liar, liar
Liar, liar, pants on fire your nose is longer than a telephone wire.
- liar, liar , the castaways
Tom is happy. As close as happy he can get, he thinks. He has a family now long gone are his days of rotting away in the cold, desolate confines of a foster home surrounded by filthy screaming children who also share in his misery. He has parents now. Lily and James Potter plucked him from the herd like a lamb pardoned from sacrifice and delivered him to salvation. They’re fine, Tom thinks. There are more annoying people, People who don’t care nearly as much as they do. They have a lush green yard for when James makes his failed attempts at father-son bonding by initiating a one-on-one football match, and a library stocked with more books than tom could ever read without lack of trying.
And they have a son, Harry.
xxx
7 years later
Tom is waiting. He wants to see how long it’ll take for the old man to tell him to get the fuck out of his car. He won’t, though, Tom knows. He’d be much more cryptic and passive about it. Instead, they sit in uncomfortable silence occasionally broken up by the sounds of barking dogs or laughing children traipsing through their posh neighborhood.
“This will be good for you, Tom,” he says instead.
The old man isn’t looking at him instead he’s staring ahead as if there’s something so intensely intriguing about the perfectly clipped rose bushes that shroud the front gate of the estate.
“Hmm,” tom stares holes into the side of his head.
At that, the car door promptly clicks and Tom takes that as his cue to ‘get the fuck out.’
xxx
The door is opened by a short wrinkled lady with a pinched face, it’s not the same one from last time and Tom wonders idly why that is.
“Wait here.”
Tom watches as the unfamiliar sour-faced woman waddles away.
Tom does not wait.
The idea of standing around eyeing the tacky marble interior of the foyer until Hermione decided to grace him with her presence did not seem appealing in the slightest.
So, he walked.
The first room to his left at the end of a long hallway held a stark white grand piano facing a collection of victorian chaises and ottomans. He was tempted to toggle with the keys just because it was there and he could but decided against it. Just above an extravagant marble fireplace held an incredibly generic photograph framing a family of four looking just about as close as colleagues. Tom takes a long Considering look at the happy family. Mother and daughter, father and son, and even though they’re all in the same picture it’s quite easy to tell that they’re two different families apart from the obvious differences in bone structure, eye color, and skin tone. No, really it’s the body language that gives away the fact that these are two different families forced together under the same roof.
The boy is grimacing for fucks sake.
The next room tom comes across is what can only be described as a man cave disguised as a home office. It’s all deer heads, platinum plaques, and football jerseys.
There’s also a gun.
A .22 LR Lever Action Rifle to be exact. It hangs in all its glory above a garish mahogany desk, such tempting, low-hanging fruit.
Tom lifts it gently from its display rack and takes his time running his hand along its smooth varnished wooden handle, and then to its clip. Empty. Adjusting his stance tom turns and points the offending object suddenly at what was left of a very startled deer.
Knock knock.
Tom pivots suddenly at the noise, gun still held firmly in his grasp.
“Uh--”
“Is this yours?”
Hermione wavers at the door pensive look in place as she eyes the weapon in his hand curiously because like… what the fuck?
“No. Andreas’,” she replies.
“Huh.” Tom carelessly releases the weapon from its position of high alert and places it back onto its rightful stand.
Silence.
“—We should get started if we want to get our time’s worth, we’ve got a lot to cover today.”
Tom just stares at her and wordlessly motions for her to lead the way.
____
“I think we should start with literature and then with whatever time we have left, we’ll get into the harder stuff. What do you think?”
“How much are you getting paid.”
A nervous huff of a laugh. “I am not getting paid, Tom! You’re my friend I-“ a pause.
“I want to help you.”
For as long as Hermione has known Tom she has known that he was beyond help — any help that she could give him. He knows now due to her abysmal lying that she is doing this out of pity and obligation which usually wouldn’t bother Tom in any other situations but now her lying only annoys him.
Looking at all he sees is a mask, a shell of the girl his former childhood friend really is. Tom hates when she gets like this. When they’d go days or even weeks without talking and it’d seemed like the next time he saw her she’d been like a tortoise who’d reverted back into its shell. Tom first noticed it when Hermione and her family had spent a holiday in the Caribbean and they hadn't seen each other for nearly a week. When she finally returned to school it seemed almost like they’d shipped her off and lobotomized her. Sure Tom understood she had a certain way of acting when she was around other people, everyone did. He did. But Tom isn't ‘people’ and it gets immensely annoying when Hermione happens to forget that. He doesn’t want this Hermione. The one who carefully chooses her words so as not to vex or displease, the Hermione who’d gasp and say “Tom! Stop, that's not nice!” If he’d decided to indulge her with his true opinions on her jarring, decaying new housekeeper and his displeasure with the displacement of the last one.
So. Fucking. Boring.
“So, er… you’ve read all this, then?” she says slowly unfurling the dog ear Tom had placed inside the book and viciously smoothing it down with two fingers like it offended her.
Tom wonders how long one could blankly stare at a person before they’d politely ask you to get the fuck out of their house.
It’s 4 and a half minutes for cars, he’d just recently discovered.
Her leg is bouncing furiously under the table so Tom knows this bothers her, he likes that. Anger is one emotion Tom could coax out of anyone if he really tried. The Hermione he knows is angry.
There’s a flash of something in her steady unwavering gaze, like a ripple across water, gone before it’s even there.
“Alright, a recap then.”
“And George raised the gun and steadied it, and he brought the muzzle of it close to his brother’s h- head…The hand shook violently but his face set and his…” a pause. “His hand steadied. He pulled the trigger... Er.”
Tom's face now holds a smug, quiet amusement as he places his internal bets with himself on whether she’ll actually finish or not. Truthfully he considered her gritting teeth and avoidance of eye contact a victory. A small one, but one nonetheless.
“You know we don”t…” her throat clears. “I can stop.”
“How much are you getting paid.”
The book slams shut.
“What is your problem?”
“My brother’s dead.”
Silence.
The dead brother card is one of Tom’s personal favorite off-switches.
She sputters for a moment, mouth agape opening and closing like a fish out of water. She seemed agitated like their entire interaction was some play she’d masterfully written and directed and Tom somehow wasn't reciting his lines well enough. She obviously had not planned for him to bring this up.
They sit across from each other like that for what seemed like forever but for what Tom knew to be twenty-six minutes and 34 seconds. Her arms folded across her chest, the steady thud of her right Mary Jane carefully taping the ground with each bounce of her stockinged leg. If Tom focused he swore he could hear how perfectly in tune each successive tap was with the massive grandfather clock in the foyer as each second ticked away.
At a quarter to three, she finally speaks.
“Look I know how hard this is for you alright, you’re feeling a lot of things right now and-
“That's the thing actually I really don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
Feel…anything.”
The tapping stops.
“Like…you’re still numb, in shock.”
“Like I don't give a shit.”
Her brows furrow deeply making her look distinctly cartoonish, the perfect caricature of generic ‘shock’. It’s the first emotion tom’s seen her display that wasn’t pity, or thinly veiled annoyance since he’d arrived at her house.
Tom continues.
“I mean, it’s not like I don’t know that I should and I mean I thought I did for a while; feel things. It wasn’t until just recently that I’d realized that I had gotten so used to mimicking other people’s emotions that I was just sort of convinced that I actually had them myself.”
Hermione is staring at him as if he'd sprouted a cock on his forehead.
“You feel…nothing?”
Tom sighs making a show of checking the watch of hand that was splayed lazily across the back of another chair.
“I mean sometimes I feel annoyed or tired. But normal emotions, Joy, anger, sadness, guilt, grief...” He shrugs as he starts to click at a stray pen. Up, down, up, down. “I really don’t feel any of those things”.
“But isn’t that…that’s like a disorder.”
At that Tom gives a humorless laugh. “Yes well, Dumbledore sure would like it to be. First, it was borderline personality but he needed to do more research to be sure, then it was severe depression, bipolar 1, bipolar 2, just an hour ago in the car he said it was anti-social with schizoid tendencies he’s basically just shooting darts at the DSM5 and hoping one will stick. But I’m not like, fucked or anything” he getures lazily towards his head, pen still in hand. “I have a perfectly healthy brain - the courts say so - it just happens to not contain emotion.
For a second it seems like Hermione had gotten over her animated shock and was about to say something until-
DING DING DING
The obscenely loud ringing of the timer startled her out of whatever reverie she was in.
He stands up to leave.
“Tom, wait…”
“A timer, a bit dramatic isn't it? Wouldn’t want you to hang out with me longer than you had to, right?”
“I- no that’s not- I have this thing with my mum it’s-
She’s stuttering again and Tom wonders how a girl who was once so obnoxiously sure of herself could be reduced to this.
“How’s 50 an hour? Oh, no that’s much too high dear we don’t have that kind of money could we possibly do 20? Look, I'm really busy with classes. I have friends who I would recommend. But sweetheart you must understand that Tom, he doesn’t-
Her hand drops back down to her side. “You read your parents' emails?” She says in a tone that Tom can’t quite place as defensive or accusatory.
“Honestly I'm surprised you’re so shameless in your efforts to shake down a middle-class family so soon after the death of their young child.”
“That’s not what I was-
“Just, next time don’t lie about getting paid.” A mirthless smile. “This was fun.”