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The boy is sweet.
Or maybe not sweet, more pretty. It makes sense: he’s Merope’s boy, and Merope is Lust fallen for a mortal man and the result of such a monstrous coupling is inhuman beauty. Dream, although as Harry learns, he prefers Tom.
It’s an autumn wedding, and the beginning of the annual decay that brings so many souls to Harry. Tom wears a vibrant bay laurel crown over his veil, a direct rebellion against the natural cycle of death, and when Harry leans in to kiss him at the closure of the ceremony, Tom turns his head away.
Harry’s heart feels heavy, his throat tight. He smiles anyway and plays the part of loving husband at the reception, until he manages to corner Kindness and Revenge, his two closest friends.
“He hates me,” Harry says.
“He doesn’t.” Ron sets his glass down. “He’s afraid, there’s a difference.”
Hermione’s eyes flicker to the Purebloods — Gods who refuse to mix with mortals, to even entertain the idea of them — and lowers her voice, distaste tinging it.
“They pushed him into it. He’s young, Harry. Give him time.
“Give him kindness, love,” Ron tacks on.
“Then revenge, when the time is right,” Hermione says. “They want him to fail, for you to fail. They’re scared of you too, Harry.”
“I’m not scary,” Harry says.
“Death, then,” Hermione amends. “You’re the only one of us who's not just a God, but a Master. That’s a scary thing.”
Ron gives Hermione a look.
“But we love you for it, mate,” he says, turning back to Harry and clapping him on the shoulder. “Really. Most of us wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”
“You’re very brave for marrying me,” Harry says.
Back in Harry’s castle, he realises for the first time how cold the stone is. He lights the fire, offers the bed to the boy he has just married, still standing by the window.
“Don’t patronise me,” Tom sneers.
He’s fidgety and flighty, and when Harry takes a step closer to comfort him, he flinches away. Harry stills.
“You didn’t choose to marry me,” he says.
Tom lifts his head, jaw making a sharp angle of the light. His lip is curled back and he bares his teeth.
“No.”
“I’m not your warden. You’re free to come and go as you please.”
Tom hesitates a moment. Then, in the next, he is gone; the diamond-paned window left wide open.
Harry lets out a heavy breath, collapsing onto the bed. He scrubs a hand over his face.
“Gone?” Hermione demands. “He’s a coward. Doesn’t he understand that this is just as hard on you as it is on him?”
“He doesn’t really have anyone,” Ron says. “His side at the wedding were all the ones who pushed him into it.”
Harry groans. The cup of tea has gone a little cool, and he drains it quickly, pouring warmer water from the little pot on the cafe table.
“I understand why he’s run,” Harry says, “I just wish he hadn’t. I didn’t mean to scare him.”
“Did you ever tell him that?” Hermione asks.
“He’s probably still uncertain about what it means to be husband of the Master of Death,” Ron adds.
“It doesn’t mean anymore than what we want it to,” Harry says, shortly. He takes off his glasses, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to snap.”
“I forgive you,” Hermione says.
“Maybe he’s only running because he believes the agreement is,” Ron says.
Harry takes a sip of his tea. It burns his tongue.
“Thanks.”
Winter comes and Harry sinks his claws into the earth, takes it in his bloody maw and decays. Striding through desolate forests, tree branches bare and dark, he looks for the animals who straggle.
He finds one — a wildcat with a broken paw who cannot hunt — and kneels on the snow beside it.
“Oh, love,” he murmurs.
His fingers trace gently over its fur, and its great eyes — hazy with cataracts — glance at him, or rather where it assumes him to be.
The wildcat is old and it could live through the winter, but it probably wouldn’t be a happy one. Harry smiles softly at it.
“Do you want mercy, love?” he asks gently. “Have you lived enough?”
The poor thing, inundated with age and injury and sickness, unable to hunt and starving because of it, has. Fifteen years is a long lifetime for a wildcat, and Harry sinks his fingers into its matted fur and helps it pass slowly.
He leaves the carcass — death brings life too and he doesn’t want to start arguments with Merlin.
When Harry lifts his head, there is a boy watching from between the trees. He raises his hand in greeting.
“Hello,” Harry says, voice carrying. “I don’t bite.”
Skittish, the boy comes closer. It is only then, Harry realises it’s Tom. He straightens a little, standing a little taller and prouder — this, afterall, is his husband, however unwanted.
“Oneiros,” he greets softly, “Tom. What are you doing out here?”
“It was dreaming,” Tom says.
He doesn’t lift his eyes to Harry, doesn’t greet him in turn. Instead, he kneels beside the wildcat. His fingers twitch by his side, hesitating. He is wearing black gloves.
In fact, his entire wardrobe is black now and he looks like a crow, more so when he sinks his gloved hands against the tabby fur.
“It was dreaming,” he says again. “And then it stopped.”
Harry swallows. “It was suffering. Hallucinating, perhaps.”
“You killed it,” Tom accuses.
He flinches when Harry kneels, and Harry buries the guilt that wells and tries to break free.
“It was suffering,” he repeats, a little rawer.
Tom’s eyes snap to his. There is something wild in them, a glint of malice, red rimmed and angry. The darkness of his eyes makes his entire face seem paler, and not for the first time, Harry thinks how pretty he is. There could never be another consort of Death like him.
“Do you kill everything that ‘suffers’?” he sneers, baring his teeth like one of Harry’s Hellhounds.
It’s then Harry smells it, soured and festering like ozone. It’s more than the dead wildcat and Harry tilts his head to catch it on the wind.
It comes from Tom.
“Is everything okay with you, love?” Harry asks in the same voice he uses with all dying things. “You smell…”
Fear flickers across the pale, pretty face; hesitation and uncertainty rolled in with the awful feelings Harry’s presence must generate for his poor husband. Harry despises himself — for all his attempts at kindness, he is still the most feared thing to gods and mortals alike.
And yet, Tom rips his left glove off anyway.
“It’s your fault,” he says. “Or maybe it’s not your fault at all. My hand is fucking dying.”
The boy’s fingertips are ashen.
“Tom…” Harry tries, gently.
“I know, okay?” Tom snaps, jerking himself back. His voice turns a little softer, fear edging it but the anger is gone. “It’s been happening for a couple of months now.”
“Let me,” Harry offers, holding out his hand.
Tom hesitates a moment longer, then sets his hand in Harry’s. Harry smiles, holding it very delicately and twisting it, mouth brushing the boy’s cold knuckles. Tom lets out a shuddery gasp.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Inviting the cells to die properly. They’re festering, on the brink of decay. But when they die properly…”
Harry loosens his grip. Tom lifts his hand — it’s healed.
“How…?” Tom asks softly.
Harry smiles bitterly. “I am the Master of Death, little Oneiros. I am far more complicated than a bloody wound.”
Tom’s eyes are very bright, malice mostly gone from them, even though there is something decaying still rooted deep inside of him.
“What do you mean?”
Harry stands, offering Tom his arm. After a moment, Tom stands too, putting his glove back on. He refuses to take Harry’s hand and Harry drops it quickly, shoving his hands into his pockets as they turn to walk on.
“I am everything,” Harry says. “Every minute there are about three million cells that die in a mortal’s body. Without that death comes the excess of life and that, Tom, is cancer.”
Tom is very quiet. His feet make soft sounds as he tracks through the snow, not yet having learnt how to move without leaving a mark. His dreaming stretches out, violently forcing itself into the minds of whatever sleeping beasts it can find.
“Are you saying that you are a mercy?” he asks finally. “That you are kind?”
“I would like to think so, yes. If I may, cancer is the abundance of life, slowly mutating the body until it can no longer recognise itself. In the end, I can often be a mercy for the individual.” Harry looks at Tom beside him, a little raven boy all dressed in black. “It’s certainly nicer than understanding me as a cruel inevitability.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Tom concedes. “You’re still more terrifying than anything I’ve ever known, and I still sort of hate you for marrying me.”
The sting of rejection — although it has already happened twice now; this makes a third — is harsh and heavy hitting. Harry smiles weakly at Tom, hating himself for being hated. Guilt and grief and fear are long companions of his now, but it digs so much more coming from the pretty, clever thing he married.
“Too right,” Harry murmurs. “Too right, Oneiros. I would too.”
“Why did you push for Dream to marry me?” Harry asks Greater Good.
They sit beside a fireplace in the man’s study, surrounded by books in languages long dead. Harry remembers most of them.
Greater Good hums, eyes twinkling behind half-moon glasses.
“You were lonely, Harry,” he says, “and Tom needed someone to watch over him.”
Harry starts. “You call him Tom, too.”
“He is more mortal than you or I,” Greater Good says. “Especially you.”
“He’s afraid of me. He didn’t want this.”
“No.” Dumbledore sighs, picking up a yellow boiled sweet from a circular bowl and unwraps it. “But I feared for him, Harry. He was becoming darker and more violent.”
Harry scoffs. “Did you consider that he could’ve had his own path and own choice? Or did you justify it for the greater good? For you, Albus?”
Dumbledore’s lips purse as he sucks on the sherbert lemon. Harry scoffs again, and stands.
“If you were so worried about him growing darker, you wouldn’t have made us marry. Whatever darkness you were worried about, Albus, it’s sped up. There’s very little difference between a nightmare and a dream.”
Harry has seen it; the way darkness tinges as he helps mortals and beasts alike in their final moments. Fear is eating at them, fear that can only be generated by dreams growing dark.
There is something wrong with his husband. Or maybe there is nothing wrong at all.
“Did you ever consummate?” Greater Good asks. “Perhaps his darkness has no outlet.”
No and no. Harry hates Greater Good and the man he is; a pity — they sire each other several times over.
Peverell Castle is cold like always, though Harry has taken to keeping a fire going in his room on the off-chance Tom ever comes home. It’s not like Harry cares particularly much about the temperature otherwise; bodies appear in warmth and cool alike.
It is only luck, then, which has him by the fire that burns for Tom, when the same boy whirls through the window.
“Tom,” Harry says, unable to withhold his surprise. “You’re here.”
The boy — but no; he is a man now. The same pale creature Harry encountered in the winter forest is ten-fold now, with a cold beauty made starker still by his dark dress sense. His features are sharper, more developed.
“I don’t go by that name anymore,” he says.
He moves through the space unafraid and confident, settling in the seat across from Harry.
“What name do you go by then?”
“Voldemort.”
Harry smiles. “Your French is atrocious,” he teases, “but I approve, anyway. Death is very much like sleep, only with the absence — the flight, perhaps — of you.”
“You infest everything,” Voldemort says. “Even me.”
Harry smiles. “Yes, and don’t I give you purpose too? Give you reason to exist?”
Voldemort, still that very pretty boy Harry married once, and yet simultaneously nothing like him, worries his lip with sharp canines. “I suppose,” he concedes.
Harry tilts his head, smiling softly. “Will you let me kiss my husband now, Oneiros?”
Voldemort hesitates for a moment. “I suppose.”
Harry’s hands are very soft and very gentle as they cup Voldemort’s jaw. He leans forward, the gulf between them shrinking, and disappearing entirely.
Voldemort’s mouth is very warm and very cold all at once, and he licks it open slowly, drawing a whimper from his husband’s throat. Harry thinks he might want to make home here, staking claim. Alas, he must retreat.
Staying close, Harry keeps his hands on Voldemort’s face, holding him still and loving.
“Don’t just go around spreading fear for me,” he says softly. “I want to be kind.”
Voldemort smiles, eyes glinting madly as he peers from dark lashes. He is that same stubborn creature Harry married, only now all his fear and hesitation is gone.
“And I want you to be powerful.”
Harry smiles.
“What a sweet boy,” he says, thumbing Voldemort’s cheek. “My little Melas Oneiros.”
“My Lord Arawn,” Voldemort says, “I think it is high time you take the last part of my soul.”