Harry Potter & The Hand God

Okay, Tom decides. Harry Potter is bad company.

He knew this before getting involved in their little group -- he knows better than to not do his research -- but now that his reputation has preceded him, Tom has to uninolve himself.

Harry Potter throws hands in matters that can very well be settled with words. Harry Potter is quick to rage and slow to forgiveness. Harry Potter is so Muggle, so primitive, it is physically repulsive. Harry Potter is the most Gryffindor Hufflepuff Tom's ever met. Harry Potter is disgustingly sympathetic.

Tom Riddle has no business hanging around Harry Potter.

But he knows things Tom does not, that's the issue, that's the root of it. Tom wants to know why Harry's getting possessed and by whom and how either of them are correlated to the giant fucking hand in the sky. Is that too much to ask?

Apparently, yes. Very much so. 

Tom follows Harry out of class after the potions fiasco. Harry has a scowl fixed on his face, arms swinging unhappily at his side. Tom thinks it time to make his leave. He will get the information he needs and they will interact no long. Merlin, Potter and Zabini would likely be more than thankful to have him out of their hair. Since Tom is not waiting around to gain Harry's trust enough for Harry to tell Tom himself, he would access his answers in their purest form; thought.

Tom grabs Harry by the shoulder, turning him toward Tom. Upon eye contact, he wordlessly casts a legilimency, clawing his way into his mind.

Harry's mind, however, claws back. 

Before Tom can even get a glimpse of his mind, hands -- thousands of them, millions, all pink and beautiful and protective -- push back at him, forcing him out of his (their?) head before he can even enter. It's like opening a door only to have it slammed in your face with just the look of you.

Utterly insulting. Also, interesting.

Harry's still looking at him. He doesn't seem to know that Tom had tried to invade his mind. Okay, yeah. that's good. Tom clears his throat. "I do not know what came over you," he says absently. He'd never seen an Occlumency shield like that before. Its defense is an offense.

Harry yanks his arm back. "What came over me? Did you forget that it was your friend who started it?"

"I did not," says Tom. Magical skill such as that is not something a fifth year is capable of accomplishing. Tom did not have a shield as strong as that until late sixth year. "I merely protest to your methods of engagement."

"My methods of engagement?"

"What good did punching him do, if not reinforce his ideas?" And from Tom's heard about the boy, Harry is not naturally magically talented. Not a Squib, like Snape tends to proclaim, but not "Dumbledore has his eyes on you" skill level, either. He is just average. Just unremarkable.

"Taught him he can't go around saying that shit without consequence." 

"He seemed very aware previously, if you ask me." How can someone so easy to overlook be able to hold up such a strong shield? How can someone without the magical capacity and legacy to prove it accomplish a near-impossible feat?

Harry turns away from him and begins walking down the corridor again. Tom trails him, letting Harry keep some distance between them. "Why does it matter, Riddle? To you, in particular, how is anything I do relevant?"

"I wish to be your friend," Tom says. Something in his clicks. A fifth year should not be able to do what Harry's done because a fifth year didn't do this. The hands in his head aren't his at all.

"Wish, Riddle, emphasis on wish. I don't like you. I don't even know you. Why now, Riddle? Why are you trying to change that now? What's different? I am the same person I have always been."

"But I am not." Tom thinks of that evening in the hallway, how Harry's eyes glowed brightly. Merlin, he thinks. You sure do have a pattern, don't you.

Pink. It's always pink.

Harry scoffs. "Sure, Riddle, sure."

"Why doubt me? Have I not demonstrated my willingness to change?"

"Yes," Harry says, faltering. "But willingness to change is not change."

"You must know that isn't true. I sought you out for a reason." Whatever lives inside you does not want your mind pried through. It's smart, I'll give it that. But I am unavoidable. Is it smart enough to know that, too?

"And what is that? What conceivable reason do you have for going to me in an attempt to change? Me, a child, two years your junior? Me, who is not morally pure and does not pride himself on such?"

"I do not want morally pure," says Tom. In his mind, he is running through all the books regarding possession in the library. A large majority of them are in the Restricted Section, but that's not anything a well told lie cannot fix. "For me, that is unachievable. But you -- the way you hold yourself, your ideologies, your take on morality -- that is achievable."

"You wanna hear my take on morality? Fine. Okay." He spins on his heel, nearly making Tom walk into him. "Who you are friends with matters."

Tom resists the urge to roll his eyes. Merlin. He really is a Hufflepuff, really is a child. "Harry, I am not defined by my friends--" Harry lets out a dry chuckle "-- in the same way that you are not defined by yours."

Harry seems offended at the proposition. "To some extent, you must admit--"

"Admit? Admit what? Everyone we willingly associate ourselves with is an extension of ourselves, yes, but to what end? Your take on House politics is quite radical. Does all of your friend group agree with it?"

Harry's jaw tightens and he backs up a little. Ah, yes. There is it. "My friends consists of every House color. They obviously hold no prejudice toward even their rival Houses--"

"Really?" Tom's doubt doesn't even have to be faked. "Ron has never said anything about Slytherins, meaning to jest at Malfoy but jeering his friend, too? Not once?"

Harry deflates, putting his arms around himself. 

Tom dives in for the kill, mainly happy to be ending this conversation. He has much to research. "Face it, Harry. I am not Malfoy. I am not like him. Mostly importantly, I do not want to be."

Harry runs a hand through his hair, puffing out his cheeks. "I'm sorry," he says softly.

Good. "Don't be," Tom reassures. "I did not mean to be insulting with my criticism."

"Nor did I."

"So, will you?"

"Will I what?"

"Allow me to stick around?" Harry does not know how lucky he is to be asked this, to be honorable to even be on Tom's fucking radar. He takes Harry's ignorance as a personal affront. "Your influence," he says. "It is good for me."

Harry turns around, resuming their walk once again. "Yes," Harry says. "But we're going to have to have a talk about you joining the Ministry, okay?"

Tom's smile is like the Cheshire Cat's. "But of course."

Harry walks out of the conversation much more fascinating than how he walked in.

•─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────•

Tom Riddle doesn't know how to love. 

This is nearly true. It is an assumption that Harry does not even think to note with context, made off of an out-there unorthodox thought that those surrounding him at the time do not share. In all honestly, it's not even an unfair assumption to make. 

It's just wrong. However slightly.

Because Tom Riddle does, in fact, know how to love. As a child, young and not yet slighted by the world and death it would cause and death HE would cause, back when he did not fear being in the wrong place in the wrong time and still laid in bed at night to pray for a family to come and take him home, still needing one and believing he wanted one, Tom had a snake. He stole a book form the market that pointed out how to tell the gender of a snake -- this one was a girl -- but he didn't think that mattered much when naming her, anyway. Names aren't gendered (another belief of his lost to time; the Purebloods got to him and sucked out the childish yet correct part of himself that Harry Potter and people like him tend to live in).

During the winters she huddled close to his body, hoping to catch any warmth he gave off. Tom let her. Tom let her do just about anything she wanted. When she was small, she needed help with food and coming and going and so Tom helped her. He caught her insects. Frogs. He carried her from inside to out and got caught and hurt a few times over because of it, too, but he didn't care.

He spoke to Nagini in hushed whispers, not realizing that being able to do so made him powerful and almost special. His mind was clear of things like that. Then, he was just a boy and his snake, willing to do anything for her because she would grow to do the same for him.

Love. Yes. I suppose this is what Harry would call love.

But it doesn't last. And that's not the fault of Tom , because he does not at the time fight these feelings, but father, he embraces them and feels them as they are, and it is not the fault of Nagini, who did everything right except be in the wrong place, wrong time.

Wrong place, wrong time. It is always that. The second death that happened with those circumstances made Tom fear death. The first made Tom fear love.

It hurts. Merlin, it hurts more than he can bear. Once efficient in everything he did, Tom now did nothing. He lays in bed for days on bed and though the gnawing in his stomach and the cracking of his lips tells him otherwise, most of the time, he cannot convince himself that he's alive, that it was Nagini's brains splattered on the sidewalk and not his.

Mrs. Cole yells at him a lot, spewing words so cruel that Tom didn't know they existed and even though that hurts, even though his body's rejection of his method of coping (i.e. not to cope at all) hurt -- none of it hurt as much as the idea that Nagini will never hiss under concealed blankets in the dead of night again. He will never carry her in his pocket from the garden to his bed to the forest. Never again.

It hurts. Too much and too hard and nobody is there to help him deal with it, to even convince him that there is something to deal with, no parents to wrap his arms around as they lie lovingly about the farm in the vloud or Sky Daddy or Merlin or one version of the afterlife or the next. He has no one. He is entirely alone.

Eventually enough is enough. He rises from his bed and he is surprised at how hard it is to do something so simple. He decides then that never again will he be weakened like this, hurt and crushed and utterly wrecked like this. It will not happen. He will not allow it. He is entirely alone and maybe it is better that way, better to grow resistant than to keep an open wound open.

I will never love again. It is a promise. He builds up a walls around his heart, makes it black and inky with room for no one but himself, because it is better that way. You cannot lose something you do not have. Rising from his bed is to be normal. Expected. It is not a task to be put off, revered, downright rejected. He will save his effort for more important things by making things like that effortless. 

Time passes. Jimmy dies. He realizes he is powerful and almost special. It is given a name. Any expectations built around Hogwarts are blown away and then stomped on and burned. He is amazed at the expanse of the castle and the magic it both holds and represents, would consider it his second home if he did not consider it his first.

He meets a snake at the end of the Forbidden Forest. She is lost and without a home and traveled here, to Hogwarts, to find one. Tom thinks I have finally met someone like me, and puts her in his pocket and lets her roam the castle as she pleases. He calls her Nagini and it is so nostalgic, he almost wishes he had let himself come to love her.

Almost. 

Tom Riddle doesn't know how to love. No. He does. It is a skill he has retired but somewhere, deep in the storage closest of his mind, there's a box with Nagini's name on it. It contains the image of a small but agile and lively -- oh, how undeniably lively -- snake rendered dead, splattered and spilled on the curb, like she is common roadkill and not Tom's best and only fried. In the box, there is the blurred line between alive and dead and dissonance from either.

It is a box he hopes to burn but has only managed to bury.

To love is to hurt and Tom... Tom has had enough of that for a lifetime.

Tom Riddle doesn't know how to love. And that is not very well his fault, is it?