Harry/Tom. Written for myself, by myself. Warnings for the massive AN at the end and for being unusually long.
xXx
Harry never really grew up. Which was fine, Tom is pretty sure. Maybe. He didn't really mind taking care of the younger man. He never has, even when they were just little boys and Tom was struggling to keep them both afloat in the orphanage, a demon's child and a "special " teacher's pet.
And it's not as if Harry doesn't occasionally manage a moment or two if surprising clarity and maturity, lucid poking through his craziness for a mere fraction of time before he's back in five year old seer mode, speaking in simple broken sentences about things that seem mundane but later reveal themselves to be serious. Like one day when he asked Tom if he was feeling tired after work, looking surprisingly shrewd for a second, then before Tom could reply he dropped the bomb that there would be a second world war and gave Tom the puppy eyes for no apparent reason, before wandering off to curl up under the kitchen table, one of his favourite spots to hole up and get lost amongst the visions.
(Tom, at the time, was not sure whether to be concerned about another war or amazed that he still even fit under there. Even if his husband was still more or less a child, he was a full grown man, albeit a bit on the small and fragile side, and yet he always seemed determined to squeeze himself into nooks and crannies, as if he was still hiding from the world after all these years.)
Still. Even if it was supposedly fine, sometimes being married to someone with the mental capacity of a kitten was endlessly frustrating, in the strangest, saddest of ways.
Because what bothered Tom wasn't that Harry wasn't willing to help Tom, (he very much was, Harry sometimes seemed to essentially be a housewife for all his dedication to doing all of the household chores.) or that he was still not the talkative type. (He absorbed words like a sponge, but let them out like a very extremely slow hour glass.) It wasn't even the fact that sometimes Tom came home and Harry literally couldn't remember him.
(It had stung horribly the first few times, but after a few years of coming home to blank eyes and a tentative "...dad?" (Apparently their resemblance of one another had only grown with age) he had grown used to having to reintroduce himself to his own husband. It helped that he had acquired a pensieve just for those occasions.)
No, it wasn't any of those things, as much as they hurt him or bothered him or didn't. What annoyed him more than anything else was that, when Harry hadn't grown up, he lost the excuse of "he's only young. But he'll grow up."
Harry, Tom had to face it now, would never really grow up. Which was fine, Tom was pretty sure. He still didn't really mind, and doubted he ever would. He loved Harry just the way he was: birds nest hair, expressive killing curse eyes, penchant for spiders and rock collecting, constant mumbling and helpfully handing out things a person wouldn't need until days later, hiding in dark spaces, and all.
He just wishes that he could at least know that, when Harry gives him those big green puppy eyes and mumbles that he loves him before spouting random facts about next weeks weather, he could know for sure that the other actually knew what he was talking about, and wasn't just a scared kid trapped in an adults body, trying to please the only reliable figure in his life.
xXx
So like, this is actually an AU that I really love, the whole, Seer!Harry in Tom Riddle's time, and they're friends, thing. Really it's more of a combination of AUs, but whatever.
So in this version, we're going to say that little Harry was mysteriously pulled through space and time, at some point along the way handed the ability to see the future, and he's been significantly effected by this event in several ways. He's pretty much what I assume a child who went through the Dursley's abuse followed by a mostly loveless childhood at an orphanage would be like, and as you can tell, he's a bit dotty from being a seer as well. He stopped maturing mentally and emotionally at a pretty young age. Tom, of course, instantly became interested in the new kid who could literally see the future, even if no one else believed it to be anything but bizarre coincidences, and took Harry under his wing, more or less, quickly forming a tight attachment when he realized that they were both freaks, even if Harry was better accepted by their peers, somehow. (Dunno why, exactly, but he was super helpful, I suppose) Their relationship continued all through Hogwarts, Tom at some point falling in love with his friend and not bothering to deny himself for long, with Harry accepting this new element to their relationship with not really any particular opinion about it, negative or positive. They graduated, and a few years later, Tom's still a manipulative little punk but Harry takes up too much of his time for him to go a-dark-lording, and viola! Here we are! A bizzare domestic life full of spiders and offhanded remarks about upcoming great events in history, and Tom doing his best not to hate himself for loving a man who is essentially a scared, eager to please child trapped in a very attractive body.
Ooh boy, was that a wall of text or what!
Anyhow, thanks for reading, if you think I could pull this off on a larger scale or maybe you want to try it then please leave a review along those lines, and have a nice day. Byeeeeee!