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Until now, there had been nothing. An endless, unyielding, and all-consuming nothing, but now Tom is no longer alone.
He knows someone is touching him. Tom can't feel it, not really, but he knows. Even if it's only a ghost of a feeling, it's something, and that's more than he has the rest of the time.
It's the girl that carries Tom most of the time. She wears him around her slender neck and tucks him down the front of her cardigan.
After a week, he can feel her heartbeat; it's a wild, electric feeling like he'd been run through with lightning.
He affects her the least, and it's not entirely by choice, but he likes the feel of her skin and the beat of her heart, and later, once he's stronger and can hear her mind, he likes that, too.
She's sharp and analytical, but she's weak. Sentimental. Sometimes so much so that it sets Tom's teeth on edge. It makes him want to lash out and bite.
When Tom becomes too much for her, she gives him to the boy.
Tom doesn't like the boy. But the boy is easy. He's malleable, and given enough time, Tom could make him his. But Tom doesn't want him. He's nothing, not interesting, or clever.
He bores Tom.
And then there's the third.
Another boy. But he's closed like a locked door, always just out of Tom's reach. It's infuriating, tantalizing, captivating.
Tom craves an understanding of this boy, who is nothing and everything and who feels almost familiar.
Tom wants to crack him open, to watch all his secrets pour out, laying them bare until there's nothing left to learn and that this deep, burning curiosity carving a hole in the center of Tom’s chest will be satisfied.
Only Tom can't get close.
They won't let him.
But Tom will find a way. He always does, and then three became two.
Now, the girl still wears him around her neck. But her mind is dull, and she drowns him in waves of her never-ending sorrow, a constant deluge of her worries until Tom can't bear to hear about the boy who's gone any longer.
It's all so frightfully dull, and he longs for the silence, for the nothingness that had consumed him for so long.
Anything but this constant unending noise.
His only reprieve is that she can't take him all the time. She tries, oh she tries, but Tom is stronger now. Every day, he soaks in her warmth and her feelings, and he grows.
She can feel him, pressing against her mind, always present, and she can only bear it for so long.
"Hermione, you can't take it all the time- it'll drive you mad."
"I know that; it's just, well, I worry about you."
"I know, but I'm not fragile, and I won't break, I swear. You don't have to protect me."
"I do, Harry; we have to protect each other."
"Then let me protect you too."
In the end, she gave Tom to the boy. The boy's name is Harry, and there's something about him and his iron will that's alluring.
He's a puzzle, and Tom wants to make him come undone.
It doesn't happen quickly or all at once, but Tom didn't expect it to. Everyone has a weakness, and once Tom finds it, it doesn't matter how strong Harry is when he's awake, not when he falls apart in his sleep.
Harry knows him. He's created a shade of Tom that he hides away in his dreams.
It's delicious, really. Nothing has caught Tom's curiosity like this since before, when he wasn't this. When he had flesh and bone and blood. When he could feel fear and bleed, and wasn't what he is now.
Tom became more, and to be more, to be better, to be great; he paid a price, one that sometimes, in the never-ending nothing, felt as though it may have been too high.
But not anymore. Not when Tom has Harry and the girl, and he can feel again.
Maybe feel wasn't the right word.
But there aren't words for what Tom is, not really.
He is smoke, and ash, and nothing and everything all at once.
He is the shadow on the floor and the tingle on the back of your neck; he lurks in the dark always and never. He is a great and terrible thing, and he is watching.
It's Harry he's watching. Always Harry.
Harry who touches an imagined Tom so sweetly, while Tom watches, ever present in the shadows at the edge of Harry's consciousness.
It's addicting at first watching as they speak to each other, but it always goes the same; in the end, only the imagined Tom remains, teeth bared and bloody, with Harry crumpled at his feet.
Dead. Throat ripped out by jagged teeth that shouldn't be so large or so sharp.
It’s a scene that repeats, over and over; the shade of Tom leans in close, so close. Close enough to touch and Harry knows. Tom can see he tries not to flinch; he can't help it- not when he knows what's coming.
He's a stupid boy, allowing himself to be ruined by nothing but a shade of a memory, and if Tom had anything else to do, he'd look away.
What good is a stupid boy like that- letting such devotion lead him to his death.
Such a stupid boy, a painfully stupid boy, and yet.
He touches the imagined Tom so sweetly, with such care, that Tom can't help but burn with jealousy.
Because Harry shouldn't give his devotion to a shade, something so cracked, broken, and useless.
Not when he could look at Tom like that instead.
Tom will make him. It can't be hard, not when they already know each other so well, and Tom-- Tom will treat him much kinder, and Harry will be his. Always.
But how is the question?
Tom is many things, but he is not a dream.
While he can walk among Harry's dreams, he isn't part of them, and if Tom wishes to replace the imagined him- the shade, he must first get rid of it.
Could one kill a dream?
Perhaps not, but the shade of Tom isn't a dream after all.
Tom learns what the shade is the moment their eyes meet. The shade bears its teeth like the useless feral creature that it is. Something so putrid could never deserve someone like Harry.
The shade isn't imagined at all- he's a piece of Tom. A very small one, with jagged edges, full of cracks, and ready to shatter at any moment.
Full of anger, fear, loathing, and little else, the shade has no thought, appreciation, or understanding of what Harry really is.
Harry is not an enemy that must be disposed of; he is a gift, a jewel, a crowning glory, and he will be Tom’s.
Tom's patience for fools is short, even more so when the fool is a shade of himself. It should know better, be better, and yet.
It's too broken, too fragmented, too empty.
It's an abomination, a failure, and it will make a boon for Tom, granting him both its little remaining strength and its access to Harry.
The shade looks at Tom with a blatant disparagement that only goes to show how little intellect it possesses because it should know that it is no longer the hunter but the hunted.
His shade’s lips part in a snarl, like it might dare to rip out Tom's throat.
Tom waits, and it comes.
There is a moment when Tom takes hold of its wrist that he gets a jolt, a tiny, fleeting feeling of what the shaded power could be. It's intoxicating and horrifying, and Tom wants it for himself so badly that he can taste it on his tongue.
All Tom has to do is pull.
And he does, drawing the shade in and in and in. When the shade realizes what Tom intends to do, it's too late.
That doesn't mean it is easy. The shade fights until the very last of its hazy, faded, crumbled edges vanish, sinking into Tom's skin.
The shade is part of him now; Tom can feel its wild electric power surging through him, its voice whispering endlessly.
To bite. Tear. Destroy.
Kill the boy. Ruin the boy. Make him pay for what he has taken from us.
'Silence,' Tom tells the voice, but the voice will not be silent, howling with rage at his insolence. If the shade will not be silent, then Tom will silence it. Pushing it deeper and deeper into himself until nothing of it remains.
The shade is no longer. Tom is eternal, and Harry will be his.
The dream ends, as it always does, and now Tom must wait.
He's tired of waiting, sick to death of it. He's waited for so long, sitting in the dark as nothing, waiting and waiting and waiting.
But he must, and he does.
The girl takes him again, unleashing a wild fury that burns where Tom's heart should be with an intensity that the girl can hardly stand.
"I'm sorry- I just can't. He's so angry-"
"It's alright, Hermione- I can take him; we'll make it work."
Something warm curls in Tom when Harry- his Harry, winds him around his slender throat.
Tom has waited long enough. Tonight, once Harry's asleep, Tom will take the shade's place, and the girl will never wear him around her neck again.
No, he will stay with Harry, where he belongs.
When Tom enters Harry's dream, it's familiar now.
Only this time, Tom sits on the edge of the high-backed chair near the roaring fire. The room is built from bits of memory, all layered on top of each other into a collage of every place that has ever been dear to Harry.
Tom waits, and Harry appears in a doorway that hadn't been there a moment ago.
He's slight and lovely, with those huge green eyes that always burn a little too bright, like emeralds, like death. Tom loves them.
He loves the way Harry's long lashes flutter against his cheeks when Tom touches his skin.
The shade is gone; this is Tom's moment now, and he's the one who gets to touch Harry like he owns him- Harry lets him until- the end of the dream nears.
If Tom didn't have such keen eyes, he would have missed the small way Harry starts to pull away- he knows what's coming.
What has always come.
But Harry won't die here tonight. Tom won't let him. He has no intention of allowing Harry to leave him, even if only in a dream.
Tom hooks an arm around Harry's slender waist, pulling him ever closer, refusing to allow any space between them.
"Don't you want to stay with me?" he asks.
"I always do," says Harry, voice barely above a whisper. "But you won't let me."
Tom hums, and Harry's lips part as his thumb presses against Harry's bottom lip.
"Are you going to hurt me?" Harry asks as though he already knows the answer.
"No," says Tom, "I've tired of that game."
Harry's too-bright eyes widen. Tom smiles.
"I'm going to love you," he says, "after all, isn't that what you've always wanted?"