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Harry has always struck Tom as odd. Since the older boy was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the orphanage, yelling that if he stayed there he would miss the revel. Harry was tossed not long after into Tom's room, with the declaration that Freaks belong together.
Tom was six, Harry eight. Both were old enough to regard each other as oddities in their own right: Tom with his cooling heart and building anger at the world, and his growing taste for revenge. Then Harry, with his uncaring appearance and inability to stay still, his wild movements and wilder, more terrible mind. They are both crazy, most would say, and while Tom is at first scared of the larger boy with unkempt black hair and eyes the color of new spring growth, who walks like an animal in a human body and speaks undecipherable things, it is not long before he finds himself under the other's care, whether he wants it or not. It's forced on him, by Harry's strange words of half-comfort and a body crawling into what was once only his bed.
They're never given another.
It's Harry who first tells him bedtime stories, for some reason, and Tom reacts like any child who's introduced to something that they consider foolish and beneath them: he scoffs, and silently seethes, even though at some point he cannot help himself wondering what will happen to the crafty cricket maiden or the princess who sawed off her own hands.
Soon enough he begins to admire them, and look forward to midnight tales of tragedy and strategy and good versus evil where, in a ridiculous parody of the way that adults insist to be true and a direct reference of what Tom knows to be true, neither matter, and in the end it's only power that wins the battles. Tom Riddle has never feared the dark or sleep, but with Harry leaning over him in the moonlight, spinning tales like spider silk, he looks forward to them.
It’s Harry that gifts him meaningless touches after so long without them. Nothing big, just brushes of hands and head pats and strangely proud smiles pressed as kisses to his carefully combed hairline, messing it all up with a hand shaking his hair up a moment after. He's the one with shoulder touches and fleeting hugs when Tom is feeling furious and full of hate for the world, because it's never given him anything but hate and all he's doing is returning the bloody and rotting favour.
Tom hasn't been treated with such tenderness since he was very, very young, not since whispers of the demon dwelling in him began to exchange lips, and he is not sure what to do with himself when Harry pulls near to deliver affection upon his unprepared brow.
Soon, he doesn't even mind the other's oddness. They've reach a strange and unnatural harmony in their thoughts and movements around one another. Tom is a little bit more childish, and Harry a bit more gentle, a bit less wild.
Tom doesn't hate it.
Of course, that doesn't mean that Tom ever forgets the atypicalness of their arrangement. Far too many examples of the other's inhuman and affection-starved ways glare back at him as they grow.
Tom has seen Harry collapse to the floor like a puppet with strings cut, only to rise with his pupils big and cloudy, speaking in reverse some great verses of prophecy that, somehow, always seem to come true within the week. He's seen him dance atop rails and walls with impossible balance, jump like a cat from the rooftops and land. He eats ravenously, swallows eggs whole at the dinner table and chews bark off of branches as he sits basking in the sun. He stares off into nothing and listens to birdsong in the midst of a city that never sleeps. He gets into arguments and scraps and pummels other boys into the ground with a laugh, not even noticing attempts to drag him off. He stares at Tom, eyes like absinthe, eyes like death, and softens.
Time and time again, Harry has begged Tom to join him.
He doesn’t really need to ask. There’s something different about Harry, just like there’s something different about Tom, and it seems only natural to give in.
Tom has felt the other boy trembling in his sleep, when they share the same old moldy bed in a dark room. He’s had his dreams haunted by strange creatures that Harry refers to by name and title. He's twirled around in fancy dress with queens and knights and rose coated maidens, under Harry's watchful and protective eyes. He's ached with hunger, because Harry steals extra food for them and on the very rare occasion that he's caught and cannot get out of it, the cook doesn't give either of them dinner, because everyone knows that the two are joined at the hip, and anything Harry does, Tom is probably in on it too. He's smelt blood and sweat, when Harry creeps back through the rickety window in their room at sunrise after a full moon, his cheeks flushed and his fingers burned. He's tasted Harry's skin, because Harry bites when he's angry, and the best way to retaliate, Tom has found, is to bite back.
He's had fingers trace his back on bath nights, covers thrown over him in his sleep, words of warning hissed at him in foreign tongues, people point at them in the streets, female hands slap his face and male fists delivered in same, skinned knees, nights spent cold and close together and shivering and others spent near naked and still close even though they feel like they're smouldering in the summer fire, sunburns and quick beautiful kisses leave his cheeks red and hot, women with green hair leave wreaths of flowers in his, earbreaking sounds leave his head ringing, books leave his heart sad, and a million interactions leave his heart hard to the world only to see Harry's unearthly, grinning, dangerous face and feel it all melt away into a puddle of burning, abandoned dreams.
There have been nights where he saw terrible things in their shared dreams and cried out, only to find Harry smiling. Early mornings where he's sleepily reached out to find a hand, and found it already reaching for his. Days where Harry has been made fun of, and he's felt so enraged that his anger has come alive and made Harry's haters crumple and scream.
There is the evening where Harry pulled him aside, and told him that what he just did is called magic, and that Harry can do it too.
More nights, spent watching Harry make sparks fly, and conversing with snakes from the garden. Years have passed in glorious, rain-wetted hazes, haunted by sweet things on his tongue and the sounds of willow leaf whips hitting the air. Puberty has started to hit Harry, and the tiny boy, once barely taller than Tom, has started sprouting, his voice losing a trace of its reediness but still remaining honey lilted, and his wild crow feather hair now has to be forcefully cut by the caretakers when he least expects it.
He always expects everything. Neither of them trust anything. This inspires a strange sort of trust for one another.
Tom has watched with wariness and curiosity as an owl has alighted in their open window, still open despite the encroaching autumn chill, and delivered a letter with Harry's name written on it.
Harry has never bothered to read past a beginners level. Tom is the book smart one of the pair, with good grades and carefully kept books and a pristine social life at school.
The school the Wool's Orphanage children are allowed to attend is a place where Harry does not deign to stray, and so nobody knows the full extent of Tom's freakishness. He is allowed to keep up an innocent schoolboy mask there, and pursue trivial goals that may or may not prove meaningless in his future, and neither of these are things that Harry is interested in.
So it is he who reads the letter first, and it is he who feels the ice come crusting from the winter that has not yet come, come crusting down his throat and coat his heart, because oh no this is not something he is prepared for not something he's planned for Harry is his escape Harry is his to hide with and this is their small wonderful world and how dare anyone try to get in when they're so content and mottled and twisted and angry at the world that doesn't quite take them in the way that it should they're going to remake it in their own image but how, how can they do that if they're not close enough to one another to breath in the other's breath.
Harry drags him down to hold him in their bed, and it's next week before Tom manages to tell him what the letter said. The very next day, a man dressed like one of the creature's in their dreams poor imitation of what a human may wear shows up, and asks to speak with Harry.
Alone.
Harry is not the only one who snarls at the presumptuous suggestion, and snakes come crawling from the underbrush for miles around at the mere idea of their anger. The man, calling himself Dumbledore, falters, and Tom stays.
They sit, sides melded together and ankles crossed, and listen to a pack of lies that neither believes, and neither wants to believe. Not even Dumbledore's calm insistence that Harry will learn more and his magic will flourish for it, persuades the now eleven year old to part from his dark hearted charge and attend Hogwarts. Dumbledore leaves with a warning of trouble to come and shock and dismay on his face when Tom forced one of the orphanage caretakers to drop their current task and believe that Dumbledore is a very important guest that needs to be led to the door.
She leads him down and curtsies as she lets him out, spouting meaningless details and thanks to what she sees as a rich man with money to donate to their crumbling orphanage. They do not watch him leave.
Another letter arrives a couple days later. Tom doesn't bother to read it, and Harry doesn't ask. Clearly, letters are not something they need in their lives. That night, in their dreams, they drop it in the silvery bonfire, and then go to dance with a woman with fox ears and hair the colour of the sun. When they wake up, the copy on the floor by their bed is gone as well. So they pay the matter no attention, and instead go on with their day, carrying out activities like any strange pair would.
Tom goes to school; Harry disappears until Tom gets back. Then they lay on their bed and speak nonsense to each other. Harry speaks in riddles, Tom in arithmetic problems from class. They are both confused, and both happy, and both have fruit juice drying in the corners of their mouths, because Harry has robbed a stall at the farmer’s market by making the distracting, shimmery sheen of his skin too glamorous to notice what his hands are up too.
They pass the afternoon there in their shared bed, exchanging jokes and prophecies and stories and half-serious threats and dead insects. Harry tells him that he comes from old money and dishonor and ditches. There is that special sheen to his eye and he starts to babble backwards. He then predicts when it will next rain. Tom listens, and watches, and ponders what will be next for them.
The air between them is shared as well, electric with their magic and humming with their avaristic satisfaction.
After an unsatisfying dinner of fried potato chunks, bread, and watery tea, they dash away from supervision and go to the park before curfew, and Harry climbs a tree only to drop down with something shimmering in his hand. They trudge back to the orphanage, and that night, in Tom's dreams, they run through the woods in silver face paint, diamonds, and tiny spider silk tailcoats, and Harry sprinkles stars in their wake as they chase the blue glow of the Wil-O-the-Whisps.
Another letter arrives the next day, and with this one, the moment Harry touches it to dispose of it, it turns blood red and shoots into the air. Tom yells and Harry steps in front of him, and the letter bends and contorts into the shape of a human mouth, and begins to sternly lecture them, and Tom begins to feel a hopeless sort of angry when it tells them that Harry must attend Hogwarts for training. He hates it, despises it, and even more what it stands for. The letter gives a dying shriek as it bursts into flames from his withering glare.
Harry twirls with excitement at the drama and drapes himself, purring, over Tom, but Tom can't bring himself to move until the last flame flickers out and only smoky ash is left blowing in the window, and the owl that had brought it is long gone, never to come again.
Harry may fight the idea of separation in a feral, protectorate way, frothing at the mouth to keep their messy, mutilated but ultimately satisfying life as it is, so that he can continue to foresee the weather and the deaths, and continue to hold Tom close at night, but Tom is the one who will fight this rationally, controlled, and full of hatred until he gets his way.
Harry will do unspeakable things to keep them together, Tom has seen the glow of possessiveness in his eyes and the blood and tears on his fingers some nights before the disappearance of another hated authority figure who thought to separate them, but Tom will do the same, and take a far more twisted satisfaction from knowing what he's doing. He is the one who actually needs this now, when Harry has never truly needed anything. He will be just as possessive and just as jealous, and if need be, just as unhumanly unhinged. He's keeping Harry to himself, and making sure that everything is just as he likes it.
They spend long hours that night tangled together, unspeaking, but just knowing that they're the wrong in a world that's right and feeling all the better for it.
When men and women come next, knocking on their door after school a few letters later, Harry crouches and hisses, pulls Tom behind him, and forcefully backs them both out the window before the door is even fully opened. Tom is terrified and clinging to him for what he is sure will be the last few seconds of their life, before Harry lands with the grace of a creature without proper bones and Tom is still clinging to his side, even as he's dragged off through a hole in the ornate iron fence, Harry's olive toned skin turning red even as he scrapes them both roughly through.
The chase does not last long, and when they find themselves no longer able to move, as if frozen in time as the men and women approach, it's all Tom can do to keep from crying his angry tears, the only kind he has ever cried.
He is furious that this could ever possibly end. He wants to shut the whole world down for this, watch smoke blow and gears grind to a stop and lights go out in homes and eyes alike, for ever daring this heavenly blur to stop. They are too wild; they should not be caught so easily. The world is so unfair.
His near-tears do not go unnoticed by Harry, he can tell, because the other's eyes have turned the dark green of endless pine forests, where children get lost and are never found, because they're long since tangled up in some starving spiders web, and long since sucked until all that remains are husks of want. Tom has never before seen his eyes go so deep without a body coming of it.
A woman steps forward and speaks to them, but neither of them pay attention. Harry's skin is hot beneath his own, and Tom hates that his own feels so cold. He always has been the one more effected by the chilly, dirty water climate that is London. He's the one that borrows Harry's coat when his own threadbare one no longer warms him, and watches as the fine hairs on Harry's arm barely rise when it snows. Harry acts above the weather he predicts, and Tom is disturbingly weak and human before the overpowering elements.
Tom is too distracted and only pays enough attention that when a man speaks and he feels his limbs loosen, he can spit at the woman and scramble to his feet, moving all of his lacking weight onto the leg he positions in front of Harry, who is still on the ground, still unmoving.
Tom glares at her, and sets his feet into the ground to protect Harry this time.
He has faced down adults, strangers, bullies, senseless demeaning children who do not know better, unfair teachers, Dumbledore, and monsters in his dreams that he refuses to believe could ever truly exist in his waking hours. He does not think much of this lady, with her uniform and drab curly hair, coppery eyes, and scarred hands holding her pale stick tightly in white knuckled, ring adorned fingers. He has stared creatures formed of mud and bark and ivy and human teeth in the face, and danced with them under grassy knolls. Now is not the time to be childish. Now is the time to be biting and angry.
Evidently, she does not think much of him either. A moment later, he's back on the ground frozen, half on top of Harry, and watching with satisfaction as the fire he has willed into existence burns its way up her hair, steadily to her scalp, until one of the other uniformed men puts it out with rain that falls from nowhere.
Harry and Tom would be thrilled to have found another magical in the world of their waking, one who was not Dumbledore who had set their possessions alight in an unburning, alarming fire, were in not for the fact that he was working against them. The woman yells, the man comforts her, another tries to talk to them, and Harry's eyes steadily darken further and further.
Feral light is beginning to build around them in heatwaves, and where their skin touches, Tom can feel burns beginning. A familiar blue glow is beginning to appear, and he can see dancing shadows appear on the brick wall of a nearby building. Panic hits him, and he sees Harry give a minute twitch before he bursts free, a wicked, animal howl pouring from his mouth.
It happens in a flash. Bright light flashes, Wil-O-the-Whisps sing, a cloud of dandelion fluff sylphs shriek, and Harry's blackened eyes suddenly catch fire like a tiger trapped inside a kitten's body.
Tom wakes up gasping, his head swimming with fear and anger and his skin singing with adrenalin pinpricks.
They're back in their room, in bed. When he looks over, Harry is pretending to be asleep. Tom knows because Harry is only truly still when he's sleeping, and right now he's breathing too hard, and his toes are wiggling beneath their sheets. He doesn't bother to say anything though; this is just the sort of thing that Harry does.
Where their legs twist together the other's skin is not burning hot, and Tom does not feel as though he's been frozen in time. His mouth is dry, his tongue swollen, but it is just the sort of morning feeling he is used to, not something to indicate anything out of the ordinary. Spots where his skin was burning do not feel numb. He has time to wonder if maybe it was one of his rare, personal dreams, not shared with Harry and not of moonlight creatures, before he rolls over, feeling Harry's false sleep-breath against his neck and his arm slip over his hip as though the other is doing it in his sleep, and Tom catches a glimpse of ash smeared across the floor from a screaming letter, and a pale stick resting against the door of their wardrobe.
He closes his eyes, breathes in Harry's exhale, and dreams of children with high-pitched voices and pointed ears, who play with him without calling him names or trying to weedle him to tell them test answers, Harry watching nearby next to a woman with cat eyes and another, the one with hair like the sun, red and beautiful, and eyes as green as Harry's.
Two more years pass in the same manner as always. Harry is even more insistent on their constant nearness to one another, and follows him to school now, hiding in a schoolyard tree until the final bell rings. They spend their weekends getting thoroughly lost in alleyways and robbing tiny pathetic balcony gardens of their bearings, eating golden fruits in their sleep and getting into fights and territorial spats in their waking hours. Harry's teeth are sharper than ever, and Tom carries a knife.
They spend evenings laying in park streams and barking at leashed dogs and looking at the streets beneath their window, hating where they are and loving it all the same. Tom never mentions the letters or the uniforms, and watches carelessly as shadows from their dreams begin to appear in real life too. Small squat creatures with long arms, women with spider legs, tiny delicate winged children, all appearing as flitting shadows that disappear if he looks.
He is acutely aware of the fact that such things appearing as little as three years ago would have sent him to angry, frightened, and bloodthirsty tears. What once would have horrified him, he now ignores. His inhibitions are dropping, and everything is fine. That seems to be the trend around Harry.
Harry kisses him once, on the mouth instead of on his cheek or nose or heavens knows what other planes of his face Harry has decided to kiss when he's excited or feeling particularly whimsical.
It's only a peck, soft and slow, and Tom is only ten, but their hold of each other at night changes a bit after that. Biting is less for fighting, and more for the joy of tasting flesh and blood. The hand he holds on the groggy mornings holds more meaning in its uncut nails and long, burnt fingertips. Fingers brushing his ears and hair are a little less brotherly, and a lot more growing instincts and teenage lusts, and become even more commonplace than before, when Harry was already linking their pinkies together and tucking his hair back.
Tom lets it happen, lets their relationship grow and twist and fold in on itself, and thrives on chocolate milk that Harry brings him on the weekends and skin on skin touches of their knees brushing each other when their shorts hike up in the summertime. They dance a bit closer to the fire and to each other at night.
Tom wants to kiss him back, but he never really works up the nerve. It's one thing to go along with Harry's harebrained fancies, another entirely to lower himself into initiating something of his own.
He's not really sure what he would even do.
December rolls by suddenly, like a crash of frost upon an unsuspecting flower, all biting cold and heated skin contact, homespun coats and knitted hoods, cuddling by an unburning fire that Tom has just learned to replicate, saying goodbye to snakes as they escape beneath to hibernate, huddling in bed with blankets on their laps and starving street felines huddled by their legs, hiding from caretakers when their touches turn secret in nature, and then, shortly before his birthday, another letter appears.
Same as the first. Only this time it is his name written in flowery font above the address, faint tracks of ink spiderwebbing out across the thick paper from where the wet ink was first layed, like marker on thin pale knuckles when Harry draws lines of stitches across his fingers, the ink following the pattern of the paper as it does the pattern of his skin. Harry hands it to him, and he shoos out a tiny female ginger tabby from beneath his knee as he sits up straighter to read it. She darts out the window, disappearing down the roof.
He does not know when it was decided that cats could join the snakes in their room, nor how they get up here when, unlike the snakes, neither he nor Harry bring them. But he cannot say he minds. Their window remains open despite the cold. He can stop some of the chill from sleeping in with just a thought, anyways. He just has to bother to do so.
Instead, he opens the letter, and wonders what exactly happened a few years ago as he reads words he's already read before, just with another name to tell who it's for.
Tom Marvolo Riddle is invited to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He wonders if they noticed this letter, and thought of him specifically. He wonders if Dumbledore looked at it for longer than necessary to sign his name, and thought of him. He wonders if any of the wizards from two and a bit more years ago even remember his name, or his existence at all. He wonders if, after what Harry did, they exist at all.
He's never asked for specifics. He got what he wanted, and he was sure it wasn't going to be a problem again. He saw no point in paying attention to details when, honestly, the lives of those involved, besides of course for his and Harry's, never will really matter to him.
Then he wonders if the answer to those questions should influence his answer. It occurs to him that the reason Harry's letter so upset them both was that it required them to separate, to cleave their odd little fellowship in two and branch out.
Since their very introduction, they've found their cozy little niche in society: hiding from it, above it, and silently plotting how best to rip it to shreds and see how they could reshape it. Together.
They've never really said as much, he supposes, but he's fairly certain that they like to think that they are already where they belong, huddled together, two people so different that they're almost the same, waiting to break out and raze the outside world to the ground from whence it sprang.
Thus begs the question, he thinks, of how to answer the letter. Because it suddenly occurs to him that, this time, there is no threat of separation. Harry has already been invited to Hogwarts; surely, if it's someone as impressive as he is, the invite still hangs?
It occurs to him, then, that they could go together this time, and all those things that the magicking adults insisted that they must know, they could learn together. He thinks of what it might be like to huddle in some other room, with a different window propped open, one from which cats and cold winds do not creep. To sleep in a different bed, with Harry across from him in a separate bed of his own, because if Hogwarts is as grand as Dumbledore had once said years ago, then surely it has enough beds for everyone to get their own, and they won't even smell faintly like mold and sweaty skin.
He wonders what it would be like to go to classes where they get taught magic instead of arithmetic and bomb drills and choir, and he will be starting from scratch in a place where they don't sometimes whisper about the poor brilliant orphanage boy.
He wonders what it might be like to have food enough to eat himself sick, and an entire library of books to read, and dozens and dozens of new friends.
The thoughts make him feel sick, and his mind roils with disgust at himself for even thinking such things.
He feels like another room would be running away, a different bed would be empty, and a place where no one knows that he's an orphan would lose him that delicate persona that he can play as the talented boy trying his hardest to overcome his situation.
It's a persona that he has been carefully playing to the fullest advantage for a very long time, and very effectively, and one that he does not like the idea of losing. And Tom already has all of the children at school whom he has to pander to and act like a nice boy around, and then all of the other kids at the orphanage whom he constantly has to remind why they don't mess with the two Freaks upstairs. The thought of being expected go keep up his acts around so many more people as well makes him feel tired just thinking about it.
Especially when instead he could just stay here with Harry, around whom he hasn't bothered with much of a mask in years.
It's not like delicate falsehoods and sweet faces were very effective with Harry, anyhow. Harry's very first comment to him had been that his anger was stunning in the very best of ways, in that exact wording. There had never been any point in pretending when Harry would treat him the same either way, unlike others. Caretakers got angry when he talked back to them, little girls cried when he was mean to them, and the vicar didn't expect him to ask questions or argue. Harry, however, would witness Tom do anything he like and he would not think twice about it.
There was something reverent in being accepted at your best and your worst. Whatever queens they kneeled to at night in their dreams, Tom had no doubt that Harry would care for him most of all.
Tom might even do the same for him.
Tom Riddle stands and drops the letter, thick envelope and all, out the window, then watches it flutter down to the street, and watches it be trampled beneath muddy wet boots and soaked in half-melted slush.
Harry coos appreciatively and puts arms over his shoulders, making Tom feel frustratingly small and uncomfortably safe. He wonders if maybe he's leaning too much back into Harry, depending on him too much, and if he'll become a weakness in the future. If the fact that he needs this anymore is something to be feared, an advantage over him that could be easily exploited.
Then he remembers burning heat and the flickering shadows of people with wings dancing on blood colored brick, and abandons that thought as the foolishness that it is. Harry’s sway over him may someday be weakness, but he tells himself that it's worth it for that sort of power, and that it's not for having someone to hit and scream at and cling to and cherish when he feels like there's nothing else particularly worth living for.
Unlike the last time, no second letter comes, and Dumbledore does not come to persuade them. This leads Tom to believe that maybe the other wizard does, in fact, remember them. Maybe he does not want them anymore. Maybe he's scared to have them now. Maybe now everyone knows to leave them to their own devices. That makes his pulse quicken with delight, and each day that no letter comes fills him with a sense of victory. They must have made quite the impression on the world of magic that they'll never be a part of.
He turns twelve, and rumours start to fly about something big happening on the continent. Harry lays shivering in their bed one day, eyes tinted cloudy and pupils big and black when his eyes aren't squeezed tight against things that Tom can't see. He mutters to himself, and Tom writes down what he says because he knows that if he deciphers the backwords letters there will be a message waiting for him.
It's nothing good, but he ignores it. Together, they will survive, like always.
Harry gets up soon enough, and the caretakers are told that he was sick. Everyone seems happy to know that the strange, inhuman looking teenager can even get sick. Tom has been occasionally tugged down by short colds and fevers and hunger pangs since he was young, but Harry has never lay sweating in bed and heaving. It makes him seem human to everyone else at the orphanage, who don't know the truth of what happened that day.
People start meeting their eyes at breakfast again, and the handful of other orphans still in school seem more inclined to say good morning to them as they walk the way there. Tom isn't sure how he feels about the fact that one perceived case of weakness can make people think that they're all on the same level. But he knows that he has to hurt a lot of people before all is right again, and no one speaks to them like they're anything but scourges to society anymore.
Then he hurts a few more, just because Harry laughs.
He turns thirteen, and just like Harry did years ago, begins to grow in earnest now. His limbs stretch suddenly and he always feels tired and grumpy, which for him is less of a normal child angry and more of a murderous, mindless lust for blood and pain.
He starts to slowly abandon his polite persona at school. None of the other children there matter either way anyhow. They might as well be dead to him. He only still bothers to charm the teachers.
Over that spring, Harry's soft, almost mockingly gentle kisses begin to grow more adamant and risky, and he can feel eyes like viridian forests on his pale, battle-scarred skin when he changes. He still hasn't figured out what to do in response, so instead he just accepts the brunt of Harry's affection and all it brings. They hold hands when nobody is looking, and Tom almost absently wonders if, had they gone to join the wizarding world, they would have been better accepted, or if it would have been just the same there.
He doesn't regret his choice, though. And he never will.
Another war has already been declared, just as Harry foresaw. There’s always something. The caution in the air makes Harry grow wilder, more jumpy. He hissed at shadows and pulls Tom so close at night they might as well be sharing skin.
In their dreams, Harry now steals him away with the cat eyed girl, whom always is dressed in greyscale and roses, and a pair of twins with slanted goat-like pupils and starlit skin who wear nothing at all. They sit away from the riot and dances, exchanging prophecies and rumours over bright blue wine, grapes, and charred fish.
Tom isn't entirely sure how these creatures know so much about his waking realm, nor does he want to know. He simply leaves his questions to burn up in the bonfire, and watches bluefire catch on Harry's face and cast it into light and shadow.
At this point, Harry's wild hair has reached past his shoulders, lending him almost feminine grace, and Tom wonders what it would be like to braid it. When they are finished sharing information for the night, they dance until moonset and sunrise, and wake up tangled in a knot of limbs, Tom's long and ungainly and carefully controlled, and Harry's slender and spidery and hinged in with a sort of grace that would belong to any funamentally wild creature forced into human skin. Sharp nails dig into his hips, Harry trills anxiously, and he gets up slowly and reluctantly.
A few months later, the bombing starts. They sit laughing in their bed with ears peeled for the sounds of sirens and screaming, and hide with everybody else in shelters dug out of the ground, and note with a tiny bit of bitterness that there are less snakes, and that some of the cats don't come back. The little orange tabby still appears though, and Tom has named her Rosse Anniot, after the girl in greyscale that they talk with in their sleep. Annie for short. She has become a favourite amongst the felines that appear, and he starts to contemplate not letting her back out onto the ruined streets every time she comes. He isn't sure whether it would be a relief or an imprisonment, so he does not yet, but he mentally wills her to stay clear of danger, and adds magic so that he knows she'll obey. She's still coming by the time he has turned fourteen.
His month of December is a haze of frozen glory and destruction, as bad news hits the streets fresh every day and Harry starts to tug insistently at his clothes, and the hot heat of their bodies pressed together beneath their sheets keeps them warm and sated. They creep through shadows in the evenings and scare little children, and haunt alleyways waiting for someone weak looking enough to come along so that Harry can slip something from their pockets. Preferably food. Hopefully nothing iron.
They are always hungry, in one way or another.
Sixteen year old Harry is now beginning to receive looks on the streets, from men and women alike, their eyes noting his strange complexion and beautiful face, and Tom easily convinces Harry to go out in public even less. He becomes like a wraith, melting from Tom the moment they reach the schoolyard and only reappearing for him.
It is almost frightening how easily he accepts his social dependence upon a murder-eyed boy who cannot even bring himself to care when human beings are being crushed beneath buildings. Harry hasn’t cared about Tom’s twisted sense of morals since the beginning, and this is good, because their absence is becoming even more stark.
They spend hours hiding from people in parks that once were green and lush, but now smell of smoke and rubble and dirty snow, and whose fountains no longer sing, because they have long since been broken.
When spring dawns, rising budded heads from grey slush and warming the sky ever so slightly, giving a deceptive peace that almost convinces everyone that all is well, the tabby Rosse Anniot no longer comes back. They never find her, and a tortoiseshell takes her place, but Tom never likes it quite as much. Neither of them mention any of what if happening to their world except to make light of it and laugh.
Sometimes when Harry wakes him up after a dream free night, his cheeks feel wet, and stiff from it. He's always been good at acting calm, and now he keeps the act up maliciously, so hard that he begins to fool even himself.
Harry, as some point, has started collecting things in their room. There's a couple more wands in addition to that first pale one they won, and he doesn't know what happened to their owners, but it's not hard to figure out going by the new burns on Harry's fingers and the scent of blood in his mostly unwashed hair.
There's a collection of books in foreign languages with torn pages and pixie dust betwixt the pages, paper crackling with age and filled with drawings of ancient Greek gods in all their flowery glory and quaint Little Folk, equally as terrible and just as majestic.
There's jewelry: golden anklets and earrings, ruby droplets, cracked biotite collars, and two matching spider-silk coats the colours of sunrise and starlight and bone.
There are dead and dried roses, daisies, violets, sage, viscaria, dutchman's trousers, foxglove, dandelion, rosemary, ragwort, sweet grass and clover.
A collection of knucklebones from some unknown creature that Tom isn't particularly interested in knowing about.
An array of pin pierced insects and arachnids in varying degrees of wholeness, some with missing legs or torn wings, others lightly crumpled, and still others whole and pristine, beetle wings shining and moth wings soft to the touch.
Broken shards of glass, some smooth and others sharp, and clever little stones filling little pouches sewn from materials he doesn't always recognise, with beaded ties and initials embroidered on the sides.
He's started collecting things on Tom too: his papers from Missus Cole's office, and a strange locket that Tom doesn't remember seeing, but when Harry drapes it over his neck one night before bed, it feels inexplicably right against the thin skin of his bruised and bitten collarbone.
That's the night he finally kisses Harry back.
He's tired from a day of blaring sirens and being scared, and that night he wraps his legs around Harry and pulls him down, and wonders if what he's doing is for any other reason but for his own pleasure and the feeling of suffocation disappearing when Harry's tongue is on his. He can't think of a single other, and swallows a million blissful moans instead, treasuring the feeling of Harry's sinful smile against his hip.
The next morning, they're in Faerieland, and they live monstrously ever after.