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He feels Tom’s deep, sleep-heavy breaths rattle through his body where it’s curled into the other man’s chest. A weighted arm encircles his waist, gripping tightly lest Harry wiggle free in the night.
Possessiveness and fear aren’t all that different in a man like Tom Riddle.
Harry’s bones ache with it sometimes.
He sits in the oaken armchair on the porch of their seaside cottage, crocheted throw spread out over his lap and delicate porcelain teacup cradled in one hand. A rather musty book is spread out atop the blanket, and a note-filled parchment curls over the edges as Harry pushes it further up with each addition.
It’s been three years of them living together out here in the Pembrokeshire wilderness, and Tom still looks down from his study window every hour to check that Harry remains seated where he left him. To confirm that Harry is still here.
Every morning, Harry watches the waves break and the sea foam spray, and he wonders if the French were on to something. Tom’s eyes dance with amusement every time he sees Harry’s battered copy of No Exit and Three Other Plays in a new spot around the cottage.
“For a muggle, Sartre cuts to the root of the issue quite well,” Tom says once after Harry marks his place with a piece of cut cloth. At the time, Harry is surprised the man even knew of his favorite playwright. He mentions his astonishment that Tom had kept up with muggle literature after graduation.
“I have an inclination towards the French,” Tom says in response, lips curling into a sly smile.
Harry freezes. He lets the words linger in the air, and his lack of confusion makes the room grow heavy with equal parts tension and anticipation. Tom holds himself perfectly still, but Harry sees it in the clench of his hands, the tensing of his magic: that unique mix of possessiveness and fear that only Tom exudes.
Harry wants to say I know, or you really want to admit that, Tom? but he can’t make the words cross his lips. Either way, with those words, things will change, and they dwell in a perfect limbo as they are.
His silence changes everything regardless.
Sartre wrote that hell is other people, and Harry understands. When he lets himself think of his childhood—the stale, dusty air of the cupboard and the purpling bruises that littered his unnaturally pale skin—Harry sees Sartre’s point. When he remembers Ron’s tirades against all Slytherin’s, ‘just on principle’—you could be great, you know—or the way his dormmate decided it was fine to scoff at Tom’s scuffed shoes despite Harry's own threadbare trainers all because of a difference in tie color—you don’t know what it’s like to fight for every meal, to keep warm with thoughts of freedom rather than the knowledge of a parent’s love— or Abraxas’ sneering face mocking his worn robes, tattered undershirts and dead parents—you could burn in front of me and I’d sip on water as I watched—Harry thinks Sartre right.
But along with all the other people, Harry has Tom, stately, lovely Tom who understands poverty and survival just as well as Harry. He has Tom’s palm warming his own when they clasp hands on the train, recognizing something kindred and searching between shuttered emerald and hardened sapphire. (Nothing changes when sapphire becomes garnet. Harry recognizes Tom’s soul in all his forms. Even forms that take on other names.)
He has Tom’s example proving the necessity of most methods a Slytherin uses to survive, to escape, to succeed. He has Tom standing in the shadows as a silent, menacing deterrent from further cruelty and pureblood curse repertoires.
Harry has Tom years before a godfather emerges from the woodwork of false accusations and prison sentences to offer what Tom has already been providing; Tom is home, more so than Privet Drive ever could have been, more so than Grimmauld ever would be, more so than Hogwarts may have been if they had met just 24 hours later.
“Why?” Sirius asks, voice rasping quietly.
His screams cling to the walls of the house he hates, the house that is not Harry’s home even after six years of living there, but Sirius is all screamed out and Harry’s bag is packed and shrunk in his pocket.
It isn’t that he wants to leave, but he can’t stay. Even if he should, even if he knows what leaving really means, Harry has to go home.
Sirius’s grey eyes watch Harry’s curls flutter in the wind before his gaze turns to the traveling cloak he gifted Harry last Yule. Harry remembers a photo in his album in which his father wore a similar cloak on a date with his mother. Sirius’s eyes finally return to catch Harry’s, and they flicker with resignation so deep it makes Harry’s throat burn. Shame saturates the air. It’s such a familiar, shared feeling for the pair of them.
Harry both does and doesn’t have an answer.
It’s a million little things. It’s the callouses on Tom’s hands, nothing that you’d see on most eleven-year-olds. It’s the taut way Tom carries himself around authority figures and kids who are older or bigger than he is. It’s the way Tom’s eyes flicker to every corner of a room, lingering on the entries and exits. It’s the slight shake in Tom’s hands that Harry sees from across the Great Hall—only because he’s watching Tom to see what an appropriate reaction to all of this is supposed to be—when Tom first reaches out to the platters upon platters of food laid out before them.
Harry recognizes it all. Kindred, something in his blood, in his very core, sings
So Harry has an answer, but it’s nothing Sirius will be able to accept. His godfather loves him more for the illusion of what Harry could be rather than the reality of what he is, what his childhood made him.
“I’ll visit, Sirius.” His promise is soft, but sincere. Grimmauld is not home, but Sirius offered Harry a place to call his own within hours of meeting him. For all his flaws, for all their flaws, Harry loves Sirius.
“I have to go, but I’ll come back.”
He registers the sound of his godfather’s gasping inhales, the pitiful mewling noises that crawl from the man’s throat as Harry fixes the locale of the cottage Tom bought for them in his mind. Something inside him cracks as he apparates away, leaving the closest thing he has to a father falling apart in the street, but Harry is used to broken things.
Maybe hell is other people, but Harry can disregard most other people.
Or maybe hell is when Harry has to consider people other than him and Tom, alone inside the pulsing wards of their home.
Hell is when he can’t shut out the thoughts of Tom’s actions after he leaves their bed.
Hell isn’t his own conscience, because unless Harry thinks about the ash that’s been scattered, the bones that have been buried in the name of Tom’s cause, he doesn’t care. When it’s just the two of them in front of the fire listening to the wind howl and batter their fortified walls, Harry isn’t thinking about other people.
He isn’t thinking about his godfather’s final agonized wail when Harry called his bluff on the summer solstice and accepted the ultimatum to, “come home now or never again, Harry James.”
He isn’t thinking about Hermione’s distressed expression and crackling hair the last time he took tea at her flat.
He isn’t thinking about the way Remus’s steady, quiet anger burrowed under Harry’s skin and scarred something deep within him when the man told him, “Your parents didn’t stand against Grindelwald and fall to his fanatic, dictatorial wand for you to disregard everything they stood for in their resistance. Your willful ignorance dishonors their memory.”
Harry sits in his armchair, Tom watching from above, and sips the scalding brew in his teacup. The unpleasant, tingling numbness singes his tongue and scalds the delicate skin of his throat, and he knows he deserves the condemnation. He breaks too many hearts, including his own, with his willful indifference. Not ignorance. Never, to his shame, ignorance. Harry knows. He has always known.
Hell is other people reminding him of his selfishness.
The slow disintegration of Tom’s subtlety gets worse, after that silent night in the cottage.
Tom takes his tacit acceptance as the go-ahead to cross other lines. Disappearances in the dark become confrontations in broad daylight. Subtle maneuvering in Wizengamot sessions becomes assassination attempts. Becomes successes.
It’s a turning point, and Harry remains adrift in a sea of his own quivering morality.
He is stuck in the endless cycle of pondering, ‘what do I owe other people,’ and, ‘what do I owe myself.’ A piece of him wonders if anyone else has two such different answers to those questions or if anyone willing to ask such things even cares about the answer to the first.
The tension remains. It’s now a permanent resident in their home.
An inclination towards bloodshed, more like, is what he should have said. Harry wonders if he could have pulled off a tone full of stony condemnation, wonders if it would have mattered.
The question of culpability is one he isn’t willing to ask, even as it circles around his mind, circles around his neck late at night, tightening further with each death.
It’s about weight.
The comforting pressure of Tom’s broad form collapsed over top of him.
The crush of self-condemnation when the political campaign morphs into a war after Harry’s heavy, deafening silence.
The damning weight of the platinum band encircling his finger, reminding him he picked a side regardless of whether or not he acknowledges that’s what saying yes really meant.
The crushing heaviness that settles into the hollow of his chest when Sirius’ pleading letters stop coming. Harry has never felt more cowardly than when he tells himself it’s because Sirius has given up on him coming home.
Again, it’s never been about ignorance.
Harry tends to let the people he most wants to love him do as they please, even when he loathes what they choose to do. Especially then.
His blood still sings, kindred, kindred, when Tom’s magic encircles him in the early mornings or when Harry’s own magic adjusts the wards to a better protective scheme and intermingles with the already laid castings.
He still hears that same song the night Tom comes home, garnet eyes shining with victory and draping black robes saturated with crimson. Kindred. Beloved. Kindred.
Tom cleans the coagulated blood out from under his fingernails in their en-suite sink and asks what they’re having for dinner tonight.
Harry wonders what kind of wizard, what kind of man this makes him, as he opens a bottle of merlot to breathe before plating up the roast.
He doesn’t care to know the answer.
Maybe it is about ignorance, but even willful ignorance can still be bliss.