May 1998
A great slithering beast, one made of dark cold blues and greens, coiled its way in the firelight about his chair and trapped his body inside, raising its head until its tongue flicked against his ear like a leaf caught in a stray wind, "Speaker."
Tom ignored her, instead flipping a page in his book, allowing his eyes to trace faded dark lines of ink in the firelight of his small and spartan apartment, pale fingers idly circling the frail corner of the next page until it too would be turned.
Nagini's body wound tighter, the armchair groaning and beginning to buckle beneath the strength of her muscles, and in her voice, impatience grew, "Speaker."
"I am thinking," Tom replied distantly, mind and eyes still locked onto the yellowing pages. There was no word for reading in parseltongue, not truly, at best when one was not hunting, sleeping, mating, defending, resting, or attacking one was taking up the strange pastime of contemplation.
A trait considered unnatural and eccentric in a serpent when not done in the pursuit of flesh or young.
"You are staring at the remains of trees again," Nagini hissed in impatience, always jealous of Tom's collection of dead trees. She then wound her head about his neck like a noose, moving herself so that she was looking Tom straight in the eyes as her heavy body coiled and tightened around his chest, she said, "Speaker, you are getting old."
Tom frowned, watching his curved and grotesque reflection in her great golden eyes, a pale young man with dark hair and eyes that almost seemed to glow no matter the lighting, and noted rather wryly, "I haven't been getting old in more summers than you have existed."
His face, in the mirror, still resembled that of a young man no matter the fact that his seventieth birthday had come and gone. That was the gift, the purpose in fact, of the immortality Tom had spent so much of his youth chasing. Tom would never face age again the way a mortal man would.
Nagini flicked her tongue in dismissal, and if her eyes could narrow, if she had the eyelids to pull off such a human expression, he imagined she'd be doing so now as she moved her head closer to his, "Yes, you cling to the skin you should have shed ages ago, but no matter your skin your eyes are old."
No, his eyes were odd. Where once, years and years ago, they had been a pale, clear, and arresting blue they had since darkened and brightened all at once into a glowing crimson, as if there were muggle traffic lights glowing from behind his eyes. In truth, Tom imagined that they were painted by the blood of his torn soul, stuffed into diaries, lockets, cups, diadems, rings, all those ancient trinkets he had stored himself in, and that their screaming, pain, and sacrifice had found their own way to leave some visible reminder on his skin.
A warning to all those who dared to cross his path.
An unheeded one, for the most part. Though Tom was the odd combination of youth and intimidation, his strange appearance had also garnered him respect. Not only from the cosmetic potions and charms industry but also from within the ministry itself, a silent mark or else reminder that Tom Riddle was on the level of Dumbledore or perhaps even greater than that, no matter his family background.
Still, he sometimes wondered if it was those same eyes, burning so bright out at anyone who looked at him, that had kept him so long from the top of the government when he had finally returned to England from abroad.
"You are not listening again!" Nagini hissed, rearing back as if in affront, leaving Tom to give her a rather dull stare as if to convey that his full attention was not a gift often given and certainly not something she was entitled to.
There were times that he swore the snake thought she was his bloody mother.
"You weren't going in for the kill," which was about as close to a proverb that a snake could get, translating roughly to failing to make a point, only far more insulting and emasculating.
Predictably Nagini's affronted look became an affronted, wordless, hiss, then closing the gap between her face and his once again she said, "You are old and alone and without hatchlings. Proud and beautiful you might be, speaker, but that will mean nothing when winter collects your shed skins and bones and the light of your eyes goes out like the sun."
"That is the price I paid," Tom said without inflection, with barely a thought at all, "I shed my death in place of my skin so that no winter will ever claim me."
Nagini seemed rather put out by that, enough to be silent and loosen for a few moments, giving Tom the chance to look down at his book. However, apparently, he moved too soon as Nagini said, no, really stated, "You are lonely."
He opened his mouth to disagree, to note that it had been seventy years and he'd never had nor needed companionship, and even owning a giant bothersome snake was more grating than it was in anyway gratifying even if she did fill the deafening silence.
"You are old and lonely and believe yourself so above a mate that you will end your legacy here and deny me hatchlings!"
Oh lord, Tom thought to himself as it all came together in his head, and if Nagini wasn't currently doing her best to either smother or suffocate him then he'd put his head into his hands and try to pretend that this wasn't happening.
"That human down the street has a hatchling now. It toddles on two legs now instead of squirming and wriggling and its eyes are so big and so blue, Speaker," Nagini said, tightening further around him, to the point where if he was a muggle he might truly be in danger of breaking ribs or suffocating.
"My hatchlings are grown, grown and hatched far from this dark island you took me too, and you seem unnaturally uninclined to have hatchlings at all!" she accused, as if this was some grand failing on Tom Riddle's part to put a halt to the growing of the family tree.
She didn't seem to appreciate the effort he'd put into that, it wasn't easy committing familicide and framing your maternal uncle. Well, no, that was a lie, it had been almost entirely too easy. So easy that he'd just stood there after, in the wake of their corpses laughing, wondering if it was all a joke, that murder could be easier than cutting butter with a hot knife.
More, he wasn't quite sure she'd ever truly grasped the state of his immortality, that continuing his family line was pointless, he would outlive whatever hypothetical children he might have.
So, all Tom did was smile, a cheerful pleasant expression reserved for Slughorn, Fudge, and all their ilk, and sweetly he said, "Well, that's just too bad for you, isn't it?"
Then, without further ado, he wandlessly banished Nagini straight into the wall where she writhed and hissed and cursed him, his mother, and the unborn progeny he refused to have, and that she hoped a hawk ate each and every child he'd never have even as she slithered out of the room and out of view.
In English he sighed and said to himself, the empty fireplace, and his book, "I should never have gotten a snake."
There were some days that Tom wished that he had pursued his reckless, youthful, and frankly idiotic dream of resorting to guerilla warfare and terrorism in order to brand the country in his own divine image.
Oh, it wasn't every day, the sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle he had once been had grown up rather quickly and despite his youthful appearance he just didn't have the energy or tolerance to put up with all the logistics needed. When he'd sat down and thought about the money, the grimoires, the wining and dining and wooing, after all that embarrassing effort to get Hufflepuff's cup and Slytherin's locket from that wretched old hag Hepzibah Smith, it'd just seemed too exhausting and humiliating to be worth it.
A store clerk, he had debased himself into being an antique dealer's store clerk, surely there had to be a limit to how low he was willing to sink. The idea of having to impersonate Charles Manson with the heirs of noble and ancient houses appeared to be his limit.
Let England rot, let them eat themselves alive, the then twenty something year old Tom Riddle had thought to himself as he'd packed all his things, his horcruxes, his whole life in his pack to leave for the continent and further than that. Lock Voldemort inside a box and do it the bloody old-fashioned way if he was so inclined.
And so here he was, doing it the old-fashioned way, undersecretary to a man decades younger than himself, Cornelius Fudge, who just might be more of a doddering idiot than dear old Professor Horace Slughorn.
The difference, of course, being that Slughorn's weakness to flattery and ever pressing need to network had been to Tom's favor at the time. Fudge's weaknesses, well, they just tended to irritate him.
"Tom, there's a lad," Fudge said as he looked at himself in a mirror, preening for an upcoming press conference on the rights of house elves, pushed through by some nattering know it all muggleborn brat with Dumbledore's ear, Hermione Granger, who had only just graduated from Hogwarts and thought herself a lawyer and abolitionist, "How do I look?"
Fudge frequently forgot Tom's true age, liking to call him lad, or on horrific occasions even son. However, that said, Tom was a very private man and as a result most that passed in and out of his life forgot his true age when they looked at his face. Only those who had been there on the outskirts the whole time, Dumbledore, McGonagall, Hagrid, looked at him with wariness and a bit of fear in their eyes as they recognized that only something dark and unnatural could make him look the way he did.
"Marvelous, sir," Tom said shortly even while he thought to himself, as he thought nearly every day, that he could simply kill this man. Fudge was a politician at its finest, there was nothing charismatic about him, no true convictions, but he told people what they wanted to hear and when he pandered he pandered with a talent that was almost admirable if it weren't so very sad.
This had gained him office of the minister of magic, a post so very many failed to ever reach.
And Tom, Tom was second in command, in position to gain the title should anything… unfortunate happen to the minister. However, Tom thought to himself as he watched the man straighten his robes, look at himself this way and that in the mirror as he rambled about kids these days and the strange ideas they got in their heads like freeing house elves of all things, that Tom had aimed for undersecretary for a reason.
The true work of the ministry, all the ins and outs, all its functions fell to the undersecretary. The minister of magic, was the face of the government, taking blame as it fell apart but mostly dictating actions onto others, others, of course, namely being Tom who answered to only the minister himself.
It was thus Tom Riddle who held the power, under this minister as well as the next, the next, and even the next under that should Tom play his hand carefully. And with the minister's blessing, with a few whispered words in the man's ear, Tom had free reign to subtly shift the bureaucracy to his own design.
And if no one had realized before Tom how rife a position like undersecretary was for abuse, well, that was hardly Tom's problem was it?
"I mean, Tom, you just graduated from Hogwarts, right?" Fudge asked, looking at him closely, clearly expecting the response to be a hearty 'yes' rather than a 'class of 1945, sir', "You didn't go around talking about the rights of house elves, did you?"
Tom felt a wry smile growing on his lips, "I'm afraid, sir, that at the time I was more preoccupied by my own rights."
At first Fudge just blinked at him as if he had no idea what Tom meant, and then his mouth formed into a comical and pitying 'oh'.
"Oh, right, Riddle," he said, pausing meaningfully on Tom's muggle last name with all the subtlety of a nundu tearing into the corpse of a wildebeest, "That must have been hard for you."
"We all have our disadvantages and privileges," Tom said casually, as if discussing the weather rather than the bitterness of his schooldays as well as his own dark ambition that had festered inside of him, "And whatever I lacked in blood I more than made up in ambition and raw intelligence."
Fudge laughed, his head thrown back, and slapping Tom on his shoulders as if they were brothers or friends, "Well said, lad!"
Tom attempted to hide his grimace behind a dutifully polite smile. He spent so much of his time smiling, this forced false ridiculous smile he'd worn all his life, he wondered if he even knew how to convey any true emotion anymore.
Predictably, when Granger appeared on the stage with a look of righteousness not to be questioned and curly hair not to be contained and rambled on about house elves and somehow connecting it to the plight of muggleborns and other dark creatures and all that was wrong with the world, Tom loathed every inch of her and once again wondered why he hadn't just burned the goddamned country to the ground when he had the chance.
"I am ill!" Nagini hissed in his ear, writhing on top of him as they walked down the street on one of Tom's few days off, "I am ill and dying, Speaker!"
"You are neither," Tom hissed back, his lips covered beneath an issue of the daily prophet and a more than healthy notice-me-not shrouded around him to guide people's eyes away from a man walking through Diagon Alley with a giant snake thrown over his shoulders like a truly hideous boa.
Although, given wizarding Britain's truly hideous taste in fashion, it really wasn't fair that Tom would be the one sticking out like a sore thumb.
"I am ill, dying, and you are as cruel as a hawk eyeing a mother's precious eggs!" Nagini cried out, slumping on him further, indeed without the energy to nag at him the way she normally would in this circumstance.
Which, on returning home and finding her slumped on the floor by the fire, barely lifting her head to look at him, had been concerning enough that Tom had poured through floo directories searching for the address to some sort of magical veterinarian.
The trouble was, despite all of Newt Scamander's work in the field, magical creatures were still mostly seen as things to be bred or else better off dead. Nagini, being a rare breed of magical snake, despite the use of her venom did not fall on the same sort of list as farmed dragons. So, it'd taken a few hours, a few desperate searches through every newspaper advertisement the could find, that he'd landed on a small ad in the hideous tabloid the Quibbler, right between the article on something called nargles and a conspiracy about Fudge's rancid toenail rot.
And there, a newly opened magical veterinary practice run by one Harry Potter, which Tom supposed had to be better than nothing at all.
"It is as if you don't even care!" Nagini whined, although it really came out more as a moaning hiss than anything else, and he hoped that was the illness in question talking. Because if Nagini thought he would do this, for anyone human even, then she truly was an entirely deluded and entitled overgrown pest.
Finally, they reached the address. Or, Tom double checked what he'd written before looking up again, he thought he had. The place was right on the edge of Knockturn Alley, just when rent started becoming ever so slightly cheaper. It had a rundown sort of look to it, but with signs of recent renovations and paint jobs, likely by whoever this poor Harry Potter was.
However, where a normal business owner might simply add a few coats of paint in some neutral color, Harry Potter appeared to share a taste for the flamboyant with Albus Dumbledore. The window sills, filled with sunflowers and glowing bluebells, were painted a fluorescent flamingo pink that shifted into magenta and back again. The door, a bright lime green to match. Then on the face of the building itself a parade of smiling flowers, rainbows, and all varieties of grinning magical creatures pranced across in an incessant blinding parade.
And Tom was left with the distinct impression that this Harry Potter was actually a five-year-old girl.
"Oh, dear god," Tom said to himself as he realized that yes, he really was going to have to step inside this place, and that there was always the one in a million chance that whatever this was, it was bloody contagious.
Nagini did not know how much she would ever owe him for this.
With a deep breath, as if to avoid breathing in the toxins, Tom opened the door and stepped inside as a small tinkling charm announced his presence. The waiting room was an equally hideous yellow to match the equally hideous exterior, filled with plush armchairs and floating lamps, and there at a hideously orange desk crammed with more knickknacks than Tom could even count, was a blonde young woman Tom assumed was the receptionist.
Only, moving closer, he noted that the magazine she was reading was not only the latest edition of the Quibbler, but was also upside down. More, she had decided that clearly the best place for her wand was behind her ear like muggle pen. Around her neck was a string of muggle bottle caps complimented by a pair of radishes dangling from her ears. Added to all of this was a truly overwhelming amount of bright blue scarves and shawls and bright yellow socks on the feet she had propped up onto the desk while she read.
As if sensing him she looked over, eyes an odd dazed blue that seemed to hover near his ears rather than make direct eye contact, a sign of either extreme paranoia against mind reading or else lunacy, "Oh, hello, are you here to see Harry then?"
Tom dearly wanted to say no, but a glance at Nagini, now drooping further, convinced him otherwise, "Unfortunately, yes."
The girl dropped her feet down from the desk and clapped in delight, "Oh, excellent, Harry's very good!"
"God, I hope so," Tom said, even if this was for free, by even entering this place he felt as if he had somehow carved off yet another half of his soul.
The girl bounced out of her seat, practically danced to a doorway into the rest of the practice, calling out, "Harry, you've got a customer with a giant snake! And I think he might be a dragon in mortal disguise!"
She then grinned back at him, prancing to hold out her hand towards him, "Harry's coming, I'm Luna, by the way, Luna Lovegood."
Lovegood, he knew that name, goddammit where did he know that name? He took her hand, frail and small and dotted with freckles into his own, shaking it politely, "Tom Riddle."
"Oh, you're the undersecretary!" Luna said, eyes widening with delight, "Daddy's written lots of articles about you."
And suddenly it all came together, that name that lined every publication of the Quibbler since it had first appeared on the market as the only alternative to Lucius Malfoy's propaganda machine, the Daily Prophet, "Ah, Xenophilus Lovegood's daughter."
"Oh, you know him, he'll be so pleased! The ministry has never let him have an actual interview before, not like the Prophet. He never said you were only wearing a human body though," she said as she looked at him, torn between delight and apology, "He never would have written any of those awful things about you and the minister."
"You know," Tom said with something of a wry smile, "I hadn't even noticed."
And neither had anyone else either, the fact that Tom even had the Quibbler spoke mostly of his wanting to spite the Wizengamot and all of Malfoy's ilk, and if making a statement meant buying the Quibbler then by god he'd bloody well subscribe to it.
"And I am human," Tom then insisted, pointing to his own glowing eyes with two fingers, "The eyes are… a symptom of a condition."
"Oh, is it the toenail rot?" Luna asked, peering closer into his eyes as if she could see Cornelius Fudge's athlete's foot in his pupils, "We had no idea it had spread so far, and to eyes of all places, we will have to write about this in the next issue."
"No, no, it has nothing to do with the minister's…" Tom trailed off, allowing the cheerfully grinning Luna to finish the sentence for him.
"Toenail rot."
"Right," Tom said with a grimace, then looked over her shoulder to where this Harry Potter had yet to appear, "Does he normally take this long?"
"Harry only just opened a week or so ago," Luna said, before motioning to herself and twirling, so happy it was like sparkles appeared around her, "And during the summer before Hogwarts starts again I'll be his secretary! He says I'm awful good at it, and decorating, do you like it?"
"Oh, so this was your doing?" Tom asked, eyeing their surroundings once again, all of it clicking together.
"I studied the Chinese muggle art of feng shui as well as complimentary colors," Luna explained as she motioned towards the apparently artful and intentional blinding chaos of the room. Tom had half a mind to find every practitioner of this feng shui and erase it from their minds completely to burn every trace of it from the earth.
"Hello, sorry about that, had to set up the reptile room," a dark-haired young man appeared in the doorway, hunched over and breathing hard before looking up with a bright smile, "I'm Harry Potter, and ready to get started."
Tom blinked, the boy was good looking, a boyish charm in his dark hair that stuck out in every direction, his pale skin, as well as his bright smile, strangely well-dressed for a wizard in dark clothing and a blue and bronze scarf, but it was his eyes that caught Tom's notice. They were so very green, almost too green, the kind of green that matched Tom's red. As if they didn't belong in human eyes at all and something dreadful or wonderful must have happened to put them inside his head.
Tom shook himself, took Harry's hand, and said curtly, "Tom Riddle"
Harry nodded, apparently not recognizing the name as his friend had, gave one last waive to Luna, "Thanks Luna."
Then he was guiding Tom and Nagini through the rest of the building. As they wandered through the hallway, the building naturally far larger on the inside, the boy glanced back at him in curiosity, then flushed as Tom caught his eye, "Sorry, just, have you and I met somewhere?"
"You just graduated from Hogwarts?" Tom asked, and the boy nodded even as he rubbed at the back of his head, chagrinned.
"Oh, do I really look it?" the boy asked, but not as if he didn't know it, that he wore his youth not only in his face but also in his eyes in a way that Tom no longer could, "Class of '98, just stepped out into the real world."
"Then likely not," Tom said, his own amused smile causing the boy to flush further, to try and regain his professionalism while Tom just watched. Still, he did not even think that they would have passed on the street somewhere. Tom was something of a recluse and tended to either mail order or else apparate directly where he needed to go, and besides, eyes like those he would have remembered.
"Right," Harry said with a good-natured laugh, "Still, have you ever gotten that feeling, when you pass someone on a street or see them through a window that maybe you met them in some past life?"
Tom considered this, was about to answer no but then thought of the boy, of his eyes and wondered… Why were they so striking, was it only the color, or was there some shadow of them already haunting his mind somewhere? So instead he just said, "Perhaps."
"It's just a stupid feeling," Harry said as he opened the door to what must be the reptile room, revealing a dry warm place with a great rock that Nagini, under normal circumstances, would have loved, "Here we are, the reptile room, now let's look at your friend."
Harry showed them to the middle of the room towards the rock where Tom coaxed her wordlessly down, allowing her to curl there in the artificial sun while Harry glanced at him, "Does she have a name?"
He knew Nagini was female, at only a glance, well, Tom was impressed, "Nagini."
Harry grinned again, and it was far more real than any smile Tom himself had ever given, a thing which grew out of love for his work and creatures and perhaps simply life itself, "It's a lovely name."
The boy then looked at her, stared at her for a few moments, eyes peering into hers, and opened his mouth and spoke, "Nagini, your friend has brought you here to see me, he thinks you aren't feeling well."
Nagini lifted her head, eyes wide and open and staring at the boy, as she noted with an undercurrent of tension, "You are not a Speaker."
Harry flushed, then looked up at Tom, caught Tom staring at him, perfectly still and perfectly expressionless as he waited for the sound of a pin to drop.
"I'm, oh bloody Merlin, I'm not a parselmouth," Harry said, lifting his hands in defense, face now impossibly red, "I know what it looks like and I'm not, I swear, I just… It's old, really old and dead forgotten ability called beast speech. You can look it up if you need to. It's like… Have you ever seen this old muggle movie called 'Doctor Doolittle'? Because it's a lot like that. Well, no, it's exactly what it sounds like."
"I believe you," Tom said distantly, staring past Harry and out into the projected wilderness, giving the illusion of a snake or lizard's natural environment.
Harry stopped, mouth fell open, then swallowed and asked, "Really?"
"The Gaunts are long since dead," Tom said, as if it had no bearing at all on his life, as if the last of them hadn't died in Azkaban by Tom's own hand, "And they were the last of the parseltongues."
Harry sighed, then let out a relieved almost desperate laugh, "I can't bloody believe it, I almost lost my whole practice, my whole future because… You know, I had a friend at school, first whole year we were inseparable, then he thinks I'm a parselmouth and I haven't talked to him since. They say it's irrefutable proof of being a truly dark wizard…"
"I highly doubt that," Tom said with a scoff.
"Why?" Harry asked.
"You're looking at correlation, not causation," Tom explained with some amusement, "The ability is hereditary, more likely the family itself engaged in dark magic versus the ability itself driving one into madness and darkness. Humans are very complicated beings, to look at one aspect of them, some odd genetic trait, and be able to divine their true nature from that…"
"Well," Harry said with a soft smile, "I wish you could have told them that."
Harry then returned to Nagini, coaxing her into his hands and asking her questions about her feelings, and indeed Tom could tell he wasn't really a parselmouth. It wasn't quite the right idea, but he had an accent, something off about his inflection and tone and even word choice here and there that just didn't fit. He lacked the instinctive understanding that Tom himself had always had.
Nagini, strangely, after getting over the idea that the boy wasn't a speaker yet still intelligible enough, a mutterer she settled on about halfway through, relaxed in Harry's hands and appeared more than willing to let this strange boy gently poke and prod at her and even cast spells.
Nagini's retinas closed and she relaxed fully in his hands, and as she did Harry switched back to English, "So, what house were you in then?"
Tom motioned towards Nagini, as if she was prime evidence, "Slytherin."
"Really," Harry said, a spark of interest in his eyes as he looked Tom over, "You don't strike me as much of a Slytherin, I had you pegged for a fellow raven."
"Many do," Tom said, he had denied it at the time, railed against the idea of it and used his bitterness to sharpen the knife with which he would crack open the oyster that was the world, but he truly had been something of a black sheep in Slytherin. A token mudblood, as it were, how proud Slughorn was of him because of it.
The boy then looked at Tom again, closer, green eyes sweeping up and down with a furrow between his brows, "You don't look much older than I do, are you sure we haven't met? You must have been at Hogwarts at least part of the time I was there, maybe a few years ahead… Were you in Cedric Diggory's class?"
"I am far older than I look," Tom said wrily, to which Harry frowned, leaning back to get a better look at him.
"Oh, come on," Harry said slowly, "I know wizards age slower than muggles but you can't be older than twenty-five or twenty-six."
Tom laughed, a short amused and almost bitter thing, "Much worse than that, I was Hogwarts class of 1945."
"1945?!" Harry asked, loud enough to cause the sleeping Nagini to twitch slightly, "But that must mean you're sixty… seventy…"
"Seventy-one years old and counting," Tom corrected for him, a grin unwillingly pulling his lips upwards, "Yes, and I've aged marvelously."
"Merlin," Harry said almost in awe, "You must make a bloody fortune with whatever your secret is. I'm surprised you're not being worshipped at the altar of Witch Weekly."
"Trade secret," Tom said with a finger to his lips, "Although I can't deny that I get an odd number of interviews with Witch Weekly considering my rather dry and unglamorous position in the ministry."
Tom highly doubted that any of the preteen readers were interested in any of his opinions on the innerworkings of their bureaucratic government. Or the interviewers, for that matter, as they always tended to drift into questions about what his ideal date or girlfriend might look like.
"Oh, so you're in the ministry?" Harry asked, still clearly not recognizing Tom, "I thought about being an auror for a bit or else going into the magical creature's department but in the end the idea of having my own practice here in London won out. What do you do then?"
"I'm undersecretary," Tom said, and Harry spluttered.
"Oh, oh, that's very high up then, isn't it?" Harry laughed, raking a hand through his hair, "Imagine me, Harry Potter, with the undersecretary in my practice. My uncle and aunt would never believe it…"
He smiled over at Tom, a coy and mischievous thing, "You are just full of surprises, aren't you, Mr. Riddle?"
"Well, it is in my name," Tom couldn't help but say back, another delighted laugh coming from the boy at the pun.
The visit finished up soon after that, Harry reaching into a cupboard and handing him vials of strange liquid and stating, "She'll be fine, feed her a vial two times a day, morning and night and you should see improvement in a week. If not, come back in and we'll see about getting her something stronger."
Harry then walked Tom back to the entrance, past the cheerful and dotty Luna Love good now tilted upside down in her receptionist chair, her feet occupying the space where her head would have been.
And as they reached the door back into the alley, Nagini draped over Tom once again, Harry smiled down at him from the doorstep, "It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Riddle."
"Thank you," Tom said shortly, but with more warmth than he usually gave, it was such a rare thing to see that kind of kindness and competence all in one day. It was almost a pity, Tom thought as he apparated away and back to his own house on the other side of London, that the boy was so awfully young.
"Speaker!" Nagini cried, writhing in front of his fireplace, "Speaker! It as if my stomach is burning, Speaker!"
Tom glanced up from his book, took in the ridiculous sight of Nagini having what she likely thought was a seizure on the floor. At his attention Nagini writhed that much harder, "Oh, Speaker, I am dying! We must see the Mutterer again!"
"For someone dying you are awfully loud and energetic," Tom noted with irritation and at that Nagini stilled, body drooping again, head lifting so slowly as if it was died to so very many weights.
"You are so cruel, Speaker," Nagini moaned, slithering over to him and circling his feet, "You would see me dead for your love of quiet!"
She said that like he hadn't had half a mind to kill humans for less.
"Speaker!" she cried again, that same incessant cry that she'd been doing all evening, and what little patience Tom had was swiftly wearing thin.
"Would you please be quiet!" he commanded, slamming his book shut as shadows writhed about him wordlessly with his ire, "If I take you to this… This Muttterer of yours, will you shut up?!"
"Oh, yes, the Mutterer will fix me," Nagini said, still with the ridiculous pretense that she was still ill, "The Mutterer is very talented, polite too, and with such pretty eyes for a human…"
Tom felt something in his stomach plummet, his fingers resting on the cover of his book as Nagini happily piled herself on his legs like an overgrown dog, "Nagini, why exactly do you want me to see him again?"
Nagini gave him a rather dry look, as if he was being willfully stupid, "I am very ill, Speaker, and the Mutterer is the only human on your island that can help."
He breathed out, breathed back in, then breathed back out again as the absurdity of the situation caught up with him, "Nagini, the Mutterer is decidedly male, even if I were so inclined to throw him onto the forests of the jungle and ravage him there would never be any hatchlings."
Nagini hissed, affronted, tightening in warning about his feet, "How can you tell?! You humans all look and smell exactly the same!"
"If one of us were to know how to tell the gender of one human from another, Nagini, I think it would be me," Tom pointed out, although his subconscious did point out that Harry Potter had been an exceptionally pretty young man, and that if he'd had the inclination to wear wizarding robes and grow out his hair then he perhaps could be mistaken for a woman.
"I think you're just being selfish, cruel, and willfully stubborn! You want to deny me hatchlings!"
"They would not even be yours!" Tom cried out, and if Nagini thought she'd be some sort of monstrous aunt, or god forbid grandmother, she had another thing coming.
"You just take, and take, and take and never think of poor old Nagini," Nagini sniffed, as if Tom hadn't just bottle fed her back to life over the past week or dragged her to Diagon Alley in broad daylight to meet this mutterer of hers.
"Perhaps, Nagini, he has a sister," Tom sneered but Nagini did not even listen, just kept coiling about his feet in anger and irritation, set on ignoring his presence and willful disregard of his apparent perfect mate to bear his young, an eighteen-year-old boy who had only just graduated from Hogwarts.
"Speaker, I am dying, if we don't see the Mutterer then I…"
Tom banished her once into the wall with a flick of his fingers, glowering into the fireplace even as he consented, "Fine, we will go and see your beloved Mutterer and then you will shut up and we will never see him again!"
Nagini didn't seem to mind this last bit as she perked up, slid onto his shoulders, and did not even complain as they apparated to Harry Potter's practice's doorstep. And if Tom was covered in a strange miasmsa born of his unspoken rage, well, that was not Tom's problem.
Opening the door he spotted Luna Lovegood, blinking over at him with those dazed blue eyes from behind the desk, "Oh, Mr. Riddle, we were just about to close up for the day. Is something…"
"My overgrown snake is convinced that she is dying," Tom ground out, and at the way his eyes glowed and shadows pooled beneath his feet, Luna only stared for a moment before skipping away from him.
Luna cried out cheerfully towards the back of the practice, "Harry, Tom Riddle the angry dragon man is back with his snake, and I think the ministry may have found and stolen his gold!"
Luna, turning around, paled somewhat and noted, "Oh, Mr. Riddle, your eyes just got a little brighter I think."
Tom said nothing, just kept waiting, waiting until the unfortunate Harry Potter walked over to the entry way. At the sight of Tom his eyes widened slightly, his face paled, and his hands began to fidget, "Right, Mr. Riddle, you said something's wrong with Nagini?"
"She insists," Tom said curtly, his voice at once cold and burning, as if the same rage that was burning in his eyes was spreading to his vocal chords.
"Right," Harry said slowly, nodding, then turning he motioned for Tom to follow, "Well, follow me then."
The hallway was suffocating, where before it had seemed large enough it was now entirely too small and cramped, Tom practically breathing down Harry Potter's neck. And the boy looked so much smaller and younger today, insultingly so, so that Tom could look down at him and wonder just what game Nagini thought she was even playing at.
"You caught us at a good time," Harry said, nervously, interrupting the silence, "We were just about to close."
Tom said nothing, grit his teeth, even as Nagini slithered happily by his ear, triangular face pointed towards Harry, tongue flicking out as she tasted for his scent.
Finally, they made it to the room, where Harry began to quietly ask Nagini questions, Tom stepping away from the pair of them to instead stare at the enchanted walls and the illusion they painted of a deep jungle.
"Mr. Riddle, I don't know how to say this, but I think she's fine," Harry called out awkwardly towards him.
"Only because the Speaker brought me to you, Mutterer!" Nagini corrected, causing Harry to flush, and Tom to wonder just what kind of a conversation he missed between the pair of them.
"Is that so," Tom said, his voice quiet, distant, and so very dangerous. It was the tone he had used before he'd killed his father, so very many years ago.
"Yes, she's fine, just reassure her…"
"Thank you, Mr. Potter," Tom cut Harry off, turning back towards Harry and the delightfully smug Nagini.
"Right," Harry rubbed at the back of his head, flushing again and looking away from Tom for a moment, "Well, feel free to come back anytime."
Tom wouldn't, but Harry Potter didn't have to know that. Instead Tom picked up Nagini, gave a flat sort of smile to Harry Potter, and then apparated from within the building straight back to the door of his own apartment.
"You did not even speak with him!" Nagini cried out in affront as they stepped inside, "You didn't even look at him or speak with him!"
"He is a mayfly, Nagini," Tom said coldly, "Young now, but winter will come for him as it does all men and snakes. And I will still be here when it does."
And the door behind him slammed shut.
Weeks passed, the summer bled on, the ministry shambling on as always and the streets of Diagon Alley filled not only with adults but also Hogwarts age children as they bought their supplies early or just roamed through the local shops.
And Tom, naturally, did not see or think of Harry Potter at all.
Why should he? Nagini was hardly an invalid, and aside from that one strange occurrence was unlikely to be truly sick again. Thus, there was no real reason for his and Harry Potter's lives to cross.
Perhaps, once, years ago, a name like Potter would have caught his attention. Perhaps he would have looked at this cheerful, grinning, flushing boy whose eyes had roamed over Tom with something that was not merely curiosity and perhaps a lightbulb would have flickered on inside of Tom's head. Perhaps, he would have seen an opportunity, an in that was far too easy to ignore, and would trail fingers over skin and whisper words in ear and have to barely anything at all until the child was panting after him like a dog in heat. Then, perhaps, seeing those eyes and that flushed hazy look, Tom might have indulged his own idle curiosity.
But Tom was no longer that young man, if he had ever truly been him in the first place, and where once his ambition had been a great burning thing it was now a slumbering dragon, content to push and prod at the ministry itself rather than the full out anarchy and coup d'état he had once envisioned.
And if that irritated Nagini, denied her his hypothetical children which she could alternate between doting on, terrifying, and eating them, then that was hardly Tom's problem. No matter how she whined or writhed like an overgrown tantrum throwing toddler about how every decision he made was simply to spite her.
Of course, when left to her own devices, Nagini often made highly questionable decisions. Clearly, she'd thought to herself at one point, if Tom was going to insist on being entirely unnatural then she'd have to bring young, sweet, child-bearing flesh to him.
So, it was that late one evening, Nagini presumably out hunting somewhere in the outskirts of London, there was a quiet, hesitant, knock on Tom's door and there, flushing and trying to stand as tall as he was able, was none other than Harry Potter with Nagini draped all over him.
Tom simply stared.
"She, um, came to find me earlier today," Harry said, face growing redder by the minute while Nagini flicked a tongue next to his cheek, "She couldn't really give me the address but she helped me find where you live, thankfully in London…"
Harry then, bowing forward slightly and flushing as he disentangled himself from Nagini, handed the bulk of her into Tom's arms, "Here, I really am dreadfully sorry, and I would have apparated but didn't have your address and…"
And he did now, wasn't that bloody convenient, still, Tom forced himself to smile the same way he smiled at Fudge or Slughorn or anyone else and said, "Thank you, Mr. Potter, you're too kind."
Harry nodded, looking entirely too awkward on his doorstep, as if he now wasn't quite sure what to do with himself and then Nagini hissed, "The Speaker has flavored water that he can share with you, entirely too much for himself."
Tom glared down at her in warning, but Nagini did not seem to mind, and Harry hesitated as he translated back to the presumably ignorant Tom with a sheepish smile, "She, um, I think she just invited me in for drinks."
And it was at that moment that Tom realized that Harry was hoping Tom would invite him in, that the reason he'd been lingering was more than awkwardness or idle curiosity, but that he truly did have at least some interest.
That this was not only Nagini's flimsy pretext for an invitation into Tom's home.
"You're a tad young for me, Mr. Potter," Tom said with that same, never-faltering, never true, smile, and then proceeded to slam the door in Mr. Potter's aghast face.
Oh, that felt good.
"Speaker!" Nagini admonished, tightening around him, "Speaker you will open that door!"
"No, I don't think I will," Tom said, a skip in his step, feeling lighter and more at ease with himself than he had in years.
"Speaker, you would devour your own hatchlings out of spite!" Nagini then paused, realizing what Tom had in fact done, then shouted, "You are devouring your unborn hatchlings out of spite!"
"I cannot help what I am," Tom said, moving towards his kitchen and pouring himself a much deserved glass of fire whisky. Not that he had ever tried to change who he was, only disguise it from view.
"The Mutterer is still at the door, Speaker," Nagini hissed and then, glass in hand Tom did pause, reach out and felt a bitter, angry, and desolate magical signature beating upon the wood and wards of his door.
And, perhaps it was the taste of the fire whisky, perhaps it was his age, or perhaps it was something else entirely but Tom stepped back towards the door reluctantly and opened it to see Harry Potter staring at the floor, tears gathering in the corner of his eyes, face flushed and humiliated.
Tom sighed, "You'd best come inside, you look as if you could use a drink."
Harry started, looked at him, face flushed and tears beginning to wobble down his cheeks, but he nodded and stepped inside, glumly accepting a glass from Tom, swirling it about as he stared into its depths, "You know, I've never had fire whisky before."
"You've picked an excellent opportunity then," Tom noted as he sunk into a seat, Harry taking the one across from his, "God willing you'll find yourself so tanked that you'll remember none of this."
Harry laughed, a desolate yet charming sound, "Oh, but I'm sure you'd make yourself perfectly clear some other time. That I'm too young and stupid and…"
He raked a hand through his already ridiculous hair, shaking his head in desolation as he asked, "Oh, what is wrong with me?"
"Drink quicker," Tom noted drily, "Thoughts like that will disappear."
Harry laughed, looked Tom in the eye and asked, "Do they really, Tom?"
Oh, he was bold, to call him Tom this early and this soon when many who had known him for years still only referred to him as Mr. Riddle.
Harry took a drink, flushing, and appeared to feel the effects, that buzz from the alcohol, nearly immediately, "Oh, oh that feels…"
He stopped then, took another drink then looked at Tom, his smile soft and far too warm to be directed at Tom Riddle, "You're very kind, Tom."
"Kind?" Tom balked, ignoring Nagini happily moving her bulk to the fireplace where she warmed herself like an overgrown dog.
"You didn't have to do this, I… I know you're not interested. You know, no one ever has been," Harry shook his head, laughing, "There was this boy in Hogwarts, years older than me, Hufflepuff Cedric Diggory and he was… Oh, Merlin, he was perfect. Smart, charming, good looking, but I was so much younger and he… He only liked women."
Harry then shook his head, laughing again, "And now here's you, looking like you should be maybe his age if not close to mine, and you're seventy bloody one."
"You wouldn't want to date me, Harry," Tom said softly, far more softly than he intended, something close to pity rising from inside of him, "I am… I am not what I seem."
"No," Harry said, but with a smile on his face, "I think you're more than what you seem. Every time I look at you, you seem… At one so familiar and unfamiliar, and like you're only wearing this human skin but could at any moment transcend it. Your eyes, it's like there's a sunset burning somewhere unseen from inside your head, they're almost blinding sometimes. And it makes me want to stare at them and be able to see that spectacular sunset for myself."
Harry leaned closer to him, emboldened by the alcohol, hand shaking and reaching out to trace Tom's jaw. Tom, eyes falling on the boy's hand, said, "Many have said they look like blood."
"No, no, not even fire, they're… They're more than that."
For a moment, Harry's eyes strayed from Tom's (thoughts a collection of yearning, hope, lust, and something sweeter than all of them), to Tom's lips. They lingered there, desire evident in each and every shade of green in his eyes, and then he dropped his hand, falling back into his seat, "Sorry, that was… That was very forward of me, I'm so sorry."
He finished off the last of his drink, sent Tom a small smile as he stood, "Thank you, Tom, I should go."
Tom said nothing, just watched as Harry, without looking back or waiting for another word, stepped out of Tom's doorway and closed the door quietly shut behind him. Then, through the wood, Tom heard the crack of apparating, and Harry was gone as if he'd never been there in the first place.
And if the taste of Tom's fire whisky was suddenly bitter, Tom paid it no mind at all.
Somewhere in the back of Tom's mind, as the summer wound onwards, as Nagini curled like a dog at the foot of his bed, an image grew of Harry Potter's pale fingers tracing Tom's jaw, whispering in his ear, "Tom, Tom, your eyes are like sunsets."
And Tom would turn to him, naked beneath the sheets as Harry Potter himself was, look into those terrible green eyes, and would say nothing at all but instead lean forward to brush his lips and the rest of his body against the boy's, watching he shivered as if in a fever beneath Tom's touch.
The sun would come through the blinds on the window, painting them in golden stripes of light, and when the light caught Harry's eyes they would almost glitter, sparking as he threw his head back in either laughter or ecstasy.
And in the real world, the true world where Tom was clothed, his bed was empty, his life filled with pandering to Cornelius Fudge and whoever else, Tom compensating by drinking through his stores of fire whisky and then some, at a rate that would have destroyed any mortal man.
Yet, the images still didn't disappear, and Tom… Tom wanted in a way that he didn't think he had ever truly wanted before.
Not with that burning overwhelming desire that consumed him, that need for power, for recognition, for dark magic. Not even that deep pit of fear that gnawed inside of him, that drove him running as far as possible from the hint of death and age.
No, this was a stranger, softer thing, like light falling in through the windows in the morning. A soft yearning, a quiet pang in his heart, as he thought of a face and a smile and quiet contentment that it could perhaps bring him. So that for once in his life, instead of sulking in his bitterness, his suppressed rage and resentment, he could stand in the moment and sigh, see the world stretching before him and only think that there was something quiet and beautiful about it all…
And no amount of alcohol drove it out.
Or the thought, the wish, the vison of what Harry's lips would have felt like if only the boy had had more nerve or Tom had had lest inhibitions. How they would have tasted ever so slightly of fire whisky, and how Harry's skin would have been warmed as, fueled by alcohol, recklessness, and loneliness, clothing would have been shed and they would have migrated to the couch that was far too small, then the bed that was just large enough.
"Speaker," Nagini hissed at his feet, looking up at him, somehow chiding without having the human face to express such emotions, "You are acting like a young and arrogant fool."
Tom took another drink, feeling the burning down his throat, wondering again if that burning was enough to compensate the silent fire that raged in his stomach.
"Speaker, even snakes do not live entirely alone," Nagini said as she looked at him, "And humans are even more needy than that."
"There will never be hatchlings," he bit out, ragged by alcohol and bitterness, but Nagini only kept staring.
"Then there are no hatchlings," Nagini said, as if that was not what she had been hounding after him for for months now, "I am not eternal, and I am not human, and you will need him."
"Need him," Tom scoffed, bitterly pouring himself another glass too many, "How could I need him? He is a child, a schoolboy, and he knows nothing about me and never will. He is a fool who likes the color of my eyes and thinks that's enough knowledge to wander into my den. And then one day he will age and wither and die as all men and snakes do."
Nagini just stared, a strange, almost pitying note in her voice, "Then you, Speaker, while you will never die will also never live."
And something about how she said that had Tom, without even thinking, reaching for his dark overcoat, stepping out the door and breathing in the sweet summer air. And just like that, without any thought at all, he was apparating to the front of Harry Potter's practice, once again only just before closing.
And there, he waited until Harry Potter stepped out, blinking at him in confusion, "Tom?"
There were so many things he could say, so many inhibitions still curling in his gut, but none the less he held out his hand to the boy, a wild smile growing on his lips, "I just thought, that perhaps, you would like to come back to my place for a few drinks."
Author's Note: This is for 300th review of "When Harry Met Tom" by Gurgaraneth which naturally turned into a romcom. There were quite a few stipulations for this one, first, it had to be humorous/fluffy (i.e. romcom), had to be Tom/Harry. Tom had to have red eyes, Nagini had to be present and sassy, had to still be good looking, had to work as undersecretary for the minister, had to not really be a blood purist, had to still grow up in the orphanage, and had to have a sweet tooth (though I guess that one never came up). Harry, for his own part, had to not have glasses, had to be intelligent, had to be fashionable, had to be close friends with Luna, not friends with Ron, Hermione, or Ginny, had to have been a Ravenclaw, had to grow up with the Dursleys (though that went somewhat unstated here), had to own a veterinary practice for magical animals and have "beast speech" where he can talk to all animals to help them. The plot of course, being Nagini playing match maker and getting Tom into talk to Harry.
So, yes, I am impressed I managed to stuff most of that into this ridiculous story. And also felt the need to explain some deviations from what I usually write, such as, "Hey, why are Tom's eyes red now". Also, I feel like you all are turning me into a romcom author, which I suppose isn't a bad thing, but not a genre I saw myself exploring as much as I have.
Thanks for reading, reviews are most appreciated.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter