Author: Fleur (vettori11harris5@hotmail.com)
Summary: Percy isn't sure what the difference between he and Tom is, but he thinks it might lie in what they fear.
This isn't real, Percy told himself. He isn't real.
You aren't real either, Tom breathed back. Percy had long stopped wondering how Tom managed to read his mind. You aren't real. I don't exist and you don't exist and none of this is anything.
Then again, some days he talked differently. Some days Tom would glare at him, and ask, how do you know, Percy? I could be real and you could be not. You just don't know. You don't know anything.
And long fingers would slither under Percy's shirt, and he knew none of this was real because there was no way Tom's fingers should be able to mix with Percy's skin. There was supposed to be a line, a difference, but there wasn't. Percy knew he was supposed to end here and Tom was supposed to begin there but when Tom was lying on top of him and his hands were everywhere and his hands were inside Percy, there was no ending, there was no beginning, there was only them.
At first, he had thought Tom was something from inside himself. Something that Percy had created without knowing it. Because sometimes Tom seemed like he was Percy.
Well, a different Percy. A Percy who was still a Prefect and still top of his classes and still perfect, but a Percy who went up to the Oliver Woods and Cedric Diggorys after Transfiguration and told them to meet him in the East Tower after dinner. A Percy who sat in the Prefects' bathroom dangling his feet in the bath, smoking and watching the ashes as they fell into the water. A Percy who didn't spend half the day afraid the Marcus Flints of the world were going to find him in some dark hallway.
A Percy who wasn't afraid.
But now he knew that Tom wasn't all that. He knew who Tom was and what Tom was and what Tom wanted.
For the first time in Percy's life, though, that didn't matter. He could label everything about Tom but it didn't help him to understand him, or to stop him.
You can't control me, Tom reminded him, you can't even control yourself.
He was right, too. Percy knew it. He couldn't control what was happening with Tom. He couldn't control that he would go looking for Tom, couldn't control that when he found him he wanted it more and more.
He couldn't control the day it ended, either.
Tom did.
One day, he looked at Percy and grinned. I know how you know I'm not real.
Percy just looked at him, hoping that if he kept quiet, Tom would stop talking and they could go through their routine of becoming one again.
But he went on.
You know I'm not real - because nobody real would ever want you.