The Houses Competition
House: Ravenclaw
Position: Herbology
Standard
Prompts: In the basement the marble floor was cold under their feet, Green
Word Count: 2,464 (wordcounter net)
Disclaimers/triggers: kidnapping, murder mentioned, obviously unhealthy relationship,
A/N: this is a god AU based off of a combination of RotG and another fanfiction, Life is a Fairytale, written by my utmost beloved writer of possibly all time, Lanx Borealis. It was generally inspired by Killing Stalking, which I was rereading at the time. I don't know if it's exactly Tomarry, it can be read either way.
In the basement, the marble floor was cold under their feet. Who even had a marble floor in a basement? Harry wondered. The ones he'd been in before had just had things like concrete or hard-packed dirt.
And here, his filthy bare feet were being allowed to parade around on pale stone like he belonged. Like he was good enough to even grovel on these floors. Luxury stretched around him in dimly candlelit paradise, from the wrought-iron frame of his feather-stuffed bed to the steel reinforcement of the pillar his silver chains led to. Luxury wrapped around his waist, in the form of ice-cold fingers clawing at his spine and the brush of cool, white, silk sleeves on his exposed skin.
Tom Riddle smiled at him, teeth like pearls, his eyes a reflection of bottomless pools of Harry's own blood, and Harry nearly stumbled at the beautiful sight. But he remembered what had happened the last time he had fumbled a dance step. He had scars, and more than that, the terrifying memory of disappointing Tom.
He felt dizzy. He felt valued and oppressed. He felt like the high of an Imperius curse's ecstasy couldn't beat this.
Tom bent him back so far he thought his bones might crack, and Harry didn't dare stumble in his touch.
Harry meets his own personal guardian angel on the way home from Hogwarts the year he graduates.
He falls asleep on the train ride home from Hogwarts, like he does every year, and he will never get to do it again. This is the last year of Scottish hillside paradise for little orphan Harry Potter before he goes back to living in what was probably meant to be an orphanage. Instead it had ended up as just a place for feral children to gather and disperse from as they pleased.
And even they will not keep him for much longer, now that he is of age. Harry is less than an inch from the streets. He will be haunting Knockturn Alley with all the other poor, dark, and forgotten folk in a month's time, if he is lucky.
He is drowsy as he looks out the window at the passing countryside. Rain is skating down the glass, making maps of reflected light and miniature portraits caught in droplets. The rain washes the dust off every plant, making forests and water and grassy hills go by in technicolour. Bright, shamrock green, like fresh limes, like peacock feathers, like all loveliness arising. The reflection of his eyes matches up in colour, and in the glass reflection, through droplets, he sees trees rush past in his big, sleepy pupils.
It's a much better shade of green than his tie. It's so much more welcoming. It's so much louder than being ignored by every house, including his own.
When Harry wakes up, he is not on the train.
xXx
He is in a room, a dark basement, that he has never seen before, and he is alone, and his hands are tied behind his back.
He is not alone for long.
Light streams from above him like an angel descending from heaven, and footsteps echo off the stone walls. Legs appear to move down the stone stairs above where Harry lays, still nestled in the mass of worn blankets and towels he had woken in.
The footsteps leave the stairs and land too softly on hard white marble, and an upper body appears around the edge of the stairs, face lit by a light balanced at the end of a long white wand.
It's an angel.
Or a devil.
Harry isn't sure. But it's staring at him like he's worthy of being stared at, not just a problem student who doesn't know the answer or someone who is just another mouth to feed among the much more deserving masses, and just like every other figure who has ever paid Harry a lick of attention, he latches immediately to it and stares right back, terrified but too touch-starved to look away.
This is the pastor who was a bit too handsy.
The woman with the flowers who gave him a daffodil and never appeared again.
The cook who served his food onto a platter without glaring at him.
The snake in the garden that talked before it was beheaded.
The little Hufflepuff girl who laughed at his joke, not his failures.
This is existing in something other than another person's peripheral vision, and Harry attaches to it like a starving artist, falling down the rabbit hole in a single second of exposure to his new infatuation, and he emerges out the other side as suffocating as he can be.
"You're awake already, then," the man says, his voice disapproving and his eyes curious, and Harry shudders.
That tone isn't a problem from someone he doesn't care about. From a professor who doesn't look him in the eye or another starving caretaker at the orphanage it wouldn't mean anything.
From someone who sees Harry, it's like a kick to the stomach. The first time words are directed to him alone in days, and they are disappointed.
"Sorry! Sorry. Sorry..." he responds immediately, wriggling into a sitting position just to lower his head. "Sorry. Sorry..."
When he peeks upwards, the man looks more bemused than anything, as if apologies are the last thing he expects. But that doesn't stop Harry from spouting them, until this angel has spelled his mouth shut and stolen his voice like a tape recorder.
"That's better," the man purrs. His voice is like velvet. It's all for Harry. The luxury of it all almost tricks his brain into thinking he has never left Hogwarts at all.
"You probably wonder why I took you. I just needed someone. A believer. I'm a god, you see."
Harry could have told him that.
xXx
The god visits irregularly. Harry counts in between a few times. It's killing him because he never knows when he will get to see him next.
This isn't right, he knows. He can see in bloodstains and the fractured thread of blonde on his towel nest that he is not the first one in this position. He knows the others must have died, because Tom does not seem the sort to let anyone go. He knows that there is every chance he will join them, and yet, he can't bring himself to function from a place of fear and not of reverence.
It's not as though he's been through worse. It's not as though he's feeling at all brave. But he's never had a good survival instinct.
A lot of animals can walk soon after they are born. Or swim, if they're in the ocean. Human babies can do neither. Human babies cry for help, because more than running or swimming from danger, humanity is meant to ask for help. Independence is a fraudulent lie, and it is impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, because you will only stumble and fall further down.
Harry has been begging for help since he could make sound, since whatever god that smote his parents left a newborn child alive, since he ever existed. He is always overlooked.
It doesn't matter if the price of not being overlooked is believing in a dark god, is using his precious belief to keep alive a being of terror. You only after all follow one god, and his god has chosen him, specifically.
He has been chosen.
Being heard like that is not something he is afraid of. It is something he craves.
xXx
The god's name is Tom Riddle. He is slaughter and madness, prejudice and thoughtless deaths. He is infanticide. He is snakes.
He gives Harry his voice back after a promise not to speak unless prompted. He doesn't prompt.
"You looked sickly," he tells Harry one day, playing with a bit of Harry's hair. He is referring to when he took Harry. "You looked like the sort of thing I'd kill without a thought. You looked like a siren. You tasted like magic on meth."
Harry's always been a powerhouse, magic wise. More's the pity, then, that his wand never listens to him. His wand is meant for someone bold and loud and prophesied, but Harry cannot muster self-defense in his own house. He's got no friends and no context. He is a child taught to feel helpless, not a prophesied saviour boy.
His magic without a wand, though…
Using a wand is about learning control. Spells are specific, words and thoughts that grant specific reactions. Harry may not manage them, but he can manage the nameless want of accidental magic. He can feel the dystopian pull of scraping the world into a form to please him.
Tom sits across the room when he visits and closes his red dove eyes, like he's soaking up the sensation of being seen. He looks like a fish back in water. Harry thinks he must have had a thousand worshippers at some point, because if he looks this perfect with just one believer, he must have killed other gods with more.
Sitting there, staring at the black wing angel before him, Harry manages the pure want necessary to break his chains and go lie in the lap of his god in worship.
xXx
"You're kind of pretty, I suppose. I didn't notice when I took you," Tom murmurs, cold fingers tracing Harry's bones beneath his skin. Harry was already malnourished long before this, but all Tom gives him is candy and bread and water. Gods rarely understand how human bodies work.
Not that Harry minds. The fact that he gets anything, he takes as a sign that Tom values him. The fact that he is being praised…
Harry looks up onto a face of uncanny valley perfection, and he smiles. Tom smiles back, all fangs and a maw of many-eyed horrors, and Harry doesn't even flinch. He reaches up to touch Tom's face, uses his other hand to find Tom's on his ribs. He runs his fingers over the god's jaw.
"I think it's because you're so fragile. You're like a diamond. I could crush you into nothing with my bare hands."
Tom bolts to his feet too fast for a human eye to track and yanks Harry up with him. When his vision is no longer black, Harry looks up into Tom's face. Tom is looking at him like prey. Like something precious. He is whispering wordless things in his ears, making them ring.
Harry isn't afraid. But he shivers.
"Being fragile makes things precious, right? Like glass. Like children. I have to be careful with you."
Harry parts his lips.
"Promise?" he squeaks. His voice is faint and creaky with disuse. How long has he been silent? How long has he been here?
Tom grins at him and moves his arms. One circles Harry's waist, the other slides along his arm, feeling all his clammy skin. Tom lifts him until Harry is standing on his tippy toes.
"I promise, sweet believer," he says, voice thundering with his oath, and begins to lead Harry in a dance.
Tom Riddle has a boy in his basement.
His name is Harry, and he was tied up not five minutes ago, silver shackles bound around his joints like jewelry instead of restraints, but all Tom had to do was sit a few feet away and close his eyes and wait.
When he opened them again, the chains were scattered across the floor, easily shed the moment Harry wanted them to be, and he was crawling across the candy wrapper-littered floor to Tom with light reflected in his acid-green eyes and a lolly in his mouth.
God's blood is green. It runs like endless meadows in spring and absinthe and the ocean. Harry has god's blood in his glowy green eyes.
Harry is a God in his own right, though maybe not in the same sense that Tom is. But he looks ethereal. He looks starved-skinny, and sticky-fingered. Tom hasn't given him anything but candy to eat for days. He really should do something about that. But Harry likes the treats Tom provides so much; it's hard to give him anything else. Tom wants him to only eat things he enjoys.
He doesn't have to be here. Harry's clearly capable of escaping, unlike all the others Tom has collected, who stay whimpering in their nest until he tires of them and they are disposed of in favour of a more interesting person he can menace into believing in his fallen godhood. Those ones are pretty and seem interesting at first, but they never do anything. And if they do ever do anything, it's always the same old thing they go for.
The door at the top of the stairs. They run for the door as if Tom isn't just waiting on the other side.
Yet Harry doesn't move unless Tom is there. He'll stay tied up in whatever position Tom has left him in for hours, looking after him with pleading, begging eyes as he leaves.
They're not begging to be released, though, like anyone else's.
They're begging him not to go.
And as soon as he's there again, Harry will shed his restraints like they're nothing, just for contact, just for Tom, as if to say that he's the only thing worth escaping for.
Tom feels high off it. He feels worshipped. He feels like he's a true god again, and Harry is fighting to lay prostrate at his feet.
Tom is no stranger to his own ego. He sees no harm in indulging it on occasion. Fallen, cursed, banished, whatever he is, he is still himself. He is still a cruel, vicious, greedy thing with little restraint. So he stokes Harry's worship with contact and pampering, with silver-wrapped sweets and a new feather bed to replace the old towels. It's not too hard to keep belief when it's a touch-starved ghost of a mortal with dew still on his skin and magic like a drug singing it's lonely siren song in his little red veins.
They've been doing this for a year now. It's the longest Tom has ever kept anyone. The most freedom he'd ever willingly given. He doesn't even try to tie Harry up more securely now. He just lets him do his thing and basks in as much attention as he gives. Clearly his follower has no intentions of wandering off into disbelief.
Tom has no doubt that he'll get tired of this eventually.
But maybe he'll keep Harry anyways. Maybe he'll be bold beneath the true gods, challenge them once more, dare to take two followers at once.
Maybe he'll let Harry be the first to build him a shrine.