Harry Potter & The Hand God

The world looks different when you realize you are in love. Harry knows this because he’s been in love several times.

In his second year, the year Neville Longbottom, one year his junior, joined their little entourage, Harry found himself infatuated. It was during the third -- maybe second -- Quidditch game of the season that Harry had scowled, moaning, “It’s freezing out here.”

Neville had glanced at him, sitting beside him in the Hufflepuff box. “You didn’t… like, I dunno, bring a coat?”

Harry wrapped his arms around himself, suppressing a shiver. “I forgot. So. It’s not my fault, alright?”

Neville just rolled his eyes. “Alright,” he said. He removed his coat and handed it to Harry. When Harry opened his mouth to protest --”won’t you get cold” -- Neville put up his hand. “No. Shush. I came prepared.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a second coat, slipping it on and turning back to the game. “So just -- just take it.”

With his eyes on the field, he missed Harry’s red cheeks. You knew I would forget my coat… so you brought an extra one. For me. Hermione would’ve told me something like “then don’t forget next time, Harry, you need to seriously consider your health” and Ron would’ve... What, shrugged sheepishly? 

But you.

You, I think I’m in love with.

And the world… it took on a greenish tint to it. No, that isn’t quite right… it’s that everything green became a little more vivid. His eye catches plants more easily and is torn away from them harder. He visits Neville in the greenhouse from time to time and thinks it is a beautiful place, not just for Neville’s presence. 

He soon confesses in that very same greenhouse. And then they are lovers. It really is that easy. 

With Blaise, it was much simpler. Or complicated. Or it didn’t happen at all. The fact of the matter is that the moment Harry saw him, it was love. It was not gradual. It was a childish gamble that should not have paid off but did. 

So Harry, with him, did not have a moment where every green became important and plants became beautiful -- instead, Harry had a moment where the love he had for Blaise, previously the completely arbitrary kind that you gift to strangers on the subway with a pretty smile and cool outfit, morphs into something… more. Into something solid. Harry loved Blaise from the moment he saw him, but that love did change.

During their third year, Blaise confesses that he can see hearts and the future. (Unbeknownst to him, this is round two. The guilt of that will always linger.) And Harry asks him, “Is it as cool as it sounds?”
“Oh, Harry. Cooler.”

Blaise expects that Harry will ask what his own heart looks like. But he does not. “What about your heart, Blaise? Is it pretty? I bet it’s pretty.” Like you. 

“I…” And wasn’t that a good question? What about you? “It is… challenging to put into words,” he says.

“You’re good at that. Words. Aren’t you?”

“Yes, but…” But what? But he has spent so long describing and observing the hearts around him. He has never really bothered with his own. “Hm. To start, it’s… like soup.”

“Like soup? Blaise. That is fucking hilarious.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be good at words, Mr. Vocab Man?”

“Do you want to hear the rest? Then shhhhhh.”

“Yeah -- alright. Shhhh. Go on then.”

“It’s a half circle -- sphere, really -- resting in my chest. And it is made of liquid. Or it moves like it, at least.”

“What color is it?”

“It’s… a lot of colors. You know how soups will have an excess layer of oil on top sometimes?”

“Mhm.”

“Well… mine has that. And it is sparkled with gold.”

“Gold? Is that rare? Should I be jealous?”

“Rare? Astonishingly so.”

“Are you making this up to impress me? Lying isn’t cool, Mr. Zabini.”

“Oh, please.”

“So what color is the soup part of your soup heart?”

“Don’t say it like that. You sound like you’re mocking me.”

“That’s because I am.”

“How rude, Harry.”

“But I’m doing it sweetly, don’t worry.”

“It was not in my understanding that you could mock someone sweetly.”

“Yeah, well, it’s sweet cause I like you. So answer the question, Blaise.”

“About the soup part of my soup heart?”

“Yeah. That.”

Blaise snorted, laughing. “You’re so… silly.”

“That’s what you love about me.”

“Yeah,” says Blaise. “It is.” Before Harry can respond, he continues, “The bulk of my heart is sage green. And in it, there are shards and chunks of other, lighter and darker shades of green.”

“Kind of like Neville’s.”

“Hm?”

“With the green. You said Neville’s was all plants and ferns and… and green shit. So your heart is kind of like Neville’s.” The unmistakable tint of jealousy in his voice has Blaise rolling his eyes.

“No. And yes. My heart is kind of like yours.”

“Mine? Really? What’s mine like?”

How should he say this? “It is the most vivid green I have ever seen.” And pink, but he doesn’t say that. Perhaps he should have. Perhaps he shouldn't be needing to keep any secrets from Harry because he shouldn’t have any in the first place.

“Really?” Harry repeats, whimsical. “Is that a coincidence?”

“Is what?”

“That the… the people I love and me have matching hearts?”

“The people I love and I, Harry,” corrects Blaise. Harry rolls his eyes. “It probably is not. But I don’t know much about my power. It is hard to say.”

Harry hums, digesting the information. “You know,” he says after a beat. “Before I befriended you, I was warned about Slytherins.”
“Were you?” 

“Yeah. I was told green was a dangerous color.”

“It is. Sometimes, Harry, it is.” He thinks of Tom Riddle and his soul, black and blank and how you could run circles around it and never catch it. 

“Sometimes. But I think green is beautiful.”

“... Me, too.”

And it was just like that, that easy. Harry finds his love for Blaise different and solid and growing and the world… the world around him looks a little different. A little prettier around the edges.

So Harry knows that the world looks different when you realize you are in love. Sometimes it is subtle and sometimes it is blatant but every time, it is not unwelcome. Every time it is gorgeous. It is your mind making the world match your mood and the mind? It is a powerful thing.

Tom Marvolo Riddle, the man with a heart made of black, the one that did not know how to love but sure as hell taught himself, Headboy, tells Harry he will get Harry a spot in the Divination class and Harry is immediately overcome with deja vu. Like Neville bringing an extra jacket, Tom does not tell him to just get over it. He accommodates. 

In the few classes in which there are multi-year classes with Slytherins, Harry almost sits with Tom. He sits with Blaise instead. But it is a close thing. 

Blaise notices. Of course he does. Blaise always notices. “What is this?” he asks him when they are walking from class together. Harry has his eyes locked on Tom, who, at the moment, is in deep conversation with Draco Malfoy. 

“I don’t know what you mean,” says Harry. They both know it is a lie. 

Blaise chooses his words carefully. “Green… is a dangerous color.”

“I thought it was beautiful.”

“It is. Sometimes, Harry. But only sometimes.”

“Well. Why not now?”

“Because, Harry! Because--”

“Because what?”

“Because… what he wants from you and what you want are two… very different things.”

“And you know what I want? What is it, then?”

Blaise looks at him sadly and he looks just like, exactly like, Cedric Diggory, all those years ago, warning him about his infatuation with Blaise. For some reason, Blaise’s version just makes him angry. “Love,” he says. “I suppose.”

Love. Yes. Harry supposes this is what he would call love.

And Tom is the product of a love potion. From what the magical scientific community knows now, Tom’s heart is one unreachable.

Of course, if this was so, then Blaise would have nothing to worry about, would he?

Harry whips out his journal and almost adds an entry to Tom Riddle’s section. Instead, he just erases one. 

•─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────•

“Harry,” says Tom. “Are you alright?”

Is he alright? Good question. The answer is he’s planning, but, yeah, whatever, “Could be better,” is equally as truthful.

Tom sits next to him, placing food on his plate. “I’d have guessed so. I don’t know what I would’ve done if my remaining family called me such insulting things.”

“Well. I sent howlers, that’s what I did.”

“Yes, yes. I know.”

“Oh,” says Harry. Did he? 

“Some of my Housemates are…”

“Are what, Tom?”

“Planning to reuse some of the insults from the Dursely howler. Repurpose them as slurs in order to slight you, so I thought I’d give you a heads up--”

“What do you mean ‘repurpose them as slurs’?” asks Harry, voice tight.

Tom blinked. “...Huh?”

“Tom,” Harry groaned, putting his head in his hands. “They’re already slurs. The shit they called me. Faggot. That’s a homophobic slur. Do your Purebloods now know that or are they purposefully being offensive?”

From what Tom heard, none of the Purebloods seemed aware that it was anything other than ‘some bullshit Harry Potter’ got called. “Truthfully, Harry, I had no idea ‘faggot’ meant--”

“Are you gay?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are you gay?” Harry asks again. “Or bi, or queer or whatever. Are you not straight?”

“Hitting on me in the middle of a serious conversation, Harry? I had no idea you were so bold.”

Harry’s face turns pink. “I’m -- I’m not asking for that, alright? It’s just that faggot is a really… strong word and it’s got some gruesome history. And gay people, though we do not experience exactly what the generation before us did, have some sort of common experience with it, with queerphobia in general. When we say it it is reclamation. When straight people say it… there’s nothing to reclaim.”

“What type of ‘gruesome history’ are we talking about? You seem rather passionate about it,” and, Harry, your voice when you are passionate -- I would give anything to keep you talking. Even learning about boring Muggle prejudice history I do not care for.

“Oh… well, the term faggot comes from old French, Italian, and some forms of Latin -- and it’s generally agreed upon that it means ‘bundle of sticks.’ And what do you do with bundles of sticks? …You burn them. So when people began to light gay men on fire -- whether it be on the stake, or when wrapped in rugs -- people kind of… put two and two together.”

Boring? This is not boring. You make everything exciting. Who knew all it would take to radicalize Tom is being a simp? “I wonder why things like that are not common Pureblood knowledge,” says Tom. 

“Merlin was not queerphobic. In fact,” Harry says, in the tone of voice that says he’s said this a hundred times, “most sources find Merlin to be apathetic to gay and trans people as a whole. So most wizards were never homophobic. But they weren’t exactly informed on gay or trans issues -- they were neutral. That’s why, in Church of Merlin circles, you’ll never find anyone spitting homophobic slurs but you’ll never find anyone knowing why they were slurs in the first place, either.”

“Fascinating,” says Tom. To his own surprise, he is not lying. 

“So… yeah, unless you’re queer… try not to say homophobic slurs?”

“Queer,” Tom repeats. “That’s me, I think.” That’s what he’s decided, isn’t it? Queer feels right. Queer is right. (Maybe he just likes Harry, Harry, and only Harry -- but there’s not very well a sexuality for that, is there? So queer is right. Queer is close enough.)

“Oh. Oh!” Harry smiles brightly. “Well, alright. Thanks for trusting me enough to tell me. And I’m… sorry, for being such a spaz. I dunno. I get on edge and all defensive around LGBT issues.”

“It’s alright,” says Tom. “Your nerves are understandable. Even more so, given your recent family situation.”

“...Yeah.”

Tom is hesitant to say more, to share what might comfort Harry and might do the opposite. But he does it anyway. “I have only been an orphan for a year.”

Harry blinks at him. “...What happened?”

“My mother died in birth,” and she left me all alone and I will never forgive her. Never. “And my father, who was a Muggle, had only been with her because of a Love Potion. When she stopped giving it to him, he clammed up. Left me and her.”

“Yikes,” says Harry. 

“Mhm. My mother was a real bitch--”

“--Bitch? Tom, I believe the correct term is ‘rapist’--”

“--but my father was a coward.”

Harry frowns. “I don’t know about that. I mean,” he says quickly, “I don’t know the entire situation, of course, but if I was forced into a relationship, forced to sire a Heir… I would stick around for the child. But I am not everyone. I think it’s a really difficult situation to be put in, and it is wrong to put so much blame on your fa--”

“It is my mother’s fault,” says Tom. “I know it is my mother’s fault. That does not erase the fact that, because of him, I was raised without a family, in an orphanage, with no parental figure. I had to figure out my heritage single-handedly. It doesn’t matter that it is my mother’s fault that happened because that’s what happened. And my father could’ve stopped it. And he didn’t.”

Harry says softly, whether he agrees or disagrees, “Alright. What happened to him?”

“In my sixth year, I found out who he was and where he was and sent a letter. I received no response. I sent another, telling him I was to visit him soon.”

“And then you visited him?”
“Yes.”

“What happened then?”

“He… did not take kindly to me. He did not take kindly to magic.” Harry thinks of a howler, thinks of Pomfrey’s warning words, and decides he knows what that is like. “So he gave me his ring in exchange to never see him again.”

“Wow,” says Harry. “I’m sorry.”

Tom shrugs. “And then he died of a heart attack three weeks later. I think that hurt much more than his rejection. The idea that I would not even have a chance for reconciliation.” 

“Like me and my father,” whispers Harry. 

Tom says, “Yes, Harry. We are more alike than you’d think,” but it is a lie. Most of his story is a lie. Harry was not an orphan voluntarily but Tom?

Tom is a murderer. He killed his father and stole his ring so he would have access to their vault and nothing about that hurt.

Tom is a liar. But only when necessary. Only when it benefits him. And now, lying is beneficial. Harry’s cheeks have a little more color in them. That dullness in his eyes that had stuck around since the Dursley letter is lessened, too.

“I wonder what my father would’ve said to me later in life,” says Harry absently, “if he hadn’t been murdered.”

Tom feels his gut catch in his throat. Because how Harry’s parents died is not common knowledge. He’d punished his Knights for not being able to gather this piece of information, but it was not their fault. Tom assumed that Harry had only told his Melting Pot about his parent's deaths, if anyone at all.

So this here… it is new information. 

“Your father was murdered?” Tom asks, carefully, planned, trying not to break the thin ice on which he stands.

“My mother, too,” he says. He takes a sip out of his goblet. “And I know who did it. But they’re protected by religious freedom -- stupid fucking Ministry, am I right?”

“Why would religious freedom have anything to do with it?”

“My parents were murdered by a sector of the Merlin Church. Because of blasphemy, or whatever. It’s such bullshit.”

“Quite,” says Tom, absent. Tom has intuition strong. Something about James and Lily’s murders strikes him as odd. Something about it is such bullshit… but not in the way Harry’s thinking.

It is time to talk to a member of the Church of Merlin. It is time to talk to Draco Malfoy.