinks, he does look very suspicious, standing with the other night shift workers with his arms crossed like that.

And Riddle’s right. Harry would notice it.

It suddenly ends and Harry is back fully in the present, with only his own mind.

“It’d never work,” he says, and he’s touching the back of Harry’s neck again. He sounds calm. “Of course, I've thought about it, but we’re too different. You'd know.”

Something isn’t right.

Now that Harry is looking out for it, he can recognize it quite clearly. It’s like someone is screaming and shaking him. He has to back out of the room for a moment and lean against the wall to deal with it.

He thinks of all the times he had this intensity of feeling and he shakes his head.

Jesus, Riddle’s right. He is an idiot.

In the hallway where he’s standing outside Severus' office, water is beginning to drip from the ceiling and pool onto the floor. Harry stares at it, his heartbeat quickening.

“What’s, uh, what’s going on in there?” he asks because a part of him really doesn’t want to know.

“Come in, Harry,” he hears Riddle say, so he does.

Riddle is sitting at the desk, pouring over his own notes, and nothing is obviously wrong. Still, Harry can’t shake the feeling.

Harry swallows. “Um… what are you doing?”

Riddle looks up at him and looks unsurprised by whatever he finds in his expression. “Working.”

Harry feels a lot like he’s going to die. “I, er, I think I need to tell you… I don’t know, something. It’s really uncomfortable.”

“Yeah. We’re going to have to move the timeline up.” Riddle says. He takes another calculating look at Harry’s expression. “Way up.”

Harry feels like he might need to sit down. “Maybe even more than that,” he admits. “I feel like I’m going to die.”

“Okay,” Riddle says, easily acquiescing to that information. He turns to Harry more fully. “You need to shoot me, then,” he says, very plainly.

“What?!”

“Harry, I’m not fucking around here.” He stands and moves closer. He picks up the gun sitting on the desk beside him and he pushes the cold metal of the weapon into Harry’s hand.

“No! What are you talking about?!” Harry pushes the gun away, and for a long moment it looks like Riddle is actually going to punch him.

“Do it!” Riddle says, wrapping his own larger hand around Harry’s and forcing his hand into the correct position around the gun to fire it. He’s got an ironclad grip.

“I need some fucking help in here!” Harry yells, but though he knows for a fact that there are at least twenty people in the house, he hears no one coming.

“Do you want to see me possessed?” Riddle asks him, between clenched teeth. He pulls Harry close to his face and his expression is terrifying. “Do you want to see everyone in this house dead with a snake around their throats? Do you want to see the entire world burn? Do you?”

“No,” Harry whispers.

“That’s what’s going to happen pretty fucking soon if you don't get with the program, and I don’t need to have your kind of gift to figure that out!”

“I can’t,” Harry says. “Please don’t make me do this.”

“You, specifically, have to, right fucking now. I need you to do it here.” He forces the barrel of the gun to a specific point on his chest, maybe near his heart, Harry thinks, though he doesn't know anything about anatomy.

That’s very poetic, or melodramatic, or something, Harry can’t decide. If he weren’t having what feels like a panic attack, he might laugh about it.

Riddle’s expression goes blank for a second, and then he closes his eyes tightly. It looks like he’s concentrating very hard on something.

“Oh, fuck,” Harry says.

“I swear to god, Harry, I'll haunt you if you don’t do this,” he mutters, his eyes still shut tight.

“You’ll haunt me either way!”

“Yeah," Riddle says, and he laughs. It sounds a little unhinged. "But I’ll be a lot angrier when I do if you don’t shoot me, right fucking now!”

Riddle’s hand is twitching. His grip on the gun is super loose now.

Harry would rather do just about anything else than what he’s been asked to, but it looks like Riddle is right. He’s twitching so much that it looks like he isn’t going to be upright for much longer, though his hand remains over Harry’s on the gun. He’s mouthing something that Harry can’t figure out, and it looks like a smile is going to break through on his face.

Harry shuts his eyes tight, and he’s distantly aware he’s making some kind of horrified whine.

His finger moves over the trigger, pressing down, and the kickback from the gun is hard. It’s so loud. In the aftermath of the ringing, he hears Riddle stumble backwards with the force of it, and make a pained noise as the clink of shell casing and the bullet falls against the floorboards. He also hears the gun hit the floor in a clatter because Harry can’t hold it anymore. He presses his hands to his face because he can’t look at it. He feels a sob clawing its way up his throat.

Then he feels Riddle’s hands prying his away from his face and he’s talking still, somehow.

“So good. You did so good,” he says, in a more comforting and placating tone than Harry’s ever heard him use before. Riddle pushes him against his body, and envelopes him in the warmth of his arms. He feels a hand running through his hair.

Harry looks up and he’s smiling, looking very pleased with him. There’s a bullet hole in his shirt, but there’s something else there too, some thick fabric underneath it.

A bulletproof vest.

“Next time,” Riddle says, still petting him possessively. “When I tell you to do something, don’t hesitate.”

Harry stares at the wall as he’s crushed into Riddle’s chest.

This is how he trains people, Harry thinks, a little hysterically. This is how he gets them to do everything he wants without any of them requiring an explanation from him. This is probably written in a manual he wrote somewhere called “101 Ways to Force Idiots to Do Your Bidding.”

Harry remembers when he first met Draco outside the store in that car; the look he gave Harry before he drove off, like he was concerned for him. Weaponized psychopathy.

A part of Harry thinks he is having some kind of trauma response, frankly. He’s caught up in so many different conflicting emotions that it’s hard to figure out which one will win out for a moment, but then it becomes apparent which will.

Harry shakes his head because he still feels like he’s going to die, and it's the same feeling from before.

“Something’s really wrong," he says.

“I know,” Riddle sighs, and he reaches around his side to pull another gun out of a holster he’s wearing now, though Harry isn't sure he's ever noticed him wearing one before. He presses it into Harry’s hands.

“Your premonition isn't about me, not quite yet.”

Chapter 11: This is a Weird Conversation

Notes:

There's a little bit of violence in this chapter, but it's not graphic. If the tone of this story was different, I could have written some truly nightmare-inducing stuff, so believe me when I say you'll be fine.

Chapter Text

Harry was told he has a special connection to the dead, though he doesn’t understand what that means until he gets a full block of six hours of sleep. After water starts coming out of the ceiling, Riddle decides that’s probably the best thing for them to do. All of them. People are flopped across armchairs, or curled in fetal positions on the floor, adjusting their pillows. Everyone in the house is doing so somewhere in pairs of two. Harry knows this because he followed Riddle while he walked through the house and glared at everyone.

Everyone is preparing to sleep except Riddle himself, who, it looks like, is just going to stare at Harry the entire time he sleeps.

It’s a little unsettling and Harry winces at him when he realizes that’s what he’s planning on doing. They’re on the couch together, and Riddle is sitting rigidly beside him.

Draco is standing at the door staring at them too.

It’s awkward to be watched, but Harry is also so tired he’s been starting to stumble around. He’s also noticed that he’s been jolted awake during the training sessions he’s having with Severus. After only a few minutes, he does manage to fall asleep lying on the couch.

Voldemort comes to him in his dream, looking much the same as before, a terrifying dead person wearing all black, with a wig on. It’s not crooked this time. It is on backwards though. Voldemort has to part the plasticy dark material repeatedly to see.

Harry sighs. He really doesn’t want to deal with this shit.

They’re in the backyard of his parent’s old home, somewhere he often dreams about. Harry used to sit out here all the time before they died. He had a little swing his father had nailed to a tree branch, and he sits in it now, though he’s a little too big for it to be comfortable. Harry feels safe here; the horrible feeling has evaporated completely from his body, so he supposes that probably means he is safe in his dreams.

Voldemort is standing before him, peering out through the dark strands of the wig and smiling creepily. A white snake is curled in the grass, though it appears to be asleep.

Harry watches as Voldemort takes the wig off and says, quite seriously, “does the removal of my disguise shock you?”

Harry stares at him, trying to figure out what the right thing to say to that is. Maybe there isn’t one though. “Are you serious?” he asks after a long moment.

“Gender is a social construct, Harry,” Voldemort says, again, quite seriously. “It isn’t real.”

“I get it!” Harry says, irritated already. “You can’t actually be lecturing me on that. It was a bad disguise is what I’m saying.”

“I have not come to lecture you. I came to see whether you will accept my gift to you.”

Harry blinks, wondering what it is. He watches Voldemort narrow his eyes. “The coins!” he says. He seems to be getting kind of mad at Harry. “They will save you both, as I told you,” he explains slowly, like he thinks Harry is very stupid.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Harry says, leaning back on the swing and moving it a little bit back and forth. “I think you’re lying to me.”

“It is true,” Voldemort says. “You are in denial about it.”

Harry stops swinging. “What do you mean?”

He doesn’t answer that question, but only responds with one of his own. “Do you want to kill Tom Riddle?”

“No. Of course not.”

“He’s going to die, Harry, by your hand, if you keep this up. You know that, I can see. But I do find myself feeling merciful towards Tom.”

“Doesn’t really sound like it,” Harry says with a huff, and he watches Voldemort’s expression grow tense, his eyes narrowed to slits.

“You’re infuriating,” he says.

“Yeah, I get that a lot actually,” Harry sighs.

“The coins will give him an opportunity to use a power he knows not.” He leans in, like this is really, really important, but Harry isn’t looking at him, or even thinking about it. He’s looking at his creepy snake.

“Can you leave?” Harry asks. “So I can enjoy sleeping for once in my life, or?”

“What is the power that he knows not, you ask?” Voldemort says, between his clenched teeth, though Harry didn’t ask that. “The power of love, of course.”

“Well, I guess,” Harry says because it’s certainly true that Tom Riddle probably can’t feel love. "You're trying to kill us though, so I don't really believe you."

“Am I?”

Harry nods enthusiastically, gesturing down at the snake. “Or your freak snake is. You’re also trying to possess half the world. The shit you’re doing is psychotic. It’s not normal.”

Voldemort looks like he’s breathing deeply in a bid to remain calm, though his creepy white fists are clenched tightly, and the snake has awoken. It’s looking at Harry pretty intensely and he doesn’t love seeing that.

“What does ‘the power of love’ even have to do with anything?” Harry asks, making air quotes, watching it for signs of an impending strike.

“It is the power that can keep him without possession, isn’t it? It can help us both.”

Harry laughs. “What a dumb lie,” he says. “You’re so dumb.”

Voldemort is getting pretty angry now. Harry doesn’t need to be clairvoyant to be able to tell that. His body is rigid with it. He really hopes he’s actually safe in his dreams. Riddle wouldn’t let him sleep if he wasn’t, so he’s fairly sure, but he is growing uneasy watching the snake grow tenser.

“Why not just give the coins to him then?” Harry asks.

“There’s something wrong with his mind,” Voldemort says cooly. “Therefore, I need you to do it.”

“And what? I’m supposed to believe that you feel love?”

“I’ve been watching you for a very long time, Harry,” he says, with an unhinged smile. “I have been inside your mind as well. You have deeply inspired me.”

Harry cringes because it’s frankly, the creepiest thing he’s heard all day and he’s been surrounded by very creepy shit for a while now. Voldemort seems to rethink what he’s said for a long moment.

“If you don’t want to have to kill him, use the coins,” he reiterates.

Harry sighs. “Let’s say, for the sake of the argument, that I believed you. I don’t know how I’d even get him to put the coin in his mouth. I mean, the dude can read my mind too.”

Voldemort smiles again and it’s terrifying and wide. “He cannot do it without eye contact.”

Harry has always been a very curious person, and he finds that he is now. He does want to know what will happen if they use the coins, but there's probably an easier and less risky way to do that. He thinks he can probably find something out by just badgering people.

“Severus, I need to ask you something about the coins.”

Severus is sitting in the living room now that everyone is awake and back to work, though it looks like he refuses to do so on his own couch. He’s dragged a couple of chairs in there from his office instead.

Draco is with him now. They’re doing something creepy and strange, holding what looks like a dead rabbit between them. When Harry walks into the room, Draco gives him a pained look like he really doesn’t like this interruption. Harry wonders what gross thing is going to happen with the rabbit that Draco hates being prevented from seeing. It’s probably horrible, Harry decides. Draco will probably call his father about it. They’re all so fucking weird.

“Must you do this now?” Severus asks in a sigh.

“I thought you were my trainer,” Harry argues. “Shouldn’t I like, be feeling the coins or whatever to see what’s going to happen?”

“I’ve already tried,” Severus says, and Draco pets the dead rabbit with his thumb where he’s holding it. It’s slumped over in their hands. It’s really gross.

“But the coins were given to me, weren’t they? I mean, maybe--”

“Do I need to get Riddle?” Draco asks Severus.

“I don’t care what you do,” Harry says, before he can answer. “He’s not my fucking keeper! I’m just asking a question. I don’t know why you’re all so cagey about the coins. I’m starting to get suspicious about it, honestly.”

Harry looks down at Severus’ clothing and adds, “also, you look like a bat in that and it pisses me off.”

Severus narrows his eyes and exchanges a pointed look with Draco. “Fine. I’ll allow it, but only for a few seconds. Do not put one of them into your mouth.”

He shoves the rabbit at Draco, who makes an irritated sound, glaring at him, but then he cradles it gently against his chest.

Harry has a way better plan than just immediately popping a coin into his mouth so he only rolls his eyes.

He watches Severus open one of the terrifying jars on a shelf, and he fishes around in it until he pulls them out; two baggies marked with the word evidence. He holds them out, and Harry takes them. They feel great to hold, even through the bag, like dipping his hands into hot water.

“Nothing,” he lies. “I don’t know, I mean… I guess I was wrong.”

He hands them back and watches Severus put them in the exact same place.

Now, he just has to wait for them to leave the room, not make eye contact with Draco, and he’ll be set.

He’s probably not going to save Riddle with the power of love, he thinks, but he does want to save him. He definitely doesn’t want to have to kill him. Maybe, Harry thinks, he can save Riddle with the power of a bunch of gay sex instead.

“So… Riddle, we uh, I’m wondering about something, and I’m really embarrassed about it.”

Harry glares a little at the floor in Severus’ office. He can’t believe he has to do all of this shit. It’s relentless, but at least he’s determined to get through it, to see it through to the end.

He hears Riddle doing something in here, possibly writing. He doesn’t know what it is for sure because he can’t look at him.

“Okay,” Riddle says slowly, and he sounds immediately suspicious.

“Uh, I was wondering,” Harry says quickly, “if we could try something weird. Sexually. Sexual weird stuff. But I, um, I need to do it with the lights off.”

Riddle is silent for a long moment. Harry imagines he can hear the chug of whirring in his brain as he’s trying to figure out what in the world Harry would be this embarrassed about. He imagines Riddle probably believes he trained Harry out of it by being the most embarrassing person alive.

Harry knows that, though it can backfire spectacularly in a hundred ways, withholding information from Riddle is probably one of the only ways to get him interested in something. The guy is clearly capable of some love because he loves control to an extent that should make him fearful.

“We don’t have time for it,” he hears Riddle decide. “But what is it?”

“It’s uh, really weird and I think I just need to show you.”

More ringing silence.

“Harry, how weird could it possibly be?” He hears Riddle ask, and he sounds kind of concerned. “You can’t even look at me?”

“It’s so weird,” Harry says. “I don’t even know how to describe it, and I don’t want to. But it’s really distracting me and I can’t focus on my training.”

He hears Riddle sigh raggedly. “How long will it take?”

“I have no idea,” Harry admits.

“Have you ever done it before?” Riddle is walking into his field of vision, though he isn’t doing anything to force Harry to look at him, and it’s a pretty good sign, he thinks.

“No. I haven’t, and frankly, I don’t even think I can keep talking about it.”

“We can’t even discuss it,” Riddle says, deadpan, closer now. Harry can see his obnoxious shoes and the bottom of his nice pants.

“I’m sorry, it’s just my one thing, you know? We, uh, we all have that one thing that we’re embarrassed about, right?”

“Harry,” he hears Riddle say, and doubt is starting to creep into his tone. “I’ve been so fucking far up in your head that I feel like I’d know.”

Harry thinks about how unbelievably sexual that sounds. Maybe it is, for Riddle.

“I mean, uh, I just figured out about it today,” Harry says, and it’s not even a lie. He did just figure out today that he’d like to know what the coins do.

“This is so inconvenient,” Riddle says, sounding aggravated. “Make it quick.”

He sees Riddle pass him in his peripheral vision and he flicks the light switch off. The room is pitch black, but then he feels Riddle’s hands as he finds Harry in the dark. This is way further than Harry thought he’d get in his plan, and much further than he’d even had a plan, so he tries to come up with the easiest way to do this.

He drops to his knees and begins undoing Riddle’s pants.

“Sucking my dick is this embarrassing to you?” Riddle laughs, and Harry feels it in the jolt of the button he’s undoing. “I know that’s not true.”

“No, it’s something else,” Harry insists. “It’s uh, I’m just trying to get you warmed up, you know?” He laughs uneasily.

Riddle hums thoughtfully. “That’s going to be difficult to do right now.”

Harry stops undoing his pants, zipper halfway down. “Uh, why?”

“Because, Harry, I know you have the coins in your pocket. You’re an abysmal liar. I also know you slept and for exactly how long because I was sitting right there. I know that means Voldemort visited you. That’s why we timed it as a group, so that the people in here keeping up the shields could sleep, and the others who actually have information I need to keep a secret would be left alone.”

“God damn it,” Harry groans.

“Yeah,” Riddle says, his tone bordering on malevolent, and he pulls Harry up by his neck in the dark. “So maybe you should start fucking doing what I tell you to!”

He sounds super mad. It’s getting Harry a little horny, if he’s being honest, but there are more pressing issues.

“Is any of what Voldemort said true? It sounded like it could be true to me.”

“I don’t even need to know what it was to assure you it was a lie,” Riddle tells him, loosening his grip on Harry’s throat.

“It was about the power of love,” Harry whispers in the dark, and he hears Riddle laugh.

“Love isn’t real.”

Draco is sighing in the long hallway and moving a pail to catch the water dripping from the ceiling. It’s gotten extensively worse in the past couple of hours.

“I see it, Harry,” Riddle tells him between clenched teeth, and he sounds immensely irritated. “I know what it means. You can stop doing it.”

Harry squints at the water and gestures to it. “I’m not doing that.”

“You are,” Riddle says. “And you need to stop because if Severus sees it again, he’s going to get mad at me.”

“Why would he be mad at you if I’m doing it?”

“Because!” Riddle says, and he turns in the hallway to glare. “I was supposed to be trying to teach you how to stop doing that because he’s got more important shit to do, but instead we fucked on his couch then took a nap during that time. It fucked the whole schedule up!”

“Yeah,” Harry sighs. “All of that was definitely your fault.”

“It’s okay,” Draco says, before Riddle can yell at him, and he places the metal bucket under the stream of water with a clink. “We have the pail.”

It’s a fairly small pail though.

“How’s the feeling?” Riddle asks Harry, shooting Draco a glare, like he doesn’t think he’s funny.

“I mean, it’s pretty terrible,” Harry says because it’s back full force. He can’t take a full breath and he kind of feels like he’s standing at the edge of a cliff without a guardrail. “I’m definitely going to die soon.”

“Am I going to die?” Riddle asks him.

Harry considers it, but it’s hard to focus on with the intensity of the doom. “I really don’t know,” he says.

“Then we’re still fine. Draco, you’re on pail duty for the next three hours, then we need to leave. I’m sure it’s going to get worse. Harry, try to stop doing it. Just… you two stay here for now.”

He disappears to the end of the hallway, where the stairs and front door are located and begins yelling up to the rooms. “WE’VE ONLY GOT A COUPLE OF HOURS LEFT! START COMING DOWN!”

Harry hears a couple of people groan from upstairs and a couple of things slam, with what sounds like frustrated or stressed out reactions to that news. One person curses loudly. Harry has no idea what all of these people have been doing or why they’d possibly be stressed out.

The stairs groan as people start coming down, one by one.

The first is a middle aged woman, who is dressed in business casual clothing. “Theresa Hobbs,” she says as she stops at the bottom where Riddle is standing in the entryway.

“Your assignment was the building layout, right?” he asks.

She nods.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes sir,” she says.

They make intense and prolonged eye contact at the bottom of the stairs, and Harry waits a long time for her to say something else, but she doesn’t continue. It goes on and on, for a full fifteen minutes. Draco has to go empty the pail in the kitchen twelve times and he starts to look angry about it. Another person sits on the stairs, waiting their turn and looking bored.

Then she blinks and begins to look confused.

“Good work,” he says. “This is a code white. Class E.”

Harry sees her expression grow more serious, and suddenly much more worried. “Yes sir,” she says, hesitantly. “Thank you.”

She leaves the building, and it looks like she’s grabbing for her gun as she opens the door. When she does, the noise outside is deafening, people screaming and what sounds like a lot of hissing. It must be really bad out there, though whatever protection is in place here, it apparently blocks them from hearing anything. When the door is shut again, it all abruptly stops.

The next person, and then the next comes down and it’s much the same, and Harry realizes what’s happening. They’re giving him information in the form of mental images, and he’s altering their memories. He’s spread the work out of finding out the things he needs in the very little time they have, and he’s kept them alive while they’ve done it.

Not all of them stop to exchange information. Riddle opens the door for every other one of them without a word. Harry thinks about Riddle’s insistence on bathroom buddies, and he thinks maybe that’s what they are. He wants to laugh. He would, if he didn’t feel so lousy.

Riddle gets through eight people in an hour.

The feeling of dread only continues to grow worse, as he'd said it would, and eventually Harry has to sit on the ground to deal with it. If he didn’t know better, he’d say he needs to go to the hospital.

The water from the ceiling is growing more intense too. He hears the sound of liquid rushing, and something creaking in the walls, perhaps the pipes.

“God damn it, Harry,” Draco says, as the pail fills with water immediately when he gets back from what must be his thirtieth trip. “Stop it. Are you even trying?”

Harry only groans, holding his stomach where it feels like the pit is growing wider. “I think it’s about Riddle now,” he says.

“Oh,” Draco says, dropping the pail. “Shit.”

“Riddle, you’ve got problems,” Draco yells, and he abandons his post at the pail to move closer to the stairs. Harry watches it flood, water pouring over the curved aluminum sides, as he focuses on breathing.

“I NEED WHOEVER I ASKED TO CUT MY ARM OFF DOWN HERE!” he hears.

There’s no way that’s what Riddle just yelled, but Harry does hear someone running down the stairs.

“Let’s go,” he hears Riddle say, in a remarkably calm tone, and then there’s some shuffling. There’s a buzzing noise, the sound of a saw turning on.

“Fuck,” Harry says because if they’re serious, he really doesn’t want to hear it, but there’s nowhere to go.

Harry tries to pretend he’s somewhere else as it happens. It’s a horrifying thing to hear.

When he looks up again, Draco is watching him carefully.

“Bit better,” he calls over his shoulder.

“It’s okay, Harry,” Draco says, wincing at his expression. “He doesn’t remember it. I altered it for him immediately. It’s just like anesthesia.”

Harry doesn’t argue from his place on the floor. He knows it was the right thing for them to do because the pit in his stomach has gone back to being sickening dread rather than a freefall.

“I still feel like I’m going to die pretty soon though,” he says.

“Yeah, that’s because right now, that’s the most likely immediate outcome for you,” Draco says. “It’s gotta be that way for a while. You’re our scapegoat for right now. Voldemort thinks you betrayed it.”

Harry blinks. “Well, I mean, I kind of did, didn’t I? With the coins?”

Draco doesn’t answer that. “As long as we get Riddle stabilized and keep him alive for a little white longer, you’ll be fine,” he says instead.

“Riddle’s really going to die then?”

“Well, yeah. There’s only so much you can do to stop the possession from this thing. A lot of it is mental but the physical changes will eventually take hold. We’ve done all we can now on every front.”

“Why’d he let me fuck him then?” Harry says, and he is starting to get a little upset about it because if he’s being honest, he really thought this was going to end differently.

“I mean, why not?” Draco says. “If you’re into somebody, why hold back, especially in this dire situation? Everything can end badly at any time.”

Harry nods, laying his head back against the wall and staring at the leaking ceiling. He understands that logic because he's known it his whole life. He knows that everything good has to end eventually. He does hope Riddle will haunt him though. Maybe ghost sex is really good.

Riddle’s looking a little sweaty and pale, and he is, in fact, missing his lower arm, but he’s reasonably alert. There must be a tight tourniquet on his arm, though Harry can't see it over the bandages wrapped around the stump at his elbow.

“Come on, Harry,” he says gently. “We have everything we need. It’s time to go.”

Harry nods, standing, though he has to fight a wave of nausea as he glances down at Riddle’s arm. “Are you okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” he says, and Harry knows he’s talking about the plan, not himself. “Do you have your gun?”

Harry winces. “Yeah,” he says. Riddle stares at him for a second.

“You’re gonna do great,” he says.

Chapter 12: This is the Problem

Chapter Text

Outside the flat, the sun is shining and its a beautiful day, but in every other way, it’s actually worse than Harry imagined it being. The noise didn’t do any of it justice.

There are cars crashed into one another, giant plumes of smoke rising between them, and Harry stops short when he sees someone dead in the front seat of one of them. There are snakes just outside, tons of them, along with possessed people clawing at the house, and the FBI agents left that both lead and follow them out are shooting or dispatching them with knives in brutally efficient maneuvers. It sounds like a bomb is going off in the distance somewhere, too. There’s some unbelievably loud noise overhead and when Harry looks up, a shiny black helicopter is landing on the street in front of them.

“Oh shit,” Harry says, but then Riddle’s pushing him forward with his stump like he can’t feel pain in it.

“Get in the fucking helicopter,” he yells. Harry does. Draco gets in behind them along with two people that Harry doesn’t know. He never bothered to introduce himself to any of them.

No one says anything to each other inside, though Riddle is making an uncomfortable amount of eye contact with Draco now. Both of their faces are emotionless and Harry can see they have unbelievably dark circles under both their eyes. He isn’t sure when the last time is he’s seen either of them sleep, now that he’s considering it.

Harry feels the helicopter lift off the ground, and it’s pretty terrifying. The sides are completely open and no one bothered to buckle themselves in.

Riddle takes a quick break from the prolonged eye contact to glance at Harry’s expression, considering something, then he’s right back at it again.

The city below them is insane to look at from the air, though it does make him a little bit dizzy. He sees the tops of buildings, skyscrapers gleaming in the distance and a bunch of trees clustered together further off. It really looks like the end of the world, maybe, because there’s enough commotion and noise below that it fills the air even with the roar of the helicopter.

“Okay,” Riddle yells over the sounds of the spinning blades after a few more minutes, and Draco seems a bit less tense, breathing deeply and closing his eyes. “We’re fine.”

They did something in their heads; something having to do with Voldemort now that he has access again, or maybe Riddle shared all of the information with Draco as a backup. Maybe one of their memories was erased. Maybe something else. Harry has no fucking idea, but he is starting to see the endless possibilities.

“Where are we going?” he yells.

“Where do you think?” Riddle asks, very seriously. “We’re going to file a grievance about the situation at your workplace.”

Harry thinks about that, but he decides Riddle can’t be serious. He’s gotta be speaking in code again.

The helicopter lands on the roof of a building after only ten minutes, and Harry is pushed out of it, along with Draco. Whoever is piloting it stays, and the two others immediately run to the door that leads down into the building, disappearing inside.

Riddle leads them to it at a slower pace. Draco sighs. “Do you think I could take a vacation after this?” he asks. “I’m sick of doing dumb shit like helping Harry file grievances. I mean, he should really be able to do that himself, and he said he’d quit anyway. Why is the FBI even involved in this?”

Riddle is holding his gun in his right hand now, though Harry knows from prior experience that he’s left handed. That’s the arm that’s missing though. His hand is shaking a little as he holds it, which is worrying, but his voice is even. “Harry can’t quit,” he says. “I told him that already.”

“What about my vacation though? I want to go home for a while. I’m sure father would love to see you as well.”

“Draco,” he says, and he looks very tired. “If you pull this off, I’ll pay for whatever vacation you want to go on.”

Draco looks super concerned about that, even a little fearful.

Harry, as per usual, has no idea what they’re really talking about.

Another ten minutes pass and though Harry is filled with ever-increasing dread, nothing happens. Draco lights a cigarette and passes the pack to Harry silently, and Riddle leans against the side of the opening to the stairwell, closing his eyes. He’s not looking so hot now, and Harry is starting to understand the difference between the two distinct possibilities. The pit in his stomach is one of Riddle’s futures, probably the one where he’s possessed by Voldemort. It’s starting to feel a little like a chasm.

“Um,” Harry says, wincing. “You uh, you doing okay?”

Riddle nods, but his eyes are shut and he’s breathing heavily.

Draco nods. “You’re an early detection system, Harry, because you’re so sensitive to it. He’s got his own methods too. Just stay calm.”

Eventually Harry hears one of the agents coming back up the stairs at a quick pace. She nods at them and Riddle stares at her, but she says nothing out loud.

“Good,” he says, breathing hard. “It’s time.”

He goes through the open doorway to the emergency stairs that lead down into the building, and Draco follows, casually tossing his cigarette to the side.

Harry looks at the metal stairs leading down and begins to feel incredibly uneasy. They both turn to look at him.

“It’s fine,” Riddle says, and Draco drags him by the arm. They’re moving quickly downstairs and there are a lot of stairs. Harry feels really bad, so he tries to stop. “Riddle, I don’t think—"

“It’s fine!” he yells, and they keep going.

They begin to pass numbers painted onto the walls indicating what floor they’re on, and Riddle stops in front of a few to look at Harry’s reaction. Finally, he does have one. Water begins flowing from somewhere above them, cascading down the stairs. Draco turns the knob and disappears behind the door that leads to the thirteenth floor.

“No,” Harry says. “I really don’t think—"

“Quiet,” Riddle says, leading them further down, all the way down, in fact.

The floor they get off on is a really nice lobby. Pleasant music plays, and someone sits behind a reception desk. The sign behind it says Stag Mart Corporate Headquarters, and Harry looks between it and Riddle desperately.

“There’s no fucking way—"

“Hello,” Riddle says to the receptionist, cutting him off. “He’s here to file a complaint.”

Harry stares at him, bewildered.

They both must look insane after having worn the same clothing and not sleeping or showering for a couple of days. Riddle, in all honesty, looks a bit like an escapee from an insane asylum, but the woman at the front desk doesn’t react to any of it. “Of course,” she says. She picks up the phone on her desk and Harry sees there’s a snake around her arm, biting into her wrist. Blood trickles from the wound over the buttons.

“They’re here, sir,” she says into the phone’s receiver.

They’re led to an elevator, and when she smiles in an unhinged way, Riddle shoots her in the head. He must be ambidextrous because if Harry didn’t know, he would say that’s the hand he prefers to shoot with. Harry is becoming a little numb to the sounds of gunshots, though he still flinches backwards.

“It’s alright,” Riddle tells him. “I know where we need to go anyway.”

The executive suites are also startlingly nice, though Harry doesn’t focus much on that.

Voldemort comes out to greet them as they step off the elevator. He’s wearing a suit now, and his skin doesn’t look quite so dead, though he is still ghastly pale. He’s even got a nose now. It’s clearly him though. Even if Harry didn’t know what he looked like, he’d be able to tell from Riddles body language alone, which is suddenly completely unreadable.

Riddle smiles and it looks fake to Harry. “You must be in charge,” he says.

Voldemort gives him an equally unbelievably fake and considerably creepier smile. “I am. You’ve interrupted my board meeting.”

“I apologize,” Riddle says. “I am escorting someone who has a complaint to file with you.”

Riddle turns to look at him with a sickeningly sweet expression, like Harry is incredibly special to him. He even reaches out and touches his cheek with his gun.

Harry flinches away from it, blinking rapidly. It’s so weird and off-putting, and he doesn’t really know why he feels that way.

Voldemort hums.

“Did you not like the outcome of your decision, Harry?” he asks, and when Harry looks at him, he’s smiling very, very wide. “It is clear now what you chose, though his mind is beyond repair, it seems. You have trouble following directions, don't you? I told you to put the coins in both your mouths."

Harry just shakes his head and looks at the shiny, polished flooring.

“Why don’t you join us?” He sweeps an arm out, and leads them to a set of wooden doors.

When he opens them with a flourish that makes Harry wonder if he was a theatre kid, he sees a long dark, shiny meeting table filled with people in business suits. Harry hesitantly follows Riddle into the room.

Riddle attempts to grab his hand and hold it once they’re inside, and it’s so out of character that Harry really can’t deal with it. He pulls his hand out of Riddle’s grasp and throws him a disbelieving look. Riddle doesn’t react to it at all, his expression blank as he stares at the far wall behind them. It’s horribly creepy, and Harry is starting to feel the pit in his stomach widen considerably. He winces with the intensity of the feeling.

Among the people gathered sitting at the long table, Harry sees Severus.

“What the fuck is going on?” Harry tries to ask him.

Severus doesn’t react to it. “He is a quite excellent worker, I hear,” he says in a careful tone that Harry has never heard him use before.

“As I know,” Voldemort hisses at the man, his lip curling, but then, just as quickly, he is back to the frightening smile and his voice has evened out. “That is why I chose him as employee of the year,” he finishes pleasantly.

That's some bullshit, but Harry doesn't call it out. He wonders, though, why he would care about something so meaningless. Harry has never wanted a pat on the head from any authority figure on earth, and he finds he is disgusted by the idea. Voldemort's sudden change in mood isn't something he's seen yet, and it also puts Harry on edge. It makes Voldemort seem genuinely insane.

Harry sees movement along the floor, and when he looks down, he sees the giant, white snake. He edges away from it as it moves past them under the chair legs. None of the people in the room seem to care about it, though. Harry doesn’t see any of them with their own snakes, either. It must mean they’re here of their own volition.

“Harry here has a complaint to make,” Voldemort says, and he sounds quite amused. "As he is such a valuable employee, I propose we hear him out."

Everyone turns to look at him then.

“Uh,” Harry says, after a long moment. “Our store is haunted?”

Voldemort’s brow furrows. “A bold claim to make. Why do you say that?” he asks, but it’s clearly sarcasm.

“Come on, I mean…” Harry narrows his eyes at the man.

“No, Harry. We at Stagmart Corporate Headquarters care about the safety of all of our employees, even if their claims are a bit…” he laughs, and it’s so pretentious that Harry feels ill. “Ridiculous.”

“Sure,” Harry says, and he feels his hands curl into fists. “Sure you do. That’s why you pay us minimum wage, right? That’s why, until recently, my friend and I could barely afford rent in the worst part of the city we live in? That’s why you don’t offer insurance? I mean, you can say you care about people, but what you say doesn’t matter, does it? If you don’t follow through with your actions, it’s fucking meaningless.”

Voldemort tilts his head like some kind of terrifying reptile that genuinely has to think about that to consider what it means. Harry is probably going to punch him, if he gets the chance. He’s starting to shake with his anger. It is all-encompassing.

“Was it not your choice to work—”

"You want to talk to me about my choices? Fuck you. You don't even know me."

Voldemort is silent for a long moment, and it rings in the space between them. Harry fills it, as he finds he is burning with rage.

“There are a million safety hazards in that store! The fucking lights won’t stay on. We keep finding weird shit everywhere. There are snakes in the fucking toilets! They’re your snakes! You have a snake right fucking here!” Harry gestures to it in exaggerated movements of his arms, then to the windows. “Have you seen the shit that’s happening outside? It’s fucking insane out there! People are dying in droves because of you!”

“Harry,” Voldemort says, interrupting his tirade with another fake, perfect smile. “As your employer, I’m always happy to listen to what you have to say, however vulgar I find your language to be. You must know that these things simply aren’t happening. I have never killed anyone. That is a preposterous claim.”

Voldemort dropping ‘preposterous’ in a sentence and saying it so seriously really makes Harry want to make fun of him for being such a wanker, but he does manage to hold off on that. It's not important anyway.

“Maybe you're not killing people directly,” Harry says instead. “Your fucking snakes have, though. You’re trying to take over the world! You visited me in a dream!”

Harry takes a moment to breathe and he realizes he probably does actually sound fairly insane, if these people somehow don't know about all of this.

Voldemort shakes his head with mocking sympathy and turns to the people in the room. “Let no one here say that I am not a man of the people. I bring this young man into our meeting because I care. He is clearly sleep deprived and I will instruct his manager to put him on day shift.”

The people in the room nod or smile and Harry stares at them. “Day shift. You think you can fix this by putting me on day shift?”

“I will speak with him privately and I assure you that I will do everything in my power to help him,” he says magnanimously, another generous sweeping gesture, a politician on a stage.

“Yeah fucking right. You don’t give a shit about anybody but yourself. You’re shallow and stupid and I feel bad for you,” Harry says, and this does seem to get through a little bit to Voldemort, Harry thinks, because he sees his eyes narrow. It feels great for a second, but then the snake hisses at him and Harry does remember Draco saying he should stay calm. He begins to wonder if he fucked up.

“You are all dismissed,” Voldemort says, his body rigid, his tone a little colder.

Everyone seated stands, in their perfect business attire, and they file out of the room. Severus doesn't even look at him.

Harry tries to come to terms with the fact that this is probably where he’s going to die, in some corporate office with some shill.

It’s not how he imagined himself going out, if he’s being perfectly honest.

“Let us step into my office and we can speak candidly, Harry,” Voldemort says, and he leads Harry into another room. He doesn’t seem concerned or surprised that Riddle follows them. Harry honestly forgot he was there he was so silent during all of that. He still is silent, and he’s sweating a lot now, which is concerning. All of his movements are a little too measured. Riddle is not ordinarily a very measured guy.

The office is full of silver coins, so many across every surface and the floor that Harry has trouble walking over the piles of them. Voldemort sits behind a desk where they’re stacked high. Riddle reacts to none of it, sitting in a very nice chair in front of him.

Harry is starting to feel increasingly hopeless about it all, but he does the same.

“So,” Voldemort says, and he is clearly addressing Riddle now. “Harry doesn’t know. He still trusts you.”

“Of course,” Riddle says, very seriously.

“You’ve done so well," he says, mocking and sweet. "Finding him and leading him here.”

Riddle doesn’t react to that. He’s staring at the wall, and Harry sees a muscle jump in his neck.

Voldemort stands and approaches the chairs. He picks up the bloody stump of Riddle’s remaining arm, looking at it and making a disapproving noise. “And look what they’ve done to you. Horrible. That’s okay. I can fix it for you.”

He turns to Harry next. “You should have believed me,” he says. “The possession took hold before you attempted to mangle him. He’s lied to you for much longer. There’s no need to pretend to listen to your little grievances or for you to follow through with your ridiculous plan. I know all about it. You’ve made your stance quite clear. I am disappointed in you, Harry. It is a waste to kill something powerful. I will enjoy eating your soul, however.”

Harry looks between them, desperately trying to read their blank faces, but he honestly can’t tell which of them is lying to him anymore.

“Kill him,” Voldemort says, laughing at Harry’s expression. It echoes in the grand office, with its high ceiling.

Riddle stands and Harry scrambles over the chair to get away from him.

His eyes are blood red and he’s smiling, exposing his teeth.

It’s a very wide smile.

Chapter 13: This is the End

Chapter Text

Riddle is absolutely, really trying to kill him, Harry finds. It’s not a joke, and he’s not faking it.

He’s blowing holes into furniture centimeters from Harry’s head as he yells and dodges behind shit in the office. Though it is quite nice furniture, Voldemort doesn’t seem to care about any of his things. He simply laughs as Harry ducks in a corner behind the heaviest thing he can find, which is a side table made of solid wood.

It’s sheer luck that he isn’t hit the first few shots, Harry knows. Riddle is probably an excellent shot, even possessed, but Harry doubts he’s such an excellent shot that he would allow bullets to whiz past Harry’s head as close as they are. Harry can feel one knick his ear, and when he reaches up, his fingers are shiny with blood.

Harry takes a moment to breathe, crouching behind the end table. He feels he is pretty fucked. Maybe he does have to kill Riddle, and that’s hard enough. He’s a trained FBI agent. Even if he somehow does, Harry has no idea how to kill a ghost, and that doesn’t even make sense to him. As Voldemort told him, one cannot kill the dead. It is an idea he finds that he agrees with.

Maybe downstairs Draco is doing something helpful, though Harry spares a thought to wonder if he’s also somehow working for Voldemort. He seemed to be Riddle’s right hand man, and Harry never understood why. Riddle certainly spent a lot of time with him, didn’t he? Harry peeks over the end table and immediately ducks again as he sees Riddle’s gun pointed at him.

Gunfire rings out, and the edge of the end table is blown off inches from his face. Harry takes his own gun out.

“Harry,” Voldemort says, as though he is calling a dog, sounding entertained. “Cowering in the corner again? I would prefer to see you die differently.”

Harry ignores all of that because there’s another problem, and it’s actually fairly immediate. Harry feels like he’s going to die. It’s not simple unease. It is something else, this pressure he’s feeling in his chest. He hears the trickle of water somewhere in the walls, and he finds he must bend to the floor for a moment to try to reorient himself. It feels like his body is collapsing in on itself, a star going supernova and dying. He hears himself making a noise, some shaky plea. He can no longer tell what possibility he is feeling. He can no longer think clearly about it. Whatever it is, it is the worst of them all, something so viscerally horrible that it has taken and snuffed out what’s left of his hope.

“He is destructive,” he hears Voldemort say, laughing. “It is too bad that he is so useless. He would make a beautiful weapon.”

Yeah, Harry thinks, a little angrily. That’s obviously what Riddle thought too. Though Harry is still curled up on himself, his teeth clenched and body shaking, something else becomes apparent to him.

He is going to have to move.

The end table moves against him as another round of bullets is fired into it, and the force of the impact pushes the end table into the side of his body. A couple of bullets break through, and fly into the wall behind him. It can only take so many rounds of gunfire before this piece of furniture he is using for cover is no longer standing.

The shots also seem randomly fired to Harry and he thinks Riddle is probably trying to draw him out. For what, he doesn’t know. The floor is starting to feel wet and his trainers squeak against it as he moves, adjusting himself behind what is left of the end table.

“You are boring us,” Voldemort says. “We would like to see your face when you die. Perhaps I will even allow your lover to use your body after you expire.”

Harry doesn’t even know what to say to that, and he isn’t sure he can speak anyway. There is a yawning void inside of his body that he is falling into. He touches the cool metal of the gun under his fingers and listens to the sounds of water pouring down the walls.

“I grow bored of this game,” Voldemort says, and he sounds a little like he’s thinking hard about something, a little distracted. “End it.”

Harry hears sloshing and he knows that Riddle is following the order.

Harry closes his eyes and breathes. He is going to have to try.

There is another piece of furniture in here, one that he considered diving behind in the seconds before he chose this one. It is the other end table, the exact match to this one on the other side of the loveseat. It is the one closer to Voldemort and it is perhaps the only other thing heavy enough to buy him time. Harry doesn’t feel like he has a lot of time left, but he is going to try to live a little longer. It is part of who he is to persist.

Leaving the end table is harder than he thought it’d be with the horrible feeling singing in his blood. He stumbles out from behind it as quickly as he can manage to make his feet move; a flurry of water. He can see it. He just has to get around the couch. It will only take a few seconds.

He hears the firing of Riddle’s gun, feels more bullets flying so close to his body that he thinks a few of them touch his hair. He hardly feels it when one of them hits, as he slides into the other end table, bringing down a lamp in the process. He only knows he has been hit by a bullet by the flood of heat in his lower leg. When he looks down, there’s a ragged hole in his jeans. It is filling quickly with blood.

Harry hisses as he presses his hands down over it. It’s a problem. He can’t run anymore, and that is really, in some ways, the only thing Harry is good at doing. He knows that all good things end. It is something he has accepted, and he knows when things get bad enough, when he should have done it.

He should have done it a long time ago.

Adrenaline is making him shake. It’s buzzing through his body like a drug.

“Fuck,” Harry mutters between his clenched teeth. There’s a lot of blood clouding into the freezing water around him. It’s risen to cover the floor and it’s only pouring more quickly from the walls. He’s too sick with dread to do much now, except bend over his wound. He’s so fucking stupid, he decides.

He hears Riddle’s footsteps evenly sloshing through water. It is very leisurely, and he must know that Harry definitely can’t run now. He’s gonna die here, and the world is going to end, and really, it’s his fault. He did so many things wrong. Maybe he deserves to die for his mistakes.

When Riddle appears, rounding the corner, he is smiling. Harry freezes in place to look at his expression, at the wide, manic smile and the piercing intensity of his red gaze.

He looks so happy, so relaxed. Harry has never seen any of it from him before.

“Our time is up, isn’t it?” Riddle asks him, but it’s not his voice that comes out of his mouth. He raises his pistol, pointing it at Harry’s head. They must be sharing control, though, because unless Voldemort was trained in the FBI, that is definitely how Riddle stands holding a gun.

“Fuck you,” Harry says, shivering and curling into himself under the oppressive feeling in his chest.

Voldemort smiles with Riddle’s face. “He doesn’t want to kill you. Isn’t that touching?” He laughs, a cold, high-pitched thing that settles in the space around them. “It is only the coin you fed him, of course. You could have died differently. You could have been happy, if you were only smarter and you'd taken one as well.”

Harry huffs out a disbelieving sound at him, shaking his head. “I didn’t feed him a coin.”

Riddle’s smile falls and it looks like he is thinking very hard about something, the way he tilts his head and his brows furrow.

“Harry,” Riddle says, in his own voice, with a punched out gasp. He grimaces, and it seems very pained. “Do it,” he says. “Right now.”

Harry scrambles for his gun, and shoots Riddle in the chest without a single second of hesitation.

He hears the wet sound of it, the bubble of blood in the hole in his chest when Riddle collapses. FBI agents are pouring into the room, the sounds of their feet sloshing through water and frantic shouting, some pop of electricity that lights the room in bright green in the background, but Harry doesn’t focus on any of the commotion happening around him. He can only focus on the sight before him.

Riddle is really dead.

He is lying on his back and Harry can see it, the unnatural stillness of it. His eyes are open but lifeless, his face slack. He’s not breathing either. Harry shudders as he looks at his body, still in the cloudy water, which is nearly covering his face. The image of it will be burned into his brain for the rest of his life, he thinks.

He drops his gun and ignores the splash of cold water, lowering his arm.

Harry did it. He killed Tom Riddle, and Voldemort was right, in that regard. He doesn't know how he's going to live with himself.

He hears the sound of frantic running past him, accompanied by labored breathing.

Draco is panting really, really hard and he makes some kind of exhausted, frustrated wheeze as he slides into Riddle’s body.

He lets out an extremely dramatic, irritated groan and Harry watches him press his hands over Riddle’s wound. There’s so much blood that Harry can’t see the skin on his hands as he does it. He begins huffing out whispers as quickly as he can in a language Harry doesn’t know. It sounds a little like snakes hissing.

All of the lights in the building go off, plunging them into darkness, and everyone stills, all the commotion in the room pausing. Harry feels the crackle of a dark, ominous energy in the room, something that should not be here, but is, and the temperature drops so much he’s sure he could see his breath if the lights were on.

He hears a gurgling gasp.

All of the lights go back on at once. People rush forward with medical equipment, sloshing water around. They surround Riddle on the floor now, trying to keep him alive in a perfectly coordinated effort.

Draco is running a bloody hand over his hair, plastered to his forehead with sweat and water when he stands, backing away from them. He looks like he might have had to swim, his clothing is so drenched.

“Harry. Fucking stop with the water,” he says between hard intakes of breath.

Chapter 14: This is the Beginning

Chapter Text

Riddle has an oxygen mask over his face now. Someone is pumping air into his lungs in regular intervals with a bag attached to it. There’s an IV in his arm, and the people on their knees around him have their bloody gloved hands in his chest.

There is a look of intense concentration on the face of one of the masked men who is bent over him, furrowed brows and squinted gaze, and he’s even got a scalpel. A generator hums beside them, lifted off the floor and providing power to something Harry can’t see.

It really looks like they’re doing surgery right there, on the floor. There’s probably not another option for them, Harry thinks, if the building is really that flooded.

Tom Riddle had seemed, to Harry, like a figure larger than life. He’d always been in control of everything that happened and of everyone around him, so watching a team of people working to keep him alive on the floor in a widening pool of his own blood is, frankly, an insane sight to Harry.

“How did you bring him back?” Harry asks. Draco is standing around beside him, and someone in an FBI jacket is cutting off the leg of Harry's pants to work on his bullet wound.

“Necromancy, duh,” Draco says. He’s wiped his hands on his pants, but there’s still blood in the spaces between his fingers. He’s got a cell phone out and he’s thumbing through it, looking distracted. His face is a lit with the glow of it. “Anyway, you probably want to go home, huh? See your friends and get back to your job or whatever. I can get you a flight whenever you want. Just say the word.”

Harry glances up at him. He’s focused entirely on the screen of the cell phone.

“I mean… is Riddle going to be okay?” Harry asks, looking back at him.

Draco glances up and meets his gaze when Harry looks back at him. “Yeah,” he says. “We’ve done this before. A lot. This one was rough, but he’ll pull through.”

“But what happened to Voldemort? I mean, is he dead, or undead, or something? What was happening downstairs? Does he have to die every time you do this? How did—“

“Classified,” Draco says, flipping his phone shut with a snap, and smiling at him wickedly. “Unless, of course, you want to accept a job offer.”

Harry sighs. He really doesn’t want to deal with this shit. He just killed the guy he fucked, then witnessed him come back to life, and frankly, that has to be a hard line for him. Not to mention that the guy was also his manager, and an FBI agent, and a member of some occult group that can manipulate people’s minds, and a psychopath who can’t feel love. Harry could go on. There are probably thirty lines he’s crossed.

“I don’t know, I mean, I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to keep—“

“That’s fine,” Draco says cooly. “You can hang out a while and think about it. But I will have to wipe your memory of all this if you decide you don’t want to join us.”

Harry blinks at him. “Did Riddle tell you to offer me a job, I mean—“

“Of course he did, Harry.” Harry watches Draco roll his eyes with a disbelieving look. “Come on. He really likes you.”

Harry narrows his eyes. He knows that’s not true. It’s just another attempt at manipulating him. Riddle sees him as some kind of weapon, something he can use to better accomplish his goals. Riddle will say anything to get what he wants, or he’ll make his lackies do it. Harry isn’t so stupid that he can’t understand these things. They’ve been made very clear to him, by multiple people, after all. He’s seen the signs himself. There are so many of them that even Harry can’t ignore them.

Draco is making some kind of pained expression at him, for whatever reason, wincing, his brows pinched. Harry’s been staring into his eyes, so Draco definitely read his mind.

“Why do you even care so much?” Harry asks, breaking eye contact a little angrily. He looks around him instead. The FBI agents who aren’t operating on Riddle are picking up coins and slotting them into individual evidence baggies. It looks like it’s going to take a while. There are a lot of coins.

“I’m his Ron,” he hears Draco say. “My family raised Tom Riddle. His parents died, just like yours. Of course I care about him. Jesus, Harry. Get your head out of your ass and figure out what’s going on.”

Tom Riddle is asleep for twelve hours, but Harry knows when he’s conscious because everyone in the ICU knows.

Harry is asleep in a chair in his room when Riddle starts yelling. He jolts awake to see Riddle pulling his own IV out. Alarms begin going off in the room because it looks like he’s flatlining since he isn’t hooked up to them anymore.

“Where is Draco? I’m going to fucking kill him,” he says, and it does really seem like he’s serious.

A bunch of people in medical garb run into the room, pushing a cart filled with life saving equipment into it, but Riddle is getting up from the bed.

“Don’t start,” he says to them. “I’m leaving against medical advice. I’m not signing anything.”

Everyone looks shell-shocked about that for a long moment, and a little terrified of him. Harry can’t see his face from the angle he’s sitting, but he’s sure that’s why.

“No,” someone says, a doctor, it looks like from the white coat he’s wearing. “You just had surgery and you’re confused. You need to lie back down and calm--”

Harry sighs as Riddle lands a solid punch to the dude’s face. He walks over to the landline in the room and dials a number angrily.

“What hospital is this?” he asks Harry, with the phone pressed to his ear as it rings, but before Harry can answer, he’s pulled the answer from his head already. He must have because when someone picks up, he begins shouting orders into the phone.

“I need a ninety-six at West Memorial Hospital. Shut it down and wipe everyone’s memories. I’m supposed to be debriefing right now, so I don’t want to hear anything about it.”

He pauses to listen to whoever’s at the other end before continuing.

“Whatever. Oh, and tell Draco he’s being demoted if he does this shit again. It’s not funny. I only have one more hospital visit left in me before I lose it.”

Another pause. His jaw clenching.

“Because I don't like hospitals. He should have taken me to HQ and he's doing it to piss me off!"

Riddle looks at the ceiling and listens to another round of talking.

"I don’t care that he’s busy and I can promise you he’s not doing my job. Don’t lie to me. I know he’s taking a fucking nap.”

Harry climbs into the back seat of a taxi wearily. Though he got some sleep on the chair, he's still exhausted. Riddle is still in a hospital gown as he slides into the seat beside him.

He just walked out of the hospital. No one stopped him. A bunch of people with guns ran into it. That would all be very surprising to Harry about a week ago.

They eventually stop in front of a building that looks very official. It is a building that says FBI right on the front. Harry can read well enough to know that’s what it says, though Riddle turns to him and states that’s what it is as well, to be extra sure. There is barbed wire fencing around it and armed guards at a shack that stop them at the gate.

Riddle rolls down the window and glares at them.

“Sir… why are you in a hospital gown?” the guard asks, swallowing. He looks appropriately nervous.

“I don’t have my badge but if you don’t open the fucking gate, I'll burn the guard shack down," Riddle answers, and Harry doesn't need to be able to see his face to imagine what it looks like.

“Oh, shit,” the guard says. "Guess it was rough mission, huh?"

"Now," Riddle says.

They open the gate.

Riddle literally runs into the building and Harry limps behind him. It's gray and prison-like inside, and they actually do pat Riddle down in the security area here, though he’s still dressed in a hospital gown. Harry doesn’t have the gun anymore; he has no idea where it went, but they pat him down too.

Riddle leads them through massive concrete hallways, but Harry is limping slower now. His leg is really beginning to ache. “God damn it,” Riddle says to himself as he’s forced to slow down and act as a crutch.

They stop by an office that has Riddle’s name on the door. “Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Telesthesia Division” is his title apparently, because that’s what is underneath his name. Harry stares at it for a long moment and Riddle begins to read it aloud to him.

"I can read!" Harry yells, and he stops.

It’s spectacularly organized inside, with so many books that it kind of looks more like a library than an office, though there is a desk pushed into a corner that looks like it’s never used except for as storage. There are neat stacks of various things both on it and under it, papers and files and shiny awards with his name on them. There are a bunch of objects on the walls, shiny silver balls in cases. Harry reads the plaques underneath each of them. They are all engraved with very complicated-sounding names.

Riddle opens one of the empty cases and tosses a metal ball inside it, and Harry recognizes it as something Severus gave him to touch during one of his training sessions. The name beneath the case is "Voldemort." Harry stares at it for a while with his mouth open.

Riddle pulls clothing out of a bin beneath the desk and hands it to Harry before taking a couple of items for himself.

Harry watches as he shrugs off the hospital gown and throws on sweatpants and a sweatshirt like he’s being timed by someone with a stopwatch.

Harry just blinks at him when he turns and glares. “We’re late,” he says, and he begins helping Harry out of his wet clothes.

“You’re not asking me any questions or being sarcastic and it’s really freaking me out,” he says as he pulls Harry’s arm through a sleeve.

“I don’t know what to say anymore,” Harry admits.

Riddle kind of looks conflicted for a moment between getting angry and something else Harry can’t identify, but he only ends up nodding. “Yeah, that was a tough first mission,” he says, rubbing his thumb over Harry's wrist.

Harry is too tired to think about that very hard, but he is distantly aware that Riddle thinks he’s going to do this again. Frankly, right now he’d rather have a bathroom buddy and make minimum wage.

Riddle leads him out of the office and down the hall to a set of double doors.

They step inside an auditorium filled with people, all holding styrofoam cups. Harry spies an industrial-sized coffee dispenser on a table in the corner and a bunch of donut boxes, but before he can head over to it, Draco grabs his arm.

Riddle walks to the front of the room where there's a rolling whiteboard and a podium with a mic set up for him.

Draco leads Harry away to a seat in the back, and sits beside him on one of the metal folding chairs. He pulls out a notebook and a pen, with a haggard sigh. He then begins pulling six cell phones of his pockets and setting those on his lap too. He starts checking them in what looks like a rotation.

“Alright,” Riddle says into the mic at the podium. “Anybody die?”

Someone says something at the front that Harry can't hear.

Riddle sighs. “He was good. Wasn’t his understudy Bellatrix?”

“Yeah. She’s having a meltdown,” Draco calls out loudly. "Says she's gonna quit."

“Okay, I'll deal with it later. Next order of business, I’m going to start listing all the things you all did wrong. I’m going to go quickly. Write it down because I’m going to ask you what you learned the next time I see you." Harry watches the people around him pull out notebooks.

"Let’s start with Draco,” Riddle says, leaning into the mic and sounding very dangerous.

Draco groans. He pops the cap off his pen and dumps the phones into Harry’s lap.

“If anyone calls, answer it and stall for time,” he mumbles, distraught. “It doesn’t even matter what you say. You can answer two at once and just scream into them if you want. I do that all the time.”

Harry gathers the phones into a pile and sighs.

Riddle starts rapid-fire talking so quickly that Harry immediately tunes it out. He’s way too tired to keep up. Draco has some kind of hieroglyphic symbol system, it looks like, because he’s just frantically writing down shapes. It’s probably faster than complete sentences, or maybe he’s been doing the mind arts thing so long that he just thinks like that now.

In the middle of it, one of the phones lights up and rings. Though Draco flinches, he doesn’t stop his frenzied writing. Harry watches his body grow a little tenser though. He’s probably been chewed out before for answering a phone while Riddle is speaking to him, Harry thinks.

Harry flips the phone open. “Yeah?” he says, putting it to his ear. Whoever's on the other end begins yelling at him immediately.

“WE HAVE THREE DEAD PEOPLE IN AUSTRALIA and there are SPIDERS INFESTING A MINE! Draco! This is serious! Get Riddle on the phone right now or I swear to god I’ll kill every last—“

“Hey, so…” Harry interrupts. “Draco is really busy being yelled at, and Riddle’s busy yelling at him.”

It looks like Riddle’s making a quick diagram actually on the board behind him and drawing out one of Draco's mistakes now, but Harry doesn’t say that.

“Who is this?" the guy asks, sounding angrier. "Why do you have line three?”

“Oh. I mean, I’m just kind of filling in for the moment," Harry sighs. "My name’s Harry.”

“Well Harry, let me tell you something," the man says, clearly now seething. "I’ve eaten twelve spiders since I’ve been down here, and I can tell you whatever’s going on here is paranormal in nature! No spider should taste like this.”

“Why would you eat—“

“Don’t worry about that! Listen, I need someone from mind arts to come down here and listen to these spiders and tell me if I’m going to be okay since I ate them.”

“Er,” Harry says. “I dunno. That doesn’t sound like—“

Draco takes the phone from his hand, and when he looks up at the whiteboard, Riddle is yelling at someone else now. He’s circling the word ‘immediately,’ which he’s written in perfect handwriting. “I want you to look it up in a dictionary, Peter. I want you to write me a report on it!”

Draco looks like he steels himself as he takes the phone. “Draco speaking,” he sighs. He listens and frowns for a moment.

“Spiders? No,” he says and then he flips the phone closed with a snap, hanging up on them. "I'm not dealing with that."

The debriefing continues like that with Riddle having a lot of yelling to do about some people, but getting through it all very quickly. After he’s finished it, he seems to be looking around to be sure he’s yelled at every single last one of them. Harry isn’t even surprised because he does understand what it’s like to work for him. Draco goes back to checking his six phones, and it looks like he sends a couple of texts.

“Harry,” Riddle says, and Harry winces as he looks up, but he doesn't yell.

“You did great,” he says. "You're very tuned into ghosts. You made the perfect distraction."

Everyone in the auditorium erupts into whispers, and about half the people there turn to stare at Harry, who looks around uneasily.

Riddle ignores all of it. “You can all leave now,” he adds. “Do whatever you want for the next twenty-four hours.”

The whispering is louder now, more of a murmur that sweeps over the room. A few people look at Harry in terror as he just sinks in his seat.

“I need to take a break,” Riddle sighs, and this is the final killing blow, it seems. “I’m going to turn off my phone."

“We’re all going to die!” Someone screams, and a few people literally run out of the door like the room is on fire. Draco drops some of his phones, and he looks horrified. “Oh my god,” he whispers.

Riddle rolls his eyes at their reactions as Severus stands and approaches him. He leans into the mic. “It’s alright. I understand what’s happening. Everyone calm down.”

No one does until Riddle starts threatening them a few seconds later, looking irritated at everyone. He doesn’t need to use the mic to do it.

“Your friends are fine,” Riddle says, once they’ve breezed past security again. “I sent someone over there to watch them. Plus, they have Neville, as useless as he is.”

Harry groans, watching him look for their terminal in the busy airport. “There’s no fucking way you’re telling me Neville works for you.”

“Of course he does, Harry. I found him at one of the other stores and it really seemed like Voldemort was going to use him for a while, so I brought him in to see which of you he’d choose.”

“Did you fuck him, too?” That was the wrong thing to say, and Harry isn’t even really sure why he said it, except that he’s frustrated. He’s pretty sure that Riddle is going to manipulate him into fucking him again. He might even tell Harry he cares about him. Harry just can’t handle not knowing one way or the other, and everything is over anyway. It's done. He can leave, and really, he should.

Riddle stops walking through the airport. There’s a tick in a muscle in his neck, a clear sign of repressed anger. “Why do you always have these issues in the airport?” He asks. “It’s the worst place to have to deal with it. Is this going to become some kind of pattern I should know about?”

“No, it’s not,” Harry says, refusing to meet his gaze. He looks out of the window at the grey sky instead, at the tarmac filled with planes edging forward. “Because I’m not going on a plane with you again after this. I’m not doing this, Riddle. I know you’re trying to manipulate me into working for you. I’m not that dumb, not about this.”

Riddle doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, then he sighs. “Oh, right,” he says. “You have a relationship history too.”

“Yeah,” Harry says, irritated. “And it’s Voldemort-level bad, and it was actually real for me. I wasn’t working undercover. And I learned a fucking lot from those experiences, like when to walk away from something before it kills me!”

“Harry—"

“You’ve been asking Draco to talk to me, to try to convince me to work for you guys, haven’t you?”

Riddle rolls his eyes. “No! He’s just an annoying little cretin. It’s a personality trait of his. I can't train it out of him.”

“He told me your whole sad little backstory! Why would he do that unless you told him to manipulate me?”

“Because he’s an idiot and he cares about me!” Riddle grabs his shoulders. “The mission’s over! I’m not manipulating you, but you’re sure fucking making me want to!”

Harry feels his body respond to that immediately and he hates himself for it. He pulls away from Riddle.

“I just want to go home,” he says.

Riddle’s body language changes and his expression shutters. “Fine,” he says evenly.

The store is in shambles. It’s way worse than when they left it. The windows are blown out and the back door is hanging off the hinges, though it looks like they boarded everything up at some point. There’s a giant pile of dead snakes swept into the corner, and there are shopping carts stacked across the front of the store in some makeshift barrier. Blankets are open on the floor among open cans of food.

Ron meets them at the back door, and it looks like he’s gone through some kind of war. He’s wearing a shirt with torn-off sleeves and he looks thinner. He has kitchen knives strapped to his belt and his eyes are harder when Harry meets them. Harry could cry he's so happy to see him, but before he can hug his best friend, Ron starts talking.

“Oh no,” he says, looking between them. “You guys fucked.”

“Why is everyone so fucking interested in my dating life!” Harry says, throwing his hands up, and Ron cringes.

“Harry has commitment issues,” Ron tells Riddle very seriously, ignoring Harry’s glare. “They’re really bad. That’s why he chooses terrible people to date. As soon as things get real, or there’s any sign he’s ‘fixing’ them, he’s out.“

Harry stares at him disbelievingly. "What the fuck, Ron!"

Riddle and Ron both ignore him.

“That’s… interesting,” Riddle says slowly.

“Yeah," Ron says, looking uneasily between them again, and running a hand through his hair. "I mean, kind of. It’s also really fucking insane. Like, I really can’t be serious enough about this. Sometimes he unconsciously tries to make it worse before he leaves. Way worse. I mean, they're crazy, but he, like, pushes them to be crazier. I mean, my parents told me I needed a life insurance policy if we were going to move out together.”

Harry feels his mouth open on it's own accord. “They did?!”

“Yeah, mate," Ron says, wincing. "They saw it. Remember that guy you dated in high school, the one who cut the breaks to our—“

“Yes! Crazy Car Guy! Ron, I know!” Harry yells.

“He’s really spiraling,” Ron says, frowning at him. “What’d you do?”

Riddle looks like he’s thinking about it. “I burnt down your guys’ apartment,” he says casually. “Is that it?”

Ron doesn’t even look surprised, like he already knew that. Harry glares at them both.

“No,” Ron says thoughtfully. “It’d be something else. Something about commitment. Or, oh god, you didn’t tell him you care about him, did you?”

Riddle sighs and it sounds haggard to Harry. He turns to him in the hallway and opens his mouth to say something, but Harry doesn't let him.

“No, fuck you," he says. "You’re psychotic, and Ron is an asshole, and Draco can go fuck himself too.”

“Oof,” Ron says, cringing.

“Harry,” Riddle says, and it sounds like he's getting angry. “None of that is going to work on me. We can have this conversation right here, I don’t care.”

“Jesus,” Ron says, and it looks like he's edging away, further into the store. “I don’t know that I really want to—“

“Your friend didn’t need to make a speech about any of this," Riddle says, smiling. "I don’t care about it. Do you know why?”

“Uh, because you don’t listen to anyone, and you’re psychotic, as I’ve said?” Harry says, seething.

“Because I’m very possessive of my shit," he explains, still smiling. "I told you that. I don’t care how you feel about it. I can do whatever I want. I can imprison you in this office right here behind us for the next five years and no one will question me. No one will be able to stop me.”

“Oh man,” Ron whispers.

“You want it though, don’t you?” Harry insists, leaning closer to him, glaring. “You want me to like you.”

“No, Harry. I truly don’t care whether you do. I can make you fuck me and you won’t even know it's what I’m doing. I’m smarter than you. You know that.”

Harry tries to be upset about that, but he finds he can’t. He’s too tired anyway, and maybe that’s the real problem.

“Alright,” Harry says. “Can I get some sleep first?”

Ron looks like he’s terrified, his eyes wide, but he doesn’t say anything. Riddle turns to him. “Is someone still tied up in the bathroom?”

“Uh, yeah.” Ron says. “It's some blonde guy with a phone. He's super annoying. Won't shut up."

Riddle closes his eyes and sighs, running a hand down his face. "You guys tied up Lucius?"

Chapter 15: This is Night Shift

Chapter Text

One Year Later

“Potter, we’ve got a lot of issues down here,” Neville yells.

They do. There are sixty ghost spiders crawling up the crumbling walls of dirt they’re scaling, and Harry has no idea where Ron even is. He hasn’t seen him in hours. If he’s making out with Hermione in some dark corner, Harry’s going to be so pissed. He doesn’t think she’d let him do that though. Also, he really doesn’t like spiders, so he’s probably too freaked out.

“It’s still fine,” Harry yells down to Neville because he can tell everyone is still alive, regardless of how sideways this has gone. The walls of the mine are sticky with ectoplasm and threads of web stick to his fingers. He wipes it on his jeans and the rope attached to the harness on his chest frays a little more.

That’s still fine too, though there is another thing happening, something else he’s become very familiar with, a horrible, dark energy emanating from somewhere above him. It is pressing into his body in sickening waves.

Riddle is attracting them en masse.

Harry hears the sounds of hundreds of skittering legs growing more frantic. They really like Riddle. He’s been down here in the dark hand-feeding them flies for weeks, after all. He's started eating the flies too, and it's a real turn off.

Neville shrieks, and when Harry looks down, he sees that they’re crawling over his body in their bid to get to the surface faster. Neville’s swatting them out of the way desperately. It looks like he’s having a panic attack. He is probably the slowest clairvoyant Harry’s ever met, if he’s being honest, and he’s met a lot now. Hopefully none of the spiders bite him, or this is going to get way more complicated.

Harry freezes as he feels them move over his body too, hundreds of tiny legs.

One of them stays behind on his face after the majority have passed, and he holds his breath. It crawls to his mouth and pries its body against his lips, trying to get him to open them. It's a little too familiar, the route this spider is tracing across his mouth. It feels a little too intentional and strangely sexual. Harry makes a noise behind his closed mouth, irritated.

He hears Riddle’s unhinged, maniacal laughter echo down into the mine, as he is no doubt sharing his body with hundreds of spider ghosts now.

The spider moves on, scrambling to join the final mass of them scampering up the dirt wall, disappearing out of the opening of the mine above his head.

“Can you stop fucking around?!” Harry yells. “We’ve been here for two weeks! I want to go home!”

Riddle’s eyes are glowing red when he peers down into the mine, looking amused. “I want to keep them,” he rasps out in a hundred voices, and a couple of spiders are desperately trying to get into his mouth, but he gently shoos them away.

Harry rolls his eyes. “Sure you do. They’re very special to you, I’m sure.”

“We all like you, Harry,” he says, in the same strange voice. “We’re going to fuck you together as one.”

“Oh my god,” Harry groans. “That’s not funny, it’s disgusting. You need help.”

He laughs again in a chorus of a hundred rasping, discordant voices. It echoes in the space around them, super dramatically. Harry rolls his eyes again. Neville is probably pissing his pants.

Harry’s gonna have to kill him pretty soon, if this rope doesn't snap and he doesn't fall to his death. He's starting to feel increasingly sick. He isn't looking forward to any of that. This mission was only supposed to last a few days, and Harry had been absolutely convinced that Riddle was going to live at the bottom of this mine as a spider-ghost-person. Riddle convinced himself of it, too, probably. That's not even to mention all the shit having to do with Aragog and that bloke hiding him, Hagrid.

It was really complicated and if Harry's being honest, he could barely follow anything that was happening.

But that's night shift at the FBI, for you. Just a bunch of insane bullshit, really.

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chaleria on Chapter 2 Mon 11 Aug 2025 10:30PM UTC

Fascinated, this already has its hooks in me

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1. blood_moth on Chapter 2 Thu 14 Aug 2025 04:25AM UTC
  
  My condolences. I hope you recover soon from your hook injuries.
  
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vushedhushed on Chapter 2 Mon 11 Aug 2025 11:08PM UTC

🫶🫶

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1. blood_moth on Chapter 2 Thu 14 Aug 2025 04:25AM UTC
  
  🖤
  
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A_isot on Chapter 2 Sat 16 Aug 2025 09:08PM UTC

I didn't expect Tomek to be with the FBI.

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fundamentalBlue on Chapter 2 Sun 17 Aug 2025 01:27AM UTC

Haha I am living for this eerie nothing-is-right hilarity. Also Harry attracting closeted gays, yes, my beloved. And tom being in Narnia? Yes, thank you.

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vushedhushed on Chapter 3 Thu 14 Aug 2025 08:26AM UTC

😭😭😭😭🫶

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Florencefreya31 on Chapter 3 Fri 15 Aug 2025 11:44PM UTC

You have such a talent for building a world that feels real.

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1. blood_moth on Chapter 3 Sat 16 Aug 2025 05:28PM UTC
  
  Glad to hear you’re feeling fully immersed!
  
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2. 1. Florencefreya31 on Chapter 3 Sun 17 Aug 2025 09:46PM UTC
    
    I’m honestly really enjoying everything you’ve shared so far.
    How did you first come up with the idea for this story?
    If you’re okay with it, can we talk on Discord or Instagram?
    
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  2. 1. blood_moth on Chapter 3 Mon 18 Aug 2025 12:44AM UTC
      
      You know the alignment system in DND? I am truly a chaotic neutral writer. I never have a solid plan or an idea, and if I do, I'm always forced to abandon it. I had no idea what was going to happen in this story until I wrote it. I started with a scene I was excited about, then I just kept writing around it until I understood the characters enough to know what they would do before/after that scene.
      I'm not on instagram, and I only use discord to keep up to date with a challenge I'm writing for. I am on Tumblr though @bloodiedmoth, if you'd like to reach out there.
      
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fundamentalBlue on Chapter 3 Sun 17 Aug 2025 01:35AM UTC

Ok honestly, Harry is what’s wrong with the store. Calling it. We need some gay sex to fix it or make it worse, idk.

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Coriolan on Chapter 3 Sun 17 Aug 2025 12:57PM UTC

I’m absolutely cracking up when Riddle denied he’s gay

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vushedhushed on Chapter 4 Sat 16 Aug 2025 03:41AM UTC

🫶

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1. blood_moth on Chapter 4 Sat 16 Aug 2025 05:10PM UTC
  
  👻 🐍
  
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Onthemorrow on Chapter 4 Sat 16 Aug 2025 05:48AM UTC

i wanna inject this fic into my veins

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1. blood_moth on Chapter 4 Sat 16 Aug 2025 05:05PM UTC
  
  As a reader, I understand that feeling. As the writer of this atrocity, and especially because I’m in the editing phase, that is unbelievable to me. My hatred of it at this stage adds that special spice to it and it has to happen. Probably. Anyway, thanks for your feedback.
  
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A_isot on Chapter 5 Sat 16 Aug 2025 09:53PM UTC

Tf you mean Tom have a wife. Nah he's lying.

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1. blood_moth on Chapter 5 Sat 16 Aug 2025 11:42PM UTC
  
  Mm, I love this comment.
  
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Onthemorrow on Chapter 5 Sun 17 Aug 2025 12:23AM UTC

Tom doesn't not have a wife, trying to act like he doesn't want harry up in his guts, whatever, but like if fr he's married and it's belatrix or something i'll scream and throw my phone.
i just need tom to get over himself and suck harry's face again

Last Edited Sun 17 Aug 2025 12:25AM UTC

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1. blood_moth on Chapter 5 Sun 17 Aug 2025 07:18PM UTC
  
  Tom told me to tell you that the closet is lovely, dark and deep.
  
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2. 1. Onthemorrow on Chapter 5 Sun 17 Aug 2025 07:25PM UTC
    
    😂😂
    
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vushedhushed on Chapter 5 Sun 17 Aug 2025 06:23AM UTC

Oh Ron 😭

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1. blood_moth on Chapter 5 Sun 17 Aug 2025 07:25PM UTC
  
  He’s got his own character arc, for sure, haha.
  
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fundamentalBlue on Chapter 5 Sun 17 Aug 2025 07:43PM UTC

This story is so funny oh my god. Is it the horror that’s making this closeted gay or the closeted gay that’s making this a horror story?

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1. blood_moth on Chapter 5 Sun 17 Aug 2025 10:14PM UTC
  
  Asking the right questions, here.
  
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A_isot on Chapter 6 Sun 17 Aug 2025 11:25PM UTC

I need more

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Hjptmr on Chapter 6 Sun 17 Aug 2025 11:55PM UTC

MORE MORE MORE OMG THIS IS AMAZING I HAVE NO WORDS

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calculatepotions on Chapter 6 Mon 18 Aug 2025 12:19AM UTC

giggling at 3am like a moron :) no seriously, this is such a fun read and also very intriguing because harry is right, WHAT is going on, why are there snake ghosts that are suspiciously very voldemort-esque. tom is so uppity it's hilarious but also it suits him? like yes, this is him in the slightly chaotically tweaked alternate muggle universe. i loVE harry's personality in this, the world is out to get him and it's just another day for the boy who's somehow still alive.

Last Edited Mon 18 Aug 2025 12:21AM UTC

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Onthemorrow on Chapter 6 Mon 18 Aug 2025 12:21AM UTC

tom trying to convince harry that tom's gayness is harry's fault is the funniest thing and somehow gayer than if he just admitted he was attracted to him. Also i need some guy to flirt with harry and tom get jealous, and harry to just be flabbergasted at tom's audacity

Last Edited Mon 18 Aug 2025 12:30AM UTC

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vushedhushed on Chapter 6 Mon 18 Aug 2025 01:42AM UTC

this chapter is so funny like omg

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Coffee_on_a_rainy_day_23 on Chapter 6 Mon 18 Aug 2025 02:02PM UTC

This fic is so good, it has the right balance of eeriness and comedy...AND I'M LIVING FOR IT!!
KUDOS...
I simply love your characterisation of Tom, him being all dramatic and committed to the closet with an exasperated Harry is just a fun dynamic.

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Night Shift

blood_moth

Summary:

Notes:

Chapter 1: This is an Advertisement for an Energy Drink I Saw Today

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Chapter 2: This is a Picture I Accidentally Took of a Lamp at a Party I Went to

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Chapter 3: This is the Dollar I Used to Get a Snack at the Vending Machine

Notes:

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Chapter 4: This is a Postcard From a Vacation I Took

Notes:

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Chapter 5: This is... Starting to Become a Problem, Isn't It?

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Chapter 6: This is a Problem and We're Going to Fix it

Notes:

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Chapter 7: This is a More Serious Problem Than I Thought it Was

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Chapter 8: This is a Far More Serious Problem Than I Thought it Was

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Chapter 9: This is a Problem That Doesn't Have a Solution

Notes:

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Chapter 10: This is Not The Problem

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Chapter 11: This is a Weird Conversation

Notes:

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Chapter 12: This is the Problem

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Chapter 13: This is the End

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Chapter 14: This is the Beginning

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Chapter 15: This is Night Shift

Chapter Text

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chaleria on Chapter 2 Mon 11 Aug 2025 10:30PM UTC

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blood_moth on Chapter 2 Thu 14 Aug 2025 04:25AM UTC

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vushedhushed on Chapter 2 Mon 11 Aug 2025 11:08PM UTC

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blood_moth on Chapter 2 Thu 14 Aug 2025 04:25AM UTC

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A_isot on Chapter 2 Sat 16 Aug 2025 09:08PM UTC

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fundamentalBlue on Chapter 2 Sun 17 Aug 2025 01:27AM UTC

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vushedhushed on Chapter 3 Thu 14 Aug 2025 08:26AM UTC

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Florencefreya31 on Chapter 3 Fri 15 Aug 2025 11:44PM UTC

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blood_moth on Chapter 3 Sat 16 Aug 2025 05:28PM UTC

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Florencefreya31 on Chapter 3 Sun 17 Aug 2025 09:46PM UTC

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blood_moth on Chapter 3 Mon 18 Aug 2025 12:44AM UTC

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fundamentalBlue on Chapter 3 Sun 17 Aug 2025 01:35AM UTC

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Coriolan on Chapter 3 Sun 17 Aug 2025 12:57PM UTC

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vushedhushed on Chapter 4 Sat 16 Aug 2025 03:41AM UTC

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blood_moth on Chapter 4 Sat 16 Aug 2025 05:10PM UTC

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Onthemorrow on Chapter 4 Sat 16 Aug 2025 05:48AM UTC

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blood_moth on Chapter 4 Sat 16 Aug 2025 05:05PM UTC

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A_isot on Chapter 5 Sat 16 Aug 2025 09:53PM UTC