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Mirrors aren’t one of Harry’s favorite pieces of furniture.
It still catches him off guard, at times, that favored pieces of furniture are things he can have these days. Preferences have never stopped feeling like an item he couldn’t afford. But he has a house now, one of his own that is firmly his own. An interior that he can decorate as he wishes, a pantry he can stock as full to bursting as his anxiety would like.
So mirrors are things he is able to have opinions on now. Harry’s opinions on them had always been decidedly negative. Be they magical mirrors that scolded him for his ever-tired eyes and unruly hair (now perpetually tied back in a low ponytail a la Bill Weasley, who to this day remains Harry’s definition of cool) or mundane ones that kept their comments to themselves, all mirrors still showed his scar in all its grotesque glory.
If he’d thought the literal eyesore that was his scar had been bad during his childhood, multiple encounters with the man who had given it to him in the first place have made the once-healed wound reopen and grow, extending with each interaction.
What, in his pre-Hogwarts childhood, used to have been a thin, light red slash from the middle of his forehead, down bisecting his eyebrow and cutting through the skin of his eyelid all the way to the apple of his cheek was now a searing crimson wound that jutted down to the furthest corner of his mouth and stretched horizontally, with offshoots of scar tissue splintering off from the main mark. Almost the entire left side of his face has been taken over by the scar.
Harry hates it. Now, more than ever, all you can see of him is his scar. But at least the symbolism of it all rings true.
His scar had been the first thing anyone in the wizarding world had seen of him, always. Even when it had lain dormant and his skin had been, relatively, unblemished, all eyes had tracked the harsh lines.
The entire wizarding world had been carving their expectations into Harry’s flesh long before Quirrell burned beneath his palms and left him to wake in the hospital with a fresh, inflamed scar.
They all owned him long before I can touch you now and offshoots that reached the skin of his left ear.
Harry once laughed at the thought that anyone had ever seen just Harry. As if just Harry had ever even existed. Well, even if he had, he never would again. Not with all these mirrors around to remind him of that impossibility. No, he has always been Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived. He has learned how to smile softly, sharp teeth and bitterness suitably hidden behind his lips.
“I have always been public property, Tom.” It’s what he wishes he’d said, that night in the graveyard when the weight of all those expectations truly settled upon his tied-up shoulders, but the best rejoinders always spring to mind long after the perfect moment has passed.
Looking at the sprawling spread of his scar as he looks over himself in the morning, Harry tries.
Pull the loathing forwards, let it spew and saturate until it’s all I know.
“Voldemort ruined my life,” he tells the mirror. It’s a mundane one, doesn’t speak back to him, just lets the words press up against the glass and slide off harmlessly.
“He killed the only family who has ever loved me,” Harry continues, settling into his morning mantra.
“He marred me, basically branded me.” For fuck’s sake, if this hideous scar isn’t a mark of ownership, Harry doesn’t know what would be. It’s more distinctive than the Dark Mark. Yup, just like that, the last vestiges of warmth from his dreams fade and the fiery anger burns through as a replacement.
“He spread a blanket of terror across magical Britain so heavy that the entire country decided a toddler was its savior for accidentally kicking it off in the night.”
It’s all true. It never stops being true, yet Harry still needs to remind himself of it each day, like rewriting muscle memory. Hating Voldemort is a habit, one that Harry now needs to practice.
Push the longing down, deep as it can go until it shrivels, malnourished and neglected.
Harry knows enough about such things, after all.
Harry is a Gryffindor.
Even when it feels like a lie, his colors are red and gold and his badge must always be of courage. Cunning is only useful when he can disguise it as accidental, or so he’s learned. It’s for this reason (and this reason only), this habit beaten into him by his surroundings and countless unsubtleties and worn like armor when it was clear they’d give him no other protection, that Harry didn’t try to avoid sleeping after the change first happened.
It’s certainly not the longing that makes him willing to succumb to these dreams. No, that’s buried, shivering in the cold. He stifles it every morning, after the tendrils of sleep and desire recede back in wait for the next night. No, Harry is already so good at denying himself the things he longs for.
“Sharing dreams is not romantic,” Harry would like to say to someone.
He doesn’t though.
If Harry mused on such to Tom, well the man might try to prove him wrong or something equally as irritating.
If he shared that opinion with his friends or anyone in the Order, they’d be up in arms before the full thought even left his lips. They think the visions have stopped, and they’re right. But they have no idea what replaced the nightmarish sights he used to glimpse through Voldemort’s eyes.
Sharing dreams isn’t romantic, but it is intimate. Incredibly so.
Whatever transformation Tom had undergone to resume a mostly human form (and mostly sane mind) had returned to him the ability to sleep. It had also made Harry’s sixth and seventh years calmer and had given him the ability to actually study, focusing on school to avoid his grief since there hadn’t really been a plot to foil, but that's another story. One that Harry doesn’t have time to think about as he washes his face and gets ready for the day.
Everything had changed after Tom purged the snake-like characteristics from his body. The least important change for the Order, and the biggest for Harry, was that Tom could sleep now in his new body. And, differently than when Harry was the only side of their shared link that slumbered, sleeping simultaneously made their minds too vulnerable, especially to each other.
For all that Tom is a master of mind magic and for all that Harry had suffered to learn not just passable but exceptional Occlumency after Sirius’s death, sleep strips them both mentally bare. It also unwittingly forces them together. It is like neither of them can resist another soul when it sits so close , within reach in a way no one else is. Especially not a soul so similar to their own. Is this what it is to be soulmates?
Harry never mentions his theory as to why their minds pull them together every night, but it feels sound: Theirs are two lonely souls who can't deny their (literally) unconscious desire for understanding, for companionship, for someone else who knows what it is to be abandoned.
The dreams they share are, blurry, for lack of a better word. They lack the bright colors and pressing warmth that romantic notions would attribute to them. Harry feels–senses more than sees–his surroundings, his interactions with Tom while they dream.
Even still, he and Tom have their routines, so it seems.
They lay there, hazy and almost ephemeral, curled together and calm.
Dreaming Harry seemingly has a fascination with Tom’s hands. Harry often wakes with the soft notes of a concerto tinkling in his ears, and his own fingertips tingle with the faux-remembrance of tracing the lines of Tom’s palms, stroking the elegant lines of his pianist fingers, tapping the ridges of his knuckles and squeezing the taper of his wrists.
Dreaming Tom seemingly has a fascination with Harry’s scar. Harry knows they’ve been dreamsharing when he wakes up in the morning to see slightly healed scar tissue in the mirror’s reflection, when he feels a lingering warmth pulsating exactly beneath the markings that mar his face.
His morning mantra to the mirror works less and less each day as the redness fades and the edges of his scar stop expanding. Sometimes, on the nights he gets the fullest rest and allows himself to sleep in late into the morning, the scars on Harry’s arms would carry the same feeling and look diminished as well.
All of these jagged blemishes on his skin are contradictions, the essence of Voldemort versus Tom. His greatest moments of danger and hurt, branded into his body as if he couldn’t remember them on his own, now healed and soothed by the touch of the same man who inflicted the wounds. Harry imagines Tom stroking along the marks, something like regret hovering underneath the pads of his fingers.
These are just guesses though. Harry can’t recall much of the dreams. They aren’t grounded enough for him to do so. They touch. That’s about all he feels sure of. Even still, something inside him feels certain he is right when he imagines them pressed against each other, fingers searching and bodies lax.
The dreams are intangible things. He only knows they have happened because of the way he feels when he wakes and because of the furious conversations they share the few times his and Tom’s minds connect before they both sink into a deep sleep.
When the dreams are lucid enough for either of them to speak, they always argue, be it about the war or this incomprehensible mind link or–one time when Harry feels particularly brave–how maybe the dreams aren’t as awful as they keep making them out to be. Even then, their conversations lack the relaxation and comfort that is the cornerstone of their true dreamsharing. Having enough cognizance to converse means having enough awareness to put their emotional walls back up. To be fair, neither of them have gone without them in a decade (or more, Tom is fucking ancient, after all).
Harry hates the loss of control that accompanied the hazy nights wrapped in Tom’s embrace, but it is just so nice . He never thought he’d go to bed hoping it is a night where he will forget to be wary of the man who has spent the past two decades trying to kill him. That just isn’t who Harry is.
Except, maybe that’s who he is becoming.
As a boy, all he wanted was to be loved.
When he knew he wouldn’t find that at Privet Drive, all he wanted was to get away. When he got away, he realized the wizarding world and its people would only ever love him once he had defeated Voldemort for good.
Harry’s ambitions have always been different enough to a normal man’s so as to masquerade as humility or heroics. Survival is like that.
But he is 22 now, inarguably a man grown, and disillusioned.
Wanting Tom’s admiring touch, wanting the calm to spread between them and overwhelm everything else, wanting reality to resemble his dreams–even as he gets closer to striking his prophesied enemy down every day, diary, ring, locket, cup, diadem, Nagini–feels like a betrayal.
The hesitance he’s begun to feel as the inevitable end creeps closer is another. This one is a betrayal of his friends, his mentors, his parents, everything he’d been working towards for the past eleven years.
But before he ever knew anything about where his scar came from, his only real goal was finding someone who would love him in spite of it. Someone who would follow the jagged lines with their fingers. Someone who would press their lips to his left eyelid–almost destroyed by the wide, harsh cuts from the wand motion that took his parents–or to the tip of it where it ended on his cheek or on the center of his forehead, as if he’d never been scarred at all. Someone who Harry could believe saw the little, lonely boy behind the scar tissue, and thought he was enough. No meals to cook or wizards to kill to prove he belonged.
When he raises the war wards he's found in a hand-written journal in the Black library and puts the house under the fidelius, locking the secret away in Dobby’s heart where the creature would never let it free, Harry grins, a rictus of crazed triumph. He can’t wipe the smile from his face. Even as he walks in front of the mirror (he’s decided disliking a piece of furniture is beneath him) and sees the way his scar stretches and contorts at the corner of his mouth, the feeling of victory doesn't abate.
He settles on top of the light grey comforter he’s chosen for his four poster and looks around at the first bedroom that was ever intended to be his from the start.
Huh, so this is what peace feels like.
He’s done enough for the war effort. If they can’t cross the finish line without him, well, maybe they don’t deserve to win. Harry pauses in putting on his sleep pants, the thought settling into the long-hollowed-out part in his chest. He isn’t sure Tom deserves to win either, but yeah, if they can’t win without one malnourished, nearsighted, orphaned wizard, the Order has no place winning, no right to emerge the victor.
Good luck, he thinks as he finishes brushing his teeth. Harry isn’t quite sure who he means to send the well wishes to.
Harry isn’t actually sure if he cares one way or the other anymore. All he really knows is that he is ready for bed and whatever comes after he falls asleep.