Chapter 1
“You’re a good man, you know, Tom?”
“It’s only what a good friend does,” he said, putting the slight emphasis on friend. It wouldn’t do to lose his prey now, after all, not after all these months.
“It’s just—” Cedric blinked at him, slowly, weakly, his wide grey eyes red-rimmed. His lips were cracked—they looked sore, out of place on his handsome features—and spattered with blood, his breaths ragged and painful sounding. “I don’t feel like I can talk to Cho about this.”
Tom nodded, feigning sympathy with a small smile. “It can be hard to talk to your wife about, ah—” He inserted a moment of faux hesitation. The wavering smile. The nervous shifting. “Well, about illness. And—what comes after.”
“It’s not just that,” Cedric said, more forcefully. “It’s easy to talk to you, you know? You make it easy. Everything is easier, with you. Sweeter.”
He ran a gentle hand across Cedric’s forehead, brushing the sweat-damp hair out of his eyes. “I think you’re delirious. Your wife is probably expecting you home.”
Cedric’s hand caught his wrist. “But that’s just it, Tom. She doesn’t know. She thinks it’s just a cold, not—not near death, god.”
“Hanahaki is rarely fatal. There is every chance you’ll get better—especially when it’s just your wife. It should be an easy confession to make.”
“That’s just it. Tom—”
“Shush now,” he said, a little less gentle than before. That was the damnable thing about hanahaki, he’d discovered: most people weren’t willing to choke on feelings to the grave. Tom had taken to keeping them with him, before his death, and pointedly mentioning their spouses. It worked often enough. “Think of your wife, Cedric. I can help you through this.”
“No, Tom, I really need to tell you something. It’s important.”
“Oh, Cedric,” he murmured, like he cared for the creature before him. The white knight destroyed by himself. All perfect edges and easy smiles and affable charm, yet so easy to coax away from his wife.
Even the flowers he coughed up were white. White roses. Base, simple enough; if he fell that easily, and that simply, then he deserved to be the bush Tom planned.
“Tom, please.”
“Just think of Cho. We can get through this. Remember that she shines the brightest, yes?”
Cedric was crying, he noted absently. He had this tendency to be brutally honest, emotionally honest, and half the challenge with him had been to get him to clam up on his feelings. It had taken months, and Tom had grown bored of toying with him—truly, if he didn’t want the very best for his plants, he thought he might have slit Cedric’s throat by now. He did so love his dear Cho.
“Just—stay with me?”
“Of course.” Tom offered him another small smile as Cedric hacked his way through a cough, a whole bloodied bloom working its way out of his throat, thorns tearing his throat to shreds. “And you know—if it’s easier—you can just stay here. It can be hard. To have your wife realise you died because you couldn’t accept just how much you loved her, I mean.”
Cedric gave him a defeated look, and Tom knew the battle was almost won. “Because it’s for Cho. The hanahaki. God, I just—”
“Of course it’s for Cho. You’re not the kind of man who cheats on his wife, I’ve seen the two of you together. You’re so in love it’s almost embarrassing.”
Cedric was choking again, and Tom sat back and let nature take its course. It had been close, with Cedric, to stop him from accepting it; a struggle to the end. But at least he was dead.
Because Tom already had his next victim picked out.
A change of pace, maybe—to go from married victim to married victim was all fine and well, but Tom wanted a challenge he wouldn’t get bored with, and Harry Potter was famously unattached. The playboy, the bachelor, fuck and dump. His longest date had been two weeks. Anything longer would ruin him, the star seeker, Puddlemere’s best, untouchable, unfalliable, perfect.
*
The first thing people noticed about Tom was his garden, then his face, then his name. That was the way he liked it. When he was seducing someone, he made it smaller; a flower, usually, pinned to his lapel, or clasped in his hands, the fake nervous energy and too wide grin of someone asking for a date. Love was all chemistry and easy body language, and Tom had written himself into the code.
By the time people asked for his name—boring, betraying his mystique, and nothing anyone ought to be proud of—they were already enamoured with him. The simple Tom never seemed to bother them the same way it bothered Tom himself.
Harry Potter was different.
“Alright,” he’d said. “What’s your name, then?”
“Riddle,” Tom replied. “Ah, Tom Riddle, not some kind of game.”
Harry had huffed in a way that was almost a laugh, then cocked his head. “Why are you here?”
“The—match,” he said, wrong-footed. It was why anyone would be there. It was such an odd question he hadn’t even thought he’d need to lie.
Harry had only shaken his head. “I saw you come in,” he said. “You didn’t so much as glance at the merch, the pitch, the other players. You walked right past a broomstick display. You looked uncomfortable with the idea of being here—disdainful at the general rowdiness. You’re dressed like a man with money.”
“You didn’t strike me as particularly observant,” Tom replied, solely from the sheer surprise at being read so easily.
“I people watch when I’m nervous. I’ve been watching you the whole time. You stand out in a crowd of quidditch fans, you know.”
“I—well,” he began, ducked his head. There was always a recovery zone. “I don’t really care for quidditch itself, I just—I like you. Every time I see you, it’s—breathtaking. I don’t have room for any thoughts in my head.”
He was watching Harry, scanning him, looking for some hint that the seduction was working—most people preferred the shyness, the idea that affection would somehow embarrass them, as though it wasn’t awfully flattering. Less entitled, he supposed. But Harry just looked amused, barely even ruffled; then again, Tom supposed, he probably got a lot of propositions. Took people up on them sometimes, too.
“Well, I’ve never had anyone claim they like me without at least pretending to like quidditch.” Harry raised his eyebrows at him, almost mocking. “It makes for an interesting change of pace.”
Tom extended the hand with the rose before him, the white bloom pale against the unfortunate tan he’d acquired working in the garden. “This was for you.”
“Most people try red roses,” Harry said, not making a motion to take it.
“I don’t grow roses, really,” he said, pressing on. “This is the only colour I have, and I thought—well, I have other flowers, but I thought this would look good against your robes.”
“You grow flowers?” Harry asked, finally, finally, touching the petals. “You the sort to have a gardener?”
Tom offered him a small smile. “I’m a herbologist. I like working—the feel of it, soil under your hands. The satisfaction of months of work. Not that the aesthetics hurt, of course.”
Something about this seemed to give him reason to pause—something Tom’d said had finally struck a chord with him, possibly the suggestion of Tom being ‘down-to-earth’. His research indicated Harry was averse to the rich and insufferable, after all. “Yes,” he said, slowly, eyes scanning Tom’s face for any indicator of an untruth. “I think I get that. It’s a good feeling.”
“I thought you might like it. You don’t have to keep it, of course, if I made a mistake—”
“No, no,” Harry said, and plucked it from Tom’s hand. “I’ll keep it. You said you imagined it pinned to my robes?”
He offered a shy smile in response.
“Well, I can’t keep it for the cameras, but I’m sure I could wear it for five minutes if you wanted a quickie.” A flash of a grin. A hint of that cocky way he conducted himself before the cameras. Playboy. Sex, and nothing more.
“I couldn’t say no to that,” Tom murmured, and dropped to his knees, already reaching for the waistband of Harry’s trousers. People, he found, rarely turned down a free blowjob, and after Tom had his mouth on their cock, they usually were more amenable to a second round.
It wasn’t that Tom was that good, it was just that Tom was that good.
It took only a few seconds for Tom to free Harry’s cock from its confines and only a moment more to coax it to fully hard, and then he flashed Harry a cheeky look and licked a wet stripe up the side of his cock.
“Christ—”
Tom allowed himself a moment of focus on the tip, then swallowed down. He was looking up as he did so, and got to see the look of wide eyed surprised and pleasure on Harry’s face as well as the way his cock twitches in his throat, then busied himself with the business of sucking and licking through the rest of the blowjob. He really did find it very easy, and men were very weak in the afterglow.
Harry would be no different.
His hands were in Tom’s hair, curled in a way that ruined the effect of the gel. It was frustrating, but not terribly; he had only planned on seeing Harry today, and his plants did not need him to be immaculate. He was gasping, shuddering his way through his orgasm, and Tom obediently swallowed before pulling off with a wet sound and a grin.
“Well?”
“Christ—that should be illegal,” Harry panted, leaning up against the wall for support. “Where did you learn that?”
“Care to have another round? Somewhere a little less public, next time.”
“Do I ever.”
He accepted the slip of paper Tom held out to him, and got in contact fairly quickly, and when he was done pounding Tom through the mattress, he managed to coax a real date out of him, at a proper restaurant. Something solid from a man who could obtain sex from anyone.
Proof that Tom’s charm hadn’t faded. The challenge wasn’t in obtaining the unobtainable—Tom already knew he could do that—but in coaxing hanahaki where roots weren’t meant to grow.
Tom did love a challenge almost as much as he loved his garden.