Chapter 21
“Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself by as an echo of who I was.”
-- Novel quote; Ocean Vuong, ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.’
.XoX.
Tom is acting weird. (Harry is, too. He knows he is. But can he really be blamed?)
(Maybe Tom can’t be, either.)
Previously, the diary was their main form of communication. Tom’s identity as the Dark Lord -- even as just part of him -- was something that needed to be kept on the wraps. Tom had only used his ghostly form whenever they were in an assured private setting.
Tom, now, has abandoned all pretense. He makes no attempts to hide his presence, sitting steadfastly at Harry’s bedside, smiling politely to Madame Pomfrey and other injured students.
Harry’d grabbed his arm the first time he revealed himself publicly, hissing, “The fuck are you doing? They can see you!”
“I know,” said Tom, calmly. “But it doesn’t matter. There’s no reason to hide. In fact, there’s plenty reason not to.”
Despite Harry’s incessant pleading, Tom remains steadfast in this, too. It’s led to some confused questions from students -- none of which Tom has shied away from answering. “Oh,” he’d said, innocently. “I’m Voldemort’s son. Yeah, no, I’ve heard of that other guy going around claiming the same thing but… he’s obviously way too old to be seventeen. I don’t know what’s up with him, but I’d watch out if I were you.”
Harry stared at him, gobsmacked at the pure gall. Harry eventually sputtered out, “Wha… what? What was that? What was that!”
Tom had shrugged. “Just want to fuck with Marvolo.”
“But…!”
“Teach him a lesson or two. And who knows? Maybe whatever happens as a result will work in our favour.”
So, yes, Tom is acting weird. And it’s not that he outright refuses to answer Harry's many questions. It’s just that he does not find his answers worthwhile. His apathy, this refined anarchy. It’s new.
He brushes over his honestly insane tale of his time away and asks, repeatedly, how Harry acquired Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. “It’d have been impossible to, first off, get it out of Riddle manor and, secondly, into Hogwarts--”
“I don’t know,” Harry had finally snapped, throwing his hands up into the air. “I don’t fucking know whatever it is you want to hear, okay, so can you stop asking?”
Tom has never been off put by Harry’s anger, by Harry’s bitterness. He keeps asking and though Harry keeps denying him, Tom is continually unaffected.
It is odd how, only days before, Harry’d been wracked with guilt about sending him off. He’d been eager, so eager, to recuse him, to apologize, to talk to him again.
But Harry died and came back and came back different. (Something went wrong.) Tom did not die… but upon his return, it’s evident he has the same problem.
Harry had threatened to kill Marvolo because he thought he had killed Tom, and now when Tom asked what Harry saw when he died and if Tom can somehow help him deal with it, Harry’s only response is a rapid fire, defensive, “Who told you I died?”
“I had a talk with Dumbledore.” Tom utters the admittance like it is casual.
“What?”
“He’s aware of my presence in the castle.”
“I mean -- Yeah, yeah I’d figured -- but--”
“We are on the same page,” says Tom. “Where it matters.”
Harry blinks at him.
“He can help protect you, if worst comes to worst,” Tom offers. A vague attempt to ease Harry’s discomfort, his confusion.
“What,” Harry says, carefully, feeling the detachment to his own body absently, “happened to you? While you were away? And I don’t… I don’t just mean what went down.”
“What do you mean, then?”
“You’re… different.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
And Harry jumps to say Yes, it is. I don’t know you anymore. I needed you and then I didn’t have you and I don’t have you now. But that is unfair. Because Harry has changed, too. And this is Tom. Tom is his friend… even if it feels less and less like it.
So Harry instead says, “I don’t know yet.” Honesty and kindness. Harry calls it compromise.
Tom hummed, placing one leg over the other. “I realized something, Harry,” he says, after a moment. “During my time away.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, I did. I realized I have been overcomplicating things. Crafting manipulation upon manipulation will only get you stuck in your own web eventually. It would have gotten me caught, sneaking around in the library. It caught me with Marvolo… It got me caught with you, the first time we talked.” Tom chuckles, like he remembers confessing to being Voldemort with some sort of fondness.
“Great,” says Harry. He pushes his confusion and his bitterness out of his tone. Tom is explaining things to him. He is getting exactly what he wants. It would be cruel to punish him for that. “So what are you doing now instead?”
“There’s no instead, not really… I’d call it an enhanced focus on what I’d been doing before. It’s what you should be doing, too.” He holds out his hands to Harry, showing off his scars, a new edition to his body he’d explained to Harry in an almost bored tone. “This Tournament killed you. It tried to kill Luna.”
“I’m aware,” snaps Harry.
“So,” says Tom, shrugging, “destroy it.”
Harry blinks at him, waiting for the punchline. “You’re not joking,” Harry says after a moment. He furrows his eyebrows. “Why aren’t you joking?”
“I am Voldemort,” Tom says. “I am Voldemort in the way that he was okay with letting a piece of his soul die for grievances so minor they’re hardly faults at all. I am Voldemort because I killed a Horcrux that was not beyond redemption and I’m okay with that. I am Voldemort and I am Tom and Tom realizes that this is a fire you must fight with fire.”
He stands, spreading his psalm out in front of him. “This Tournament is rigged. It’s rigged against Luna and Julian and it killed you. It should have never been reinstated. It’s a fire and it will encompass it if you only let it. So,” he stresses, leaning in, “destroy it. Burn the whole thing to the ground if you hate it so much. If you need me to, I’ll do it for you.”
Harry snaps, meekly, “I still have to win it, you know. Emancipation, remember? I swear, the smoke’s gone to your brain.”
“Destroy that, too.”
“Fuck are you going on about?”
“Threaten your parents. Say if they don’t retract you from the marriage contract, you’ll destroy them. Make a statement to prove your point.” Tom’s eyes flash. “Make a statement with fire.”
And Harry closes his eyes and imagines the kitchen from his dream with Ravenclaw now with flames licking at the walls. He imagines his childhood bedroom -- a place stinking with memories of misery -- with smoke and ash repainting the walls.
He imagines his parents -- already emotionally strung out, having read the many newspapers saying that their son died and is evil because he didn't stay dead -- being blackmailed by their only child. He imagines his parents, looking upon their burning home with horror.
They’d deserve it. They’d deserve it like Maître did. They hurt Harry so they should get hurt themselves -- and Harry had been around that, at one point in time.
But Harry opens his eyes, exhaling slowly, because he’s not about that now. He hurts himself instead of the world around him. This is how he functions. He was not built this way… but he does not have the heart to change.
“No thanks,” he says, voice cracking. “I’m not crazy.”
It is supposed to be a slight. Like always (like even before), Tom does not care. “We will figure something out then. Together.”
…And that’s another strange thing Harry’s noticed.
Tom is a bonafide agent of chaos. Scars like lightning string down his hands, visual proof of his will. He survived and now he is putting in strong effort making sure Voldemort doesn’t.
Given his time in Riddle manor -- something relayed in great detail with little to no emotion in his voice; a tale of deceit, betrayal, and useful revelations -- his insurrection is… understandable. And it isn’t new. He has always wanted, always been working to, kill Voldemort, even if the methods he goes about it now are more disorderly. More disorderly and less Slytherin.
What surprises Harry is not Tom’s arsonist tenancies because, it’s like Tom said, those have always been here. The amplification of them, given the circumstances, may be uncomfortable, may be something Harry isn’t used to, but it’s in character, absolutely. What isn’t -- or what feels like it shouldn’t be -- is Tom’s interest in Harry.
They are friends. Friends who are there for trust and backup; who do want to protect each other; who help each other work toward their goals, mutually. That’s what friends do.
Harry thinks Tom might’ve loved him. He thinks he was growing to love Tom.
And now Tom has returned and there is no uncertainty about the fact. He cares about two things and two things only -- and one of those things is, incredibly, Harry.
Tom says he has a good idea of what locket Marvolo is. With the thought that it’s Slytherin’s locket in mind, he’ll be able to track it down more effectively. He refuse, however, to take to the library until Harry is released from the Hospital Wing. “I cannot leave you alone,” he says, sternly. Harry thinks it because Tom does not trust the people around him and because he doesn’t trust Harry around himself. “You went to Mouton’s party -- something I still can’t believe--”
Harry flushes. “I had backup!”
“-- and we don’t know if she’s going to try and make a reappearance. Nor do we know if Dumbledore--”
Harry is surprised at his suspicion. “I thought you said Dumbledore and you were on the same page.”
“On some things,” corrects Tom. “I did not know he was going to visit you.”
“Ergo?”
“Ergo,” says Tom, “he’s unpredictable.”
His special treatment toward Harry does not end there. He is patient where he does not have to be. After watching Harry write for some six hours straight, he pries the notebook gently from his hands and asks if he’d like to do a tarot reading instead.
“I thought you hate tarot,” Harry said, confused, still flexing his fingers.
Tom shrugged. “I know that you don’t. And… besides, it’s not always wrong.”
And when Harry refuses to relay what he saw when he died, Tom is both sensitive as to the possible reasons why, and unabated in getting the truth. He wants to know, he says, in order to help him deal with him. In order to protect him from other, more dangerous people who will not take ‘no’ as an answer.
Harry does want to tell him -- he wants to tell Tom in the same manner that he wanted to tell Dumbledore, expect this time when he opens his mouth, nothing comes out.
He sounds insane. Rowena Ravenclaw brought him back to life and he saw Katherine when he died and it’s true, all true, but it sounds insane. He writes about it, lying in bed, and when Tom asks what he’s Novelling about, Harry cannot bring himself to say it.
Tom is Tom. Harry will tell him the truth when he is sure of this.
Tom expresses guilt, also, to not have listened to Harry, putting himself in the position to get taken advantage of by Maître. He did not listen to Harry and so he almost died and Harry realizes it is the very same guilt Harry had felt.
(It is the very same guilt Harry still sort of feels -- how he feels about New, Changed Tom changes by the minute, and he finds that guilt does, too. It’s not dissipated, but morphed; if Tom is now unlikable, who’s fault is that? And on the other hand… he thinks he can still love him, that he still does.)
Harry, hesitantly, tells him about his body. “It doesn’t feel like it belong to me and it hasn’t…”
“Since you died,” Tom finishes. Harry nods. Tom hums and declares, “I’ll look into, first time I’m able.”
Protective. Offering up information that he thinks will soothe Harry, staying by his side. And doing a fucking tarot reading?
Harry does not know how to feel about Tom, but Tom very well knows how to feel about him.
.xox.
He’s been writing his novel recently. Katherine’s words keep ringing in his head and he finds the only effective way to silence them is to listen to them.
It’s time for a sequel.
So he takes his novel concept -- a tree that turns people’s bones to wood infects some poor high school girl -- and adapts it. He wants to, at first, make the girl like him. Someone broken, someone who had died and not like what they’ve seen, who carries it with them, carries everything with them.
Someone who is rotten inside.
And everyone they touch is a little rotten too, and then he thinks that it is not the main character who’s rotten. It’s the tree.
The tree is him and the tree is Katherine. More accurately, the tree is their disorders. It’s a sequel, but it’s all unofficial.
He stops writing one evening to binge. Tom looks on with a frown and Harry gets the sense that he is out of his depth here. He always has been. He wants to help Harry but he’s not trained for this. He will say what he thinks is helpful, tries his best to support Harry; he will try and try and try and can only hope it’s doing anything.
(Harry thinks his eating disorder hurts everyone, least of all himself.)
And finishes eating and takes, again, to the bathroom. Tom slips him beside him.
Harry had opposed, of course, to this the first time Tom had tried it. “Gross,” Harry snapped. “You’re not watching me purge.”
“Then can I come in afterwards?”
“No,” Harry huffed. “It’s invasive.”
“There’s a whole aftercare process to this -- lot of misinformation surrounding it -- and… and I think you need some comfort. But it’s your call.”
“...Sure,” Harry had said. “You can come. But you can’t be mean or -- or pretentious or I’ll kick you out.”
Harry wonders why he wants to be there. It must be heart wrenching, surely, to hear your one and only friend attempt to throw his guts up right beside you. Tom has his reasons and Harry is not pretending to understand any of them. It is weird but so is Harry and so is Tom so it’s whatever.
Harry gags over the toilet. Thick strands of saliva trail from his mouth and his shoving heaves with the effort but no food comes up.
How can other people manage it so easily? Is he a failure? Is he broken? IS he destined to be fat, to keep gaining weight forever?
Harry wipes the tears from his eyes angrily with the back of his hand. He shoves his fingers into his hair, uncaring about the sanitation of it.
“It’s stupid,” he says, stubbornly, coughing once. “It’s stupid.” And then he shoves his fingers back down his throat to try again.
Tom is sitting on the toilet tank cover, watching him with a frown and that sad, sad look in his eyes.
Harry sighs, staring into the toilet bowl, dejected.
It’s stupid. It’s stupid. It’s stupid that he’s trying this and it’s stupid that he’s failing and it’s stupid that Tom’s just sitting there, watching. It is stupid, stupid, stupid and Harry would want to die if he no longer knew what it would feel like when he did.
Yes. His death. The one thing his mind can’t escape and for some reason -- maybe his vulnerability; his desolation; the fact that even if this Tom isn’t the Tom he knows, he is still a version of him and maybe that;s enough -- Harry looks at Tom with lidded eyes.
“Do you know,” Harry asks, lowly, “what it’s like to die?”
“No,” says Tom, quietly.
“It’s painful,” says Harry, lowering his gaze back to the bowl. “It’s so, so painful.”
“I’ve never died,” says Tom, careful, “but I have done something similar.”
Harry looks up at him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Tom tilts his head. “Tearing my soul… I was nearly your age when I did it, Harry.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Like nothing I’ve never experienced,” Tom breathes. He rolls his shoulders, sighing. “But I thought it was worth it. I wanted to be immortal and a moment worth of pain, no matter how excruciating, was nothing in comparison.”
Harry rests his arms, bile covered hands stuck out weirdly. He lets himself sink into the feeling of familiarity. “What would you give,” he asks, “in order to go back and make sure it would never, ever happen?”
“I hadn’t… really thought about that. I am more concerned with things, how they are going forward…”
Harry keeps speaking like he did not hear Tom’s answer. “I would give anything. Anything to make sure it never happened. And -- and I can see why Voldemort did what he did. With his Horcruxes.”
“Harry?”
“Splitting your soul… and then I could never die again.” He places a hand against his chest. He feels his irregular heartbeat under his palm. “I could see the appeal.”
“Harry…”
“I don’t want to die,” says Harry firmly. “Not anymore. And -- and don't get all worried, Tom, I’m... I’m not going to go all Dark Lord to make sure it doesn’t happen. I’m just… not going to help speed up the process.”
“But if you want to live so bad,” says Tom, confused, “then why are you doing this? You said you don’t want to speed up the process, but that’s exactly what this is doing.”
Harry stares at Tom’s scarred hands, avoiding his eyes. “It’s not that simple, Tom.”
Harry ducks his head, breathing heavily, trying to work himself up to one more attempt.
Tom interrupts the silence tentatively. “I thought about you. At the manor.”
“When you used my magic to escape?”
“Right,” says Tom. “I thought of your entries – your early ones, when you didn’t know I was listening.”
“Still think it was rude of you,” Harry says, weakly.
Tom smiles gently. “It was.”
“Well… go on, then.”
“When this was first starting, you first destroyed everything around you. You wanted to make your parents listen to you and you’d do anything -- anything -- to make that happen. And it was impressive.” Until it wasn’t. “ I thought of that at the manor. And then I saw the merit in it -- what use is rolling over and dying, all without a fight? No. I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me.** Your rebellion -- that version of it -- saved me, in a way. And I think it could save you, too.”
“...Pretentious,” Harry mutters. He gags into his hand.
Tom wrinkles his nose. “You’ve got to give that up -- it’s terribly damaging. It’s addicting, too--”
“What did I just say about being pretentious?” Harry wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. He rolls his eyes with a tired sigh. “You’re sounding to start like Madame Pomfrey.”
“Well, maybe she’s right. But…” Tom winces. “There’s… there’s more than one reason you shouldn’t start purging.”
“Is it stupid and will I hate you?”
“No -- well. Maybe. It’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I thought I had more time,” Tom says. “To work myself up for it -- to find the right time for it -- for you to… be, I dunno, more stable.”
Harry laughs a bitter laugh.
“But then you died.” All laughter dies in Harry’s throat. “You died while I was aware and I realize, Harry, that our time together is not guaranteed. There might not exist a ‘right time’ -- and I am as worked up as I’ll ever be.”
Something in Tom’s voice is starting to scare him. “What are you talking about?”
Tom takes a deep breath, then tells Harry what Marvolo told him, long ago, about the terms of emancipation.
.XoX.
“Where do I set this timeliness?
In my home and in my heart,
I beat and flow and bleed
My blood is that of love
And when I tilt my head back,
I see and want to say,
‘The stars look like hope.’
But the words dry up,
And my throat catches
On those dry letters.”
-- Harry Potter, “Ace of Swords.”