Pencil
“Professor Potter.”
There was a pause, a moment where the professor didn’t acknowledge that he’d been called by name, that there was someone else now in the office.
Tom tried not to smile, a sharp wave of excitement curling up the edges of his spine. He liked this game. Professor Potter liked to pretend that he didn’t know he was there, that he wasn’t watching for Tom’s movements with the corners of his eyes, but Tom always knew.
Professor Potter’s magic gave him away.
The sharp climb in temperature in the room, the anxious buzz of energy that curled around Potter’s stiff form. It was heady. It told no lies.
“Mr. Riddle.”
Potter still didn’t move from his place at his desk, attention fixed on the piece of parchment in front of him that they both knew Potter wasn’t reading. Not with Tom in the room.
“It’s been a long time.”
Then, in the time Tom took a step further into the room and shut the door behind him, Potter’s gaze finally flickered to him. Tom couldn’t fight the smile any longer, allowing himself this moment of self-indulgence to take in the disarray of Potter’s hair, the dishevelment of his robes, and the disaster around the room.
“What brings you here?”
It hadn’t changed since Tom graduated from Hogwarts, but that was no surprise. Potter had always been set in his ways, had always been an adventurous soul with no room to set things right.
Not like Tom.
One of Tom’s many talents involved just that.
Setting things right.
“I was in the area, and I thought it would be a brilliant idea to visit my favourite professor. Is that a problem, sir? Have I troubled you in some way?”
“No.”
The subtle tick in Potter’s jaw made it clear just how much of a problem it was, but instead of commenting on the visible displeasure on Potter’s face, Tom pulled back a chair and sat across from Potter at his desk. The sensation of Potter’s magic on his skin, from this short distance, was almost hot enough to singe.
“How wonderful to hear that, sir. You don’t understand just how…upsetting it would be if I came all this way only to be turned away immediately.”
How Potter managed to grow more tense, magic more sharp, in the span of a few seconds, Tom didn’t know. Tom took it all in, nevertheless. From the bitter tang of Potter’s unease and his rigid shoulders, Tom fought down the urge to pry, to dig and prod until he was cradling all that unrest in his own hands.
To swallow it all down and make it his, forever.
“…Right.” Potter’s response was casual, but that undercurrent of dislike was impossible to mask. Potter might be able to lie to others, might even be able to lie to himself, but not Tom. There wasn’t anything Potter did, said, that Tom didn’t inspect, didn’t pick at for nuance and subterfuge.
Tom grinned even wider, leaning forward on the chair to slide his hands over the professor’s desk. There was a stray pencil lying on the outer edge, and Tom’s fingers teased along it, watching Potter all the while.
What shall you do, professor?
Potter’s eyes did not flicker away from Tom’s face, but Tom could sense his desire to look at what Tom was doing in his eyes. It was incredible just what one learned from skating over the top of a person’s thoughts.
How a skilled professor such as Potter could leave his mind so unguarded, Tom couldn’t begin to understand, but he wouldn’t question it. Tom seized on the opportunity.
Why is he here? Potter’s voice was a loud cry, furious and frustrated, tinged with an edge of panic. He graduated. That was supposed to be the end of it.
Oh, that was just precious.
“Was there something you wanted to talk about?” Potter cleared his throat, pushing back into his chair until he was as far away as his seat allowed while simultaneously edging forward to place his hands on his desk in a poor attempt at nonchalance.
Potter,’s gaze had, not once, left Tom’s eyes.
Tom read him like a fascinating book.
What the fuck do I say to get rid of him? I can’t very much say I know you’re a dark wizard, and I am onto you? That would go over swimmingly. What would Dumbledore say? Fuck.
Tom’s breath caught, his fingers seizing the pencil in his hand to stop himself from reacting. Harry’s expression didn’t flicker.
Tom did not expect this.
No, he most definitely did not expect for Potter of all people to suspect him.
It wasn’t often that he…miscalculated.
“…yes, I do believe I do.”
Tom had suspected his professor had been interested in him in a manner that was beyond what a professor should, having come to such a conclusion when he’d caught the man staring at Tom through most of lessons, often vying for Tom’s attention. The hostility, Tom had assumed, had much to do with his fear of being caught red-handed with inappropriate thoughts of his student, but this—
Tom laughed, ignoring the bewildered look that flickered in Potter’s eyes, before Tom was on his feet, pencil still in hand.
“Pardon my boldness, professor, but I’ve come to the conclusion that you don’t like me as much as I do you.”
Potter froze, expression like a deer in the headlights, before forcing a smile on his lips that no one—not even the imbecile that was Slughorn—could find convincing.
“It’s not that I don’t like you—“ Potter started, but Tom didn’t let him finish.
Within a span of a few seconds, Tom had seized the collar of Potter’s shirt and dragged him over the desk onto his back, dropping files and inkwells as he did, before pushing the tip of his pencil into Potter’s pulse point at his neck.
Potter’s face had broken, genuine fear swimming in his eyes that Tom wondered how he could have misinterpreted that fear with worry of censure, with the fear of being sacked for his sexual preferences and interest in his students.
It was—
Tom’s heart was racing, his blood singing in his veins.
Potter’s fear was delicious, far more intoxicating than Tom could have ever anticipated.
More.
Tom dug the pencil deeper into Potter’s neck without realising, devouring every glimmer, every shade of fear and fury that danced beneath Potter’s eyes.
Don’t panic, Harry. Just grab your wand and—
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Potter swallowed hard when Tom leaned in closer, and Tom’s insides curled with pure delight at the way Potter shrank into his desk to get away from Tom’s growing proximity.
“Sir,” Tom added at the end, laughing with delight when Potter’s face flickered through several different shades of red, white, and purple before settling on white. “I could kill you, right now, if I chose—“
Tom pushed the pencil deeper in emphasis, drinking in the pained twist of Potter’s lips as droplets of red began to bead where the pencil end broke the skin. Tom wanted to swipe his fingers through the red, to bring it to his lips and taste.
He wondered if it would be as intoxicating as the terror in the man’s eyes.
“—long before you would even think to draw your wand, so think it through carefully.”
Potter didn’t move for some time, as if all the life had been drained out of him and he were nothing more than the hard shell of a corpse. Tom didn’t let up, even when blood began to drip in a steady manner, as the droplets rolled over the side of Potter’s neck into the desk.
Tom wanted to see more, do more. That cruel and curious thing inside him was growing more difficult to contain.
“Do you understand?” Tom repeated, and then—
With a bitter, mutinous expression, Potter sank into the desk in spite of the pencil biting into his neck. It wasn’t as submissive as Tom would have preferred, would have relished, but it would do.
For now.
“…Fine.”
Tom relaxed at that, but didn’t move to release Potter. It went without saying that Potter, as the youngest professor to grace Hogwarts’ halls, wasn’t someone to take lightly. Defence Against the Dark Arts was his specialty, his craft. He was an expert duelist, and whom Tom had learned a sizeable amount from.
He was a brilliant man. It would be a shame if Tom had to kill him.
“Now then, tell me, Harry—“
The name was like chocolate on his tongue, decadent and rich, delighting in how every syllable rolled off his tongue. The flicker of unease in Harry’s face made it all the sweeter, more indulgent. The curl of Harry’s hands balling into fists, of his neck muscles straining and twitching on the desk, only added to the rush of excitement in Tom’s veins, to the urge to push that pencil deeper into his neck and see just what other expressions Harry might give him.
To think, Tom had intended to seduce him, to splay him over this desk in an entirely different fashion before he’d stumbled on something much more interesting. To think that Harry, without even knowing it, had unwittingly seduced him.
Tom could have laughed.
No matter.
“Just what is it that you know about dark wizards?”
He’d make do.