Chapter Text
Tom had been Harry’s constant from the very beginning. Always there, steady and consistent as the sunrise. Some days, he felt sure Tom would be there long after the sun burned out too.
Tom had taught him his name, Harry, Harry, not Boy , had taught him he was a person, shown him he was loved when their relatives failed to do it. Tom held him as he slept, curled close to one another on that little mattress in the cupboard beneath the stairs. He cared for Harry, fed him and looked after him. Protected him as best he could.
Harry had seen how their relatives treated them differently. He hadn’t realized what it meant, hadn’t realized how glaring it was, but he’d noticed all the same. Harry was ignored, for the most part. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon acted like they’d like to forget he even existed in the first place. Tom didn’t have that luxury. No matter how small he made himself, no matter how much he tried to hide, there was something so large about Tom, so other. Too smart for his own good, too knowing. It was unnerving to anyone but Harry, made them nervous. Their Aunt and Uncle had a visceral reaction to Tom’s strangeness. A fear and a loathing that his brother didn’t deserve.
Harry was under no illusions that Tom was some sort of saint. He knew his brother could be petty and cruel. He knew Tom often acted out to illicit a reaction (though he could never figure out why why why?!) but it was all reactionary. Tom only returned what was already given, only reacted when prompted. He did not lash out first, but he would bite back and bite back hard .
Like a fox in a snare, snarling and biting, willing to chew through the wire until it cut through teeth and bone and meat. Tom reminded him of a wild animal sometimes. Never free, he’d been trapped a long time ago, but feral at heart no matter how long the Dursleys kept him caged. There was a part of Harry, one he didn’t like thinking about or dwelling on, that knew one day his brother would snap. Those fox jaws would close around their family’s throat and bite down until there was nothing but blood and the whistle of a last breath through a torn windpipe.
Tom was not the kind of person who could tolerate captivity long, and he was not a creature inclined to forgiveness. Harry didn’t acknowledge it to himself consciously, but deep in his mind he knew there would be a day when they would lose the last of their family who wasn’t really family, and that blood would be on his brother’s hands.
Tom was capable of horrors, just as he was of wonders.
It was Tom who had shown Harry magic long before they had a word for it. Amazing things only they could do. Fantastic and strange and otherworldly. Harry had thought himself inhuman for a long time. He and Tom, they were different. Something removed from what the Dursleys were. Long before Hogwarts and wands and the taste of spellcraft on his lips, Harry had read of the fair folk. Creatures old and powerful, with magic in their blood. He thought maybe that was what he and Tom were, a pair of fae children stolen away and given to the Dursleys. Maybe for protection, maybe for punishment. Most times Harry thought it was the latter.
He wondered what it was they could have done to deserve being locked away. Treated less like children and more like unwanted pets.
Tom had nightmares of a city on fire, of stone walls too small and too many children to feed. He had memories he shouldn’t of a life he couldn’t have lived, and Harry wondered.
Why did Tom remember but Harry didn’t? Why was he always missing from his brother’s memories? They were together from the very beginning of this life, surely they were together in the last as well. Looking at Tom, Harry sometimes thought his heart must be hidden somewhere in his brother’s chest. There was a tie between them, a link that couldn’t be broken by time or space or death. If Tom had a life before this one, then Harry must have as well. One could not exist without the other, he knew that as instinctively as he knew to breathe.
(Then why couldn’t Harry remember too?)