Chapter 3
He hated the way they looked at him, surrounded him. Their gaze dissecting him into this pathetic thing, pulling him apart, stretching and ripping until they tore him completely. Maybe that’s exactly what Tom wanted. Why he insisted on so many of these predatory mirrors in the apartment.
Weirdly enough, the bathroom was the only place free of their constant staring. It only had one small mirror by the sink, but Harry turned it away every time he was in there. Tom’s little mercy.
It was bad enough that he had to look at his sickly reflection in the bath water, still tinged pink, making him look livelier than he really was. The flower crown on his brow should have helped, though it probably looked just as dead as he did, after he spent all day braiding and weaving it over and over again. Making it perfect. There was nothing else to do, no books, no friends, no Tom.
Nothing.
There was a pounding on the bathroom door. He would have startled normally, but the cold water froze him so deeply he couldn’t even feel, let alone move. Doomed to stare down into the water forever, until it swallowed him up completely, and he was deep, deep, deep with her.
A petal dripped, crumpled and dry. He watched it be revived by the water, before disintegrating and disappearing completely. The shouts and beating at the door were like a soundtrack to a dramatic movie scene.
He wanted to cry when it went quiet again. Abandoned.
“Harry, please.” There it was, low and dangerous under the thin mask of suffering kindness. “Please can you open the door? Please let me help you.” Nothing to worry about. He relaxed into his paralysis. ”I don’t mind kicking it down again. You know I don’t. Harry, I swear, If you’ve done something…”
Sometimes Tom was inexplicable. That’s when Harry did the unforgivable and wondered how a human being could do such things. But then, Tom wasn’t human, Not really. Not like Harry was, in this ugly and primitive way. He was beyond that, beyond anything.
How else could his hands be so smooth, so caring sometimes. When they held him, touched him, created him. How they could be so cold, bony and talon-like, when they killed him over and over again.
“Harry.”
He wanted to answer, he really did. He wanted to open his mouth and let all the excuses gush out, save himself from Tom’s sacrificial hatred. But all he could give was a shaky breath, as his body succumbed deeper into the cold.
There was a few seconds of swallowing silence, air tensing and flexing itself, as it waited for the fatal blow. And when it finally crashed down on the thin door, wood and dust flying into his barely open eyes, he couldn’t even flinch, as his eyes started to water.
There was a pressure on his shoulders, his cheeks, the nape of his neck. Fingers searching his arms and wrists, unbothered by the cold.
Ice digging into his jaw, lifting his head as a skilled puppeteer forces his marionette to bend and bow. Forced to look into Tom’s frown, trying to decipher its honesty.
“What did you do?” Quiet. An apology, maybe even a plea. Maybe Tom was showing his hand.
The icy grip softened, cradling his head to a warm chest. Warm but unmoving, as though without a heart. Soft promises and apologies whispered into his wet hair, skin burning against his pale cheek. Harry wanted to flinch away, but he was drowning in a sea of fire and ice, scalding and cold, and sinking, sinking so deep, he was the only living thing.
Pathetically alone.