HELLO! Whaaat, I updated within 6 months this time? Yes, yes I did. Come on, people, that's PROGRESS! Focus on the positive. Yes. Haha. Plz
(I'm sorry)
ooo
Potter won, of course. Tom didn't much appreciate the sport for the value in and of itself; rather, he understood the value in that he could use the investment of the other students to his advantage. Despite his lack of appreciation for the skill, however, even he could recognize that Potter's win had been impressive.
At first he'd been concerned that the love potion would ruin his gamble, since no sooner had Potter taken to the air that he'd sought out Tom in the stands. Once he'd found him, he gave a quick smile, nearly missing the starting cue and certainly not watching the release of the snitch. The action immediately triggered mutterings in the Slytherin stands, but In the end, Tom privately wondered if the love potion hadn't helped them after all, what with the boy's determination to impress him.
Of course, that would imply that love had given strength where sheer dedication and skill had not, and Tom scoffed at the very idea, but he supposed that love might be supplementary to the two. Potter certainly had both, at least on the Quidditch field.
The match had ended in a spectacular sixty foot dive, Potter and Cormac—the Gryffindor seeker—neck-to-neck until Cormac pulled up at the last possible moment.
Tom had been certain that Potter would lose control and the impact would likely kill him—he surprised himself with his own disappointment at the prospect—but then Potter pulled up, leapt from his broom, caught the snitch during his free-fall, and went rolling through the grass dizzyingly fast, out-of-control and painful, but not lethal.
Potter rolled to a stop, lying on his back and panting, and the stands gaped when he held up and arm, a glint of fluttering gold in his grasp.
"Potter...Potter has caught the Snitch!" the announcer blurted incredulously, the sputtering a far cry from his usual fluent blabber. "The victory goes to...to Slytherin!"
Tom watched with disbelief, the adrenaline of the moment fading, and he winced at the tension in his shoulders. When Potter had dived, he'd straightened up from where he'd been leaning on the railing, heart beating fast at the scene, wondering if he'd inadvertently be responsible for the boy's death. Upon the return of his composure, he leaned back on the railing, giving a harsh, disbelieving laugh.
The boy was a complete idiot.
The Gryffindors gawked in a shocked silence when the Slytherins broke ranks, starting up a chant of "Potter! Potter! Potter!"
How hypocritical they were, when mere hours ago they had been disparaging the boy's blood and status. It just showed how little one could trust human nature, how little 'love' and 'promises' meant in the long run. Emotions were fleeting; power and fear much more powerful assets.
Madam Jones, the mediwitch, kept Potter's housemates from storming him, although her shouts were lost to the chaos. Tom watched his House's lack of decorum with distaste; Quidditch was one of the few times that its dignity lapsed, a part of the reason he so disliked attending the matches.
He wondered idly if Potter had broken anything, but he supposed that so long as it wasn't his neck or spine, it wouldn't affect him, so he dismissed the thought.
ooo
After this, Tom's plans had many facets. He'd been prepared for Potter's loss, as well; if he had failed to catch the snitch, he'd made plans to cut ties with the boy and use the impending hatred towards Gryffindor to distract from his association with the idiot.
Now that Potter had won, however, he had broader goals. He had to admit he also received some personal satisfaction in knowing that he was so influential and favored, so competent, that he could pull another boy to the top, able to support two where others struggled to ensure their own survival alone in the venomous social sphere of the Slytherins.
Potter's esteem had risen exponentially, eyed resentfully by the House of Lions, and viewed enviously by all the rest. MacDougal had escalated in his rage, often hexing the boy when he wasn't looking, or cursing his things. Potter had a new array of bruises on his arms from where he'd fallen victim to a tripping jynx a few hours ago.
A juvenile prank, but even Tom felt surprised at the boldness of the Gryffindor perpetrators when they did so in Potion's class. Potter had received quite the nasty collection of boils from another cauldron he'd overturned. Thankfully, it had not been another love potion, and this one had been incomplete at the time. It had resulted in only surface burns, instead of vanishing his inner organs as a finished potion would have intended.
Tom had also seen notes which hissed 'mudblood' and 'whore', just glimpses before Potter managed to burn them with a flick of his wand and a scowl. Tom did not intervene.
In contrast, the Slytherins dangled their new talent in front of professors, students, and each other alike, all of them trying to fall in with Potter's good graces. The Slytherin dorms were no longer a safe respite for either of them. It had only been a few hours when Harry decided he'd had enough, dragging Tom to the secluded corridor on the seventh floor, the window cubby where he'd discovered that the boy spoke Parseltongue.
Or rather, he tried to drag along Tom, but ended up trailing after him, because Tom didn't get dragged along by anyone.
"I never should've agreed," Potter bemoaned, crawling into the cubby and collapsing next to the window, resting his head on the glass.
"Status is everything in Slytherin," Tom said idly. "Think of the favors and luxuries you can receive in return."
He perched lightly on the edge, swinging his legs gracefully into a casual sprawl. He made sure to sit closer to the end, so that he could escape Potter if necessary, and prevent the boy from fleeing if he tried the same. He slipped a book out of his bag, balancing it deftly on his knees.
"In return," Potter emphasized. "Excuse me if I'm reluctant to ask for favors of people who might very well ask for my first born child in return."
"You're being absurd," Tom dismissed the comment. "A Slytherin would never ask for the first born child of a halfblood."
"Not you too," Harry complained, but he inched closer to Tom, as if he couldn't resist. He leaned his head on his shoulder. "Besides, they might ask for the kid so that they could sacrifice him on the full moon or something. I can't see them using one of their own oh-so-special pureblood brats."
"Morbid, Potter," Tom said, somewhat bemused. "But a newborn baby would more likely be used in a sacrificial ritual on the new moon."
"You would know," the boy accused, letting out a huff. He burrowed his face in his sleeve, pressing a kiss to Tom's collarbone. "And it's Harry."
Disregarding the sentiment, he tried to edge Potter off his shoulder, but the moron misinterpreted his gesture, taking hold of Tom's hand with both hands and cradling his forearm in a hug.
Tom glared, but in the end ignored the gesture, then halted as he started to turn the page of his book, appalled by his own apathy. When had Potter's antics become an indignity he saw fit to ignore?
Yet the lack of witnesses made retaliation unnecessary, and he despaired of ruining his rather good mood, not wanting to put up with the boy's rambling apologies and confessions. He let the action slide, even while uneasily examining his own impassivity. He didn't even regard Potter's touch with disgust or discomfort anymore, resigned exasperation taking its place.
His eyes flickered to the side, sensing the boy watching him, and froze when Potter took the opportunity to slip his hand up to Tom's neck and pull him down into a kiss.
He had no particular goal, or even rage, to drive the action, yet alarmingly, he felt no disgust or unease, except for the unease he experienced at not feeling anything about Potter's hands at his neck.
Still, pulling away somehow felt like giving Potter some sort of victory, beginning a battle of conflicting thoughts which stalled his reaction.
On one hand, how dare this person touch him; but no, he'd gone through that line of thought before. Potter dared because he was drunk on a love potion. That whole approach was rather dull and uninspired.
On the other hand, pulling away meant that he did not view Potter's potion-induced infatuation with proper detachment; he gave the boy the power to unnerve him, when a kiss should hold no significance. If he pulled away, he admitted that he felt something—something other than cool calculability or fury—instead, he would be admitting that his lack of alarm and disgust...
Well, it alarmed him. He abhorred the contradictions, since if he felt alarm at all, surely it counted. But no, the source of alarm mattered, and Potter's fingers trailing over his neck caused him no disgust or concern; he was, however, concerned with that lack of concern. Circular reasoning that suffocated him with its ill logic.
In the end, the second line of thought won out, the first having been revisited and worn out too many times in the past five days. Potter dared to touch him because he stupidly spilled a love potion. It didn't matter if Tom tried to 'teach him his place' while under the influence of the Mollis Caritate; he would keep coming back, and failing to teach him his place would damage Tom's reputation more than not caring enough to do so.
So Tom let go of his book and pulled the boy closer.
His perception of Potter had changed since their kiss yesterday. In the space of twenty-four hours, the boy had proven he had a talent to complement his dueling skills, even one so useless as Quidditch. He'd found out about his past, so eerily similar to his own, an orphaned half-blood like him who'd been scorned for his magic. They even looked something alike.
He wondered if this was incestuous, since as far as he knew, the ability to speak to snakes ran through bloodlines, and the thought amused him. The boy had insisted they lacked any relation, and he wondered if he'd lied because of his crush. He found the thought spurred him on more than it repulsed him; a relationship with another man would make Ms. Cole recoil, and revolt the cleric who came by to preach how God would save them from their starved, hopeless lives. A relationship with someone who might share his blood?
Tom's lips twitched at imagining their screams of horror, crying devilry whilst he killed him with the very 'freakishness' they so despised.
Tom felt Potter's lips turn up in response to his own macabre smile, blissfully unaware of the true reason behind Tom's pleasure. His smile widened.
Grasping Potter's wrists, he used them as leverage to push closer, finding his actions more instinctive and natural than the kiss from yesterday. He pulled away when Potter's breathing grew too harsh, and found to his surprise that his own breath had quickened, although not nearly as much.
He remembered enjoying the boy's lips on his neck yesterday, and he tugged on the nape of Potter's neck, encouraging the action. The boy obliged, and Tom shuddered, losing momentary control when his tongue licked a stripe just below his ear. He resented abandoning even the slightest command over his own actions, but he held Potter in place, deciding that his pleasure and authority over the situation justified the briefest lapse.
Yet the unpredictability made the argument both all the more valid and all the more void, as Potter chose in that moment to scrape his skin with his teeth, and Tom's fingers tightened convulsively in his hair. Potter moaned, slipping between Tom's legs so that he straddled him, and oh, Tom suddenly realized why others found this enjoyable.
Tom pulled away then, because he needed to know that he could, that he hadn't turned into one of his mindless, imbecilic housemates who let their hormones control them.
Harry looked at him, lips wet, and Tom remembered them on his neck.
He closed his eyes, but that almost made the memory worse, the other sensations stronger with the lack of sight.
"Tom?" Potter asked uncertainly, and Tom searched for an excuse. With the boy's dazed, stupid expression, it didn't require much creativity. It really did have an uncanny resemblance to the Imperius Curse.
"You took a love potion," he said, disgusted by his own unsteady voice. "I...I apologize, Harry, that was terribly remiss of me."
A lie, perhaps, but partially true in its own way. He should avoid any relations with the boy until after its effects had worn off, not because of any personal ethics on his part, but rather because while attending Hogwarts, he couldn't afford anyone questioning his morality, much less Potter, once the potion wore off and he remembered what they'd done.
Tom focused, reopening his book, tensing when Potter leaned on him again, a mess of black hair brushing his jaw line.
He stared at the pages, unseeing, wondering what was wrong with him, that Potter's touch had begun to please him.
ooo
Potter crept into his bed, the mattress dipping as he did, an arm reaching out to lightly wrap around his waist. Tom shoved him off.
He fell asleep shortly after he heard Potter's quiet snores, and he awoke the next morning to the boy clutching at his night shirt again, pressed against Tom's side. He levitated him off the bed, dropping him a few feet off the ground.
He listened with cruel amusement to the boy's complaining, feeling an odd satisfaction at knowing he'd caused that reaction, knowing that he had that much control over Potter, and that the boy would cling to him anyway.
He swung his legs over the edge of the bed; breakfast started in an hour.
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Can I just say...
You guys spent so much time writing responses and trying to motivate me last chapter. And like, since we're talking about my depressed ass, the fact that it actually worked enough for me to edit this chapter is, like... whoa what
like, even my own future being on the line can't motivate me to study lol amiright
So anyway, thank you! It honestly baffles me that people take the time to even write a "this was cool!" or such, when there's not much incentive to do so. And then the longer responses just blow me away completely. How are you guys so thoughtful. It honestly confuses me. In a good way.
I hope you guys are all doing well :) (Also, the new YOI video of Yuri's exhibition AMIRIGHT?!)