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Harry wasn’t proud of it, but as soon as he heard that his son was missing from Hogwarts he apparated to the path between the Riddle mansion and the overgrown Gaunt shed, terrified not of the man with the gun he might find walking, but of the young man pointing the wand behind his back.
Harry broke through the locked doors of the estate and found all the Riddles alive and whole. He wiped their memories, knocked them out, and in a blink he disappeared.
The pouring rain from Little Hangleton slopped from Harry’s wool coat as he sprinted from where he Apparated in Hogsmeade to Hogwarts.
He wasn’t proud of the doubt he’d succumbed to, but he refused to feel ashamed.
Because while he had raised him since childhood to focus his machinations away from humans, the reality was that the boy Harry flew back through time to adopt was Tom Riddle. And knowing what he did about Tom Riddle, dread had been bubbling in Harry’s gut since they waved goodbye in September to start his fifth year.
If Tom killed someone, even calculated their death from afar using a beast like the basilisk, then every sacrifice Harry made would be wasted.
Just the thought made Harry’s soul ache. Only a fraction of the pain was about his parents, about Sirius and Fred and Lupin and Tonks and how Ron and Hermione would never have a normal life, wherever they were now in the future.
No, he was thinking about the little boy with skinny knees and a wary rumple in his forehead, taking chance on Harry as he introduced him to the snake he found by the creek.
Speeding up through the Hogwarts front gates, Harry couldn’t outrun the shame after all. He wasn’t only a bad guardian. He was a bad friend, too.
Headmaster Dippet opened the wooden doors to the school for him. “I’m so very sorry, Mr. Potter,” Dippet sighed.
Behind him, Dumbledore held Tom’s diary in his hands with a complicated expression on his face. Harry recognized every facet of that expression: pity for a distraught and unsuspecting guardian, and also deep unsurprise that the young man he long treated with prejudice was proving him right.
Harry bit down his reaction and his distracting heart. The boy who asked for dark chocolate cake every year on his birthday needed him to focus.
Tom’s soul could not break. Not in this lifetime.
He pushed his hair, rainwater falling down the back of his neck and coat.
“Tell me what you’ve found so far.”
September 1
I’m no longer that pitiful eleven year old who feared Harry would forget him after a year apart. And yet I stared out the train window today. Not at the Scottish hills but back the way it came, as if I could still see him waving from King's Cross.
There are many things the world believes to be impossible.
When he asks in his next letter about my first day as prefect I will tell him how Slughorn was impressed with me and how the first years have already broken a priceless centuries-old vase in the common room.
I will not tell him that for now, I am the only active fifth year Slytherin prefect. He mustn’t hear how Tiffany Veneroix called me “an overgrown daddy’s boy.”
December 11
Malfoy and his paramour have made the dorms impassable. The Potions essay is due tomorrow so I have sequestered myself in the library. But like a waking nightmare I see behind my eyelids with every blink their wet, winding tongues. Like a family of snakes in a cave.
Harry never told me two men could kiss.
January 25
Harry was on the front page of the Prophet, bleeding like water in his Auror robes. The article did not give a name for the one who dared touch him.
Harry has not sent me a letter.
The newspaper clip was tucked on that page of Tom’s diary. Where Harry’s jaw, neck, and shoulder are marred open was faded and discolored like Tom had obsessed over the wound, maybe covering it with his thumb or trying to wipe the print ink like blood away.
Harry’s brows furrowed. There was no indication here whether Tom had found the Chamber of Secrets. But beyond that he wasn’t sure what to look for. Tom’s inner world as it was presented here was… The feelings he seemed to be discovering were… Harry didn’t want to see something that wasn’t there.
Pages of what he first assumed were Defense notes followed. But then he recognized that every page—certain branches of centaur magic; the Philosopher's Stone; vampires and even the locations of known dens—was another road to immortality.
Harry swallowed bile scorching his throat as he passed a cursory page describing Horcruxes.
His fingers shook so violently he could hardly read the last entry in Tom’s diary:
June 22
Dearest Harry,
Do you remember the beach?
That day I had done a wrong I don’t recall. As punishment you sent me to collect driftwood from the beach. I was bored, resentful. Like the English lions from centuries ago I wanted to bite and hurt you for daring to censure me.
Forgive me; I was young. Today I recognize your gentle discipline. You believed the task was harmless to me. I don’t mean to guilt you when I tell you now that it harmed me: it ripped from me time I would have had with you.
You used the driftwood to light a fire that wasn’t red, but sapphire and emerald. You said it was the sea salt in the wood. To me it was just more of your magic.
I will miss being your charge. But I will still have you forever.
History will know your name, as it will always be equal to and partnered with mine.
Yours,
Tom
The stained glass windows of the steeple were shuttered and the den of vampires slept without fear, serpentine and warm on the main floor. Standing on the balcony, Tom leaned over the railing to watch them. Something hungry coiled low in his gut as he admired how they breathed and others rose with it. All of them were woven together in sleep like animals.
Soon he would be licking Harry’s bleeding neck not from a newspaper clipping but in actuality. He wouldn’t be sucking the ink from paper, but sucking every drop of magic from Harry’s body.
Forever.
Tom wasn’t proud of it, but he was giddy. The anticipation made him delirious.
But he did not imagine that voice.
“Tom!”
Tom turned. And as he knew he would be, Harry was there in the stairwell doorway. His hair was pushed back handsomely, drying in loose curls after a rain. And there was a frantic terror in his bloodshot and shadowed eyes that made Tom warm.
Look what Harry would do to himself to see Tom safe. Dare he hope it was more romantic than fatherly?
Tom hadn’t seen Harry since he was attacked in January. The scar was healing.
Tom wished to bite it.
Below them the vampires hissed and shouted, startled awake by Harry’s shout. Perfect. All he had left to do was lay the last piece.
He faced Harry and opened his arms wide, like he awaited a hug at their reunion. But as Harry sighed the tension out and approached, Tom leaned back, over the balcony railing and into the thin air above all those teeth.
“NO!” Harry shouted, and he leaped over the railing, reaching to take Tom’s hand.
Falling, Tom watched every thought pass over Harry’s face as he saw Tom’s smile. He would have seen the diary, the letter; discerned his intention. Harry would have thought the diary was too obvious, the entries too curated, but would have been too hopeful and distracted to suspect a trap. Tom had been missing from Hogwarts for hours—waiting here above the den of sleeping lions, perfectly safe and reasonably sane for the last piece to arrive.
And Tom’s blood swirled as Harry looked not at him but at the mouths below, understood the transformation awaiting them—accepted so much faster than Tom dared hope the forever they would have together.
Beginning… now.