Our Carnival of Dreams

Aunt Petunia always berated Harry for the freakish accidents he caused. Unnatural, she would call both him and them. Abnormal.

Whenever he wished very, very hard, and made objects fly, flowers bloom, items change colour, or anything else thought to be impossible, she would shriek at him and go off into long angry rants, all describing in nauseating detail how aberrant his existence was, that he should strain his mind and suppress all those occurrences if he wanted to keep living in Privet Drive...

She would remember it all: a teacher’s blue wig, Harry’s hair with a mind of it’s own, weeds plucking themselves out, leftovers vanishing from the plates before the steadily trickling from the tap water could touch them-

All of it paled in comparison to a naked boy snoring softly next to him.

Harry propped up on his elbows to observe him better, attentive of the low ceiling in his tiny cupboard. His head had fallen victim of quite a few bumps from it in his lifetime.

The boy looked his age, maybe a year or two older, but no more. Taller than Harry, that’s for sure, with pitch black hair and very pale skin, so pasty it shone in the darkness of the cupboard, illuminated by the dim light of an old wall sconce merely inches away from Harry’s head. The boy’s eyes were closed, so the eye colour remained a mystery, but the lashes and eyebrows were of the same shade as the shiny hair. Also, his features held this promise of greater beauty that would come with age, something almost aristocratic in appearance, like a trait of nobles in those pseudo-historical soap operas Aunt Petunia watched after a long, tiring day of phoning friends and yelling at Harry.

Should I wake him up? That was the first question. And then... And what is he doing here, anyway?

Well, if Harry woke him up, he would surely know, right?

Harry armed himself with courage, taking a deep breath, and leaned forward to hesitantly tap the boy on the shoulder with a single finger.

“Hey, wake up! You hear me? Wake up!” he urged softly, with a shifty glance in the direction of the door. What would his Aunt and Uncle say? Nothing good, that’s for certain. He had to be careful. As silent as a mouse, as a grave, even.

The boy stirred, and his eyelashes fluttered like a butterfly’s wings, long and pretty, but after shifting lazily, he just settled comfortably with his head on Harry’s knees. A vein pulsed on Harry’s small, scrunched up forehead when his urgings went ignored. The gall! Harry didn’t have a clock or a wristwatch to follow the time, so who knew if it was  morning already and if in a mere second he would hear Aunt Petunia banging on the door, screeching at him to make breakfast, and Vernon’s loud footsteps echoing to the loo, and Dudley stampeding to the kitchen-

“You are hurting me, nitwit,” an irritated hiss shattered Harry’s introspection. The boy looked down only to freeze under the beam of annoyance projected by claret eyes. That mysterious bloke wasn’t a jolly chap, that’s for sure.

“Who are you?” Harry blurted, shaking the other’s shoulder to push him to answer faster. In reply he got a painful, strong shove which made him wince and rub the abused area of flesh that took the brunt, all the while glaring accusingly at the irate boy whose glowers speared him with razor-sharp intensity.

“Imbecile,” the claret-eyed boy spat and, after acknowledging his naked state as if it were normalcy with a fleeting glance down, assumed a straight-backed, royal position smack in the middle of the cupboard, sitting like a king about to bestow a greatest gift with his explanation. “I have been with you for your entire pitiful existence, and you don’t even have the decency of recognition.”

Harry was getting scared. And alarmed. If he lounged for the door now, would the stranger catch him in time? Because, surely, this loon was dangerous. Being with Harry all his lifetime? Ha, as if. Always alone, always lonely – that was the motto enforced on Harry by his dear, loving family.

“I’m not daft,” Harry retorted angrily and put his arms over his chest, huffing. He ignored a snort that accompanied his statement. “I’d have noticed something. I mean, you can’t miss a person!”

“You apparently did,” the stranger snapped in reply. He had a weird, too smooth voice, unnaturally cultured for someone so young, and it showed even when he was snapping and hurling insults. “My name is Tom Riddle.”

“Oh, we are already getting somewhere,” Harry muttered dryly, head hung low, before raising his eyes to meet Riddle’s. “I was getting tired of calling you ‘boy’ in my mind. Reminded me too much of Uncle Vernon.”

“This filthy muggle must learn to keep his hands to himself,” Riddle’s deadly whisper reverberated across the room.

“Muggle?” Harry latched onto the foreign word. “Ah, you meant ‘mugger’! Well, he does those drill thingies, but sometimes he talks about stealing money from this or that company or person, and he likes beating up people, just like Dudley, so I guess he can be called ‘mugger’, too.”

Riddle shot him a derisive look and grimaced, as if Harry’s very presence grated on his nerves and he couldn’t conceive of being near this idiocy embodied.

“I meant what I said,” he bit out, and his teeth clanked when he closed his mouth. The glower on his handsome face with high cheekbones and defined, manly lips intensified and shone like a killing beam.

Harry glanced at him dubiously but kept his mouth shut for once, remembering that they were a hair’s breadth away from the Dursleys.

“Whatever, Riddle.” He creased his forehead in thought and leaned in, his nose an inch away from Riddle’s, so close he could see the tint of black in the burgundy of the other boy’s eyes. “Why are you here? How? And why me? I don’t know anything about you! And what do you mean by ‘been here with you your entire life’? It can’t be true unless you are barking mad, and, yeah, you look kind of batty but-“

“Silence!” The hiss, so powerful, so resonant, raised the tiny hairs on the back of Harry’s neck, at the same time as emerald-green eyes widened in awed shock at the hidden power behind a mere set of syllables and the menacing malice resurfacing on Riddle’s face. Dangerous. This boy was dangerous.

As abruptly as it came, the power settled. It was now merely lying about like a placid pet. Yet, the threat was still there, still prominent, and now Harry’s idle curiosity and wariness gave way to the prickling of true fear.

His face a serene mask, Riddle sighed peacefully only to swap this calm demeanour for the earlier annoyed one in a second.

“I don’t know,” he snapped and scowled, as if that lack of knowledge bothered him greatly, as if it were the first such occurrence in his entire lifetime and he didn’t know how to cope.

Harry’s eyebrows rose and in a bout of childish eagerness clashing with petulance, forgot all about the earlier terror and flung himself at Riddle, clinging to his arms.

“Tell me!” he shouted angrily and drove his nail, very long because his Aunt never bothered to cut them like she did Dudley’s, deep into Riddle’s skin, almost drawing blood, and watched with gleeful enjoyment that left himself gobsmacked the flicker of shock mixed with pain on Riddle’s face. “I have a right to know, don’t I? It’s in my bedroom you’ve turned up out of the blue-“

“Bedroom?” Riddle sneered and swept the cupboard, the cobwebs with colonies of spiders, the greying bed sheets, the meagre clothes strewn across the floor in tiny heaps, the school notebooks filled with chicken scrawl piled together in a precarious tower, the tin soldiers without limbs, and plush toys without eyes, and coloured cubes, all old and broken, with an unimpressed look. “This hole doesn’t deserve the title, I daresay.”

“This is where I live! Don’t call it-” Harry bellowed and nothing would have kept him from launching into an attack on the arrogantly sneering boy, except for-

“What is this noise, boy?” The footsteps, thunderous and dreadful, boomed over them. Harry froze, with his hand tearing at Riddle’s hair, before they traded looks – Tom’s full of anger and accusation, and Harry’s filled with panic. “Good folk’s trying to sleep ‘ere!”

“Vernon, dear, let me deal with it,” followed Aunt Petunia’s grating voice as she hurried after her husband. Harry face-palmed. “Go back to sleep, you have work in three hours-“

“No, pet, we’ve allowed the freak to do what he wants for far too long! What do I always tell you? We need to stomp this nonsense out of him before-“

But Harry wasn’t listening. His eyes were trained on Riddle, Riddle, who had suddenly gone very still and white, and whose claret eyes burst into brilliant red, radiant with hatred or fury, skewering the door with a powerful glare.

In a second though, Harry scowled and pulled Riddle closer to whisper into his ear, “What now, genius? Are you going to tell them ‘I don’t know’, too?” The viciousness in his own voice was unfamiliar for Harry, but the prat deserved it.

Riddle pushed Harry away and grabbed a corner of Harry’s thin quilt with fraying edges to cover himself.

“Hush,” he hissed tetchily and tied the corners of the quilt around his waist in a semblance of a long skirt. “Don’t worry, Potter.” He tossed Harry a meaningful look, with darkness lurking underneath the swirls of ruby. “I know what those abominations have been doing to us- you all these years. Rest assured, they won’t go unpunished. They will pay for every single hit and insult they have dealt throughout ages!”

Harry paled. He had never let on his inner anguish at the Dursleys’ derision, nor had he spilt information of the abuse they showered him with. Not even to the teachers or the nurses or the random neighbours. He struggled through tiredness and pain, keeping up the facade of strength and health, all because he was afraid that if Dursley got themselves jailed for their treatment of him, he would either be saddled with another set of indifferent relatives or shipped to some orphanage in the middle of nowhere.

The Dursleys were a known threat. Some orphanage was not.

He had to ensure that Riddle’s mouth was sealed.

When Riddle turned away, fixing his stare on the door, the footsteps mere feet away, Harry gasped and snatched the boy’s arm, whispering hastily, “How? How do you know all this? Tell me! I’ve never beeped a word about the stuff they do to me, so how-“

“FREAK!” And the light switch clicked, and the door burst open, and Harry could only stare in mounting horror, numbed and still and white as bone, as the stout form of his uncle loomed in the doorway, with Aunt Petunia’s bony neck and face emerging just behind the man’s shoulder.

A second could last a lifetime – Harry was sure of that now.

He peered up at the adults from beneath his fluffy eyelashes, taking in their stiffening shoulders, the stricken expression splayed across Aunt Petunia’s face, the splotches of purple rage on Uncle Vernon’s beefy cheeks, his fingers balled into fists, and shuddered. He seemed to shrink, even as he felt Riddle’s recriminating gaze.

Harry feared them. He couldn’t suppress this terror, especially not now, when both adults looked about to strangle him.

“Um... Uncle Vernon?” Harry asked timidly with a blink as he raised his held out his hands in a gesture of peace and continued hurriedly, “I’m not sure what’s going on, too, but we can sit down and talk it out and-“

“BOY!” Harry flinched at the sound and suppressed the want to cover his ears. “I won’t stand for this funny business! Yesterday your headmaster summons us about some freakish roof-hopping, today it’s some boy in the cupboard, what’s tomorrow? Your blowing up the house?”

“No! It’s- I swear I haven’t done anything!” Harry cried out desperately, more at his aunt than uncle, for surely she would understand, she wouldn’t punish him, right? Right? “Not this time! Please, you have to hear me out! You have to-“

Uncle Vernon advance forward and his chins wobbled menacingly as he raised his hand to strike. “I’m done with you, boy. If you don’t drive it out this second, I’ll-“

“You will do nothing,” Riddle’s voice cut through the man’s rant like a blade, unyielding and sharp. Everyone turned to look at him, Vernon with his hand still up in the air, never brought down.

“What?”

“It’s ‘excuse me’,” Riddle drawled, standing up with a smirk on his pale face. And Harry had to admire him: clad in a travesty of clothes, quite confused and, now that Harry looked into it, tired and strained, Riddle was still a sight to behold in all his imperious glory. “And you will not harm either of us. Never again.”

When a dangerous shade of puce threatened to stay on the man’s face forever, he croaked out, “I will do what I want with you freaks, God knows you don’t deserve anything better. This nonsense has to be plugged and done with! You hear me?”

“I tire of this useless discourse,” Tom interrupted and flashed a glance at Harry before setting it on Uncle Vernon. Harry just watched, gobsmacked and transfixed. “I am not Potter. I will not stand for this. Do you perhaps need an incentive to see things my way?”

Lately, Harry would wonder what would have happened if he stopped that burst of half-tired, but so lively, so happily singing magic, which filled up the space and air and thrummed under his skin and Tom’s, possessing a melody as spirited as the babble of a river creek. It was enchanting. It was deceptive.

So lulled into puzzled smiling Harry was that he missed the second Tom’s eyes flashed and lips tightened into a thin line, that his Aunt’s shriek was a hummer to his hearing, that the sight that greeted his vision, unfocused in the moments of introspection and unriddling his surprising emotions, mortified him when he looked up.

Uncle Vernon seemed peachy – at first.

When Harry’s eyes centred on the man’s skin, his eyesight traced slowly emerging lines which crawled to the surface with all the calmness of an approaching predator – veins and arteries, he heard those were called. He couldn’t believe how many of them Uncle Vernon’s body held: the previously evenly tanned skin was now nothing but a canvas of abstract painting with black lines crossing each other and creating a macabre design which made no sense but fascinated with its bizarreness.

“Vernon!” Aunt Petunia’s voice... It had never sounded so begging. So pleading. So human.

Like mine is when I ask them to stop, and they never do, and there’s all this pain I have to feel, and they hurt me, more and more, and-

Harry rejected this part of his mind.

“Please, Vernon, hold on, I’ll do something! Stay here, dear, I’m calling the ambulance-“

“It will not help,” Tom cut her off before the woman could rush to the phone and dial the number. Harry chanced a glance at him.

Claret eyes were fixed on him, never moving away, as if Harry was a puzzle and his reactions and movements and facial expressions, for once, were more important than those of the Dursleys or anyone else. Tom’s face was blank, blank like one of the slates Harry drew on when he managed to sneak into Dudley’s room and filch a few, along with some crayons or, if he was really, really lucky, aquarelle paints.

Flattering. Gauging. Calculating. Tom’s gaze was all those things-

And there was a person dying.

“What do you mean with this, boy?” Aunt Petunia questioned sharply, drawing in a breath and advancing towards the cupboard. She wouldn’t be able to enter, as Harry was well aware after having tested it a few times, but with her eyes deranged and wide, hair frizzled, and bony hands clenched into fists, she made a horrifying picture. He scrambled away. “If I find out this is your doing, boy-“

“It is,” Tom interjected again. He loved doing that, Harry noticed. The smirk on his face spoke volumes. “And if you so much as raise a fist against one of us... Well, there are plenty of other people roving this earth, so you can find yourself another husband. No harm done here-“

“That man told me-” Aunt Petunia pursed her lips and Harry thought her expression and that special way her fists shook reminded him of the way she looked like before hitting him with a pan – lightly, of course. They couldn’t have rumours about child abuse running around, as Harry’s Uncle had once said. “-that you are harmless.” Oh. She’s addressing me. Harry blinked.

“That’s why we have agreed to this madness at all. To stamp all this nonsense out of you and give you a chance to be a normal person, too – that was a secondary goal. To make you different from her.” Her upper lip curled up in loathing. Harry wondered whom his Aunt was blathering on about. And how much you could resent a person to have a reaction like this. “We thought we could shape you into a citizen of worth, someone with a regular job in a shop or a cafe, after you’ve finished Stonewall High, of course. “

Her eyes hardened and she spat, and for Harry every word burned like acid.

“If we had known of this when we took you-“ She waved a hand at her husband, who stood as if petrified, veins and arteries still black and protruding, but not attempting to break the skin anymore, and whose eyes threatened to crawl out of the sockets.

Aunt Petunia’s voice shook. Tom smiled. Harry gulped.

“-if we had known of this, I swear I would have taken you straight to the orphanage, for all the freakish ‘wards’ and ‘protection’ and ‘blood’ that old foul man was droning on about in his letter!”

“Old man?” Tom asked sharply, standing up. “I want to talk to him. He is the one responsible for our- Potter’s placement here, correct?”

Petunia paused and tormented her lower lip, obviously torn between choices.

Harry couldn’t understand what was there to choose: her husband’s life was on the stake! However much he detested his Uncle sometimes, however much he shed bitter, lonely tears, he didn’t want a person to die in front of him. He wouldn’t let Tom!

But Tom is a dangerous loon. What can you do to him? his mind whispered, and Harry scowled.

I’m made of strong stuff. I’ll save Uncle Vernon, and Aunt Petunia, and Dudley, even though the git is still upstairs and has no reason at all to be up now... And then they’ll be grateful to me. They’ll love me. Dudley will treat me like a brother!

The lives of those triumphant thoughts broke off seconds later, when Tom’s sharp nails pressed into the skin of Harry’s arm.

“Don’t even think about it,” he warned in an enraged hiss. “Believe me, your interruption will make everything only worse. I will handle this and, if everything goes without your stupidity thrown in the mix, in a week we will have better lives.” He paused before biting out, “Or I will, at least. Afterwards, you can go wherever you want and do whatever you wish.”

“You look ready to drop dead in a moment,” Harry mumbled. It was indeed true: obviously, holding Uncle Vernon under this weird petrifying thing took its toll and wasn’t very healthy, because the gleam in Tom’s eyes was sick, his skin acquired a pallor that rivalled marble-white, tremors ran down his body-

Did he care?

Aunt Petunia laughed, and Harry shuddered. It was nasty, the laugh. Even worse than the ones she shared with the wives of Uncle Vernon’s business partners when they gathered in the living room to discuss those batty womanly things Harry had never cared for and had never been allowed to hear anyway.

“Believe me, boy, if I manage to contact him we need never see each other again. At all,” she promised. Her eyes drilled into them, but her hand was soothingly running up and down Vernon’s arm, disregarding the disgusting lines of black, tender and gentle.

Tom curtly nodded.

“Good. If you do, I will cancel the spell. For now, I am allowing him to move, but not within a certain distance of us. If he dares break this boundary...”

“Fine,” she grit out and marched to the kitchen.