Lol. Has it really been over a year? My bad.
ooo
Harry asked Tom to remove the bandages, so he did.
Nimble fingers unwrapped them slowly, and Tom placed his hands gently on the boy's neck to keep him steady. Potter kept his eyes clenched shut, even when Tom caught his first glimpse of the boy's eyelids, a smattering of black lashes covering pale skin. A few faint, pink scars lingered around the edges of the boy's temple, and underneath the left eye where the burns had been worse. Tom clinically took in the damage; the boy would likely always have the marks, but they were faint, and not unattractive. They were an imperfection, a reminder that Potter had fought and won against impossible odds, and barely noticeable at all. Contradictory and complementary; his green eyes would stand out strongly against the red tinging the edges.
"Perhaps you could give us a moment?" Tom spoke to the Healer supervising the removal of the bandages. "I'll call you in if there's anything unusual. You've already told me what to expect...in either case."
The Healer frowned, but nodded. "I'll be right outside the door. Best of luck."
The door clicked shut, and Potter still hadn't opened his eyes.
"Tom," he rasped, clenching Tom's wrist tightly in his fingers.
"Open your eyes," he told him, because he saw no point in delaying the inevitable. He didn't bother with any words of comfort; they would be meaningless in the case of either event. Either the boy was blind or he wasn't, and nothing Tom said would change that.
Potter took a deep breath, eyes still squeezed shut, fingers spasming on his wrist. He leaned forward, fumbling so that his hands seeked out Tom's face, and pressed their foreheads together. Tom allowed it.
A brief moment of green flashed in Tom's vision as Harry forced open his eyes.
...Only to clench them shut immediately after, letting go of Tom in order to cover them with his palms.
"What is it?" Tom asked, hoping he wouldn't have to offer comfort. He didn't particularly want to feign sympathy and optimism.
The boy's shoulders shook as he started to cry, and Tom took a deep breath to calm his irritable response. So Potter was blind. That made his Quidditch talent and dueling talent useless, and he wondered why he should bother to recruit the boy anyway, but resigned himself to do so, deciding to analyze the motive later. He lifted a palm to cradle the back of the boy's neck.
"It's bright," Potter managed, and Tom blinked in surprise, the hand he'd been in the midst of offering as obligatory comfort coming to a halt between them.
"Bright?" Tom asked carefully, because that meant-
"I can see," Potter said, his sob turning into a hiccuping laugh. Tears dripped from his eyes as he forced them open again, and was forced to immediately shut them by the sunlight.
Tom didn't even have a chance to say anything when Potter threw himself at him, wrapping his arms around his shoulders and burying his face in his neck. Tom tensed in discomfort; pleasurable kisses were one thing, but hugs were downright sentimental.
He felt Potter's eyelashes flutter against his neck, using Tom's shadow to allow them to open, his lips pressed against his shoulder and turned up in a delighted grin.
The Healer came in, wanting to check the progress. With her help, and with several spells to dampen the light, Potter's eyes adjusted.
When Harry kept his eyes open long enough to focus for the first time on Tom's face, he launched forward to plant a clumsy kiss on his lips, right in front of the Healer.
Tom considered obliviating her, but decided against the idea. It would likely be noticed, given that she was a Healer and worked in a hospital.
It worked out for the best since she'd already seen the Mollis Caritate's presence in her earlier scans, the action failing to surprise her. She only paused to tell Tom that the potion would probably wear off in the next day or two, and that she already knew about the accident from speaking to Professor Dumbledore. She reassured him that she knew that the potion hadn't been intended for malignant purposes.
Tom smiled blamelessly.
ooo
To Tom's surprise, Potter was not ecstatic that he no longer needed glasses. The first thing he did when the Healers returned them, contrary to expectations, was not to smash them, but to ask Professor Dumbledore to transfigure the glass into thin placeholders that did nothing for his sight at all.
Dumbledore did so with a surprised blink, but smiled indulgently and complied, before
shooing them out of the Headmaster's office to which they'd Floo'd.
Yet the strange request proved fruitless, since Potter found that despite having his glasses, the frames rubbed unpleasantly against his still-tender skin and forced him to take them off.
"Isn't there some sort of charm that can make it not do that?" he asked Tom, irritably glaring at his glasses. "You know tons of spells, can't you think of one?"
"I can think of multiple," Tom said matter-of-factly. "But the Healer said no more healing spells unless you want your skin to fall off."
In truth, he was almost tempted to do so anyway, regardless of what the Healer said. Potter without glasses reminded him of Potter waking up in the morning, squinting and vulnerable and in his bed.
The boy's persistence still aggravated him, of course, but he supposed he was beginning to see the advantages of having the boy in his bed in the future. He might allow it to continue, even when the potion wore off. The boy passed in front of him as they reached the stairs, and his gaze drifted down to Potter's shoulders, remembering how the muscles had moved when he'd dueled against the Gryffindors. Seeing Potter's momentary inattention, he allowed his gaze to drift lower.
"My skin would not fall of," Potter scoffed, folding up his glasses reluctantly and stuffing them in his robes. He frowned as though struck with a worried afterthought. "Would it?"
"Probably not," Tom allowed, his eyes strictly on the boy's face when Potter glanced over his shoulder to speak to him. "But it would still do more harm than good. It should heal the rest of the way on its own within a few weeks."
"Yeah," Potter said glumly, dragging his feet down the last few steps. Tom frowned at the undignified action, but said nothing.
"Why are you so determined to keep them?" Tom asked instead, with mild curiosity. He would have thought them an unnecessary hassle, especially given Potter's appreciation of Quidditch and dueling.
"I just...I don't feel like me without them," Potter shrugged, feet scuffing the ground. "My father wore glasses too, you know, and it feels like something that connects us."
"It sounds like you don't feel like him without them," Tom pointed out tartly, ill-humored at the mention of fathers. He didn't see why Potter would want a connection with his; Tom hated looking like his father, hated that he shared the same common name.
"I never got to know him," Potter said defensively, avoiding Tom's scowl, aware that he tread on dangerous ground. His shoulders hunched, as though expecting an attack.
Tom clenched his jaw, but forced out something relatively civil, something that wasn't a dark curse aimed at the fool's back.
"I see that as no legitimate reason to inconvenience yourself by trying to cling to his shadow," he said acerbically, thinking of a particularly nasty curse that burned the eyeballs from the inside-out. It would have a pleasant irony to its completion, given Potter's fortunately successful surgery.
"They're just glasses!"
"Then put them on and suit yourself, it's no skin off my back," Tom snapped back, striding down the hallway quickly. No footsteps followed for a long moment, the boy stunned at the sudden swing in temper.
"Tom," Harry called, chasing after him shortly after. The boy reached out to catch Tom's hand, and he yanked his hand violently out of his grasp, ignoring the hurt expression he received in response.
He felt strangely and illogically cross when he wondered if the boy would have chased after him without the love potion.
ooo
It turned out that Tom didn't need to ask Black for a favor after all, since the MacDougal family paid off Potter's surgical expenses. Two of the other four Gryffindors had been expelled, but with the MacDougal family's generous compensation, the school board allowed the instigator of the entire mess to continue and finish his seventh year, under close surveillance and with many detentions. Unsurprisingly, the other two Gryffindors who had escaped the worst of the reprisal had been purebloods as well, while the mudbloods had their wands snapped without further ado.
Whispers travelled the school, some cooing about Tom's sweet attendance of Potter at the hospital, some more sinister whispers in Slytherin wondering if Tom had arranged the whole episode in retaliation for Potter's winning of the DADA duel. Harry still had scars, after all, peeking out from beneath his hairline, barely touching the far corner of his eye.
Other, more intelligent whispers suggested that Potter now fell under Tom's protection; the Gryffindors had been taken care of quite harshly, and it had lacked the subtlety of Tom's usual style of vengeance, suggesting that he wanted people to know that Potter was off-limits.
Harry clung to Tom's hand throughout it all, spurring on the rumors even further, including those of a more erotic nature. Potter's lack of glasses did not help in that department; giggles followed them, murmuring about his striking green eyes and roguish scars. The boy looked even more irritated and embarrassed by the whispers without a wall of glass separating him from the rest of the world, still making habitual gestures to push up his glasses, and looking mournful every time he realized their absence.
Potter never again complained aloud about the lost connection to his father, however, a gesture that both relieved and aggravated him.
The forlorn sighs also irritated him for some reason, so Tom found himself distracting the boy, either through kisses or sly comments. His cynical perspective usually struck others as odd and disturbing, given his supposed soft and kind hearted facade, but he'd discovered that Potter found them entertaining, even if he occasionally looked alarmed by his own reluctant amusement.
Tom found, to his unease, that he kept reminding himself that Potter had been infatuated with him before the Mollis Caritate. Nothing significant would change; already, the boy was acting more autonomously, less influenced by the potion.
He didn't analyze this train of thought too much, because he was sure it didn't deserve any more acknowledgement than it had already received.
ooo
Yet the insidious thoughts continued, as he began to scrutinize Potter's behavior even more, wondering how much was manufactured by the potion and how much was genuinely Harry. The spontaneous kisses and proclamations of love were obviously fabricated, but would the boy continue them if he fell in love without the potion?
The sarcastic comments and cynical humor likely derived from his original personality, given that the boy slipped into that persona when the potion appeared to affect him the least. The small habits, like how he'd started rubbing his nose since the absence of his glasses, and the particular tone of "hmm" he'd use when pretending to pay attention to someone, would probably remain as well.
He'd probably still enjoy it when his lover licked into his mouth, ran fingers over his hips, and sucked on his bottom lip. Tom simply had to ensure that the lover was himself.
"Mmm," Potter murmured, pressing up against him, squirming pleasingly as Tom tasted at his jaw.
Potter had initiated the kiss, of course; Tom had not done so aside from the kiss after their duel and the one at the hospital. He didn't want the boy being angry with him on principle when the potion wore off; sometimes he thought that Harry was more suited to Gryffindor than the House of Snakes.
It was also the reason they'd done nothing but kiss, leaving Tom unsatisfied and irritable with the entire situation. While it wasn't necessarily morals that kept him from going further, or even wariness of Potter's future reaction, he thought it somehow an insult to his pride if he had to use the influence of a love potion to obtain sex from someone he desired.
He could of course attempt to satisfy his frustration elsewhere, but he remembered how repulsed he'd been by touch before, and even the idea of using anyone aside from the boy disgusted him. The Unbreakable Vow allowed him to trust the fool, and he didn't completely despise Potter's personality when he wasn't swooning due to the love potion. No one else inspired that much tolerance.
So on the seventh night since Potter had taken the love potion, Tom allowed Harry's touches and kisses, even if he did stop him when the boy began to slip his hands beneath his robes, and when he began to squirm just a bit too provocatively. He allowed the boy to fall asleep clinging to him.
They were the last ones to wake up in the morning, seeing as neither of them had slept the night before last, what with the St. Mungo's fiasco. They were alone in the dorm, so Tom flicked open the curtains of his bed with a snap of wandless magic, sending a locking and privacy spell at the door as an afterthought, ensuring no one would come in and see Potter warming his bed.
He studied the boy's scruffy appearance, the mussed hair and parted lips, and privately proclaimed Potter truly fortunate that Tom found him attractive despite it. He was willing to lower himself to the boy's level and engage in such an inane and senseless thing as a relationship, seeing as that was what Potter would likely want. Far too Gryffindor for Tom's tastes, but he supposed it would work to his advantage. Others repulsed him anyway, so the loyalty would be no burden to him, and he disliked sharing his things. This would give him a "moral" basis to keep Potter to himself.
A part of him dreaded the boy's return of free will, since it would mean he'd have to feign those "moral" values in order to win him over. He was confident in his acting abilities, but it would be a pain to falsify the patience. Potter might reject him at first, out of confusion and disorientation when the Mollis Caritate wore off.
Such a plain boy, though, surely wouldn't resist Tom's attention for long? A part of him wondered if it was worth the hassle, since he assumed he'd tire of the boy eventually, but he remembered how Potter would snicker at a snide remark about Slughorn, or give casual, clever retorts, not reduced to groveling even in his infatuated state. He remembered how those lips felt against his neck, the parseltongue, their similar childhood, and how he still needed to defeat Potter in a duel.
He supposed that despite all the physical plainness, at least the boy himself was unique. And those eyes.
He watched detachedly as they fluttered, slits of green peeking out from under the lids. They met Tom's gaze, but to his surprise, instead of flickering down to his lips, gazing adoringly into his eyes, or even crinkling with a smile as he said how much he loved Tom, they widened in confusion.
The boy blinked away the last of his sleep, breath growing uneven first with bewilderment and then consternation, horror filling his just-opened eyes-
Harry Potter woke up.
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You guys kept asking when the potion would wear off. The answer is now. :))))