Chapter Text
“Sleep with me, Harry.”
Harry stared incredulously at his sometimes friend, sometimes enemy, always rival and occasionally boyfriend Tom Riddle. “Huh?”
Tom had the nerve to look irritated with his ineloquence, rolling his eyes and turning round to face him. He always looked fetching in green, Harry thought, before scolding himself. If Tom caught wind of his thoughts, as he so often did, he’d never let him hear the end of it.
“You heard me,” he said, as if talking to a child. “I want you to sleep with me.”
Very, very fetching in green. Harry swallowed, flushed, and promptly scowled at the other. “Why?” He asked suspiciously. “Who have you killed?”
“Why, he asks, as if we’re not boyfriends,” Tom groused to the sky, looking decidedly long suffering. “Because you’re incredibly attractive and so am I, Harry, and looking at you any longer without acting on my desires might just make me go and kill someone.”
“Good to know you’re as patient as ever.”
“Golden boy, you don’t even know.”
The sky above them was a dark, swirling storm of colours. Blues and greens and golds and silvers and- Where were they? Harry’s half playful frown turned confused, suspicious. “Tom?” He asked, slowly. “This isn’t Hogwarts.”
There was a silence, and when Harry turned back to his boyfriend, he looked increasingly disinterested, which only served to make Harry more certain something was amiss. “It’s another part of the Forbidden Forest from the clearing I showed you last week,” he said, after a beat. “Don’t look so paranoid, hero. Come here and let me see that pretty face of yours.”
The Forbidden Forest. Well, it at least made sense. Harry tried not to spend too much time in there, a healthy dose of self preservation he usually lacked, but Tom, being odd and out of his mind, adored it. Probably the minute Gryffindor in him, Harry often thought sourly, whenever Tom dragged him out to explore. Either that, or his delusions of immortality.
A small burning ball of light crashed into his arm and made him yelp. Picking it up, Harry examined it with a wince - it felt like looking into the sun - and found, to his surprise, it was a fairy, with little wings and everything. It looked like it was dying; its limbs bent at awkward angles, its blonde hair matted with blood. He felt sick. A fairy…...
Well, a fairy, if fairies had jagged teeth and black eyes and bled oozing tree sap. His eyes darted to Tom, who was looking increasingly more disinterested with each passing second. Realising he was going to get no answers from him, instead Harry’s gaze scanned the area they sat in. A clearing next to a ring of mushrooms, looking for all the world like it could very well be the Forbidden Forest. A group of fairies, much the same as the dying one in his hands, But the forest didn’t have fairies in it. Hagrid had told him in his first year. Harry trusted Hagrid with his life, and certainly more than Tom now.
“This is not the Forbidden Forest.”
Tom smiled at him, and only then was it that he noticed how sharp the other boy was - his teeth, his eyes, his face, his body. Tom was sharp usually, but never so….. Inhuman. “No,” he said eventually, “it’s not. What gave it away?”
Harry tensed, and moved back. Something was awfully wrong here. If not the Forbidden Forest, then where had Tom brought him?
“The fairies,” he returned evenly, not letting any of his panic or distrust show in his voice. “Hagrid told me all the creatures that live in this forest when I was in first year in my own timeline. Fairies wasn’t one of them.”
Tom sighed, looking for all the world like a child who had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Ah, the monster keeper,” he murmured, “he’s always been a thorn in my side. I should have known.”
“Tom,” Harry said, mouth dry. “Where are we?”
Because this place was wrong. He could feel it now. The trees pressed in on them, the sky was too stormy, and Tom - if this was Tom - was far different than he remembered. Harry’s Tom didn’t have black eyes. He didn’t smile with fanged teeth. And he certainly didn’t own a diadem, not in this timeline. Harry had made sure of it. So why was there one sitting nestled in his hair and making him look like a prince?
“Where indeed?” Tom mused. His hungry black eyes had fixed on Harry. He looked almost amused. This was probably a game to him, Harry realised, with a growing sense of dread. “Are you familiar with Muggle fairy tales, Harry?”
Bastard. Harry thought desperately, letting his eyes slip shut in thought. Tom would not attack him unarmed. His ego was too big for that. Muggle fairy tales, Muggle fairy tales….. What fairy tale took place in a forest with fairies and a fairy prince who looked like he ate humans for dessert? “Why are you doing this?” He asked, to buy himself some time to think.
He could feel Tom’s smile. “Entertainment,” the boy answered after a beat. The word felt rehearsed, and was not the answer Harry wanted, nor was it the truth. That much was evident.
There was a clock ticking somewhere in the distance. Harry tried his best to block it out, grimacing at the monotony of it.
“Time’s running out, Harry,” Tom drawled, “so will you sleep with me, or will you figure this out?”
Merlin. No wonder Harry wanted to punch him sometimes. Mind racing through the numerous books he’d managed to steal from Dudley’s room as a child to devour at night in his cupboard, he landed on one, and paused.
“The boy who never grew up,” he said, aloud, and when Tom didn’t reply, he opened his eyes to see the other appraising him with a cold gleam in his eyes, “very fitting. How long did it take you to think of that one?”
Tom smiled; a mirthless thing. “Well done, little Gryffindor. Seems there’s brains behind the beauty after all.”
With pale hands, he plucked the diadem from his hair, studying it in some scrutiny for a moment. Harry half wanted to hold his breath, drink in the sight in front of him forever. Because despite all his faults - and there were many - Tom was a creature of exquisite beauty. He always had been.
“Did you know,” Tom said conversationally, his eyes still possessively fixated on the diadem between them both, “that the original Peter Pan killed his Lost Boys?”
Harry swallowed thickly.
“So what are you, Harry?” The other continued, dark eyes finally lifting to meet Harry’s own. “A Lost Boy, or Wendy?”
Harry didn’t dare speak for a moment. His throat was too tight. When he did speak, it was tight and painful.
“I fought against you once,” he told Tom quietly. “I dare say that makes me Hook.”
Tom digested this information with grace, silent for a long time. When Harry thought maybe he’d angered the other, Tom blinked, and smiled widely. There was something unsettling about the charm of it all. The fairies had stopped fluttering about, he noticed dimly, and instead circled them with predatory airs.
“I dare say it does.” Tom agreed, almost pleasantly. “And every pirate needs his stolen treasure. But is it truly stolen if it was willingly parted with?”
And before Harry could speak, the diadem was in his hands, a lot heavier than he expected. The first real thing in this fantasy Neverland, he realised. Clutching it tightly, he glanced back up at Tom, wordless.
“You’re not Tom,” he stated, and when he said it out loud, only then did he realise how true it was. “You’re not real at all, and you’re not Tom. Are you?”
“Run off, pirate,” the Thing in front of him replied, turning away. Already, there was a glint of red in his eyes that made Harry clamber to his feet, “before the crocodile comes. I don’t want you to lose this little game so easily.”
Game…?
The ticking in the distance had gotten closer. Harry recalled, with some horror, that the crocodile in Peter Pan had swallowed a clock to make it tick. “Tom,” he murmured, stepping back once, then twice, “what are you playing?”
Tom didn’t answer, somehow already lost in the trees and fairies. The scene around him was crumbling, falling apart, but when he turned around, there was a glimmer of light in the distance. Harry gazed between it and Thing-Tom’s departure for a long desperate second, diadem tight in his grasp, before he did what he did best.
He ran toward the light.