Chapter Text
Tom hasn't given much thought to Harry's secondary gender. It has never come up directly between them, or rather, Harry has a way of redirecting when it does, turning the conversation gently back to Tom or letting it dissolve into one of his broader opinions on the subject.
Secondary gender matters less than people think. The same is true of blood status, of birth, of all the categories people use to sort each other into neat, unequal piles.
Harry believes this with the particular conviction of someone who wants very much for it to be true.
Tom finds this position interesting. He also finds it a little convenient.
Harry is a wizard. A powerful one, from what Tom can tell. Subtle about it, private, but powerful. He has magic, which places him above the Muggle world without effort. His blood status has never come up in a way that suggests it has ever been used against him. He is, as far as Tom can observe, someone for whom the categories have always been favorable, or at least neutral. Someone who has never had to find out what it costs to be on the wrong side of them.
Tom has found out. At Hogwarts, in the common room of his own house, in the way certain boys say his name, Riddle, like the plainness of it is a small, recurring insult. It doesn’t have the weight that names like Nott or Avery or Rosier carry in those corridors. He is tolerated. He is respected, he has made certain of that, but there is a difference between respect that is earned through effort and respect that is simply assumed as birthright, and Tom understands that difference in a way Harry, he suspects, does not.
So when Harry says people are more than how we label them, Tom listens because what Harry believes is always interesting even when Tom disagrees, but he also thinks: it is easy to believe when those labels have never been used against you.
This is not a criticism of Harry. His idealism is genuine. That's what makes it so interesting, and so fragile, it has never really been tested.
Secondary gender, in Harry's framework, falls into the same category as blood or magical ability. A fact about a person, not a definition of them. So whenever it has come up — glancingly, the way most things come up in conversation — Harry has redirected, or generalized, or simply moved on. Tom noticed the deflection and didn’t think much of it.
His conclusion, arrived at through reasonable inference, was beta.
It is, after all, the statistically dominant presentation. Alphas and omegas exist at the margins of the population, their rarity reinforcing the social weight placed on them. And there is something else, alphas and omegas tend toward biological children, drawn by instinct toward mating and familial bonds. It isn't that they can't adopt, it isn't unheard of, but the pull toward biological continuation is strong enough that adoption skews heavily toward betas, who feel that pull less acutely or not at all.
Harry chose adoption. Harry chose him, from the orphanage, without ceremony or sentimentality, with only that steady, inexplicable certainty he seems to carry about most things. The logic was clean. Harry is a beta. Betas adopt.
He has no evidence to the contrary. He'd never had reason to doubt his assumption.
When Tom presents in his fourteenth year as an alpha, it comes as no surprise.
He had known for some time. Tom does not waste energy on hope when observation will do. He simply knew, the way one knows a conclusion before completing the proof. The evidence had been accumulating quietly for years. The ease with which magic responds to him, the way rooms shift almost imperceptibly when he enters them, the particular attention of professors who mistake his ability for mere diligence when it is something considerably more than that. Alphas are more powerful wizards, statistically, demonstrably, not universally, but enough that the correlation is treated as common knowledge.
Tom had simply looked at himself honestly and drawn the obvious conclusion.The confirmation is just a formality.
What he does feel, and allows himself to feel, is a certain satisfaction. It is a quiet satisfaction, entirely unlike the loud, graceless pride of boys like Avery, who had presented six months prior and hadn't stopped mentioning it since. Something quieter than that. The particular pleasure of being right about something important, of watching a long-held certainty become fact. He is an alpha. He will be among the most capable wizards of his generation.
Harry smiles at him at breakfast and says, "Happy birthday, and congratulations, Tom," and there is something behind his eyes that Tom catalogues without yet understanding. Caution, perhaps.
Harry opens his arms and Tom steps into them, because he always does, because Harry has always been generous with this — and it is in that single, unremarkable moment of contact that everything rearranges itself.
The scent is faint. Suppressed, clearly, deliberately, the olfactory equivalent of a whisper. But Tom's new instincts are not yet calibrated for subtlety. They receive it like a shout. Something burnt-sweet and resinous, deepest at the curve of Harry's neck, the kind of scent that isn't meant to travel far but does anyway.
Tom's mind goes very, very still.
He doesn't move. He stands there with his arms around Harry and performs the hug to its natural conclusion, the appropriate duration, the appropriate pressure, while his brain quietly disassembles every assumption he has made about Harry Potter and begins reconstructing them from the foundation.
Beta. He had assumed beta.
He was wrong.
The information settles into him the way significant things do with a sudden, crystalline clarity. An omega chose to adopt. An omega chose him. He turns this over once, twice, the way one turns over an unexpected variable in an otherwise clean equation. It doesn't destabilize the conclusion so much as deepen it, add dimension to something he thought he already understood.
He pulls back when Harry does, looks down at him. He’s grown four inches since spring.
"Thank you, Harry." A beat. "Will you spend the day with me?"
Harry's expression is warm again, whatever had been tentative in it gone.
"Of course. Whatever you want."
Tom smiles.
He doesn't know Harry at all.
This is not an uncomfortable thought. It should perhaps be humbling. He has lived with this man for years, has studied him the way he studies everything that matters to him, has catalogued his habits and opinions and the particular silences that mean he is thinking carefully versus the ones that mean he simply doesn't want to answer. He knows how Harry takes his tea and which arguments will make him laugh and which will make him go quiet in that careful, deliberate way that means Tom has said something worth examining later.
And yet...
Harry is an omega who has hidden it from everyone. From the whole of the wizarding world, apparently, and from Tom most of all. Tom, who pays attention for a living, who had looked at Harry Potter for years and seen only what Harry chose to show him. There is something almost impressive about that. Something that lands in him not as embarrassment at having missed it but as a sharpening of interest, a familiar pull, the same feeling he gets when a problem turns out to be considerably more interesting than it first appeared.
Harry has always done this to him. Surprised him. Delighted him, occasionally infuriated him, with his easy certainty, his idealism, his capacity to hold opinions that should be naive and somehow make them feel like a genuine challenge to everything Tom thinks he knows. Every time Tom believes he has taken an accurate measure of him, Harry quietly exceeds it.
Harry is the only person who has ever managed that consistently.
He considers what else he might have missed. What else Harry has folded carefully away, behind that warm, open expression that Tom now understands is not the whole of him.
He wants to know. Not just the secondary gender, not just his ideologies and whatever careful architecture of concealment Harry has built around himself, though he wants to know all of that too, in time, methodically. He wants to know Harry. Every layer underneath the one that smiles at him over breakfast and says whatever you want.
Yes, it will be.
Harry is home less than Tom expected.
He'd known, in the abstract, that Harry worked, had always had causes and creatures that needed him. But knowing it from Hogwarts, where Harry's absence was simply the baseline condition of term, is different from knowing it here, in their house, where Tom had spent nine months anticipating the particular quality of Harry's attention and is instead getting dinners held in careful stasis and short notes left on the kitchen table.
Late again. Don't wait up.
The notes are not new. Harry has never been a correspondent in the traditional sense, and Tom had understood this early enough to adjust his expectations. Where other boys received long letters from home, full of family news and maternal reassurances, Tom received mainly packages with similar small notes. Harry would send him quills with colour‑changing ink and good parchment, a book he'd mentioned wanting, and once, after he had complained about some of his fellow Slytherins, a small Sneakoscope that glowed and chimed whenever someone untrustworthy came too close.
For when your housemates are being particularly Slytherin. If it goes off constantly, we may need to have a talk. – H.
Harry communicates in gifts the way other people communicate in sentences. Tom has always found this more meaningful than letters, in the way that actions generally are. Harry thinks of him constantly, just not in so many words.
But this year the packages had been less frequent. The notes tucked inside them shorter, more distracted, the handwriting slightly rushed in a way Tom had catalogued and then deliberately set aside because fifth year does not permit the luxury of distraction. OWLs had consumed him the way he prefers to be, completely and productively, every spare hour directed toward something measurable. He had focused on his tests. He had focused on being the best in his year, which he is, by a margin that stopped being interesting to track some time ago.
He chose not to focus on the way Harry's letters had thinned to almost nothing, or on what that might mean. He would have his time with Harry during the summer. A few months of Harry's full attention, uninterrupted. That had been the implicit promise of coming home, the thing that made the long stretch of term bearable.
Tom is no longer accustomed to disappointment. He finds it, on the rare occasions it occurs, a useful signal that he has miscalculated somewhere. He revises now, quietly, over a solitary dinner in a warm and empty kitchen, and concludes that something has changed in Harry's orbit this year. Tom doesn’t like it.
He had missed him. He is not accustomed to missing people either. Had not, before Harry, understood what the word meant as anything other than a description of absence. Now he understands it as something with weight, that sits in the chest and makes everything else slightly less interesting by comparison.
He had wanted to show Harry what he'd learned this year, the theory he'd been developing, the magic that had made even Professor Dumbledore look up from his desk with something approaching genuine attention. He had wanted Harry's specific, unhurried focus turned on him again.
Instead Harry comes home late, tired, and smelling of other people.
Tom notices it the first night and files it away. By the third night he has identified at least two distinct alpha signatures on Harry's coat. Colleagues, almost certainly, people who work in close quarters with magical creatures and don't think much about getting too close to harmless, sweet Harry.
They should think about proximity. Tom thinks about it a great deal and he isn’t so harmless.
"Why are you working, anyway," he says one evening, and hears the sharpness in his own voice a half-second too late to smooth it. "It's not as if we need the money."
Harry looks up from his scroll. There's something cold in his expression.
"What else would I do? It's important to have an occupation, Tom. I hope you're planning on doing something after you finish school."
Of course he is. Tom doesn't dignify this with the full answer it deserves. He will work. He will build something — is already building something. That has never been in question.
What sits underneath his words is a different matter entirely. An implication Tom hadn't quite intended to surface, and which Harry has apparently heard clearly enough despite it never being spoken aloud.
The unspoken half of the equation is this… that omegas are not built for fourteen-hour days and the particular violence of bureaucratic advocacy. That they are, the books say, better suited to quieter things. To home, to family, to more domestic labor they are supposedly designed by nature to provide. That an omega working this hard, this late, coming home exhausted and smelling of strangers, is an omega doing something unnatural.
Tom does not entirely believe this. He is precise enough in his thinking to know that common wisdom is often neither. He has seen enough of Harry's capabilities to understand that frailty is not a feature of his secondary gender.
Harry had mistaken Tom’s irritation for this sort of prejudice. The oldest, laziest prejudice in the wizarding world, that an omega's proper occupation is a warm house and a full nursery, that anything beyond that is an eccentricity to be tolerated at best. For a moment he’s inclined to agree with them.
He is annoyed at himself for that. And more annoyed, if he is being honest, that Harry is out there being capable and necessary and utterly unavailable, when Tom would give him every comfort and security those prejudices have ever promised an omega, and has never once been asked.
Harry continues before Tom can defend himself.
"Magical creatures are one of the least protected classes," he says, and his voice has taken on that particular quality. Earnest, unhurried, the voice he uses when he believes something completely. "If I wasn't doing this work, Tom, most of it wouldn't get done. The Ministry doesn't care. Most people don't care."
Tom looks at him.
His Harry. Bright with conviction, defending things that cannot defend themselves, carrying the weight of causes that would burden anyone else. There is something genuinely beautiful about it, the same quality that has always made Harry impossible to look away from. This absolute, uncomplicated commitment to his own values, even when those values are inconvenient, even when no one is asking him to bother.
Even when he comes home carrying other alphas on his skin like he doesn't notice. Like it doesn't mean anything.
Tom is fairly certain it doesn't mean anything to Harry. Harry has told him, more than once, that he has no interest in a bond. He’s structured his entire life, Tom now understands, around maintaining that position, suppressants and deflection and careful distance from anything that might complicate it. He believes him.
This does not particularly help.
What Tom feels when he looks at Harry's coat folded over the chair, when he identifies the specific alpha whose scent has transferred most heavily today, who clearly works in close enough quarters to make that happen, is not rage, exactly. It's closer to a problem he hasn't yet solved. He catalogs the scent with the same methodical attention he gives to everything that matters, files it against the others, and thinks, not for the first time, about how simple it would be to ensure that person no longer worked alongside Harry. There are quiet ways to accomplish most things.
It’s not a real solution, more of a territorial alpha fantasy if he’s being honest with himself. Even if he were to take such drastic actions and disappear a few of these alphas, the Ministry would just replace them.
He doesn't pursue the thought further. Not tonight.
"I'm sorry, Harry," he says instead, and arranges his expression into something warm and appropriately chastened. "I know how much the work matters to you. I just want you to have an easy life."
Harry smiles. The smile that Tom has been waiting months to see directed at him, and reaches over to place his hand on Tom's arm.
The hand that smells like that alpha.
Tom keeps his expression exactly where it is.
"My life is easy, Tom. I'm very happy with what we have."
Ah.
Tom looks at him. The tiredness around his eyes, the hand still resting on his arm, at the whole careful shape of a life Harry has arranged to want very little from, and thinks that this is, perhaps, the most significant gap in Harry's otherwise considerable intelligence. That he has looked at what they have and decided it is enough.
Tom has never been able to decide that. Has tried, occasionally, in the abstract way one tries to accept an incomplete solution, and found that it doesn't take. What they have is many things. It is not enough.
He covers Harry's hand with his own, briefly, and smiles back.
"Good," he says. "That's all I want."
The restaurant is one Harry found years ago, on a trip they took when Tom was still young enough that taking an international Portkey anywhere felt like a special event. A narrow terrace perched over the water, soft yellow light from lanterns charmed against the breeze, the Mediterranean stretching out in layered darks and silvers. The air is warm, the wind off the sea is not strong enough to be intrusive, just enough to move Harry’s hair and bring his scent across the table in slow, deliberate waves.
These are the evenings Tom hoards.
Quiet, contained, just the two of them with no one who knows them, no one who expects anything from either of them except that they pay the bill and leave eventually. Harry relaxed in a way he rarely is in London, shoulders loose, tie gone, eyes bright with that particular holiday ease. Tom has spent a great deal of time, the last few months, thinking about this exact scene.
Harry, of course, has been asking about what he plans to do after Hogwarts.
Not directly. Harry almost never asks directly when it comes to Tom. He circles, offers possibilities, makes it clear that there is no wrong answer.
You don't have to decide immediately. You could take some time. Travel. Gringotts would want you, of course. Or you could work with me in magical creatures, the Ministry is always looking for bright minds…
All of it delivered in that careful tone that says: I want you to be happy.
Tom has found it faintly aggravating. He does not need time. He needed information. He has spent the last two years acquiring it, studying the public healer curriculum, the less public texts on secondary gender medicine, tracing the gaps where omega biology disappears from general reference and reappears only in specialist manuals locked behind institutional wards. He has had his answer for months now.
“There’s someone making eyes at you from the bar,” Harry says now, low, conspiratorial, without looking away from his wine. His mouth curves. “Has been for the last ten minutes.”
“Is there?” Tom asks, bland.
"Mhm." Harry's eyes flick up, amusement catching at the corners. "He’s handsome."
Tom had not noticed. He looks, briefly, because Harry has pointed it out, and identifies a man perhaps a few years older than him. Well put together, expensive watch, omega, an almost sickly floral scent carried faintly on the salt breeze. Irrelevant. He returns his attention to the only person worth looking at.
"I'm not particularly interested in that, Harry," he says, a small shrug of his shoulders.
Harry's smile turns a shade more impish. "Seems we're the same, then, Tom. That's all right."
Yes. They are alike in many ways. All but the one that matters. To say he has no desire at all would be inaccurate. It is simply that all of it is already accounted for, concentrated with almost frightening efficiency in the person sitting across from him. The rest of the world is ambient noise.
The waiter appears at Tom's elbow, young, cheerful, glancing between them with open curiosity.
"Scusi — you are twins, yes?"
Harry laughs, genuine and unguarded, the sound carrying out over the water.
"No," he says, amused.
They order and the waiter retreats with an apologetic smile. Tom watches Harry's expression settle back into something warmer, in that way he gets when something catches him off guard. Tom understands the confusion entirely. The wind off the ocean has done something to his hair tonight, pulling it loose from where he'd combed it back, so that it falls across his forehead in dark, unruly waves not entirely unlike Harry's own perpetual disorder. They have the same depth of colour, that particular near-black that catches blue in direct light, and a similar structure to their faces, the strong cheekbones, the dark brows, the same clean line of a jaw. Tom's features are sharper where Harry’s are more endearing, softer and approachable. But side by side, in the soft candle lighting with the sea behind them, the resemblance is plain enough that strangers reach for the simplest explanation.
They do this often now. Slot them into the nearest narrative and move on. Brothers, cousins, a family holiday. It would be simpler, Tom thinks, if they were related by blood. Would explain, to the outside world, the particular quality of his attention. Harry insists, cheerfully and often, that they are absolutely not related and finds the confusion funny rather than troubling. Tom does not find it troubling either, for entirely different reasons. The confusion keeps people at a comfortable distance. It is useful.
On the rare occasions someone gets close enough to notice the nuance in their scents, alpha and omega, not siblings, the dynamic suddenly legible. They assume the next most obvious configuration. A bonded pair, perhaps. Or soon to be. The looks that follow are knowing rather than curious, and those Tom finds he minds considerably less. Especially because it means neither of them will have to endure any irritating flirtations.
He does for Harry, as a matter of course, all the things an attentive alpha does for someone already claimed. A hand at the small of his back when they move through crowded streets, taking Harry's plate to portion out the meal or insisting they share a dessert. Tom doesn’t enjoy sweet foods, but Harry does and won’t eat it alone. Small, unremarkable things.
Harry accepts all of it without apparently assigning any meaning beyond habit and fondness. The rest of the world, seeing two dark-haired men who look vaguely related and sit closer than strangers would, files them accordingly and moves on.
Tom's efforts register as nothing more than good manners.
It is… insufficient.
He could, in theory, correct the misapprehension. There are obvious ways. The base vocabulary of claiming writes itself in his mind sometimes when he lets it. Fuck, knot, fill, bite. The old, crude sequence the world understands. He’s not above it, can’t pretend like he doesn’t want that too but it’s inelegant. Harry is more to him than that. Tom has never been content with the bluntest solution when a more sophisticated one is available.
There are other kinds of claiming. Many kinds, in fact. The obvious, biological one is only the most vulgar expression of a much larger category.
Tom has read about them. Quiet, old rituals, bonding magics tucked away in private collections and family grimoires, the sort of spells people pretend not to use anymore. Oaths braided through cores so that magic answers to a shared call. Wards keyed to two signatures and no others. Names written into skin with ink that doesn’t show unless invoked.
He thinks about them more than he should.
The technical beauty of a properly structured soul‑bond, the way certain rites alter the flow of magic between two people so that it can never again be entirely separated. The smaller things, too. Domestic bindings that recognise a bonded pair as a single unit for the purpose of inheritance, of apparition, of travel. Minor household charms that only activate when both halves of a bond are present.
Layers upon layers of structure that say, more or less, these two belong together.
He wants all of it for Harry. If Harry would let him, Tom would thread himself through every aspect of his life with the same care he uses in spellwork. He would, if it were possible, take up residence in Harry’s soul and organise it, gently, around the fact of them.
Harry takes a sip of his wine, eyes still bright, and says, “So. Have you decided?”
His tone is light. The interest underneath it is not.
“About what you want to do now that Hogwarts is officially behind you.”
Harry watches him with that open, hopeful attention that has never stopped being dangerous.
“I’ve been offered a trainee position,” Tom says. “At St Mungo’s. In their healer programme.”
Harry stills. For a heartbeat, he simply looks at Tom, as though translating the words into something that makes sense. Then the expression breaks over his face, delighted, astonished, so proud it is almost painful to look at.
“Tom,” he says, and Tom has heard his name in a thousand registers but not quite this one. “That’s… that’s wonderful. You didn’t say you were applying!”
“You tend to worry,” Tom says, mildly. “I thought it best to wait until there was something definite to tell you.”
Harry laughs, soft, incredulous.
“A healer!” He says it like a revelation. “You’ll be brilliant. You already are. I should have seen it coming.”
Tom smiles, because that is what one does when one’s guardian is pleased. The warmth he feels is not entirely feigned. There is a genuine satisfaction in watching Harry’s conviction rearrange itself to accommodate this new information. Tom, safely within the bounds of a profession Harry understands as unequivocally good.
Harry has no idea that the very texts Tom will be studying — those restricted manuals on omega endocrinology and pheromonal regulation, the private case studies on long‑term suppressant use and its systemic impact — are the pieces he has been missing.
That the access his position will grant him to closed archives and specialized potions labs is not, for Tom, a perk but the entire point. That when he says, lightly, “It seemed a practical choice,” what he means is, I need to know exactly what your suppressants are doing to you. I need to know how to undo it without anyone being able to stop me.
Harry reaches across the table and takes his hand, squeezing once, eyes bright in the blue‑grey light.
“I’m so proud of you,” he says quietly. “You’re going to help so many people.”
Tom curls his fingers around Harry’s and thinks, with the calm certainty that has always preceded his best decisions, that Harry is almost right.
He is going to help one person.
And once he has the knowledge he needs, once he understands every system currently standing between Harry and the life Tom has designed for him, there will be no handsome men at bars, no Ministry alphas, no suppressants, no careful, fragile equilibrium Harry can mistake for happiness.
The sea breeze shifts. Harry’s scent washes over him again, warm and sugared, threaded with contentment and something like relief.
The compartment was only warded lightly.
Tom had found it years ago, during one of those quiet inventories he performed whenever Harry was out of the house. A particular tile in the upstairs bathroom, third from the sink, charmed to spring open with the right pressure. He'd tested it once, felt the subtle wards hum against his fingertips, reveal only to owner, conceal from casual glance, and left it untouched.
Now Harry is away for the day, visiting some creature sanctuary or other, and Tom has time. He kneels by the porcelain tile, traces the pattern adorning it with one finger until it clicks. The compartment slides open, revealing three small vials nestled in velvet. Pearlescent purple liquid, stoppered with wax seals, labeled in Harry's messy hand with dates.
He lifts them out one by one, methodical. From his pocket he produces their identical replacements, placebos, brewed over months in the St Mungo's trainee labs under the guise of independent study. Same colour, same viscosity, same faint cherry tang when uncorked.
The swap takes under a minute. He seals the hiding spot, tests it twice to ensure the wards reset cleanly.
Tom stands, dusts his knees, and allows himself a moment of satisfaction. Harry's heat is due soon. The timing is ideal. He’s taken the time off work and knows Harry has a holiday. It’ll be just the two of them in the house with nothing to interrupt the inevitable.