Wooden, peeling papers. The stench of rot, ever present, ever wafting.
Harry shook his head.
Dark, dark nights. Cold wind that came from no draught. A slightly moist night.
Very dark. Pitch black. Swiftly moving air— nothing, nothing, nothing, green, green something.
He opened his eyes.
“Tom!”
He felt something hard and cold beneath him. Dimly, he could make out a bed— maybe a wardrobe—
Like a cat, Tom’s eyes seemed to glow above the darkness with too-present intelligence. “Harry?”
Unwillingly, he felt something lighten in his heart. “I figured it out!”
Harry felt a smile press against his face. Despite the fact that Tom probably would have seen. Or guessed. But he didn’t care. “It was a bit different than what you told me,” he finished smugly.
“I couldn’t tell.”
There was a faint edge in his voice, but Harry heard the rustling of blankets, just the same.
“Light.”
Immediately, the room was filled with an unnatural, fluorescent glow that seemed to stretch, that tasted ragged blankets and scratched, too-moist floors, unable to reach beyond walls that looked seconds from crumbling apart.
A frizzy-haired boy came into vision. He seemed tall, taller than Harry, but not by much— and dressed in off-white shirts and too-dark pants, he didn’t look very threatening.
But Harry knew.
“Are you going to come to bed?” And there it was— his face lined with eerie determination, the intonation off, his words not quite right—
Harry climbed on top of him, scrambling beneath the covers, a blur of boney limbs.
His brain tried to tell him that it was warmer back in the cupboard. It was smaller. Easier to get warm. And the spiders always paid good company.
But his heart knew it would never be like this. Curled up together, tossing and turning and whispering until dawn.
***
When Harry first met Tom, it didn’t go very well.
It was really, kind of very loud. And there was a lot of movement and shouting and crying. Harry would Really Prefer not to think about it.
But he can remember the second and third and maybe fourth time— not because they were really important, but because they are all the same moment, leading to what happened after.
***
Levitating cakes off tables. Sneaking clothes out from underneath racks and gorgeous drawers. Tom is rude, but he is never mean.
There was a time where Tom was Special, and not Odd.
“We can’t sell it!” Harry is just…he just feels it. And Tom doesn’t feel it, and that’s the problem.
“Why not?”
It is a very hot day. Possibly the hottest day he has ever known. They’re stuck in the stifling upstairs, the only place in Tom’s Orphanage with even a hint of privacy, and Harry can feel the rotting wood burst with sticky pine sap and mix with dust and dirt and lie heavy in the air.
“Because…” Harry struggles to finish his thoughts, running his fingers again and again through cloth that streaks like water.
“See?” Tom’s gaze, always sharp, always knowing. “You want to keep it.”
The cloth is a brilliant red, so soft and light to the touch, slightly addictive. He loves it. He knows other people will love it too.
“Harry,“ and he thinks that Tom’s softened his voice now, “don’t be stupid. You know it’s stupid. Sell the ring. We’ll have more than enough then.” He can see the beads of sweat that lurk around Tom’s forehead, knows that he is probably not much better off.
The cloth is beautiful.
And so is the ring. And so is the woman who wears it— so pretty and so elegant, Harry wishes she was his mother. She would mother them in a way that Tom is convinced nobody can— cooing and asking how they have been, pulling them in for warm hugs, slipping them extras around the back.
But he lets his mind fade back into reality. Into the dark alley, where they found her. Clothes torn. Hair half ripped out.
Harry can’t explain it. But he knows that she needs it. She needs that ring.
Harry stares longingly at the scarf before dropping it to the left of them, amongst other fine jewels and scarfs and knickknacks.
Tom scoffs. “You’re an idiot.” And then, quieter— “I don’t quite get you.”
Harry thinks Tom doesn’t quite get him either. He’s almost never content. He begs Harry to steal from other shops, from shops where kind-hearted people coo and ask them how they have been and slip them some extra things around the back.
“Imagine if you were her,” Harry tries, although he’s not sure how to explain it. “And you felt very very bad and everything had been taken from you, and then someone gave you something back.”
Tom, as always, crushes straight through the explanation. “That’s so stupid. The ring won’t give her her virtue back. Where are we going to even find her, anyway?”
***
The moon hangs over them, as delicate as a dream. It’s such a soft night.
“We can’t be seen,” Tom insists, breathing hotly in his ear. Harry resists the urge to roll his eyes. People’s gazes always slide off of them— although, perhaps there is occasionally the rare exception whenever Harry gets involved. They sneak by houses, crawl underneath gaps. A dog barks before it is tiredly soothed.
Harry pretends that the haphazard alleyways are carefully constructed passages, lurking with dangers. He looks at Tom, trying to send him those glances that Tom loves to send him— but Tom only motions to ask whether or not Harry’s seen her yet, so Harry shakes his head and turns to his side.
The night closes in on them as lights slowly wink out of windows, one by one, and the sky starts to really, really darken. If Harry squints, he can still see stars. Perhaps that is what shocks him the most. He could never see stars, back at Privet Drive— and Harry would never be able to go on something like this, if he were still there. He knows he has to go back—
maybe he’s never left—
—and something small inside of him grows thrilled. He and Tom are on an adventure. They are on a quest. They are— heroes.
Harry remembers how every hero has had a sword.
He tries to focus. He’s not like Tom—he banishes the thought easily— but he can do what Tom can do. Reaching out, he feels for something— something resembling desire, and a piece of broken pipe flies to his hand.
It could be a sword. A misshapen, extremely odd, slightly hollow and deformed sword, but still a sword.
It is a sword. Harry lets himself bask in it, that knowing feeling.
“Onwards!”
He holds the sword high above his head, just like he’s seen Dudley do— just as he wished he could do— but he slightly miscalculates. The sword leans forward, taking Harry with it, and it’s all Harry can do to run forward and make it stay upright.
“What?”
It’s delivered in such unmistakable outrage and disbelief and exasperation, tinged with such constant worry and fear and care— Harry just knows it’s Tom. And when Harry turns around, he’s not that surprised.
Tom looks at him like he’s a mixture of stupid and crazy. He looks at him as if he had just declared Mrs. Cole was in her underpants. He looks at Harry like he is so utterly bizarre, so infuriatingly childish, yet he feels that tinge of something underneath it— and for a second, he wonders what the objects feel like when Tom stares at them through glass cases, except that’s not right, this is something different—
Harry curses as his sword once again tips forward— or backward, he supposes he didn’t have enough time to turn all the way around— but somehow, it’s caught by a plank of discoloured wood. Caught by a sword.
“Onwards,” Tom mutters, so gravely and so seriously that Harry is brutally struck by a need to somehow make it so that this moment stretches on forever.
Harry grins. He pulls back. “Onwards!”
And deep within the labyrinth of London, at the centre of the centre of everything, they find her. She is almost unrecognizable— face angular, hair matted, hudding under a thin blanket. When Harry presses the ring into her hands, it does not change any of these things. But it has helped. Harry is convinced.
Tom is exasperated. He can hear it in the slight edge of his voice, in the way he almost slumps as they walk back to Wool’s. “You’re incorrigible,” he informs him.
Harry smiles. It’s a loud, beaming thing, and Tom seems to quiet a little. “Thank you.”
And if they help a few people along the way back to Wool’s…well.
***
“We’re going to die, one day, and you’ll have caused it,” Tom says, and he sounds almost fond while he tentatively dabs the cut with some of Mrs. Cole’s whisky. “Half the country must have known what happened last night.”
Harry, licking the frosting off his fingers, couldn’t care less. He knows Tom knows that he‘s right. Even if it’s turned into kind of a thing— helping people does get kind of unpleasantly notorious— Harry is firm that he wouldn’t change anything about yesterday or or even any of the days before that.
But even with all of that, as soon as the frosting is gone, they sit in silence. Relative silence. There’s always some type of murmuring in Wool’s.
“You don’t have to come,” he blurts out. It’s such an impulsive thing to say— and it’s exactly the opposite of what he wants, he’s a real genius—
”No.” Tom’s next words are surprisingly even. “I don’t know how you’d survive without me.” But that’s a lie. He’s had far worse from the Dursleys, even if they both pretend not to admit it.
Half the alcohol slips off his skin and onto the ground. Harry winces.
“Well, could you be more careful?”
“I’m trying,” Tom says, muffled. He’s gritting his teeth and now Harry feels bad because it does look like Tom is trying. For all his tenderness, his hands tremor, and every dab hurts more than they should. Harry is silently convinced they’ll blister.
When Tom is done, Harry persuades Tom to rest. Curled up underneath the blankets, Harry feels safe. He feels secure.
Until Harry begins to hear voices drifting up from below.
“Yes, I know…caught him out yesterday…I’ve wondered if he’s been possessed—“
Harry stays silent. He’s with Tom.
“…says he can make things move if he wants to—“
This is about Tom. Why can’t he move? “Move,” he tells himself, and like a ghost he watches himself slowly walk over to the door and press his ear against it.
“…can make people hurt if he wants to…he never cried as a baby—“
“… nasty incidents when he was younger…suspicious incidents…never home at midnight…”
Harry is so silent. This is nothing new. Nothing is wrong. They just need to wait it out and it’ll be okay. She’s been complaining about Tom even before Harry met him.
And yet he can’t shake off the feeling that every good thing he has ever had in life— it has never lasted, for him.
“Tom!”
Harry jerks back. Loud. That was really loud. Is Mrs. Cole calling for him?
He glances back at the bed, but Tom pays no attention. Harry feels a pang of remorse— last night must have exhausted him more than he let on, and he doesn’t have the benefit of being able to sleep in a cupboard.
Harry nudges Tom, a little, and Tom begins to blink rapidly.
“Tom!”
“I think she’s calling for you.”
Tom nods, distracted, before he starts to clean up.
Harry stops him. “No. I can do this.”
Tom looks at him.
“Tom!”
Tom dashes down— no choice, really— and Harry methodically and absentmindedly scrubs away the scent of whisky.
When Tom comes back up, there is nothing wrong with him. “It’s some Doctor from an asylum,” he says, and shoos Harry‘s questions away like petty flies, no matter how much Harry insists that he wants to know.
***
It’s kind of cool now, when they step outside, and all the leaves are turning different kinds of colours.
They step, crisply trampling on piles of absolute delight. Harry grins as he carefully pushes Tom into a pile, and laughs when something forcefully shoves him back.
Clouds run past the sky, struggling against the blue floor. Harry thinks they’re racing to the end of the world. Tom told him to shut up and eat his lunch.
Harry sighs all the way home.
“Why does that Doctor get to visit you all the time?” He doesn’t take off his coat, because he doesn’t have one, but he stamps his feet on the ground and carefully picks the wet leaves off of both their feet. Tom huffs.
“I’m Special,” he says, face so smug that it is begging for Harry to punch him.
“I’m more Special than you,” he says, and then races up the creaking stairs.
Harry’s face twists. Tom doesn’t ever talk about it, the way magic flows so easily for him, the way sometimes Harry’s magic stutters and shakes.
“Nuh-uh. I know for a fact that I’m more Special than you,” he yells, just to be contrary. But his heart sinks, and he starts to feel that sticky, clinging sensation build up in his throat.
There’s a silence. And then Tom ducks his down, head just barely peeking through decaying brick. “No really, I’m more special than you. Look!”
He runs up so quickly that Harry has no choice but not to chase him, and by the time he makes it to their room Tom pulls open the wardrobe, quicker than a flash.
They all spill out. Toys, books, special things, expensive things, stuff Harry knows that they could never steal, much less buy.
So he knows. “Who?”
Tom looks at him scathingly. “I’m capable of myself. That old dung who comes around here—“ he waves his hand dismissively. “Just a few words and he’ll give me anything I want.”
“Will you share?” Harry tentatively asks, because they’ve always shared everything almost the moment they met each other, like two halves of the same soul.
Suddenly, they’re not just two barefoot boys standing in a too-cold room on too-cold floors. Tom’s face does a weird thing. It kind of flip-flops, which Harry interprets as “I think I know something and I don’t want to tell you right now.”
And when Tom says that cursed, filthy word— “Maybe”— Harry takes his silly expression that day and folds it tightly to his chest.
Harry doesn’t know if the Bad was in Tom first, or if the Bad came after. But even him— a scrawny, messy thing, barely 7, barely 9, yells at Aunt Petunia, screams at Vernon, screws up his eyes inside his cupboard, trying, trying.
But nothing in his life has ever gone right, and Tom slowly becomes frantic, almost adamant that he never comes when the heavy-set door is locked.
Harry doesn’t like to think about it too much.
***
Tom grows rather peculiar.
He knows things that he shouldn’t. Does things that he shouldn’t. When Harry laughs and pets Billy’s rabbit— joking about how Billy smiles whenever he’s even in the same room as her— Tom tells him, quietly, exactly what he could do to that rabbit to make him never smile again.
“It’s just a joke, Harry. And it would help him. You know how he is,” Tom says, when he catches wind of Harry’s face.
“Don’t joke about that,” he says.
Tom doesn’t joke about it.
The other children won’t talk to him anymore. They start to whisper really really Bad things. Things that Tom would never do.
(“Amy, what‘s wrong? Why aren’t you speaking?”
She opens her mouth. Harry frowns. No wonder she can’t speak— it’s all covered up in magic.
He carefully unpeels it—)
***
One time, when he comes, standing just outside Wool’s in a place Tom so carefully planned— he sees him.
Kind of old. Greying hair, brown eyes that almost shine. Imposing. Tall. Strong, physically, the way neither Tom nor he are. He walks quickly. And he wears scary clothes. Nice clothes, without a hole or a rip or even a visible seam. His boots are clean cut and polished, his trousers lack even a single crease, and his outfit is stylised in dry but elegant colours in every shade but black.
“For good luck,” Tom explains. “But I suppose that’s just the Doctor.”
Tom is tense, even as he walks aimlessly down the road with Harry. He’s expecting something from Harry, he realises, in a flash of clarity, only Harry doesn’t know what.
“I see a doctor too,” Harry ventures. Being around Tom, he thinks, is rather a lot like guesswork. But he’s good at guesswork. For the first time, he’s exceptionally grateful that he’s good at guesswork.
“Does he…” Tom’s face spasms, and his footsteps grow a little bit harsher. “Doctors ask strange questions right? And look at you funny?”
A breeze drifts through London. Harry feels it ruffle his hair as he thinks back to long, too-long exams, where doctors whisper behind his back. “Bruising,” they murmur, “so much…too much…concerned over the child’s safety…”
“Yeah, I guess.” Harry kicks a rock. Thinking about it makes him feel very strange, and panicky. He is not a very good kid.
“Does it always hurt?”
There’s a hollow look in Tom’s eyes, like someone has carved every part of him out and has left nothing but the bones.
Harry has a feeling that Tom is asking a question that he doesn’t quite understand— that the question he is asking is so wide and large that he has only heard about in pamphlets and newspapers.
He thinks. About the Dursleys. About how he is cold and wet and hungry and aching, and about how it is like that almost all the time. And then he thinks about Tom and finds that he cannot say all of that and really mean it— because, well, Tom.
“Not really. But I think it gets better. I mean,” Harry shuffles— and really, he has nothing to say now but what he knows, from his own mind. “Everything got easier after I met you.”
Tom seems to miss whatever is concealed beneath the words, and nods sagely. “It helps after I meet you too.”
And then his gaze turns on Harry and he is pinned. Harry cannot move an inch from cobblestone, cannot even think to move out of the alleyway, petals falling from some braindead plant raining from above.
“You’re like me.”
He had said that, the first time they met— a swirl of yelling and blood and fascination. And he said that last time too, when Harry begged him to erase—
Harry doesn’t quite know. He never Quite Knows. He tells Tom this, but Tom is unconvinced.
“You can’t leave me here,” he says, and his eyes grow large and frantic like Harry’s does after a Really, Really Bad Day.
Harry could never. It has never, ever occurred to him. Not once. Tom is everything— but that’s just not quite right— and he fumbles for the words before realising there are none. Not for the first time, he wonders if Tom is right when he says that they are like each other. If maybe Harry can visit Tom because yes, they are both special, but maybe also because of something more.
He blinks. Harry didn’t realise they had stopped. He continues walking, glancing back at Tom, and Tom follows.