Harry Potter & The Hand God

An owl lands in front of Tom. She is brown with white spots and holds herself tall. Very prim and proper. Ron whistles at the sight of it. “Blaise’s family owl. It’s probably a tea party.” Ron puts a croissant roll on his plate. “Likely why he isn’t sitting with us.”

Tom carefully untied the letter from the owl’s foot. It is enclosed with the Zabini seal. Tom raises his eyes. “Does he have those often?”

Harry shrugs, to the best of his ability, considering he is practically draped on Neville (something in Tom sparks; possessiveness and jealousy and keep your hands off of him--). “Only when someone’s really pissed him off.”

“I remember in his third year,” Hermione adds, “he blackmailed the DADA teacher into giving Ron passing marks with one of his ‘tea parties’.”

Ron goes red, buttering his roll harshly. “Not like I needed it.”

Hermione pats his back fondly. “I’m sure you didn’t, Ron. But my point is, he’s usually rather thorough in research.”

“How many skeletons do you have in your closet?” Harry jokes.

“Not near enough,” Tom responds smoothly, but the real answer rings in his head regardless: too fucking many.

•─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────•

Blaise sits in the library, the table in the furthest corner, with a cup of tea in front of him. There’s one poured out for Tom, too, and a teapot between them. Tom has no intention of drinking it. He is right to be wary with his drinks around Blaise -- tasteless, odorless, the feeling of everyone looking at him. The fact that they are alone now makes his paranoia worse.

“You are late,” Blaise states as Tom takes his seat.

“My apologies,” Tom says, not sorry at all. “It is a fairly long walk from here to the Great Hall. I arrived here rather quickly, really, on such short notice.”

“Forgive me for my impatience.” Tom won’t. His resentment stems from many things and he will never pass up an opportunity to add to the list. “We have much to discuss.”

“Alone?” asks Tom. He gestures to the area surrounding them. “Alone, with no one able to see us, to intervene? If I did not know any better,” and I do not, “then I might assume you’re looking to start a fight, Zabini.”

“Tempting. A hard no, though.” Of course not. A fight would be easy. Nothing with Blaise Zabini and Tom Riddle’s interactions comes easy. “Nevertheless, you are not wrong to assume this is an attempt to corner you.”

“Is there a Muffalo encircling us?”

“I am sure you are not thick enough not to feel it.”

“So you award us privacy, for one reason or another.” Tom Riddle feels his wand, vibrating in its holster. “It must be serious, what you wish to discuss.”

“I dare say you are correct.”

I could Obliviate him, thinks Tom, eyes narrowing, free hand drumming lightly against the side of his cup. Or search his mind, see if he knows something he shouldn’t, make a decision from there. But if he has a shield? And if he predicts my movements, throws up a protego, runs to Harry? 

Tom lets out a breath, removing his hand from his wand. No. Combat is unreliable. Talk first. If needed, act later.

“I like investigating. Did you know that, Riddle?”

“I surmised; your ambition and your grades must match up somewhere.”

“Yes. You are right to suspect so. But sometimes my investigations extend beyond my studies.”

“No harm in having hobbies,” Tom amends but he knows it is not about hobbies. It is about protection. It is about intuition, something in Blaise that Tom’s charm cannot quench that says Tom is a wolf in the sheep’s pen. He will devour Harry whole. 

“My most recent fascination begins with Draco Malfoy.”

“Ah,” says Tom. His mouth goes dry. Malfoy. Of course he is the leak. He’ll have to punish him later. Tom clears his throat, taking a sip of his tea, attempting to right himself. He takes a sip and immediately regrets it. Something is off here… but not wrong. He keeps drinking. “My dearest friend. What about him?”

“He was doing a favor for you.” Blaise’s eyes lock onto Tom’s cup and Tom notices his eye color, a lovely, beautiful hazel -- 

Tom looks down at his cup, the tea in it seeming to mock him. What have you done? Tom grits his teeth. “A favor,” he repeats dryly. 

“To sit me. So you could sit with Harry,” Blaise gets a dreamy look on his face, like he understands why someone would want to do so. “But that’s not what fascinated me about our interaction.”

“No?”

“I asked him what he was promised in return. And do you know what he said?” Blaise leans forward. “Do you know, Riddle?”

“I can guess.” Tom could blast him here. The only issue is Harry had seen him receive the invasion to Blaise’s tea party. And so did his friends, with much more reliable memory, greater threats. He has no alibi. 

“What Tom promises all his friends. That’s what he said. That got me thinking; what is it that you promise all your friends? I got to looking. In honest, I did not have to look far. Though I am a Slytherin myself I feel more yellow than green most days but I settled back into my silver quicker than I care to admit. I listened. People talk a lot. The words ‘Tom Riddle’ and ‘Housewide takeover’ are said more than once. A little digging and…” Blaise shrugs. “All you get is dirty.”

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you are referenc--”

“Do not. Do not lie, Riddle. I am not a common fool. Understand that I am not what you are used to dealing with.” Tom says nothing and Blaise continues. “You spoke some time ago about your sexuality. Experimenting, you called it.”

“That I did.” Foolish. Tom had let so much get beyond his control. This is the result.

“Tom,” Blaise says, hands folded in front of him. “You gave us no idea that those experiments were currently ongoing.”

“I-- I lied, yes,” Tom says, making the story up on the spot, desperate to get out of this conversation, desperate to fix this. “I confess I hold insecurities regarding my sexuality and am not ‘out’ as Harry is. I am queer and poly and though I loathe that this information must be revealed this way--”

“Do you ever stop lying?” Blaise snaps, banging on the table. “Every moment of your god forsaken life is a scene of one act of pretend to the next. You wear a mask so often even you do not know what you look like. It must be tiring, Riddle, must be exhausting, so let me allow you this one treasure, from me, who wants to give you nothing; drop it.”

“You do not care,” Tom accuses. “None of what I do within my inner circle bothers you. None. Not the love as a tool, not the--”

“Not the Dark magic, the pain, used as a punishment?” Blaise raises his eyebrows. “Yes. I was just getting to that.”

“Yes!” Tom admits. “Yes, that, too, you do not care about -- if it was anyone else, anyone at all, you would dislike them but you would not do this, drag them into an interrogation disguised as a tea party. Your hatred would be from afar, would be impersonal. If it was anyone else.”

“But it is not anyone else. It is you,” Blaise says.

“No. Not because it is me. Because it is me, getting close to Harry. That’s your bone to pick with me -- not my immorality, not the unjust I participate in, not the evil shit I make myself the face of, not even me, as a person, as a fellow wizard. It is just the fact I’m doing it at the Hufflepuff table and not the Slytherin one. That’s it.”

“Okay,” Blaise concedes. “Maybe so. Maybe you being evil is fine as long as you are evil over there. But that… it will not hold up to Harry, will it? I do not think him as lenient.”

Tom feels his magic splutter and static under his skin. “Where do you get off bringing Harry into this?”

“I have no intention of telling Harry any of the things I've learned,” Blaise says. Tom does not relax. “... Given my demands are met, that is.”

“Blackmail?” Tom cackles. “I should hex you now and leave you a vegetable.”

“You could. You should. But you would’ve done so already if you intended to. And,” Blaise spreads his arms out, spreads a grin across his face, “here I stand.”

The teapot shatters. Blaise’s cheek is cut but he makes no move to heal it. He waits for Tom to make a move. Tom reels in his magic and breathes and thinks furiously that for all his planning and power and sacrifices and blood, so much blood, he could not control the one thing he should have learned to have vanquished, all those years ago; his morbid fucking curiosity. He just had to patrol the corridors the same day Harry walked them after hours. He just had to investigate it himself instead of one of his Knights. He just had to get attached.

Tom swallows hard. He just had to. And he did and now he’s here, face to face with Blaise Zabini, who he did not underestimate but estimate in a vacuum; inside the idea that Blaise had made his bed and lied in it, had drew his lines in the sand in which Tom had no reason to cross because they were Blaise’s lines but they were Harry’s too, that unremarkable boy turned extraordinary. 

He is here now. Tom is not one to regret but what he is feeling now must resemble something like it. 

He is here now. There is no direction in which to go but forward.

“So,” Tom says. “What do you want?”

“Stay away from Harry. Now,” Blaise says quickly, before Tom can protest, “I encourage you being his friend, he does love you, or is growing to, and who am I to take that away from him? No. I will not ask that from you because I do not not want that from you.”

“If not that, then what? What do you want from me?”

“Distance,” says Blaise. “You are obsessed with him. Sit at the Slytherin table every so often. Keep your mind, your fantasies,” he says it sickly, “to yourself. Do not attend all of our sleepovers and all of our library visits. Have some speck of the life you had before.”

But was that life, what I was experiencing? Was that really, truly, living? It will feel like death, what you ask of me, because it might as well be. But what other chance do I have? You are cruel. You are just like me. “I can try,” Tom says at last.

“I do not want try, Riddle, I want succeed. Oh,” says Blaise, “and one last thing; you can’t date him.”

Tom acts like he was not considering it deeply, not wanting and yearning for it all of the time, every waking moment. “I am not sure what gave you the impression that I wanted to--”

“Oh, spoon the bullshit to someone who’d eat it, Riddle.” Tom thinks that is a rather vulgar way to say no, but whatever. “I can see your heart, stupid.”

Tom blinks. And blinks again. And all thoughts about vulgarity exit his mind like  that. “You can see my heart,” he echos. Oh my Merlin. You cannot mean what I think you do.

Blaise rolls his eyes, setting his tea. “Had Harry not mentioned it? I do love his respect. But, yes. I see hearts.”

“Everyone’s?” A passage in a book he wasn’t meant to be reading, a religious text, a lover, a god--

“Yes. They’re a mix of colors and elegance, the way one holds themselves in relation to themselves and in relation to others and bits of the future sprinkled in between most are magnificent and strong, lovely, always lovely, but your heart, Riddle.” He shakes his head. “Your heart is blank. It is empty. I could look into it forever and find no end. I dosed you with amortentia and you were unresponsive; that’s how void of love and room for others you are. But then you met Harry.”

Harry, Tom thinks absently. Of course it circles back to Harry. It always does.

“And your heart, it did this very odd thing.” Blaise holds up an open palm then curls it in on itself. “It shrank. I have never seen a heart shrink before, Riddle. It was making room for someone other than yourself. For Harry. And your heart, which, previously, had kept all to itself, connecting truly to no one and nothing -- why, it did this funny thing, this odd thing, Riddle. It stretched and mingled with, you guessed it, Harry Potter. 

“I dosed your tea with amortentia today. Terribly sorry, by the way, but the dosage was small and it only affected you for a moment, for a second, but that’s the strange thing, isn’t it? That it affected you at all.

“So you did not know love before. You taught yourself it. And that would be great, truly, if you were not in love with Harry. So let us keep our dating lives separate, yes? And we can put all we talked about today behind us.”

Tom thinks that is a solution most unagreeable. Thinks Blaise is as insatiable as he is, just as possessive, and, Merlin, the look is fucking ugly on anyone else. He nods his head, acknowledges Blaise’s deal with the intent to align with it but he knows he is lying even as he does so. He will find another solution. There will exist one, for there must be, and he will find it, even if no one else can, because he is Tom Riddle. 

And Tom Riddle, at the moment, is not concerned with Blaise’s intrusions. Not entirely, but that is for another time, another day, because right now he is concerned with Blaise himself.

“You are not a Seer,” Tom states.

Blaise raises an eyebrow. “Way to change the subject, Riddle.”

Tom ignores him. “And you are not a Soul Seer.” They can see people’s ‘hearts’ but not the future and that isn’t what Blaise is describing. 

“Not quite me, no.” Blaise is not sure what he is. He has longed stopped questioning it and has learned to live with it. Much easier that way.

“Merlin,” Tom breathes, grinning despite the circumstances or perhaps because of them, “Merlin, Zabini! You don’t see hearts; you see souls, you absolute dumbass!”

“I am… unsure of the difference. And furthermore, the relevance…”

Blaise keeps talking but Tom cannot care, does not listen and does not pretend to.

Oh, the gorgeous irony. If Fate was real he might just kiss them. It was Blaise, Blaise, who wanted to give him nothing, who had gifted him the answer to a question he had been asking himself for so, so long.

The Hand God is Merlin.