🌺🌞

Tom set the quill down in its silver stand. He did not sigh. He merely allowed a fraction of a second of silence to stretch, a silent acknowledgment that the intricate web of legislation he was weaving was about to be set aside for mud and biting wind.

“The fog is rolling in from the valley,” he replied, his voice low and even. “It will be raw.”

“Hence the cloak.” You shook the garment at him, your expression one of fond exasperation that he had, over the years, learned to read as well as any ancient rune. You had your own cloak on already, a deep blue that did nothing for your complexion but which you insisted made you feel like a “respectable sea captain.” You were bundled beneath it in layers of cashmere. You looked, as you always did before these excursions, like a very stubborn, very opinionated pillow.

He rose. The warmth of the hearth clung to his back, a final, desperate embrace before the betrayal of the outdoors. He took the cloak from your hands, his fingers brushing yours. Your skin was cool. It always was. It was a condition he had studied extensively, poor circulation, you’d told him once, a family trait. It was the reason he kept the bedroom so stiflingly hot, the reason the sheets were spelled to hold warmth like a bank vault holds gold. It was his excuse.

He didn't need an excuse. He could take what he wanted. But when you shivered in your sleep and turned, burrowing against the solid warmth of his chest, it was a surrender he couldn't replicate with any amount of Dark magic.

“You could simply let me cast a warming charm on the pair of us,” he murmured, swirling the cloak around his shoulders. The heavy fabric settled against his frame, already feeling like a damp shroud just from being in the same room as the open door. “We would not feel a thing. We could stroll naked through a blizzard.”

You laughed. It was a sound that still had the power to unsettle the portraits on the walls, a bright, irreverent crack in the solemn silence he cultivated. “And then the first time you’re caught in a meeting without me and a draft hits your ankles, you’ll sneeze and Avada Kedavra a junior undersecretary out of pure reflex. No. Bodies need to remember what cold is. And we need fresh air. Not this.” You waved a hand at the fire, at the perfectly climate-controlled perfection of his sanctuary.

He did not tell you that his body remembered the cold all too well. It was imprinted in his very bones, a legacy of a stone room with a broken window and a blanket as thin as a lie. He did not need a walk on the blasted heath to remind him of the damp that seeped into Wool’s Orphanage, the kind of cold that was less a temperature and more a state of being. Starvation cold. Hopeless cold.

But you knew that. He suspected you knew everything, which was why you held his hand so tightly when you stepped out onto the gravel path. Not just for your own warmth, but for his. A silent, unspoken anchor against a memory he refused to voice.

The door closed behind you, and the air hit him.

It was a physical assault. The damp curled around his ankles, climbed the weave of his trousers. The wind, sharp with the scent of wet earth and dying heather, scraped his cheeks raw. He clenched his jaw.

You, conversely, took a deep, invigorating breath as if you’d just inhaled a potion of pure oxygen. “Smell that? Fresh air. It's good for the lungs.”

“It smells of peat rot and sheep excrement,” he said flatly.

“Exactly. Unfiltered reality.” You tugged his hand. “Come on. You walk like an old man when you’re annoyed.”

He was not annoyed. He was something else entirely. He was walking across a landscape that mirrored the inside of his soul, vast and bleak, and he was doing it while holding hands with a woman who, by every law of the world he had once tried to enforce, should not exist in his orbit.

He was a head taller than you now. He remembered a time when he wasn't. He remembered the summer before sixth year, coming back to Hogwarts after two months of watery soup and thin porridge, feeling the bones in his wrists like they might snap if he held his wand too tight. He’d seen you on the platform, laughing with a gaggle of Ravenclaws, and you had looked so healthy. You’d grown over the summer; he hadn't. For a solid three months, you’d had a quarter-inch on him, and he’d hated you for it with a ferocity that far outstripped his usual disdain for Mudbloods.

He couldn't be seen with you then. Not just because of the blood status he wore like a crown of thorns in his own mind. It was because to stand next to you would have highlighted the scrawniness of his frame, the cheap cut of his second-hand robes. He, Tom Riddle, who could speak to serpents and command the loyalty of the scions of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, would have looked like a charity case next to you.

Now, he looked down at the top of your hood, at the few wisps of hair that escaped to be tousled by the moor wind. He had power. He had wealth. He had a mansion full of servants who trembled at the sound of his footsteps. He had reshaped the Ministry from lazy bureaucracy into an engine of cold, ruthless efficiency.

And yet, here he was. Letting you drag him along a sheep track.

“I heard that Penelope Fawcett’s son is trying to get a seat on the Wizengamot,” you said, your voice muffled slightly by the collar of your cloak. “The one who looks like a startled puffskein.”

“Alfred Fawcett. His application is adequate.”

“Adequate is a strong word for a man who once set his own eyebrows on fire trying to light a candelabra with a verbal spell. He said Incendio with such a lisp it came out In-then-dio and set the curtains ablaze. I remember. I was there. I had to put it out with a jug of pumpkin juice.”

The corner of Tom’s mouth twitched. “You threw pumpkin juice on the Head of Slytherin House’s antique velvet drapes.”

“Horace forgave me. Though that was because he was plied with all the candied pineapple you brought him.”

He didn't answer. He was looking at the way the fog pooled in the hollows of the land, like ghostly lakes. His fingers tightened around yours. A part of him, a very small, very quiet part that he had never managed to Occlude away completely, was counting. He was counting the steps until you turned around. He was counting the minutes until he could return to the dry heat of his study. But he was also counting the beats of your pulse where it thrummed against his palm.

You stopped abruptly.

Tom’s gaze snapped to your face, a flicker of alertness sharpening his features. Danger? He scanned the horizon. Nothing but mist and gorse.

“Look at that cloud,” you said, pointing.

He followed your gaze. It was a cloud. Grey. Lumpy. Unremarkable.

“It looks like a hippogriff,” you declared.

And then you looked up at him, and your glare softened. It was the glare you used when he came to bed at three in the morning smelling of old parchment. It was the glare you used when he made a snide comment about a colleague’s incompetence that was just a shade too cruel. It pained him more than any cutting curse ever could. Because your anger was a hot, righteous fire, but your disappointment was a cold, sinking stone in his gut. And you were not disappointed now. You were looking at him like he was the one who had suggested the hippogriff cloud.

“What?” he asked, his voice more curt than he intended.

“You’re doing it again,” you said.

“Doing what?”

“Looking at the path behind us. Waiting for it to end.”

Tom’s jaw tightened. He hated being read. He hated that you could see the little boy shivering in the corner of his mind, the one who hated the outdoors because outdoors was where you were sent when they wanted you out from underfoot, the one who hated the cold because the cold meant winter and winter meant Christmas and Christmas meant watching other children receive things he would never have.

“I’m cold,” he said. It was an admission he would make to no one else. It sounded like a lie, even though it was true.

You didn’t call him a liar. You stepped closer, right into the space where the heat of his body was fighting a losing battle against the wind. You let go of his hand and instead wrapped your arms around his waist, inside the heavy cloak, pressing your cold cheek against the warmth of his chest.

He stood rigid for a moment. The fog swirled around your joined silhouette.

“You’re always cold,” you murmured against the wool of his jumper. “You’ve been cold since you were born, and you think I don’t know why.”

He said nothing. He just lowered his chin, the sharp line of his jaw coming to rest on the top of your head. The scent of your hair, warm and impossibly fresh, a charm you’d invented yourself, cut through the peat and rot.

He should have silenced you. He should have been furious. To have his childhood, that pathetic, rat-gnawed story, laid out in the middle of a moor like a specimen on a tray was an indignity he had killed men for less.

Instead, he pulled you tighter. The movement was convulsive, almost violent in its need.

“I cannot charm it away,” he whispered, his voice stripped of its usual velvet polish. It was rough, the voice of a boy who had spent too many nights screaming silently into a thin pillow. “I have tried. I have woven warming spells into the very foundations of the house. I have turned our bedroom into a furnace. And still, sometimes, I wake up and I am there.”

You pulled back just enough to look up at him. The light was truly fading now, turning the world into a watercolor of blue and charcoal. Your eyes were bright. You rarely cried in front of him, knowing he found tears manipulative unless they were shed in the throes of passion. They were bright with that fierce, stubborn, Muggleborn determination that had kept you alive through a war he had had a hand in starting and finishing.

“That’s why we walk,” you said simply. “Because you can’t hide from it. You have to walk through it. And I won’t let you do it alone. I won't let you charm it away. You have to feel it and survive it. Every day. Until it’s just weather. Just air. Not a prison.”

He stared at you. The wind howled across the empty expanse. A lesser man would have kissed you then, a grand, romantic gesture to punctuate the speech.

Tom Riddle was not a lesser man.

He dipped his head and kissed you anyway.

It wasn't grand. It was a hard, desperate press of lips, his nose cold against your cheek, his hands fisting the back of your cloak as if you were the only solid thing in a world made of mist and memory. And in that moment, with the taste of the moor on your lips and the weight of a decades-old fear crushing his ribs, he felt it. The lurch. The vertigo.

He was sixteen again. He was scrawny and hungry and terrified that you would notice the frayed cuff of his sleeve. He was standing in a corner of the library, watching you laugh with a prefect who had a new broomstick and a trust fund, and he wanted to walk over and say something, anything, but he couldn't. He was an inch shorter. He was a Mudblood's inferior in every way that mattered in your sunlit, carefree world and superior in every way that mattered in his.

He hated it. He hated the weakness of it, the raw, unguarded vulnerability that you stripped him down to with nothing more than a walk and a hug.

He broke the kiss.

He straightened, forcing the mask back into place, but the edges were blurred now, softened by the cold. He looked down at you. You were smiling. It wasn't a smug smile. It was a sad, knowing smile. The smile of a woman who loved the monster and the boy in equal measure.

“Come on,” you said, your voice a little hoarse. “There’s a log up ahead shaped like a grumpy troll. I want to insult it to its face before it gets too dark to see.”

You took his hand again. He let you pull him further into the damp, into the cold, into the suffocating grey of the evening. He listened to you verbally dismantle the character of a piece of dead wood, then move on to the ministry officials' new hat policy, then to the quality of the scones served at the last gala you’d been forced to attend.

He grunted in agreement where appropriate. He made a single, cutting remark that made you laugh so hard you stumbled and had to hold onto his arm to keep from sliding down the muddy bank.

The fog thickened. The light died. But the cold…the cold seemed to recede. Not because the temperature changed, but because the chill in his soul had been given a name and a shape and had been met with a stubborn, unwavering warmth that refused to be extinguished.

When they finally turned back, the lights of the mansion were a welcome, golden smear in the distance. You were leaning on him now, your energy for vitriolic commentary spent, replaced by a pleasant, shivering fatigue.

He led you inside. The heat of the foyer hit him like a physical wall, chasing the damp from his clothes and hair. A maid appeared to take the cloaks, and Tom waved her away with a curt flick of his wrist.

He undid the clasp of your cloak himself, his knuckles brushing your throat. Your skin was ice cold.

“You’re frozen,” he stated.

“It was a good walk,” you replied, your teeth chattering just slightly. “Very restorative. I feel like I’ve been emotionally exfoliated.”

He looked at you. Soaking hem, wind-chapped lips, nose red from the chill, hair a mess.

Without a word, he placed his palm flat against the small of your back. You flinched, expecting the cold of his hand, but instead a wave of pure, dry, searing heat bloomed from his touch. It spread up your spine, down your arms, flooding your system with the exact temperature of his study, of his bed, of the place he kept safe for you.

You glared at him. “I told you not to...”

“You’re shivering,” he cut you off, his voice soft but final. “I won’t have you catching a chill. The walk is over. The lesson is complete. Now you will be warm.”

It was the voice he used in the Wizengamot. The one that made old families with long lineages shrink in their seats. You didn't shrink. You leaned into his hand, your glare melting into a sigh of pure, blissful relief.

“Fine,” you mumbled. “But tomorrow we’re walking the long loop. By the river. And no pre-warming yourself. We walk into it cold, and we walk out of it cold.”

Tom Riddle looked down at his wife. He thought of the river damp. He thought of the orphanage. He thought of the boy he’d been and the man he’d become.

He thought of holding your hand on the moors, feeling like a terrified sixteen-year-old with a fancy he didn't have the nerve to act on.

He hated it.

He kissed the top of your head.

“Fine,” he said. “But you’re wearing two pairs of socks.”

a/n: You can donate on my Ko-fi, your support helps me write more: https://ko-fi.com/catbayunthestoryteller <3 (Disclaimer: support is voluntary. None of my fics are behind a paywall of any sort.)

a/n: If this fic reads like an epilogue of chapter 50 of Book 2 of 3 of a very long fanfic series, it's because it is. But the series is all in my head. Hopefully it was enjoyable as a oneshot <3. Reblogs and comments are appreaciated.

It wasn’t just legendary; it was documented. There were actual incident reports.

Like the time Soap and Gaz had turned a simple training exercise into a competition over who could complete the obstacle course faster, which escalated into them sabotaging each other’s runs, which culminated in both of them dangling from a cargo net they’d somehow set on fire. Price had made them write individual apology letters to the base commander. They’d turned that into a competition too, each trying to write the most eloquent apology. Price had been furious. The base commander had been confused. The letters were still pinned to the bulletin board in the rec room as a warning to others.

Or the time Ghost and Soap had disagreed over the best way to clear a building, and instead of just… discussing it like normal people, they’d run the same scenario seventeen times in a row, each trying to beat the other’s time by mere seconds. They’d only stopped when Price physically removed them from the kill house and threatened to make them do paperwork for a month. Even then, Soap had muttered that he’d been winning.

Even Price wasn’t immune. There was a pool table in the officer’s lounge that no one was allowed to use anymore after Price and a visiting colonel had gotten into an increasingly intense game that lasted six hours and ended with the colonel’s transfer request. Price maintained he’d won fair and square. The indentation in the wall from where the cue ball had been hit with unnecessary force suggested things had gotten heated.

They competed over everything: marksmanship scores, mission completion times, who could do the most push ups, who could hold their breath longest, who could spot the enemy sniper first, who could drink the most without getting drunk (that one had ended poorly for everyone), and once, memorably, who could go longest without speaking. That had been a peaceful week for you, right up until they’d all broken at the same moment and started arguing about who had technically lasted longer.

Ghost had won that one by pointing out he never spoke much anyway, so it hadn’t been a challenge. Soap had thrown a boot at him.

The thing was, it made them excellent soldiers. That competitive drive pushed them to be faster, sharper, better than anyone else. They held records across multiple bases. Their mission success rate was unmatched. When Task Force 141 was assigned to an operation, people breathed easier because they knew it would get done.

But it also made them absolutely insufferable when they decided something was a competition.

And they decided everything was a competition.

Which brings you back to Graves.

The rec room was unusually crowded with Shadow Company temporarily stationed at the base. You’d been dealing with Graves and his people for three days now, and while professionally everything was running smoothly, personally you were ready for them to leave.

Graves had a way of taking up space, his Southern drawl filling every room he entered. He wasn’t a bad guy, exactly. Just… a lot.

You were refilling your coffee when he sauntered over, that trademark smirk firmly in place.

“Well, well. Didn’t expect to see you here,” he said, leaning against the counter in a way that was probably supposed to be charming.

“It’s my base, Graves.”

“Phil, sweetheart. We’re past formalities, aren’t we?” His eyes gleamed with something that made you tense. “Especially considering.”

Across the room, you felt the 141 paying attention. Price had looked up from his report. Soap’s conversation with Gaz had died mid sentence. Even Ghost had shifted slightly in his seat.

You should’ve known then. Should’ve recognized the signs. The 141 had a sixth sense for potential competitions, and they were already alert, already watching.

“Considering what?” you asked, keeping your voice level even as warning bells started ringing in your head.

“Oh, come on now. No need to be shy.” Graves’ smile widened. “Though you weren’t particularly shy that weekend in Berlin, as I recall. Great even.”

The room went very, very quiet.

You sighed internally. Of course he was going to do this. Of course he was trying to posture and mark his territory. “That was two years ago, Graves.”

“Phil,” he corrected again, clearly enjoying himself. “And I gotta say, you’re looking even better now than you did then. If you ever get tired of the 141, Shadow Company’s always recruiting. I’d be happy to conduct your… interview process.”

The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.

Oh no.

You saw it happen in real time: Soap’s hand tightening around his mug, Gaz going unnaturally still, the way Price’s report crinkled ominously in his grip, how Ghost’s head tilted in that particular way that usually preceded someone having a very bad day.

“I’m good where I am,” you said firmly, trying to de-escalate. “Thanks.”

“Your loss.” Graves straightened, addressing the room now, playing to his audience. “But between you and me, and well, everyone else here” he stage whispered conspiratorially, “totally worth the operation debrief we had to sit through the next morning half dead from exhaustion, if you know what I mean.”

Oh no.

“Graves-” you started.

“I’m just saying.” Graves straightened, clearly enjoying the attention. “But hey, you know where to find me if you change your mind. I’ll make sure to clear my schedule. Maybe we can recapture some of that Berlin magic.”

He winked- actually winked- and sauntered off to join his team.

The silence he left behind was suffocating.

Finally, Soap broke it. “Berlin?”

You shrugged, returning to doctoring your coffee. “It was a joint task force operation. Two years ago, like I said.”

“And you…” Gaz trailed off, eyebrows raised.

“Yes.”

“With Graves.” Soap’s voice was flat.

“With Commander Graves, yes.” You turned to face them, meeting each of their stares head on. “Is there a problem?”

Price folded his paper with deliberate precision. “Did we say there was a problem?”

“You’re all looking at me like I kicked a puppy.”

“We’re just… processing,” Gaz said diplomatically.

Ghost’s voice cut through, dry as bone: “Didn’t take you for someone with poor judgment.”

You snorted. “It was one weekend. Casual. And for the record, it was perfectly good judgment at the time. Mission was over, we were both consenting adults, and I have no regrets.”

“No regrets,” Soap repeated, something dangerous in his tone. “About Graves.”

“Should I?” You challenged, feeling your own temper stir, offended as they questioned your life choices. “I’m pretty sure I’m allowed to have a past.”

“Course you are,” Price said, but his jaw was tight. “Just didn’t realize your past included…”

“Included what? Men you don’t like?” You crossed your arms. “Grow up.”

“How was it?” The question came from Ghost, and everyone turned to stare at him.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” Ghost leaned back in his chair. “How was it? With Graves.”

You could’ve deflected. Probably should have. But you’d never been good at backing down, and something about their collective judgment made you want to defend yourself even if a voice in the back of your head said you were just going to poke the bear.

“It was alright,” you said with a shrug. “Better than most, if I’m being honest. Actually…” you paused, taking a sip of coffee, “probably one of the best I’ve ever had.”

The reaction was immediate and visceral.

Soap’s mug hit the table with a thud. “You’re joking.”

“One of the best?” Gaz’s voice had gone up half an octave.

Price’s knuckles were white where they gripped the report.

Ghost had gone preternaturally still.

You blinked at them, genuinely confused by the intensity of their reactions. “What? You asked.”

“One of the best,” Soap repeated, standing now. “Graves. Commander Philip Graves, who can’t shut his mouth for five seconds and wears those ridiculous sunglasses indoors-”

“I didn’t say he was perfect, I said the sex was good. There’s a difference.”

“Better than-” Gaz cut himself off, glancing around the room. They were still in public, even if most people had cleared out when the tension started rising. “Better than most?”

“Are you actually offended right now?” You stared at them. “This is ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous,” Soap said hotly. “It’s-it’s-”

“It’s Graves,” Price finished, and somehow that explained everything.

You looked between the four of them and suddenly understood. This wasn’t about you having a past. This was about their egos. Their pride. Their absolute inability to accept being second best at anything, especially to someone they considered inferior.

And especially not at this.

“Oh my god,” you said slowly. “You’re jealous.”

“We’re not jealous,” four voices said in unison, which was probably the least convincing denial in military history.

“You are.” A laugh bubbled up despite yourself. “You’re actually jealous of Graves.”

“Not jealous,” Ghost corrected. “Competitive.”

“That’s the same thing!”

“It’s really not,” Gaz muttered.

Soap had started pacing. “One of the best. One of the bloody best. What does that even mean? Top five? Top three?”

“I’m not ranking my sexual encounters like a mission debrief, Johnny.”

“Why not?” he shot back. “Seems like useful information.”

You pinched the bridge of your nose. “Can we not do this here?”

“Do what?” Price was genuinely curious now.

“Have a breakdown because I slept with someone and thought they were good.”

“It’s about-” Gaz gestured vaguely. “Standards. You have standards, right? And if Graves meets those standards, then what does that say about-”

“About you?” You finished. “Nothing. It says nothing about you because you’re not in competition with my past.”

The look they exchanged said otherwise.

“Don’t,” you blurted out preemptively.

“Don’t what?” Soap asked, voice too casual.

“Whatever you’re thinking. Don’t.”

“We’re not thinking anything,” Gaz said, which was absolutely a lie.

You knew that tone. You’d heard that tone before, right before they’d decided to turn a simple reconnaissance mission into a competition over who could get the most actionable intelligence. It had been effective but exhausting.

“It was two years ago,” you said firmly. “It was fine, it’s over. Can we please move on?”

“Fine?” Soap pounced on the word. “You said fine? But Graves was great.”

“It was an exaggeration.”

“Was it though?” This from Ghost, who had actually stood up now. “In my experience, Graves is many things, but he doesn’t usually undersell his own accomplishments.”

You stared at him. “Are you defending Graves right now?”

“I’m establishing accurate parameters.”

“Parameters for what?”

The look they all exchanged was brief but telling. In that single moment of silent communication- the kind they’d perfected over countless missions- you saw them come to some kind of collective decision.

“Nothing,” Price said, but his slight smile suggested otherwise. “Just thinking it’s interesting, that’s all.”

“What’s interesting?”

“That you considers Graves some of the best you’ve ever had,” Gaz said thoughtfully. “Makes a man curious about the standards being applied and if someone can raise them.”

“Oh my god.” You could see where this was going now, clear as day. “No. Absolutely not.”

“No what?” Soap asked innocently. Too innocently.

“Whatever competitive insanity you’re all cooking up right now, the answer is no.”

“We’re not cooking up anything,” Price said. “Are we, lads?”

“Nothing at all, Cap,” Gaz agreed.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Soap added.

Ghost said nothing, but his silence was somehow the most ominous of all.

You pointed at each of them in turn. “I know how you people think. I’ve seen you turn loading supply trucks into a competition. You’re not turning my sex life into another one of your challenges.”

“Your sex life?” Price raised an eyebrow. “No, love. This isn’t about your sex life.”

“Then what’s it about?”

He moved closer, and despite everything, your breath caught. “It’s about performance metrics. Ensuring quality control.”

“Quality control,” you repeated faintly.

“We’re the 141,” Soap said, appearing at your other side. “We don’t do second place. In anything.”

“And if Graves-” Gaz made a dismissive gesture, “-thinks he’s set some kind of benchmark, well…”

“Someone needs to correct that misconception,” Ghost finished.

You looked around at all of them, these competitive, stubborn, absolutely impossible men who apparently couldn’t stand the thought of anyone- especially Graves- being considered the best at something.

Even this.

Especially this.

“You’re all insane,” you managed.

“Probably,” Price agreed easily. “But you’re still here.”

You were. God help you, you were still here, and you weren’t walking away, and they all knew it.

Which is how you would up on Price’s bed with Soap’s head between your legs.

One second you’re in the rec room and the next you’re ushered upstairs, Soap’s mouth on your cunt, and your whole body jerks like someone plugged you in.

It’s wet and hot and pressure. Not a fluttery kiss, he seals over you and pulls, drawing your clit into his mouth and your hips come off the mattress a good inch. His hands slam to your thighs and push, spreading you wider and pinning you at the same time.

“F-fuck- oh god- Johnny.” That’s when your pulse drops, leaves your throat and settles between your legs in a hard, responsive beat. Every time his tongue flicks, it kicks. Every time his mouth sucks, it swells. The nerves there go loud, drowning out everything else.

You can feel your own slick on your inner thighs now, warm and a little messy. When he drags you closer, you slide on it. The sheet under your ass is going to be damp.

He angles his head and finds the exact spot.

You know it because your calves tense and your fingers curl. You try to close your legs around his head, curl around the pleasure, and he just laughs into you, low and smug, and forces your knees apart again. Your hip flexors burn from the stretch. You can feel the tremor start in them.

Above you, the bed dips; someone leans in. A broad, callused palm plants over your lower belly and holds you down. That single extra point of contact changes everything; now you can’t roll, can’t run, can’t arch away. All you can do is feel.

Soap increases his tempo.

Slow at first; long, wet licks from your entrance up to your clit, pausing there, circling. Then tighter, faster, little pulls of suction. Then when you gasp right, he adds tongue and lips and pressure and it becomes this relentless little engine of sensation, over and over, no mercy.

Your stomach knots. Your thighs start to shake properly now, not just twitch. Your nipples rub against the fabric of your bra every time you breathe, and they’re hard, throbbing, needy from the rubbing.

You make a sound.

It’s not pretty. It’s a half choked, wet, needy thing, and it spills out without permission. Someone coos at you for it. A thumb strokes your cheek. Fingers thread through your hair. It all blurs together because the center of you is flooding with heat.

He pushes two fingers inside you and the stretch is immediate; fullness to match the drag of his tongue. A sharp, perfect ache along your inner walls where your body says yes, there. Your cunt clenches around him like it’s trying to pull him in farther. The wet sound is obscene. You hear someone suck in a breath and say “Fuck, look at ‘er.”

Your chest heaves. Your ribs can’t expand enough. You can’t get a full breath because every time you try, Soap does something with his tongue to take it.

You’re right on the edge of that bright drop and your thighs try to close again. He forces them open again.

Your hips try to lift. The hand on your belly forces you down.

Your head tosses side to side, too much, too big, too good. Fingers- whose? Price’s? Gaz’s?- catch your jaw and bring you back to center.

“Look.”

So you do. You blink through the blur and look, and there’s a pair of baby blue eyes watching you come apart, and that alone tips you.

You break.

It’s hot and it’s fast. Your whole pelvis locks, then pulses. Your cunt clamps around his fingers in hard, greedy squeezes. Your clit is burning from the drag of his mouth and you are so wet you can feel your slick slide down toward your ass. Your toes curl, calves cramping, thighs shaking. At the crest, your vision goes white at the edges and your ears rush.

You come hard.

He stays on you.

That’s the killer. He doesn’t back off. He gentles, yeah, but he doesn’t stop. He licks you through it, slow, teasing, gathering everything he pulled out of you, making you feel every last pulse.

Your body shudders in aftershocks. Little heat flares. The muscles in your stomach flutter. You can’t do anything but take it.

Someone’s hand comes up to your chest and rubs, grounding. Another slides under your knee and bends it, easing the strain in your hip. Another strokes the inside of your thigh where his stubble has made it pink.

You sag.

You’re warm everywhere now, skin buzzing, limbs heavy. Your cunt still pulses in little sympathetic squeezes around nothing. If Soap slid his cock in right now, you’d pull him in to the hilt, no resistance.

They move you, fabric drags over your oversensitive nipples and you hiss, arching away, and someone laughs softly and unhooks your bra, slipping it away, soothing your nipples with their thumb. The bed squeaks, wood complaining. A knee slots between your legs and you ride it without meaning to because there’s still ache there, still want.

Another mouth finds your throat. Teeth scrape, gentle. A hand cups you, broad and warm, palm pressing over your still wet clit.

You were still shaking when they decided one orgasm didn’t prove anything.

The bed dipped and shifted around you, weight moving like a tide. You were on your back, knees loose, underwear somewhere halfway down one thigh, trying to remember how to breathe, when a warm hand slid up your stomach and settled just under your ribs. Big palm, callused, heavy enough to say stay right here. Price, then.

“Easy,” he murmured, more in tone than words. You felt it in your skin, not your ears. “You’re alright.”

You were. Your muscles, though, hadn’t caught up. Your thighs had that post release tremble, the one you couldn’t command away. Your belly kept fluttering in little afterpulses. Between your legs you were hot and slick and sensitive, pleasure still fizzing under the surface like it hadn’t decided to leave yet.

And they were all still there.

You were aware of them the way you’re aware of heat behind you. Soap, breathless and smug near your knees. Gaz, closer to your head now, arm along the pillow so you could lean if you needed. Ghost, solid at the side of the bed, one knee on the mattress so he could reach you without crowding.

Four men. Four sets of hands. Four different temperatures of want.

Your body knew it before your brain did: we’re not done.

Price’s hand slid down from your ribs to your hip, then lower, thumb brushing the still damp inside of your thigh. He hummed, quiet, pleased. “Good,” he said like he was noting it for the record. “Soft and wet.”

That should’ve been embarrassing. It wasn’t. Not with the way they were looking at you- like this was data, yes, but also like it was a gift you were like this for them.

Gaz tipped his head, watching your chest rise and fall. “She’s coming back,” he said, the way he might’ve said her vitals are up. “Look.”

You opened your eyes. The room swam into focus- concrete walls, rain on the window, four shadows leaning over you.

Soap grinned down at you, face flushed, mouth a little swollen. “So?” he said. “Better than Graves?”

You meant to snap at him. You really did. But the second your mouth opened, a thumb- Ghost’s, gloved and warm- smoothed over your cheek, and whatever retort you’d had melted.

“Don’t make her talk through it,” Ghost said, voice low. “She’s floatin’.”

You were. Your head felt light, your limbs felt heavy, and under all of it, your cunt still pulsed, slow and needy, because that first orgasm had taken the edge off but not the want. If anything, the want had gotten worse; looser, lazier, more give me more of that.

They saw it.

Price shifted, sitting on the edge of the bed so your back could rest against his thigh. The fabric of his pants was rough against your bare skin, but his palm was warm, moving in soothing circles over your belly. You let your head fall back against him without thinking.

“There we are,” he said voice like gravel. “Let’s get you comfortable.”

Comfortable was relative. Comfortable meant supported while we do more to you.

Soap crawled up again, this time on your left, bracing a hand beside your shoulder, his body radiating heat. Gaz mirrored him on the right, thigh pressed to your hip. Ghost stayed at your feet, big hands sliding up your calves, over your knees, pushing your legs apart again with maddening patience.

Your thighs quivered under his hands. He didn’t let them close.

“Look at that,” Soap said, and there was honest admiration in it. “Still shiverin’.”

“Sensitive,” Gaz agreed, eyes crinkling. “Makes it a fair fight.”

A fair fight. You almost laughed. Nothing about this was fair. It was four world class overachievers deciding one loud American didn’t get to be the gold standard in your head.

Ghost’s hands were firmer now, thumbs pressing into the tender spot where thigh met hip, easing you open inch by inch. You felt the cool air on you again. Felt your own wet, slick and warm against the inside of your thighs. Felt the ache start to build again, low and heavy, because even being held open like that sent a pulse of want through you.

He didn’t touch you right away. That was almost worse. He just kept you open and looked, head bent, breath brushing your inner thigh through the mask. His gaze flicked up to yours, unreadable.

“Still want more?” he asked.

You swallowed. Your throat felt dry. “Yes.”

Price’s hand on your belly stilled for a beat, then resumed, slower. You could practically hear the satisfaction in his silence.

“Good,” Ghost said. “Because we’re not lettin’ Graves win on a technicality.”

Then he touched you.

He dragged two knuckles through your slick and the sensation was so sharp after what Soap had just done to you that your hips tried to jerk away. Price’s arm across your middle kept you exactly where you were.

“Easy,” Price murmured, mouth close to your ear. “Breathe for me.”

You did. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Your body settled, but only in the loosest way. Every nerve from your navel down was on.

Ghost circled you first. Slow, deliberate, dragging wet over the most sensitive part of you in lazy, cruel little loops. It made everything there swell, throb, wake up. It made the ache bloom again, hotter, until you were whimpering into the air, panting from the heat of it.

Then, when you were looking at him, when he had your eyes, he slid two fingers into you.

You gasped. Couldn’t help it. Couldn’t hold it back.

It felt deep immediately. You were still soft and open from the orgasm and your body took him to the knuckle. You could feel your walls flutter around him, a helpless, greedy squeezing. You could feel just how wet you were, how easily he moved, how the motion made obscene, slick sounds between your thighs.

“Fuckin’ hell,” Soap breathed. “Listen to her.”

You heard it too. The wet. The way you caught on his fingers on the way out, then sucked him right back in. Your cheeks burned. Your body didn’t care. Your body wanted more.

Ghost set a rhythm- deep press in, slow pull out, lazy twist at the top that nudged right where you were still sensitive. Every stroke made your hips roll, made your breath catch, made moans spill out past your lips, made that warm, liquid feeling in your belly spread.

Price’s hand slid up to your breasts, fingers curling over the weight of them, thumb brushing your nipples. They were already sensitive and the touch made them tingle more. You arched into his palms without thinking and he made a pleased sound low in his chest.

“Responsive,” he said, mostly to himself. “Like that, do you?”

You managed a nod. Your voice was somewhere under the bed and you could only answer him with moans.

Gaz leaned in and kissed the corner of your mouth. “You look wrecked already,” he murmured, smile against your skin. “That’s good. That’s how we like you.”

Ghost crooked his fingers inside you.

The pleasure changed. Went from warm and spreading to sharp and right fucking there. It sent sparks up your spine. Your thighs tried to close again and Gaz and Soap clamped their hands on the fat of your thighs, held you wide and open, while Ghost worked that spot over and over.

Your breathing went ragged. Your hips started to chase. Your toes curled in nothing. Your hand flew up, searching for something to hold, and landed on Soap’s forearm. You clamped down hard. He just laughed, turned his arm so you could get a better grip.

“Yeah, that’s it,” he said, eyes hungry on your face. “Hold on.”

You could feel yourself climbing again. Already. So soon. Your body didn’t care. It liked his fingers, liked the way they filled and dragged, liked the way Price’s thumbs kept circling your nipples in lazy counterpoint, liked the way Gaz’s mouth kept brushing your jaw, your cheek, grounding you.

“Still with us?” Price asked quietly.

“Yes,” you got out. Barely.

“Good girl.”

Your cunt clenched around Ghost’s fingers at that. Hard. Instinctive. You felt the heat in your face flare.

He felt it too. “Oh, you like that,” he said, tone gone velvet dark. “That what he said to you?” A pointed reference- Graves? Did he say it like that? It should’ve annoyed you but it didn’t. It just sent another pulse of want through you.

“Doesn’t matter,” Gaz said, amused, kissing your temple. “She’s gonna hear it better from us.”

You were too close to answer with a retort. The pressure was right there, sitting low, throbbing. Your thighs were fully trembling now, little uncontrollable shakes. Your belly was tight. Your breath came in hot pants. You knew if he just-

He did.

He added his thumb.

The extra point of pressure on your clit lit you up. It was too much and exactly enough. Your head tipped back on Price’s shoulder. A sound tore out of you, high and helpless.

“Let it happen,” Price said into your hair. “Let it.”

You did.

It rolled over you harder than the first, because your body was already primed, because you were being held this time- one hand at your throat, another at your breast, hips braced, legs kept open. You didn’t have to hold yourself up. You didn’t have to be quiet. You didn’t have to pretend you weren’t falling apart for them.

Your climax ripped through you in tight, fast pulses. Your walls clutched around Ghost’s fingers like you were trying to keep him. Slick flooded out around him, hot and embarrassing and perfect. Your thighs shook, heels digging into the mattress. You might’ve said someone’s name; you weren’t sure which.

They talked but it washed over you. What stuck was touch: Price’s hand on your sternum, grounding; Gaz’s thumb catching a tear you didn’t realize had slipped; Soap’s palm tightening on your knee like there you go, that’s our girl; Ghost’s fingers slowly, carefully easing out of you when the aftershocks got too sharp.

You sagged back, boneless.

Your cunt still fluttered, slow little squeezes in the afterglow. Your thighs glistened. Your skin hummed. You were warm all over, skin prickling, heart finally starting to settle.

Somewhere near your ear, Price chuckled. “That’s two,” he said, smug. “He give you two?”

You huffed a breath that was half laugh, half groan. “Oh my god.”

“She’s not arguing,” Soap crowed.

Gaz leaned his forehead to yours. “That’s because we’re winning,” he said, delighted.

Ghost wiped his fingers on the sheet, then rested his big hand over the inside of your thigh, thumb stroking once, slow. “We’re not done,” he said, and the promise in it made your already overworked nerves spark again.

You believed him. Every part of you, flushed, wet, and trembling, believed him.

Price shifted behind you.

“Alright,” he says, voice low, that command layer threaded through it. “My turn.”

You feel him move, feel the bed dip differently, feel his thighs open so there’s room for you. A hand slides under your knee and guides your leg over his until suddenly you’re straddling one of his legs, back against his chest, his arm a wide band across your front, holding you steady.

He’s warm everywhere you touch him. Solid. Bigger than you in all the places that matter for this. You can smell him, too, smoke, wool, the faint metallic smell of weapons oil. Familiar. Comforting. Infuriatingly hot right now.

You’re still soft from coming. Still wet. When he palms your hip and pulls you backward over him, you feel just how wet; you slide on yourself, on the inside of your thigh, on the sheet. You make a small, uncontrolled sound at your own slickness.

“Yeah,” he murmurs against the side of your face. “That’s what I thought.”

There’s movement below you: a belt unbuckling, the soft metal jingle, zipper down. You don’t have to look to know what he’s doing. Your body knows; your muscles get ready. Your hips go loose and expectant. Your cunt gives a slow, hungry little pulse like yes, now.

He fits his hand between your legs first, checking like he didn’t just watch Ghost make you flood. His fingers drag through you, gather you, stroke you. The touch is gentler than Ghost’s was, not searching for a spot, just confirming you’re ready for weight.

You are. God, you are.

“Still open,” he says, and you can hear the approval. “That’s good, sweetheart. Gonna make this easy.”

You don’t even realize you’ve tipped your head to his shoulder until his beard scrapes your temple. His mouth is right there, breath warm, words for you, just you. That alone makes your chest go hot.

“Hands on me,” he says. “Hold on.”

You do. One arm goes back around his neck, dragging his collar down so you’ve got something to grip. The other braces on his thigh. You can feel the muscle there, hard even relaxed.

The others have gone quiet.

They’re still close. You can feel Soap at the edge of the bed, practically vibrating. You can feel Gaz leaning in to see. You can feel Ghost standing sentry, watchful, but there’s a charged waiting in all of them now; the kind you get right before breaching.

Price angles his hips.

You feel his cock thick, hot, and heavy pressing against you from below. It’s blunt at first, just a nudge at your entrance, sliding in your wet. Your breath stops. Every muscle lower than your ribs goes tight, held in that exquisite almost there.

He hears it. “Breathe,” he reminds you softly. “Don’t lock up on me.”

You force air into your lungs. It shudders on the way out.

Then he pulls your hips down.

It’s a slow, controlled push. He’s too big and you’re too sensitive for him to just drive in, so he eases you over him, inch by steady inch. The stretch is immediate and deep. You feel it all the way up your spine. Your body parts around him because you’re open and slick and primed, but it still burns for a second and tells you you’re getting full.

“There’s it is,” Soap said somewhere off to the side, almost reverent. “Look at how she’s takin’ him.”

You felt it even with your eyes closed: three men leaning in, watching the way your body gave for Price. You were too busy feeling it to be shy.

Because once he got past that first thick resistance, your body just… went. The muscle ring eased, the wet did its job, and you sank. You could feel every ridge, every vein, the heat of him. You could feel the difference between the blunt, stretching first half and the deeper, thicker second half. You could feel your own slick being pushed up around his cock.

Your breath came out on a shaky, “Oh-”

“Good girl,” Price said in your ear, voice gone rough. His arm tightened around your middle to keep you from scrambling away from the intensity. “Knew you’d take me.”

That praise lit you up. Your cunt clenched around him hard. He groaned low in his throat, vibrating against your back where you felt it more than heard it.

“Fuckin’ hell,” Gaz muttered, delighted. “She’s squeezin’ him already.”

“Course she is,” Soap said. “She’s still warm from before.”

Ghost didn’t say anything, but you heard the small, sharp inhale he always did when something impressed him.

Price held you there for a beat, fully seated, your ass on his thighs, your back to his chest, his cock buried in you to the hilt. It was a lot. Full, hot, so deep it nudged at places Ghost’s fingers hadn’t reached. It made your stomach feel heavy and your chest feel light. Your body wanted to move, to rock, to chase, but he didn’t let you. Not yet.

“Feel that?” he asked quietly.

You nodded, too breathless to speak.

“Tell me.”

“S’full,” you slurred, cheeks hot. It felt silly to say, but it was the truth. “You’re- full.”

“That’s right.” He sounded indecently pleased. “That’s the bit he couldn’t give you.”

Your back arched when he pulled almost all the way out.

The drag was obscene, long and slow, your walls gripping, reluctant to let him go. You could feel the way you narrowed again around the thickest part of him, the way your wet clung, glistening on his cock. At the top of the stroke he stayed right at your entrance, head just inside, letting you feel the emptiness he’d leave if he pulled out.

Your whole pelvis tipped, chasing him back.

Price laughed, low. “Oh, you liked that.”

Then he pushed back in, a little faster.

It rocked your whole body every thrust translated through his thighs and into your spine. Your breasts jostled; his forearm across your chest pushed them up. Your head fell back on his shoulder, mouth open.

He found his pace quickly, not jackhammering- he wasn’t showing off for the lads. He was demonstrating. Deep, confident strokes, bottoming out every time, giving you the full length so you couldn’t accuse him of holding back.

Every thrust pressed you down onto the mattress and up into his chest at the same time. Every thrust made your clit drag against the heel of his hand where it was braced on your hip. It stacked sensation- deep stretch inside, blunt friction outside- and your nerves lit right back up.

Your thighs tried to close and his big hand slid down and caught the inside of your knee, pushing it back open, letting the others see him inside you.

“Look at that,” Soap said, voice gone hoarse. “Fuckin’ hell, Cap.”

“She’s made for it,” Gaz said, softer. “Look at her.”

You were half gone already. Your breathing had gone high, breathy, those quick little pants that always came out of you when you were being taken instead of doing the taking. Your hands had locked on him, your cunt fluttering around him every time he bottomed out, that desperate, helpless squeezing.

He felt it. “There she goes,” he murmured. “She’s climbing again.”

You were. Faster than before. It hadn’t even been five minutes since Ghost worked you over and already your body was stringing itself tight again because now you were full, now you had weight, now you had rhythm. Your clit, still tender, zinged every time he drove you down. Your belly tightened. Your toes curled.

Price angled his hips a fraction and suddenly he was hitting a spot that made your vision blur.

You made a sound- high, keening, moaning.

“There?” he asked, voice tight.

“Yes- yes- don’t stop- please-”

He hit it again. Again. Held you down this time so you couldn’t wiggle off it. Your mouth dropped open. Heat flooded your face, your chest, your whole pelvis. Your legs shook against his hand.

“That’s the one,” Gaz said, almost delighted. “Right there.”

“Keep her there,” Ghost said. “Make it clear.”

He did.

You couldn’t run. You couldn’t even think of running. His arm was a bar across your chest; his hand was a clamp on your thigh; his thighs were solid under you. He just kept driving up, slow and merciless, right into that spot, each stroke punching a breathless sound out of you.

Your first and second orgasms had been waves. This one built like pressure. Tight, hard, insistent. Your cunt started to clamp in short, frantic squeezes. Your nails dug into his shoulder. Your head tipped back, baring your throat.

He bent and bit you there making you gasp.

That did it.

You broke around him, muscles locking and then spasming. Your walls gripped him so hard it dragged a groan out of his chest. Heat rushed down through you, out along your thighs, up through your spine. Your whole body shook. You might’ve said “Cap’in,” you weren’t sure.

He didn’t stop. He rode you through it, pace steady, letting your spasms milk him, letting you feel every inch of him inside you while you were at your most sensitive as he groaned and spilled deep into your cunt with a groan.

“That’s three,” Ghost said, satisfied. “He do three?”

You couldn’t answer. Your brain was white noise. All you could do was gasp and babble and hold on and feel.

Price finally slowed, then stilled, cock still deep, arm still locked around you. You were limp against him, boneless, chest heaving. Sweat was cooling on your stomach. Your thighs were a mess between wet and shaking and being forced open.

He kissed the side of your head. “Good,” he said, praise thick. “That’s my girl.”

Around you, the others moved.

You felt Soap climb onto the bed properly now, not just hovering. Felt Gaz shift closer to your knees. Felt Ghost come around the foot, big and quiet, watching you with that evaluating look.

“You want a turn?” Price asked, still inside you, not even pretending he’d pull out yet.

“Oh, absolutely,” Soap said, hungry. “She’s soft as fuck now.”

Gaz laughed. “You just want to see if you can top that.”

“Mate, I know I can top that.”

Ghost’s eyes flicked over you, taking in the flushed face, the trembling legs, the way you were still clenching around Price even as you came down. “She can take more,” he said.

You made a weak, protesting sound that wasn’t really a protest.

Price chuckled into your hair. “Hear that?” he said. “She wants it.”

Price kept you on him for a moment longer, big arm banded across your front, chest to your back, thighs snug under your ass. You were still pulsing around him in little, involuntary squeezes, and every one of them made his breath hitch warm against your ear.

“Well?” he asked the room, smug. “That feel like Berlin to you?”

Ghost shifted at the foot of the bed, mask tipped like he was taking notes. “So far,” he said, dry as bone, “that’s us: 3. Graves: fuck all.”

You managed a laugh, weak and breathy. “You’re all… ridiculous.”

“Competitive,” all four of them said at once.

Price finally eased you off him. You felt every inch of it; felt the drag, the last thick stretch, the way your body tried to hold him and then had to let go. You gasped softly at the loss, hips twitching. He steadied you with both hands, murmuring, “Easy, love,” as he guided you forward.

The second you were clear, Soap was there.

“C’mere, then,” he said, hands already on your waist, warm and eager. “My turn.”

Soap pulled you onto your hands and knees near the middle of the bed, the mattress complaining. You were loose limbed and shaky, so he did half the work himself, tucking your knees under you, keeping a palm between your shoulder blades so you didn’t fold.

“Oh, look at you,” he said, a low whistle in his voice when he got a full view. “Messy wee thing.”

You flushed hot. You were messy: your slick on your thighs, Price’s cum dripping out of your on the blanket, thighs still trembling. You would’ve dropped your head in your arms if Gaz hadn’t reached in and tipped your chin up.

“Don’t hide,” he cooed. “We wanna see you.”

Ghost made a little approving sound. “That’s the point.”

Soap looked over your shoulder. “So?” he challenged. “Cap do good?”

Price, still catching his own breath, wiped a hand over his beard. “She came,” he said, a little too pleased.

“Then I’ll make it four,” Soap said. “An’ then we can tell Graves to get fucked.”

“You did tell him that,” Gaz reminded him.

“Aye, but now I can tell him why.”

You felt Soap line up behind you, heat against the back of your thighs, chest to your back for a second as he reached down to guide his cock towards your entrance. His left hand stayed right in the small of your back, keeping you in position.

Soap pushed in.

He wasn’t as patient as Price- he was eager, and you felt that in the way he rolled his hips, in the way his hand tightened on you when he felt how easily you took him. You were wet enough, and already open; your body gave. You gasped- couldn’t not, after being so full already. Your arms shook. Gaz immediately slid closer on the bed and let you grip his wrist.

“Right there,” Soap breathed, voice gone hoarse. “Fuck. She’s soaked.”

“Price did the hard work,” Gaz said, but he was grinning, cupping your cheek with his free hand so you’d look at him. “How’s he feel, love?”

“S’ good,” you got out, words breaking on a breath. “He’s-”

“Better?” Soap said, smug, starting to move for real now.

You couldn’t answer right away because Soap fucked differently than Price. Price was heavy and deep and sure. Soap was energized. He rolled through his hips like he fought, like he danced, like he couldn’t keep still if you paid him. Every stroke had a little snap at the end, a little lift of your hips, a little grind that dragged over every sensitive place Price had already woken up.

Your arms almost gave. Your elbows dipped. Gaz caught you around the shoulders and pulled you up, settling you half against his chest so you weren’t bearing your whole weight. It changed the angle, your back curving, your hips tipping, and Soap groaned when he felt it.

“Oh, that’s better,” he said. “Fuck, that’s better.”

Price moved in behind him, one hand landing on Soap’s shoulder like, pace. “Don’t blow your load in five seconds, Sergeant.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Captain,” Soap said, but he slowed just enough to keep you from being overwhelmed.

Your body, though, was already there. Every thrust pressed slick heat up where you were still tender. Every time he bottomed, you felt that deep, aching fullness, your walls clinging to his cock. You could hear yourself wet, obscene, a steady rhythm under the creak of the bed. Your thighs started to shake again, traitorous.

“She’s goin’ again,” Soap said, awed, angling his hips, his dick pressing deeper and making you whine against Gaz’s throat.

“She’s not gonna last long with you showboatin’,” Price said.

“She doesn’t have to,” Gaz said, mouth at your ear. “That’s the point.”

Ghost had moved closer, right at the foot now, one knee on the mattress, watching you from the best angle. You could feel his eyes on where you were joined. You could feel the heat of him even not touching you.

“Look at that,” he said, voice gone low, almost hungry. “That’s four. She’s taken two cocks and she’s still asking for it.”

You were. Your hips were pushing back to meet Soap’s, small desperate motions. Your hand on Gaz’s wrist had gone from holding to clutching. Your breath came in high, sweet bursts.

Soap slid his hand around your front, over your belly, down.

“Johnny,” Price warned.

“Relax,” Soap said. “I’m helpin’ her.”

His fingers found your clit, already swollen and slick and went straight to steady, tight circles, timed with his thrusts. Your whole body jolted.

You made a noise that wasn’t words.

“There she is,” Gaz murmured, holding you upright. “There we go. Let it happen, pretty girl.”

Soap laughed, ragged. “Aye, let it- fuck- listen to her.”

You couldn’t hold it back. Your body was too ready, too worked, too wet. The combination- full inside, rubbed right there, held and watched and praised- ripped another climax out of you. This one was messy and loud, your muscles going tight-tight-loose, thighs shaking so hard Soap had to clamp his arm around your middle to keep you from dropping as he buried deep and came, flooding your sensitive cunt with his release.

“That’s four,” Ghost said immediately. “Graves: still nowhere.”

You dropped your forehead to Gaz’s shoulder, breath tearing in and out of you. He cupped the back of your head, pressing a kiss to your hairline. “Good girl,” he said. “So good. You with us?”

“Yeah,” you panted, tears sliding. “Yeah.”

“Need a minute?” Price asked, voice back to that command soft.

You thought about it. Your body was thrumming, muscles liquid, thighs sore in a good way, your cunt still fluttering around Soap where he’d slowed to a lazy grind to keep you from getting shocked. You could have taken a minute.

You didn’t want to.

“No,” you said, surprising yourself with how sure it came out. “Don’t… stop.”

You felt all of them react to that.

“Fuck, I love her,” Soap said, groaning, pulling out slow, another long, obscene drag that made your eyes roll. “Right. Trade.”

Gaz laughed, delighted. “My go.”

He was smoother about it.

While Soap eased out, Gaz was already shifting you, rolling you gently onto your back again, then tugging your hips toward him. His hands were warm, steady, different from the other two: less force, more coaxing. He bent, kissed you once, slow and deep, like a palate cleanser.

“How we doing?” he asked against your mouth.

“Fuzzy,” you murmured. “Good. Fuzzy.”

“Fuzzy’s good,” he said. “Means we’re doing it right.”

He pushed your knees up, opening you again, and glanced back at the others. “You lads want to see?” he asked, shameless. “Come round. She’s gorgeous like this.”

They did.

Price came to your left, hand braced by your head, beard shadowed, eyes heavy. Soap flopped to your right, still flushed, watching like he wanted to dive back in the second he got the nod. Ghost stayed at the foot of the bed, looming, mask down, eyes dark.

Gaz stroked you first, just fingers, slow up your slit, spreading your slick and Price’s and Soap’s cum along your cunt. “Still so wet,” he said, low. “God, you’re perfect.”

Then he pushed into you.

He was between Price’s deep and Soap’s eager. He sank in steady, watching your face, slowing when you gasped, pushing when you relaxed. Your body welcomed him, open and dripping and aching for it. Even so, the stretch made your breath stutter and your hands grab for whoever was closest.

Price gave you his, lacing his fingers in with yours. “Here,” he said, and you held on.

Gaz bottomed out and stayed. You could feel him everywhere, thick inside, pressing low, your walls hugging him after so much use. Your belly fluttered again.

“Fuck,” Soap whispered. “She’s still clenchin’.”

“Means we’re not done,” Gaz said, beginning to move.

His pace was cruel in its own way. Not the driving authority of Price or the showy roll of Soap, this was measured. Just fast enough to keep you on the high, just deep enough to hit where you were tender. He knew he didn’t have to prove he could make you come, Price and Soap had already done the heavy lifting. He wanted to prove he could keep you there.

He did. Within a minute you were right back on the ledge, breath short and hiccuping, thighs trembling, slick loud between you, hands switching from Price’s wrist to Soap’s forearm, back to Price’s shirt, sobbing and sniffling with each thrust. Your clit was throbbing, begging for touch.

Gaz gave it, of course. Thumb down, gentle circles, perfectly in time.

“Yeah,” he murmured when your mouth dropped open and your back bowed and lewd desperate sound fell past swollen lips. “There she is. Gimme another.”

“Another?” you gasped, half pleading, half hysterical laughing.

“You said Graves was ‘one of the best,’” he said, smiling through the words. “We’ve got to bury that score, love.”

You couldn’t even argue because you could feel it right there again, that tight, spiraling tension building from the inside out; because the others were watching you like they were cataloguing every twitch; because Price was murmuring, “C’mon, love,” and Soap was chanting, “There ya go, there ya go,” and Ghost was saying nothing but looked satisfied.

You shattered again.

It rolled over you like a breaking wave, less sharp than the last, but wide, everywhere, making your toes curl and your back arch and your fingers dig into whatever you were holding. Your cunt spasmed around Gaz in hot little pulses. He groaned, hands tightening on your thighs, but kept moving slow to draw it out until you were scrambling and wiggling and sobbing from the sheer pleasure of it.

It was the wild look in your eyes, the near frantic pleasure at being overstimulated, blubbering into the air as Gaz kept thrusting, prolonging your orgasm into too much, that broke him, pushing in deep and stilling with a groan as he added his cum to Price’s and Soap’s.

“That’s five,” Ghost said, finally sounding impressed.

You whimpered, overstimulated now, hips trying to twist away. Gaz caught it immediately and slowed, then stopped, still inside you but not moving. “Okay,” he said softly. “There we are. Breathe.”

You did, trembling all over now, thighs, stomach, even your arms. Sweat dripped on your neck. Your hair stuck to your cheek. You were aware of everything: the wet between your legs, the steady heat of a cock still buried in you, the weight of hands on your knees, your chest, your cheek.

Then there was Ghost.

“Shift,” he said quietly.

No one argued. Gaz eased out carefully making you whine- God, you felt that- and ghosted back. Price and Soap moved enough to give him room. You were boneless, pliant. You watched him take off his gloves, one finger at a time, setting them on the nightstand.

He came to the foot of the bed and took your ankles in his bare hands. His palms were hot, big enough to wrap nearly around. He slid you down toward him, closer to the edge. Your ass met the edge of the mattress, thighs spread over his forearms, knees kicked up, your back arched because there was nowhere else to go.

You were already wrecked.

Everything from your navel down felt wet, hot, loose. Skin clammy from sweat. Inner thighs slick where your own arousal had dried and then been replaced and then smeared again. Your muscles had that aftershock tremor- little twitches in your quads, belly fluttering, shoulders quaking when you tried to push up on your elbows.

He took one look at you and huffed behind the mask, low and satisfied. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s more like it.”

He wasn’t rushed, but he wasn’t delicate either. He hooked your right leg up over his shoulder; high, opening you farther than the others had and the stretch at the back of your thigh burned.

“Easy,” Price murmured from somewhere by your head, palming your shoulder. “He’s got you.”

Ghost caught your other knee and shoved it out with his hips, there was nowhere to put him. He took up the whole end of the bed, arms, shoulders, chest, all of it. You were small against him now, laid out, thighs spread over a frame that could pin three people if he wanted.

You felt his size before you felt him.

His shadow blocked the ceiling. His thigh brushed the mattress and the whole thing groaned. His hands spanned your hips like they were handles. When he bent a little, bracing one palm beside your ribs, the bed dipped like someone had dropped a sandbag.

“Want more?” he asked.

You nodded, breath already short.

“Good.”

He dragged his cock through you once and that alone nearly short circuited you.

Because you were soaked now, used and soft, and he was thick. Thicker than Price. Different shape than Soap. Longer than Gaz. He slid through your mess in a long, slow stroke, head bumping your clit, smearing heat everywhere. Your hips jumped like you’d been shocked.

“Oh-”

“Christ,” Gaz breathed, watching from beside your knee. “She’s still that wet?”

“Yeah,” Soap said, all wonder. “We did that.”

Ghost lined up.

You saw it only in a flash- cock big, flushed, heavy in his fist and then it was gone, pressed to your swollen cunt, right where you were open. You felt the blunt head nudge and everything in you locked, not from fear but from pure instinct: big, big, big.

“Breathe,” he said, like he’d been waiting for it. “Or it’ll hurt.”

You pulled air. Chest rising, shaking. Price’s hand slid up to your throat thumb under your chin to tip your face up so he could see your eyes.

“Right here,” he said. “With us.”

Ghost pushed.

There was zero give for the first second. You were open, but you were also swollen and sensitive, and he was a lot. The pressure was deep, powerful, like someone slowly forcing a fist into clay. Your mouth fell open in a silent oh, eyes going wide.

“Fuckin’ hell,” Soap said again, because apparently that was his phrase tonight. “Look at her-”

“Johnny,” Price warned, but his voice was tight too.

Ghost didn’t slam. He didn’t have to. He just leaned his weight in, inch by relentless inch, and let your own wet do the rest. Your body had to yield. And that was the moment your brain just… flickered.

Because it was too much.

Stretch, deep in your pelvis. Burn, not sharp but huge. Fullness that pushed on places the others hadn’t. Your back arched hard, heels digging into his shoulders, trying to find leverage that didn’t exist.

“Si-” you gasped, name torn out of you.

“Yeah,” he said, voice low, pleased. “Say it.”

He was halfway in and you already felt full. Crowded. Your cunt squeezed around him in shocked little spasms, trying to pull him in and push him out at the same time.

“Fuck,” Gaz said, softer. “She’s clamping down on him.”

“’Course she is,” Price said, hand still at your throat, thumb rubbing your jaw. “He’s wreckin’ her.”

He was. He absolutely was.

Ghost gave you maybe two seconds to adjust, then he pushed the rest of the way.

It knocked sound out of you. A strangled, punched out cry that wasn’t even a word. Your vision went hot white at the edges. Your hands flew out, grabbing for anything- blanket, shirt, wrist. Soap shoved his forearm under your palm on reflex so you had something solid to claw at.

“Got you,” he said, eyes wide. “S’okay, s’okay.”

Your body took Ghost’s cock, because it had no choice, because you were so wet he could’ve slid forever, because the three men before him had already made you pliant. But where Price and Soap and Gaz had felt like they fit, Ghost felt like he filled. Like there was nowhere he wasn’t.

He bottomed out and held.

You could feel him in your belly- cock heavy, hot pressure low and deep. You could feel him nudging at your cervix, you could feel your own slick squeezed around him, you could feel your pulse beating against the underside of him.

Your brain went white.

Not “I can’t think of a comeback.” Not “wow, this is good.” Actual blank space. Everything narrowed to he’s inside me, he’s so big, I can’t- I can’t- oh god-

You stared up at the ceiling, mouth open, chest stuttering. Sound was distant- men talking, praising, swearing- but it was like it was happening down the hall. The only thing close was his weight and the bed and the way your body was struggling to remember how to relax around him.

“Breathe,” Price said again, firmer. “C’mon, love. In. Out.”

You dragged air. It trembled.

Ghost’s big hand slid down your thigh, over your knee, to the underside of it. He hitched your leg higher over his shoulder, angle changing, hips dipping so he wasn’t ramming your cervix, just pressing deep.

“Good girl,” he said then, and you felt the words more than heard them. “Took me. Look at you.”

You couldn’t. Your eyes rolled a little. Your fingers dug into Soap’s arm; he hissed and let you.

“Look at her,” Soap said, voice gone soft with awe. “She’s floatin’.”

Gaz laughed under his breath, gentle. “She’s gone.”

Ghost started to move, a slow, dragging pull, to the point where you could feel every ridge of him, your own walls clinging desperately, and then a steady, heavy drive back in that rocked your whole body. The mattress creaked. Your breasts bounced. Your mouth kept making these little punched out sounds you couldn’t control.

The best and worst part was the weight. Every time he came down, his hips met the backs of your thighs with a solid, meaty thock, and because he had your legs hooked over his shoulders, it pinned your pelvis to where he wanted you. You couldn’t lift to meet him. You couldn’t squirm away. You could only take that deep, filling stroke.

Your eyes unfocused.

Your mouth went wet and open.

Your thoughts- what was left of them- ran in circles: big, deep, can’t, yes, yes, yes-

“Yeah,” Soap murmured, almost proud. “That’s the one, Ghost. That’s the one that’s gonna wipe Graves right out of her head.”

Ghost’s eyes flicked up at him, dark and amused. “That the brief?”

“Absolutely the brief,” Gaz said. “Mission critical.”

“Then hold her,” Ghost said. “She’s slippin’.”

Price’s arm came under your shoulders and lifted you partway so you weren’t flat, so you had him to lean on. Your head flopped to the side against his chest, lips parted. He cupped your jaw, thumb on your cheek, steady.

“Come back,” he said quietly. “Want you to feel him.”

“I-” you managed, voice thin. “I feel him.”

“Oh, I know you do.”

Ghost changed the angle again, just a small shift of his knee, a deeper drive of his hips and that was it. That was the key. Suddenly he was stroking over that spot inside you the others had found, but from lower, heavier, fuller, and your whole body spasmed.

“Oh- oh, fuck-“

“There she is,” Gaz breathed. “There it is.”

Your climax came up like a sucker punch.

No build. No slow climb. Just here. Your cunt clenched around him so hard it wrung a low, filthy sound out of Ghost. Your back bowed against Price’s arm. Your legs tried to close around his shoulders and couldn’t, he was too broad, he kept you open, made you take every pulse of it.

It was the kind of orgasm that blanks a mind.

Sound dropped out. Vision whited at the edges. Your ears filled with rushing. Your body just contracted around him over and over, pulsing, milking, trying to drag him even deeper. Hot slick spilled around him, down over your ass, onto the sheet.

“Fuckin’ look at that,” Soap said, half-laugh, half-disbelieving. “She’s squeezin’ the life outta him.”

Ghost’s jaw flexed. He held your hips down, taking it. “That,” he said, voice gone rough, “is better than Graves.”

Price laughed, low and triumphant, hand stroking your cheek as you rode it out. “There we are,” he said. “That’s the record.”

You could only whimper, body shaking, cunt still fluttering around the thick length still buried in you. You weren’t thinking about Berlin. You weren’t thinking about Graves. You weren’t even thinking words. You were just full, and held, and done.

Everything cut to soft static; weightless, cotton wrapped nowhere. Sound went muffled, like you’d ducked under warm water. Your body was still humming on some deep, molten frequency, but your mind had…let go. Like someone had hit the breaker.

You felt big hands moving you, but from far away.

Your leg was lifted- careful, careful, don’t cramp her- then lowered. Cool air on your thighs for a second, then something warm pressing in. You twitched, a tiny reflex, and a palm smoothed down your hip right away.

“Shhh. S’alright.”

You heard it as vibration, not words.

Your body knew them, though. Knew the cadence of their voices, the way each one sat in your bones. Even floaty as you were, they were still buzzing in your nervous system. Nobody else could’ve touched you right then.

You were rolled, whining because you were sore, onto something broad and warm. A chest. Hair rough under your cheek. Beard bristle against your temple. Arms closing around you, not tight, just there. A heartbeat under your ear, deep and steady. You made a small noise, half sigh, half childlike hum, and melted.

“There we are,” Price murmured, and even though you barely heard it, your neck relaxed. “That’s it. Got you.”

Everything else turned into hands and heat.

Someone at your legs, wiping between your thighs in slow, respectful strokes. He paused every time you flinched and whimpered, waited, then kept going. Someone else tugging the sheet away and swapping it for a cleaner blanket. Someone tucked the blanket under you so you stayed warm. Someone lifting your limp hand and putting a bottle in it, then guiding it to your mouth.

“C’mon, sweetheart,” Ghost said, low and uncompromising. “Need water.”

The rim tapped your lip; you didn’t open.

A thumb stroked your jaw, firmer now. “Open.”

Your mouth parted on reflex. Cool water slid in, shocking compared to all the heat. You swallowed slow, almost lazily. It dribbled from the corner of your mouth; someone thumbed it away.

“She’s barely there,” Gaz said, voice soft with that pleased note medics get when a patient is post op and not distressed. “Look at her eyes.”

“She’s lookin’ right through you,” Soap said, proud. “We sent her to fuckin’ space.”

You weren’t following the words, but you were following the touch. Every time you slipped a bit deeper- down, down- someone reeled you back just enough. A hand over your sternum. Fingers in your hair. A palm cupping the back of your neck. You didn’t have to do anything. They were moving you like a sleepy doll.

Your arms wouldn’t work. Your legs felt like they belonged to someone else. Your whole pelvis was one slow, warm ache, like the echo of being filled was still there even though you felt…empty? Clean? You couldn’t tell. Everything was soft.

“…never seen her this quiet…”

“…you almost did break her…”

“…well she asked for it…”

“…Graves couldn’t do that…”

You drifted lower, your nervous system had finally decided, oh, we don’t have to do anything now. We can just exist. Your breathing slowed. Your mouth stayed parted. Your eyes blinked slow and out of sync.

“Christ, look at her eyelashes,” Soap repeated, grinning. “She’s fuckin’ gone.”

Price huffed a laugh, hand big and slow on your back. “Yeah. She’s ours now.”

Ghost was the only one still a touch clinical. “She’s pale?”

“Flushed,” Gaz said, checking your cheek with his knuckles. “Warm. She’s good.”

“Heart?”

“Steady. Bit fast.”

“Yeah, well.” Soap’s grin turned sharp. “We were spectacular.”

That actually tugged a weak breath of a laugh out of you, more an exhale with a shape. Four heads turned toward you instantly, like you were a radio that had just crackled.

“There she is,” Price said, pleased. “Back with us?”

You were and you weren’t.

You could hear them better, now that you’d taken water and your brain had floated a smidge closer to shore. But your body was still out in the warm sea, rocking. Every sound was filtered through cotton. Every touch was in slow motion. You had no urge to move. No urge to talk.

You were aware mostly of warmth. Warm arm under your shoulders. Warm thigh under your hip. Warm palm at your nape. Warm blanket over your legs. Warm, satisfied men around you like a wall.

“Alright,” Soap said, mischief back, because of course he would ruin the soft moment. “Moment of truth, then.”

“Johnny,” Gaz said in warning.

“What? We have to know.”

“We already know,” Ghost said, perfectly calm. “Look at her. She can’t remember her own name.”

“Yeah but I want t’hear it.”

“Ask her later,” Price said. “She’s milk-brained.”

Milk-brained. That made you want to laugh again. It came out a tiny smile against his shirt.

Soap saw it and crowed. “See? She’s not dead.”

“Fine,” Price sighed, indulgent, rubbing your shoulder. “One question. Then you let her sleep.”

“Deal.” Soap leaned over you, upside down in your vision, eyes bright, hair a mess. “Hey. Sweetheart.”

Your eyes slitted open. Barely.

“You with us?”

A slow blink. “Mhm.”

“Gonna ask you a very important thing, yeah?”

Another blink. You were so tired. But his tone was playful and your body trusted him, so you let the sound out: “Mm?”

“How,” Soap said, sounding like he could burst from smugness, “do we compare to Graves?”

The name hit your fogged brain like a stone dropped in deep water- plop… sink… gone.

Your brows knitted faintly. Your mouth worked. You genuinely searched and came up empty. Not a coy empty. Not a “I’ll say this to boost your ego” empty. A real, floaty, no file found empty.

“Who…?” you mumbled, voice slurry, eyes already sliding closed again.

The room erupted.

“Fuckin’ yes,” Soap yelled, triumphant.

“Told you,” Ghost said, not loud but so satisfied it rang.

“God, that’s beautiful,” Gaz said, laughing, head tipped back.

Price’s chest shook under your cheek. “That,” he said, pressing a kiss to your hair, “is what I wanted.”

You were already gone again, body boneless in their hands, drifting on their voices like sleep:

“…write that down…”

“…next time he shows up I’m tellin’ him…”

“…can’t tell him, we’ll start a war…”

“…worth it…”

Competitive fucking bastards.

You learn, with a bit less tact, that you doesn’t actually mean just you; that it’s you and him whether you like it or not.

He evidently does not.

“It has to be completely fine,” Tom says to you in Potions, his voice small then but just as practised.

You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”

“I said the powder has to be completely fine.”

“I heard you completely fine. I know how to read.”

He stares blankly at you before returning to his own station, and that’s that.

It isn’t unheard of for muggle-borns to be sorted into Slytherin, so you’ve been told, but one glance around your common room and you can see it’s pretty damn rare.

There’s Tom Riddle, there’s you, and there’s a seventh-year girl whose knuckles are always white like she’s spent so long with her hands balled into fists that they don’t know how to do anything else. Tom Riddle is a prat, the girl is too old and unapproachable even if she wasn’t, and you are very good at being alone.

That decides it. Flotsam still floats.

Everything is — fine. It’s fine for months; you have no one and need no one and sometimes you catch a jinx in the back of Charms that zips your mouth shut or bends a foot the wrong way (a cruel reminder of how much more these people know than you) and your broom occasionally pivots so sharply the Flying professor has to stop you from careening into a wall and breaking enough bones for a week’s worth of Skele-Gro, but it’s fine. 

…It’s just that he’s insufferable.

The boy is eleven years old and he speaks like he’s stealing glances at an invisible lexicon between every word, more refined than any of the orphans you grew up with which makes you wonder which sort he’s surrounded by, and you take it upon yourself to theorise in passing if you could ever scare him badly enough his real voice would slip and he might just appear human for once.

Only it becomes clear when you’re stirring awake in the Hospital Wing after a mysterious bout of dragon pox (conveniently, all the pureblood children developed an immunity after catching it young) has rendered you bed-ridden and pockmarked, that you don’t think anything can scare Tom Riddle. He’s suffering just as well in the bed beside yours to keep the contagion to the two of you, and he’s all cold, eddied rage under sallow skin and beetling bones. 

“They’re going to kill you,” he says after three days of silence, when the room is dusted in moonlight so thin it’s like squinting through cinema noise or mohair fluff to try to see him.

You blink at the vague shape of him. “What?”

“If you don’t hurt them back, eventually, they’ll just kill you.”

In hindsight, it’s an assumption so hastily bleak only a scared child could make it.

I want to hurt them, you try to say, but for what follows you cannot: I want to hurt them but I’m not good enough to do it.

You roll over and pretend to sleep, and in the morning, you hurt them anyway.

It’s Avery who’s unlucky enough to be the first to test you when you’re three assignments behind in Transfiguration, still a bit groggy from your last dose of Gorsemoor Elixir, and actually, physically green. He tugs your hair and stings your cheek with the promise of “bringing a bit of colour back to your face” and it’s sort of funny how banal it is compared to the other transgressions you’ve been dealt — that this is the thing that makes you bare your teeth, grip your wand in a hand that still can’t hold half of it, and send Avery flying across the room with a Knockback Jinx.

Tom sits with you in the Great Hall for dinner that night, and he never really stops.

You practise spells by the Black Lake between classes and he’s anything but kind about the ordeal, but you teach each other. You end your days with singe prints and sore wrists and you often take more damage than he does, but sometimes, as spring settles in with warm tones (apple and jade and moss — all the greens you’d never imagined), you leave with less bruises than he does. It hardly feels like friendship. It feels much more like purpose.

When summer comes you don’t write to him, and you don’t expect he will either. You don’t suppose you’ve actually written a letter in your life. Instead you try new wand movements under your quilt every night and wait for August’s departure on a big red train.

You sit together when the day does come. He asks you if you’ve been practising. You frown and tell him you’re not allowed to use magic outside of school.

Second year is nothing but monotonous, antiquated theoretics. Most everyone complains. You don’t see why they should — they’re already aeons ahead of you — but that means you finally have a chance to catch up in your less-than-school-sanctioned meetings with Tom while the rest remain practically stationary. 

Deputy Headmaster and Transfiguration professor Albus Dumbledore is imperceptibly less soft with you than he was last year when you make the apparently poor decision to sit beside Tom on the first day, and you file the subtle shift in demeanour into some mental cabinet to review later.

You find workarounds with the librarian, Madam Palles, inclined to sympathy for the poor, orphaned muggle-borns to grant relatively unfettered daytime access to the Restricted Section so long as you keep it tidy and none of the books leave the library. That’s where things get a bit more interesting.

For a month you remain innocuous as can be. You browse through rare historical tomes and foreign biographies that would charge more galleons than you can conceptualise, and you never leave so much as a tea stain on the parchment. You smile at the Madam when you return the key each night, and walk back to the dungeons with your hands behind your back. It is, of course, totally unrelated that a month is what it takes for Tom to master the third-year curriculum’s Doubling Charm. An entirely separate affair when you meet him in the most secluded alcove of the library, slip him the key, and stifle your grin as he duplicates it perfectly. 

You discover Christmas break is your favourite time of the year. Nearly all the purebloods go home. The Slytherin dormitories are effectively halved.

It’s two weeks of earnest, uninterrupted work and sleep without fear of waking up with jelly legs or whiskers.

Madam Palles, most nights, makes a slight, drowsy effort of searching the library for leftover students before she casts the lights out and closes the door. Then, it belongs to you and Tom.

You’re splayed rather ridiculously over one of the big reading chairs on Christmas Eve, Lore of Godelot in hand, enthralled by a chapter detailing his controlled use of Fiendfyre through the power of the Elder Wand.

Tom is cross-legged and sat straight, his brows furrowed in concentration.

“What’ve you got?” you ask, leaning over to answer your own question.

Tom as good as rolls his eyes, holding up the book to give you an easier look.

“Magick Moste Evile?” You scrunch your nose. “Bit much, don’t you think?”

“It’s the stuff they’ll never teach us.”

“I wonder why.”

He steals a glance at your own book and smiles in that smug way that makes you want to slap him.

“What, Tom?”

He shrugs. “You might want to know you’re reading stories about the author.”

You look down. Lore of — Godelot wrote Magick Moste Evile? 

It shouldn’t really be surprising. Three chapters ago your book was recounting his months in Yugoslavia grave-robbing magical burial sites.

“Whatever,” you mumble, “It’s just a biography. Least I’m not reading the words out of his mouth.”

“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”

“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”

All good things must come to an end. Term resumes and your hackles are back up. 

Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov, Walburga Black and the best of the worst of your house have returned, sleek-haired and insatiable and deranged, truly, in such a manner that you don’t think you can be blamed for the instinct you feel every time you pass them to lunge like a wild predator or run like wild prey. All Tom does, though (and so you follow, because he’s standing with you and who has ever done that?) is meet their gazes with equal assuredness. He never seems bothered. He never seems animal. You are still all hammering heart and heavy lungs, and you are learning not to see the world through the eyes of someone who’s only ever had their fists to fight. You have magic, you remember. You’re good at it. You could hurt them, if you really wanted.

Not much is different that summer than the last. The war is hard. The food is hard to chew. You chip a tooth. You’re too afraid to fix it with the Trace on you, but you still smile because you will, and everyone seems put off by that. What is there to smile about? 

You suppose, for them, it’s a question with few answers. 

For you — you’re back on a big red train musing about the functions of muggle warfare with Tom Riddle, chucking a useless card from a chocolate frog out the window and moaning about how you wasted the sickle you found under your seat.

He’s gotten very good at ignoring your theatrics and going right back to whatever it was he was talking about. And you note, unrelatedly, he almost looks like he’s learned how to open the windows at Wool’s. (You dare not suggest he’s doing something so ludicrous as sitting in the sun too, but this is a start.)

Dippet, or the Minister, or whoever it is that’s in charge of the practicality of the curriculum, has become fractionally less stupid in the last three months.

You don’t have to rely on nights in the Restricted Section or weekends at the Black Lake to actually learn something anymore. Of course, without the assistance of those illicit extracurriculars, you wouldn’t be able to match up to your peers the way you are this year, but it’s nice to duel with dummies instead of motioning your wand vaguely over a desk, and you and Tom still climb the notice boards in rapid succession. 

They hate you for it. One of your roommates makes a pointed effort each night to glare at you from her bed like those jelly legs are back on the table, Orion Black (two years younger but just as nasty as his cousin) nearly trips you on your way to Divination, Abraxas Malfoy develops what you think borders on obsession with Tom, and for once it feels almost offhand to not care about any of it.

You’re beginning to think even at its best, Hogwarts is remarkably insufficient. This leads you to books mercifully unrestricted so you can read about a few of the other magical schools for comparison. Beauxbatons is renowned for providing most of the worlds alchemical developments, Uagadou’s early propensity for wandless magic makes it unfathomably more practical than Hogwarts, Durmstrang (though you scoff at their violent anti-muggle sentiment) teaches the Dark Arts as something beneficial rather than unforgivable, and — what do you learn here? Even with the hair’s-breadth of magical leniency you’ve been allowed this year, it’s no surprise so few recognizable names in wizarding history are Hogwarts alumni.

“Let me have a look at that,” you say to Tom one evening, when he’s peering once more over the pages of Magick Moste Evile. He’s a purveyor of knowledge in all forms, but he always seems to come back to Godelot in the end.

He raises a brow, handing it to you like your intrigue doubles his. “No more reservations?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only curious.”

“Curiosity—”

“Killed the damn cat, I know.” You glare at him through the pages. “I think that’s you, in this case though, since you’re the one in love with the bloody thing.”

He shakes his head as he reclines in the low light of the Restricted Section, muttering something that sounds like “ridiculous,” or “querulous,” or something else unimaginably fucking annoying.

You might be wrong. Retract your last quip and expunge it. If Tom’s in love with any book, it’s the behemoth dictionary he’s been spitting stupid adjectives out of since he was eleven.

But Godelot’s musings on the Dark Arts are fascinating enough that you can understand the appeal. He’s no wordsmith, and you appreciate that in a way you’re sure Tom deems regrettable, but his points are straightforward but thoughtful in such a way you can read in them how he was guided by the Elder Wand through everything he did. There’s a stream-of-consciousness to them. Something doctrinal you’re surprised to enjoy for all the obligatory English creed they washed your mouth with at the orphanage.

“Find what you’re looking for?” Tom asks, combing with little interest through the tomb you’d put down in favour of his.

“I’m not looking for anything. I’m just…” You sigh. It’s almost painful to say. “I think you were right, and — oh, shut up, don’t look at me like that — I don’t think we’re learning anything here. Not really; not as much as they do at other schools.”

“Of course,” he says blankly. “Hence this.”

This — restricted books and furtive duels — should not be necessary. 

“You know that’s not gonna be enough. For the rest of them, maybe, but not us.”

He tenses how he always does at the reminder of his difference. And you get it. Sometimes in moments like these you forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It isn’t just the rebellious divertissement of two academically eager students, it’s… survival. What future do you have as a penniless orphan in wartorn London? What future do you have as a muggle-born Slytherin who’s apt with a wand when there are a thousand more your age, just as skilled and twice as pure? 

It isn’t enough to be as good as them. You have to best them, and you have to do it forever.

The night stumbles into an exhaustive silence because you both know it’s true and it’s a bit too heavy right now. The answer isn’t in this room. Just you. Just him. So you sit in the dark and you stare through that muffled nighttime noise playing tricks on your eyes. The worst of the world can wait until morning. 

The worst of the world has impeccable timing.

A fault of both sides of the coin; the muggle world is a travesty and the wizarding world is just a bit fucking late, really.

So there’s the newspaper. It’s October first and the date reads September tenth. School owls are a joke and you can’t afford anything better.

And it’s a dirty, ashen grey. It smudges your green if you ever had it at all. You were born to this and you will return to it always.

BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER

MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES

DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN

All you can hope to do is pass the paper to Tom and wonder without words what you’ll go home to.

The answer is very little when the summer clouds your vision with dust and you stand dumbly with your suitcase in front of nothing at all. You’d tried your best until your departure to keep up with muggle news, but it had remained, routinely, a month behind with the owls. By the time June arrived you were still holding your breath through May. Tom had attempted to reason with Dippet for summer lodgings at the school but you were both denied in light of the exquisite mercy — the bombs have stopped! The Blitz has ended! Go back to the aftermath and make do with the craters.

It’s a bit ironic that Tom’s orphanage survived and yours didn’t. At least you can finally see what all the fuss is about.

In truth, it’s more strange than anything. You feel unreasonably like you’re impeding on a part of him that has never belonged to you (if any of him does); that place where you intersect but never draw attention to. You remind yourself you had no choice in the matter. The system puts you where it wants to, and these days the options are slim. But it’s — the walls are amber-black tile and plaster, lined with sanitary-smelling hospital beds and a cupboard per room. Per room, you think; you’ve got one of those now, and with only one girl to share it with. 

You figure the reason for the extra space is probably not one you want to know.

Anyway, you don’t actually see Tom for two days. The caretakers bring you a tray of dinner that’s vaguely warm and a bit too salty and you sleep off the debris you think you breathed in that morning, half-sated and sun-tired.

But then you do see him, and he’s in these funny uniform shorts and a thick blazer and your greeting is an offhand joke about the scandal of his knees that he doesn’t seem to appreciate. He eyes your muggle clothes while you wait for your own set and you know you really don’t have any room to judge. 

He doesn’t, or at least doesn’t say he minds your relocation.

You spend half the summer waking up in the middle of the night to acquaint yourselves with the London tube stations, and the other half in whatever crevices of the orphanage you aren’t harangued by Mrs Cole every five seconds, which are far and few between. She seems to have decided fourteen is old enough an age to worry about your intentions unchaperoned, like it’s the bloody 1800’s, and admonishes you and Tom relentlessly despite only ever finding you quietly buried in useless books. 

You begin to miss Madam Palles and her invaluable pity. Everyone’s an orphan here. No one’s sorry.

“What’s his deal?” you ask one stuffy afternoon, reclining in your creaking seat to prop your legs on the desk.

Tom knocks them off (he’s so well-mannered that you sometimes push these little gestures of impropriety just to bother him) and glances at the target of your question. Some broad, blond boy who skitters down the corridor a shade paler than he arrived. You’ve yet to properly introduce yourself to anyone you don’t have to, so names are muddy when you try to apply them to faces.

He shrugs, but there’s a flash of something in his expression you’re fascinated to realise is unfamiliar. “He’s an imbecile.”

“...Riiiiight, but that isn’t a proper answer.”

You smile. Legs return to table. Timeworn Oxfords muddy the surface. Tom scowls. 

“There was an altercation last year,” he says tersely, “he’s rather fixated on the matter.”

“An altercation.”

“Very good, that is what I said.”

You narrow your eyes and he sweeps your legs off the desk again, gaze catching the unmistakable ribbon of an old bullied scar on your shin. 

“And I suppose you’re above such incidents,” he muses.

You cross your arms and huff. He always wins games like these.

You’re grateful when you return to Hogwarts in one piece after your final night of summer is spent underground, and the certainty of knowing where you’ll rest your head for the next ten months cannot be understated. 

But the worst thing has happened, and you blame it on the flicker of a moment where you missed Madam Palles like it was some jubilant, accidental curse to ever miss anyone. A foreign thing you remind yourself never to do again. 

She’s only gone and jinxed the locks to the Restricted Section so they cry like newborn Mandrakes when Tom’s replica key clicks in place.

For a second you both stand there looking stupidly at each other. Getting caught was a fear two years ago; you’d almost forgotten it was still possible.

Tom is quicker to collect himself. He grabs you by the arm and casts a Disillusionment Charm, and you don’t burst running out of the library like two blurry suncatchers reflecting the candlelight as your instinct heeds; you cling to the shelves and you slither silently to the door. (You’ll make a joke about it when you can breathe.)

Madam Palles the Traitor comes heaving into the library in her nightgown, a blinding blue light baubled at the end of her wand, and it’s really just theatrical at this point to use Lumos bloody Maxima when the basic spell would do the job just fine.

“Has she suspected us the whole time?” you say on gasp once you’ve made it to the dungeons.

“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.

“What? Malfoy?”

You think it’s a good first guess. It could have been any of the Slytherins, upon consideration, but Malfoy seemed most fixated on Tom last year and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn he’d been observant enough to follow you to the library and notice you don’t leave with the other students.

But Tom quashes the idea. “I’m doubtful. Malfoy is attentive, but Madam Palles is hardly partial to him.” (He had, in second year, set one of her books on fire while studying offensive spells.) “I suspect it was someone with more influence.”

Only no one has more influence than Abraxas Malfoy. The rest of the Slytherins follow him like lost pups. But then Tom might mean —

“A professor?”

“It may be.” He says it like he’s already decided his suspect.

He is, as always, and ever-infuriatingly, correct.

It’s that file you tucked away for later, reoccurring when you return to Transfiguration in the morning like a second epiphany: Dumbledore.

He assigns the term’s seating arrangements, which he’s never done before, and there’s something in his tone when he pairs you with Rosier that feels intentionally like not pairing you with Tom. You don’t think it’s paranoia clouding your better judgement, and by the way Tom’s gaze hardens as he takes his seat beside Malfoy, neither does he.

Dumbledore is suspicious for a number of reasons. He disappears for weeks at a time. The Prophet writes articles on his sightings in Austria and France like he’s an endling beast. He’s being sighted in Austria and France — two notable countries in Grindelwald’s ongoing war. Perhaps ancillary, you’ve decided the charmed glass repositories he uses to hold his old artefacts are the same ones encasing the least permissible books in the Restricted Section. And if that isn’t paranoia (which, you’re willing to admit, it may be) then you assume he has them so proudly on display because he wants you to know.

You consider it a warning.

Tom does not.

“Just give it up,” you hiss over a game of wizard’s chess, “I bet we’ve read every book in there twice already anyway.”

His jaw ticks as the sole indicator of his annoyance, and he takes your rook. You scowl.

“Tom, that man thinks you’re devil-spawn. You know he’s just waiting for an opportunity to catch you doing something wrong.”

“So?”

It sounds so petulant you think he’s been possessed by his eleven-year-old self. Then you think he was a lot wiser at eleven.

“So?” You make an aggressive move with your knight. “So don’t give him one!”

He stares at the board and his breath is just a trace sharper and you hate that you know him like this and no one else. You wonder if he knows you like that too, but resolve with ease that he does not. You’re hard frowns and lewd jokes and trousers torn at the knee to bare scars with stories you wish you could forget. There’s no mystery there. Tom is nothing but — gordian knots and fixed expressions and little patterns to learn like the rules of this stupid game between you. You must know Tom Riddle by every atom or not at all. And that isn’t a choice, really. You’ve never known anyone else.

“Are you stupid, Tom?”

You glance at the board. He’s got Check. A terrible, true answer.

“No,” you finish. “Then don’t act like it.”

Your king glances at you and you nod. He falls. The game is resigned.

Tom acts stupid.

Dumbledore knows.

It all happens very fast.

You strike Tom harder in the arm with Confringo than is likely necessary that night, and he returns the favour with a Knockback Jinx that thrusts you into the shallows of the Black Lake.

You gasp. The cold water feels like it’s swallowing you whole when it strikes, an envelope sealed around you and licked shut for good measure. Everything holds to you, and it’s fucking November. Your senses are so overwhelmed that you forget to murder Tom the instant you sink in. You forget to do much of anything.

You wade trembling out of the lake when sense returns and Tom huffs, peeling off his robe to treat the burn on his arm.

“You—idi—iot,” you mutter, trying to find the incantation for a warming charm but the words get stuck between your chattering teeth. “You stole a re… stricted book.”

Tom glares daggers at you between his poor healing job and you scowl, mincing through the grass and grabbing his arm. “Fucking imbec-cile…”

You’ve done enough damage that if he were anyone else you’d be proud of yourself, and somehow, simultaneously, if he were anyone else you’d be able to manage a pinch of guilt. But he’s Tom, and you know him by every atom, so you cannot be proud, and he’s Tom — he retaliated by tossing you in freezing water and now your clothes are clinging sodden and heavy to every inch of you, so you certainly can’t be guilty either.

“I borrowed it,” he says tightly. As if that means anything at all. And then he takes his robe and drapes it spiritlessly over your shoulders. “You could attempt communication before curses.”

“I could attempt communication,” you scoff, uttering a charm to partially close the gash on Tom’s arm, “Fucking h-hypocrite. I did communicate. You lied.”

“I —”

“Omitted information? Withheld the truth? Watch your mouth or I’ll steal your fucking dictionary, Riddle.”

You swear a great deal when you’re cold and mad, apparently.

“I won’t be caught.” His calm is infuriating. “It would hardly earn expulsion regardless.”

“It doesn’t matter! He knows it’s you! He was staring at you all class!”

“So nothing novel then.”

“D’you want me to blast you again?”

His lips form a flat line. No. That’s what you thought.

You sigh, clutching his robes in your fists to quell your trembling. “What’d you take, anyway? We never touch the encased stuff.”

That is, you assume, why Dumbledore was vexed enough about the whole thing to mention it in class today. A highly valuable book has gone missing, from a repository you dare conclude belongs to him, and he has to pretend all the while not to know it’s Tom who took it. You are out of the question. Theirs is some delicate vendetta you can’t begin to unfurl.

“Nothing anyone should miss,” Tom says, a complete non-answer as he stops to murmur a warming charm you could probably manage yourself by now.

“Tom.”

“It was an encyclopaedia. It’s entirely in Runes. I suspect it will take months for me to decipher.”

“God’s sake,” you groan. He really is exhausting. “I think Dumbledore’l take his chances and loot your dorm before that happens.”

Tom wipes a stray droplet of water from your cheek. His fingers are soft. “We should return. You look half-drowned.”

“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”

And you accost him in hushed tones the whole walk back. Runes, Tom, really? Threw me in the damn lake over a Runic Encyclopaedia? He accosts you just the same; You burned me first.

It does, in fact, take Tom months to decipher the Runes, and he’s quite secretive about it. He won’t let you see the book, won’t tell you what it’s about, won’t indulge your queries on how far he’s gotten or if it’s worth the way Dumbledore bores his eyes into the pair of you in the Great Hall with nothing but the glass of his spectacles to soften his censure. You consider — well — you consider taking your chances and looting his dormitory.

The day everything changes starts the same as any. 

You muse over breakfast about muggle news and how the way Tom holds his wand when he casts defensive spells is too sharp when it should be circular. He argues. You soften the criticism by telling him his offensive magic is stellar but you’ll always beat him in defence if he doesn’t swallow his damn pride and listen to you for once. (So, really, you soften it very little.) He doesn’t take Divination so you don’t see him until Herbology that afternoon and he’s silent enough during the hour you share with your wormwood plant that you know he’s done it sometime between breakfast and now. 

Tom has cracked the book.

It’s late spring and the night takes longer to settle than it did in the winter. Errant sunbeams still sparkle on the water when you meet him by the lake, and it’s warm enough to forgo a coat.

“Are you going to tell me what it’s about now?” you ask without preamble, arms crossed over your chest as he approaches.

He hands you the book like it’s worth something to you without his explanation, but you’re intelligent enough to gather something from the illustrations of two twined snakes embroidering the cover.

“I should have suspected it sooner,” Tom says before you can comment. “By the way Dumbledore acted when I told him… I should have known he would have wanted to keep it from me.”

“Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s an Encyclopaedia on Parseltongue and its known speakers.”

You flip through the pages and none of it means anything. “Parseltongue?”

“The language of serpents,” Tom supplies, and the two of you walk along the edge of the forest. “It’s almost exclusively hereditary.”

“Okay, so, what — you’re trying to learn it anyway?”

“I have no need.”

You frown. “You… you already know it.”

“I always have,” he says, and there’s something almost unrestrained in his voice. He’s proud in a new light, and it takes you a moment to understand and you’re not sure why exactly it makes your heart sink, but —

“You’re not muggle-born.”

“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”

“So, he —” You try not to sound crushed because why should you be? Why should it matter that he isn’t some exact reflection of you? He’s at your side, he’s still there, he’ll always be there — “How does he know?”

“When he came to Wool’s to inform me I'd been accepted at Hogwarts. I hadn’t known anything, certainly not that speaking to snakes is emphatically rare, so I asked him. He said it was ‘not a peculiar gift.’ Perhaps to keep my interest at a minimum.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Because it isn’t just that I’m of magical blood. I’m a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”

You can’t be faulted for laughing. It’s not often Tom makes jokes, let alone funny ones.

“That’s good, Tom. Morgana used to have tea with my great-great-hundredth-great-grandmother, so that works out nice.”

He sighs, taking your hand and leading you further into the woods.

“Are you trying to murder me?”

“I might.”

“You’d be the first suspect.”

“No, I wouldn’t. You’ve far too many enemies.”

Not by choice, you start to scold, and then he stops, not so far into the Forbidden Forest that you’re afraid, but far enough you understand this is not something he’d chance showing you in the open.

He closes his eyes and whispers, and it’s — decidedly not English. And you know the sound of a few other languages, at least; this doesn’t sound like words at all. His consonants are pointed, his S’s stretched, the syllables repetitive but separated by a difference in cadence someone less perceptive might not notice. 

It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s exactly what he told you, but it startles you how much it reminds you of a snake.

“Tom?” you murmur, unsure at the prospect of speaking some ancient, unknown language into the air of the Forbidden Forest, and, underneath that, still reeling with the knowledge that this is real at all.  You’ve pinched yourself a few times to make sure.

There’s a low susurration in the grass, wet with dew that catches the moonlight, and you gasp, clinging to Tom’s arm when you see the blades part in helices for the space of an adder.

“It’s all right,” Tom says softly, almost elsewhere, his eyes zeroed in on the snake. “It won’t hurt you.”

You’re still by the balance of his arm and some petrifying awe as he extends a hand to the grass and the adder coils around it, weaving upward to his shoulder.

“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”

The adder points its beady gaze at you, and Tom whispers something else in that strange language before it retreats in agreement or compliance or whatever could come close to expression on the face of a fucking snake, and maybe you’re dreaming this despite your pinching. Maybe you’ve lost your mind.

“Hope you didn’t just tell it to bite me,” you try, and it comes out half-choked.

He smiles. It’s partly for you and partly for this venomous little thing on his shoulder, and that’s a bit startling. Tom Riddle smiles for adders and you and not much else. 

“Should I?”

And all you manage, for whatever reason, is, “Don’t be like them now that you’re not like me.”

It’s out before you can stop it, welling from a small, scared place that embarrasses you to return to. A hospital bed when you were eleven. The walls of a bedroom ravaged by bombs.

Tom’s smile fades. “We’re nothing like them.”

The thing is, neither of you know that’s the day that changes everything.

You celebrate your fifteenth birthday in the Deathday ballroom with Tom, a stolen dinner pastry, a green candle, and a few sad ghosts. You try to learn how to dance. Tom thinks it’s silly. You tell him that’s only because he’s upset he keeps stepping on your toes.

Summer blisters when it comes.

Some of the children take jobs as mail-sorters and steelworkers and you clasp for whatever you’re (one) allowed and (two) capable of, which isn’t much. You’re both old enough at the end of the day to explore London on your own, opting to spend as much time away from the orphanage as Mrs Cole allots, but you only have knuts and pennies and you warn Tom it would be unwise to swindle muggles and risk a letter from the Ministry. So you work where you’re needed and you eat the rationed nonsense you always do and you miss Hogwarts terribly. It’s much the same: you’re together, you’re hungry, and you’re nothing like them. 

And then it’s different: Tom makes Slytherin Prefect, is suddenly tall, and you wonder in fleeting moments if his face has always suited him this well.

A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.

Fifth year begins and you have almost the same number of electives as you do core classes, Tom has duties in his new role that take much of his spare time, and despite popular belief, you and him are not a mitotic entity, so this splits you up more often than it had in previous years. Which is fine. You still have plenty of things to talk about during meals and between duels, and you reckon you’ll share DADA until you graduate.

But in his absence, your attentions are forced elsewhere, and you should be grateful they land on something potentially promising.

It’s like Transfiguration just clicks for you this year. You’ve never been the greatest at Transformation (importantly though, you’ve also remained far from the worst), but fifth year launches you into Vanishment and something about that feels like a perfect equation. There are no complicated half-numerals and objects stuck between inanimacy and being — just unmaking the made. Nothing or not. You’re fucking excellent at it. You glean the theoretics fast and then the practise comes like breathing. Even the purebloods struggle as you Vanish Dumbledore’s Conjured garden snakes in brilliant tendrils of light. You exult unabashedly when you brush past them on the way out of class — who was it that didn’t belong in Slytherin?

You say the same to Tom and he rolls his eyes, but the amusement is there.

“Think you can talk to my snakes for me?” you tease, nudging him on the path to Hogsmeade.

“If they’re yours, I doubt they have anything worth discussing.”

And Dumbledore is… a hue nearer to the man you remember from first year. He praises your improvement and smiles when you can’t hide your giddiness as if equally impressed.

He doesn’t shelve people the way Slughorn does (you’re dismayed to find Tom has been invited to join the Slug Club and you have not) but you think if he did you’d be rapidly climbing your way to the top. Maybe get put in one of those neat little repositories he keeps all his best treasures in.

Dumbledore does, however, offer additional assignments for those who are interested, and tasks you with a few if you’re up to the challenge.

You always are.

The Tom-Dumbledore-Encyclopaedia debacle is apparently either resolved, or your part in it forgotten. 

Tom humours you when you’re both singed at the fingers from duelling, yours dipped in the lake while he buries his in the cold moss, about how Abraxas takes the seat beside him at every Slug Club dinner. He tells you he pretends to be very interested in the Malfoy’s business affairs and their stock in the Bulgarian Quidditch team’s win this coming spring. He tells you he finds it amusing to let Abraxas think he can make Tom his pet. Tom says he considers searching for Salazar Slytherin’s fabled Chamber of Secrets and showing Abraxas what a real pet looks like. You smack him in the arm.

He’s had an ego forever. He just has a few too many reasons for it now.

And maybe that’s why you push harder in Transfiguration, dedicate the majority of your studies to it, spend your Saturday nights scrutinising advanced techniques while Tom makes nice with Potions experts and politics with people who don’t even know what he is but like him anyway. It’s patronising, of course — borderline fetishistic; not a real like — but it scares you. Tom Riddle would not allow himself to be anyone’s pretty mudblood show pony if he didn’t have an ulterior motive.

Everything changes but the observable truth that he is still insufferable.

You’re lucky to see him twice a week if it isn’t in class, and the way it starts is so slow you don’t even fully understand what’s happening until Christmas break when Abraxas stays a few extra days and leaves by Dippet’s Floo instead of the train.

You don’t dare ask where Tom has vanished to in that time or why the hell Abraxas Malfoy would willingly subject himself to unnecessarily extended time at school with all his lackeys gone, and it isn’t because you don’t want to. It’s because he won’t tell you himself. It’s because you’re terrified the answer will feel like a broken promise, and you’ve come to realise (it’s been there for so long; such an obvious, tiny thing that you’ve never stopped to really dissect it) that it’s quite difficult to know someone at every atom and not love them a little bit.

You’re suddenly aware of the risk of it: you love him like an inextricable piece of yourself, and, well, you’ve seen war. You know what amputation looks like. You’ve seen the remains of structures designed to stand forever, and you’re strong like them — casts and gauze in all the weak spots because you remember the pain of breaking them — but those were blows dealt without the complication of loving the bombs behind them.

Tom is the green on your robes, the dragon pox tinge you sometimes think never truly faded when you look in the mirror too long, and all the shades you never imagined. Apple, jade, moss. The beginnings of emerald. (No, he couldn’t be that.) 

You wonder what the world would look like if he stole those colours back, and it’s much worse than some brutal decimation; it would leave you with too much. You would just be you without him.

So you love him into June like you always do, and you pluck his Prefect badge off on the last day of school and tell him it makes you jealous like a joke when it’s half-true. 

It’s raining when you walk to the train together, miserable for what should be summer but not at all remarkable in Scotland. Tom wipes it from your cheek. Your wrists are sore from vanishing bits and bobbles all night while you still can, never truly prepared for three months without magic, and you curl into your seat as soon as you’re in it. Tom wakes you up when you arrive back in London, startling you to find that you fell asleep at all.

It rains a lot that summer. There’s nothing much to see in the city and you can’t get anywhere else (you note: the Trace cares little about broomsticks but you can’t afford one of your own and flying might be the only thing Tom is bad at) so you’re stuck to the library again with a noseful of old paper and a certain prose that magical literature cannot replicate. You theorise a lifetime of reckoning with the mundane forces one to be more creative.

Perhaps it’s the cold that makes you sick. Perhaps it’s the state of your meals. Either way, your final weeks before sixth year are hell. Biblical, blazing hell.

The nurses aren’t sure what it is — another influenza epidemic you’re the first in the orphanage to catch — but they isolate you immediately and there’s not much care they can offer. 

You hear Tom arguing with one of them outside your door but can’t make out the words. Everything is dizzy, sweaty, halfway to unconsciousness but without its relief. You’d take dragon pox over this.

Some days later (though you can’t be sure because it feels like bloody centuries), he’s at your bedside, and you think even if you were lucid enough to ask what horrible thing he’d done to change the nurses’ minds, you wouldn’t. 

But you know he’s not beyond breaking wizarding law, because he’s muttering healing spells with a hand to your damp forehead, and you hazily find yourself reaching for him, trying to shake your head no.

“Not allowed,” you mumble. Your throat is sore and your nose is stuffy. You sound terrible and you probably look worse.

Tom is slightly blurry but you think he’s staring at you. You know if he is it’s with the utmost incredulity.

“Not allowed,” he repeats slowly. It’s very easy to picture him clenching his jaw. “I wonder, if the Trace is so exact that it can detect all forms of magic, it can’t also detect malady. You’re burning — and I’m to consider whether saving your life might be illegal?”

He’s angry. He’s angrier than you’ve seen in a long time; and you can actually see it now. His magic courses through you and your vision clears, bit by bit, until your depth perception steadies and you realise he’s closer than you thought. His jaw is, in fact, clenched.

You move to catch his wrist and manage it this time. “Tom.”

“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.

“You’ll get sick.”

His face is far too neutral for the way his fingers stroke your damp cheek. “Hm. Then it’s a good thing you’d break the law for me too.”

Of course he’s right — you love him. Which makes it a good thing he doesn’t get sick.

Some of the younger children do. The fever comes overnight for a girl who wasn’t in the orphanage last year, and it takes her by the next.

When you get back on the train to Hogwarts, the virus is circulating Britain and you’re livid. 

What Tom said is true; you consider the Trace’s precision and the details of the laws on underage magic — how one of the technicalities is that a young witch or wizard may be absolved of the consequences if the circumstances are life-threatening. You think about how it supposedly doesn’t care about broom-riding or Portkeys or Floo travel, and if the Trace is that complex, surely it understands sickness.

You only wonder if the Ministry would understand it. There haven’t been any epidemics in the wizarding world since Gorsemoor cured dragon pox in the sixteenth century, and when there isn’t healing magic there are antidotes and Pepper-Ups and herbs that muggles simply don’t have. The fatality of a fever of all things is not something you imagine could be comprehended by the sort of people who sent you and Tom back to London in the wake of the Blitz.

Of course, the Ministry hasn't written to you, you haven’t been forced in front of a representative from the Improper Use office, and you have no real reason to be upset.

You are regardless. 

It shouldn’t even be a thought: you immolating into oblivion protesting rescue because one of you might get in trouble for it.

A world you’ve never much cared for is blanketed in ash and its people are dying and you can’t help them. A girl is dead. You’ll return next summer and there will certainly be more.

Life is for the magical, you find. The muggles can burn.

It’s what makes you start to panic this year, knowing you’ve only got one more after it. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, and it doesn’t help that Tom doesn’t appear to share the sentiment. He’s got Head Boy in the bag and when he isn’t with you he’s with Abraxas, who can surely provide him connections if whatever game Tom is playing at works (and you have no doubt it will), but it’s like you said in third year: that isn’t enough for you.

You remember with a small ache that you no longer means you and him.

And then — it makes sense. You feel incredibly stupid.

“You told him, didn’t you?” you ask Tom the first opportunity you can get him alone, in the glum blue light of the Deathday ballroom on your way back from supper.

He sighs like it’s a conversation he’d hoped to put off for longer. “You’re referring to Abraxas, I presume?”

“You’re referring to — yes, you prick, I’m referring to Abraxas. Of course I’m referring to Abraxas, or are there others? Dolohov and Nott seem unusually enthralled by you, now that I think about it.”

“And for a reason I’m supposed to be aware of, this is an error on my part. Should I be apologising?”

“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”

“Why?” he deadpans.

You throw your hands up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Shall I provide you with my itinerary as well? Would you accompany me as I tour the third-years around Hogsmeade? Or can you do me the favour of trusting me to make my own decisions with the nature of my ancestry?”

“You’re keeping something from me and there’s a reason,” you say, stepping closer to him, “and forgive me if I want to know what it is when you were willing to tell me you’re the Heir of Slytherin and you can talk to snakes. What — what could possibly be bigger than that?”

Tom returns your approach with one of his own. His eyes are steady, dark, thick with lashes and you can’t reminisce on the details of the rest of him because that would be strange for a friend to do. Stranger to do it now, when you’re angry with him and there’s two sleeping ghosts in the corner and he’s framed by deep indigoes like the ripples in the Black Lake and — you’re doing it anyway.

To be short, he’s close, he’s very beautiful, and sometimes you despise him.

“Trust me,” he says again, without the derision of the last time. “This will change things for us.”

You frown, but it’s a weak upset in contrast to the explosion you came in here willing to make. There were at least twenty questions you meant to ask and you only managed one.

You are not his keeper. You know that. 

“Change them for the better, Tom,” you say on a sigh.

He blinks, and you think he’ll respond with a nod or a slightly offended ‘of course’ but he does not. He blinks and he just keeps looking at you. It’s disarming. It probably resembles the way you often look at him. There’s a rationale somewhere; you never see each other anymore, life is so incredibly busy, maybe he’s forgotten what you look like.

And he does nod, finally, but he does it with his thumb brushing the corner of your lip.

What? Sorry. What’s going on?

He pulls it away like he’s heard you. “You had something.”

You’re almost positive you did not.

Transfiguration this year brings Conjuration, which is an advanced and welcome distraction, and even more exciting when you consider no longer having to Vanish things you have no idea how to bring back. Dumbledore’s is one of three N.E.W.T classes you’re taking — Defence Against the Dark Arts and Alchemy besides. It’s easily your favourite.

You share it with eleven other Slytherins and twelve Ravenclaws. Four of them are muggle-born, and it’s hard to describe the ease you feel among them because you don’t think you’ve ever had anything resembling ease with anyone but Tom.

Your schedule is more crammed than it’s ever been, but it’s good. Two of the Ravenclaw girls invite you to Hogsmeade every other weekend, you share butterbeers when you can afford one, you study until you collapse, you take Dumbledore’s extra assignments and consider trying out for Chaser on one of your more restless evenings before waking up in the morning and resolving there is such as thing as too much of a good thing. Best not to get ahead of yourself.

Your contentment is remedied quickly.

Someone is found unresponsive in the dungeons. Dippet makes an announcement at breakfast that the boy isn’t dead, rather, petrified. No one is quite sure the cause, but the Headmaster warns a few minor precautions, suggests a buddy system, and says that after dinner studying should remain in everyone’s respective common rooms rather than the courtyards or library.

You know next to nothing about petrification, but the victim is muggle-born, and you suspect it was the result of a poorly performed statue curse by one of the many blood zealots in your house. The whole thing makes you hold onto your wand a smidge tighter, but you’re adamant not to let it drive you to paranoia like it would have a few years ago.

Tom nods at your theory when you manage to escape to the Black Lake together in November.

“That isn’t unreasonable,” he says. High praise.

You sink into the moss, sighing. “Do you think there’ll be more?”

He looks out onto the lake, the lapping waves, the crystalline beads that furrow them, midnight algae and flotsam you don’t think you belong to anymore.

You peer up at his silhouette in the dark. “Do you think whoever did it will do it again, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” he says finally, and after another pause: “but I don’t think it would be you.”

“How’s that?”

“No one would be senseless enough to try.”

And he sinks beside you with that, breath shaping the cold in steady, rhythmic clouds while yours are scattered. His robes brush yours and you take his arm with a sleepy hum, tracing patterns in the stars until your eyes feel heavy and he insists on taking you back to your dormitories.

One of the Ravenclaw girls, Marigold Wright, distracts you with a spare blue scarf and an invitation to her next Quidditch match. You watch from the stands and cheer as she catches the snitch to beat Gryffindor.

It’s a bit strange — having a distraction — having a friend. Mari is kind, smart, a good study partner who’s as keen on stepping into the advanced theoretics of Human Transfiguration a year early as you are. She’s funny in a vulgar way, introduces you to all her friends, shows you the best way to sneak into the kitchens, and you sometimes wonder if she was sorted wrong, but — her methods are creative, and she’s definitely intelligent. She’s also definitely not Tom.

You see less and less of him and more of her, Dumbledore, the Ravenclaw common room and the pages of progressive Transfiguration methodologies. He sees less of you and more of Abraxas, Dolohov and Nott and all the other purebloods, Slughorn’s soirées and Prefect meetings that cut into meals.

It happens again.

Second floor lavatory. A girl called Myrtle Warren. She isn’t petrified.

There’s a vigil the following week and her parents are there, two muggles whose sobs wrack the Great Hall even as the students clear out. Flowers descend from the charmed ceiling, little bluebells and white chrysanthemums.

You cry that night. You can’t remember the last time you cried.

This time, you don’t have to seek Tom out. He catches you on your way back from Alchemy and brings you to the Deathday ballroom with a melancholy glance in your direction that you don't hesitate to follow. You realise it’s an odd place to continue to end up in, but no one else goes there and you suppose that makes it yours.

You’ve seen Tom skinny and sickly and olive green, but today his eyes are circled with veined violets and the lack of summer sun this year has whittled him grey once more. He’s still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful. But he’s tired and — sad — and for the six years you’ve known him you aren’t quite sure what to do with that.

You don’t spend too long pondering it. You just hug him with the dawning newness of a thing like that; a thing you’ve never done, and never really thought to do. (You ask yourself in bewilderment how you’ve never thought to do it before.)

He’s warm. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t reciprocate immediately. 

And then he does, and you understand without caveats or concerns that you stopped having a choice in your destruction the moment you chose him. He’s home, and that’s going to ruin you one day.

Your arms tighten around him and his around you, the rhythm of his breath holding you to earth when you begin to float away. Nothing makes sense in this moment but the mercy that in all the death you’ve seen, you swear to God you’ll never see his. As long as you’re alive, he must be too.

And there’s something to be said about the innate self-slaughter of loving a person (of loving Tom Riddle, especially): that it’ll cleave you in two, that you’ll say feeble things in his embrace that you should be above saying, like ‘I’m scared’, that his hand will find the back of your head and he'll tell you he knows, that that should not feel like enough but it will be. You’ll clasp your hands under black robes and hold this singular embrace together by the faulty adhesive of your fingers. Maybe you’ll cry again, like your body can suddenly comprehend its capacity for it and is making up for lost time.

The first sign that something is wrong, more than the obvious grievance of the death itself, is the Ministry’s happy acceptance of Rubeus Hagrid as the culprit.

The boy is maybe fourteen years old, half-blood — half human, mind — and no one has a bad word to say about him other than he likes to keep eccentric pets. Which leads you to wonder what pet he possessed with the ability to petrify one student and kill another and what cause he’d have for it in the first place besides two terrible, miraculous accidents.

That question draws an even stranger path. Mari says over butterbeers (on her, bless her soul) that she read somewhere years ago that Gorgons can induce petrification, but that she doesn’t remember much else.

One of the boys in DADA says that his father’s an auror, and heard from him that Hagrid’s pet was some sort of arachnid. Tom deducts five points from his house after class with a scowl on his pale face, muttering about conspiracy.

The second sign that something is wrong is that only one of those things would need to be true for the entire case on Hagrid to be called into question. If Mari’s memory serves right, how the hell did Hagrid come into ownership of a Gorgon? (Could Gorgons even be owned?) If the auror’s son is worth your credence, then what species of arachnid is capable of petrification?

You take to the library.

Unsure of where to begin and hesitant to draw attention, your research lingers into Christmas break and stalls some of your extracurriculars in Transfiguration. Tom is busy enough not to notice the new step in your routine, and you’re grateful not to have him breathing down your back, telling you you’re looking in the wrong places or you shouldn’t be looking at all.

The third sign is the end. 

You wish to retract it all. There are time-turners and memory charms and potions that could dizzy you enough to manipulate the truth; there is anything but this. You’d suffer the consequences for the bliss of loving him with one more day before the ruin — you’d write it down to remember through the fog: look at him, duel him without wanting to hurt him, kiss him to know that you did it at least once, have him, be had. You never will again.

He’d shown you the adder. He’d joked about the Chamber of Secrets. He’d spent months disappearing with Abraxas, earning the trust of the sons of the Sacred Twenty Eight. 

And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.

So it’s statue curses and Gorgons and Tom — speaking to serpents when no one else can, buttressed by pureblood boys who want people like you dead.

Don’t become like them now that you’re not like me.

He’s something else entirely.

What do you do in a moment like this? Panting into an empty library at a revelation you wish you could unknow, fingers digging into the hickory of your desk — another memory carved among the initials and hearts; how do you stand from your chair and leave like the world outside this room is the same as it was when you entered? There’s nothing to orbit. You are cosmic debris, tea dregs in a barren cup, flotsam.

You stand; and you tell no one. Not even Tom.

His presence in your life is so infrequent that you don’t even have to come up with excuses for your distance until three weeks after your discovery when you’re paired together in DADA to practise stretching jinxes. 

You almost laugh. He’s standing beside you, tall (lanky like he was when he was a boy if you look long enough) and serious, and you love him without knowing who he is anymore. You’ve skirted corners to avoid him and sat with Mari during lunch and breakfast like he’s some scorned lover to escape confrontation from and not someone who held you through a grief inflicted by his hand. 

“You look tired,” he says, inspecting the daisy you’d been tasked to elongate.

You glance at him. You are tired. It’s exhaustive, bone-deep, aching like nothing you’ve ever known, and maybe that’s why you can look at him and smile sadly instead of thrashing against his chest screaming for what he did. You suppose it happens enough in your head to satisfy. When you can sleep, you sleep to the thought of it. The waking moments are just blank.

“Mhm,” you hum, transfiguring the daisy stem back to its regular length.

Tom observes it with curious eyes. “You’re getting good at that.”

“I’ve been good at it.”

His lips turn, a small frown before he puts it away. You make the observation that he’s tired too; there are still bags under his eyes and his hands tremble ever-so-slightly with his wand when he loosens his grip on it.

His own doing and still you flicker with some relentless hope that he's drowning in regret.

“Sorry,” you say. A ridiculous thing. Do you intend to slowly push him from your life with weak disinterest and diverging academic avenues? As if he were something extricable. He’d never let you.

You’ll have to confront him, and that’s a revelation that holds its weight on your chest until you think you'll suffocate under it.

You’re in the blue light of the Deathday ballroom with a face you've never worn before when it happens, deep into spring, and you know then that you were wrong all those years ago.

He sees all of you.

Takes you in in the flash of a second and maybe it’s your quivering jaw that reveals you or the flint of betrayal in your eyes waiting to be struck and lit. Yes, you were wrong — Tom Riddle knows you at every atom too.

“Are you going to let me explain?" he asks before any hello. His jaw is tight but there’s nothing else to go on to judge his disposition. He's settling into impassivity like an animal drawing its shell. You will not be allowed in if you're going to make it hurt, and you might be the only one who can.

“Explain," you copy with a hard exhale, “Just tell me it wasn’t you. That’s all there is to say."

He stares at you. There’s nothing there.

“Tell me, Tom.”

Your breath catches on an automatic please but you don’t want to offer him that.

“I cannot.”

Then make me forget, you want to scream. Let it be summer. Let us work for pennies and breadcrumbs and be no one together.

It’s late winter and it’s too cold.

“You killed her,” you say quietly.

“If I told you I did not wish for it, would you even believe me?”

“What are you… so it was an accident?”

“There was — an opportunity presented itself that may never have come again; that does not mean I don’t find the nature of it regrettable.”

“Regrettable.” You’re laughing or crying or both, and you must look unwell. Halfway out of your mind.

He’s so composed in the face of it that it only makes you more incensed.

“You told me to change things —”

“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”

“You nearly died,” he hisses, “and if I am to apologise for recognizing it only as the first of many times, I will not. If I am to apologise for doing whatever is necessary to prevent it, I will not. The hand we were dealt will not be the hand we die to — so yes, I understand it. And one day so will you.”

“Don't," you spit, and your anger must look pathetic under your welling tears. “Don't you dare tell me that this was for me.”

“Do you want me to lie?”

“What could her death possibly bring me, Tom?”

“Her death is the first step to —”

“God, stop dancing around the fucking question!” Both hands have wound their way to your head, clutching at your skull like the brain matter might spill through one of the cracks he’s wearing down. “Just… tell me.”

“You recall Godelot's work," he says stiffly. The question of it takes you by surprise, peels the moment back like the rim of a fruit and you're left uncertain.

All you can do is nod, arms falling to cross over your chest.

“There was one form of magic he refused quite concisely to impart. I searched the Restricted Section for days, and under Dumbledore's watch that was not an easy thing to do."

You stole from him, you're urged to remind him, but it's something you'd say with a nudge of annoyance and a roll of your eyes. Such admonishment is small and far away.

“I found it at last in one of the repositories," he goes on, “Secrets of the Darkest Art."

“...What?"

“It's called a Horcrux,” he says. “Murder, by nature, splits the soul. The Horcrux simply makes use of the act; puts the soul fragment into something imperishable so that it is protected, rather than abandoned. In turn, your life cannot be taken. By malady, by magic, by sword — the vessel is destroyed but the soul lives on.”

You blink, feeling dizzy. “Myrtle was the sacrifice.”

“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.

“How lucky for you.”

“The circumstances could be ameliorated if one were to be made for you. I would have preferred it be someone who deserves it.”

“For — you’d do it again? Again, Tom?”

His brows crease, and even his upset seems contrived. There’s this barricade he’s placed that you, in all your infallible knowing of him, cannot puncture. It’s agony to begin to question what he could possibly be keeping from you in a confession like this.

“You killed someone, Tom. You — I would never ask you to do that. I would never live at the cost of someone else."

“No, you would not,” he agrees, though he shakes his head like it’s incredulous of you. “Do you think, even if I knew it were certain,  a summons from the Ministry would have stopped me from saving you this summer? Do you suppose the threat of punishment would cause me to waver at that moment? I know it would not hinder you. So, you have your lines and I have mine — you never needed to ask.”

And now it hurts. The emptiness clears and you can't stand yourself for crying, but you do. It comes out in ragged, breathless sobs, clasped behind your palm as you turn away from him. 

You've loved him since you were eleven. It's always been you two — it was always supposed to be you two. What is there to say to him? He's blurring in your periphery like in the midst of your sickness, and there's nothing he can do to heal you this time. Your vision will clear and Myrtle Warren will still be dead. He'll still be a stranger in the face of the boy you love. 

“Why," you whine, a wet, hollow stain in your voice you've never cried enough to hear before. “Myrtle was — wasn't — uh —" You swallow, hysterics severing your words. You can't really think right now. Your body wobbles and your head feels puffy and hot. This might be shock. 

Tom scowls like it irritates him to watch you push yourself, like this is just the unfortunate effect of you depleting your energy in a duel, not eating correctly, treating yourself carelessly. 

Of course you can't stand or talk or think. You're you, contemplating a life without him.

“Sit," he says in frustration. You smack his hand away when he reaches for you, but the world has turned a shade darker and you're slipping into it. 

He tugs a chair towards you with a silent charge and a reprimand, and your body doesn’t possess the wherewithal not to collapse into it the second it’s under you.

After a moment you can speak again, shaking hands steadied by your knees. “Did you… did you think I wouldn't find out? You know, the only thing that can petrify someone besides a serpent is a Gorgon. And — where would Rubeus Hagrid have found one of those?"

“I thought I would have time.”

“To come up with a good lie? Something I’d sympathise with?”

He bites his cheek. “Evidently the particulars matter little to you.”

Fuck him. “Fuck you.”

“Very cogent.”

“No, fuck you, Tom. We could have — we only had a year left and then we could — we could've done anything we wanted." You're crying again. You don't have the energy to be embarrassed. “And you chose this."

He’s indignant as he steps closer. “With what money? For what life? We are better than all of them and it’s never mattered. It never will; you know that. You told me that. You’re angry now, but you must know the truth of it. I would not forsake you. I would not lose you.”

You blink up at him, mouth stuck with some cottony feeling and cheeks stiff from crying.

“You have lost me, Tom."

He stills as if suspended. Some maceration must follow but it doesn’t.

You stand on weak legs to look him in the eyes. You wonder if he can see the love in yours. You wonder if he knows you will walk away despite it. (Of course he does. You’ve never lied to him.) 

You think about how his fingers seem to always find their way to your cheek and you put yours to his. The bone there is sharp, but the skin is soft. Boyish. 

There isn't a word for a goodbye like this. It shouldn't exist and so it doesn't. You just leave.

You fail your N.E.W.T courses. Quite spectacularly.

Mari sits beside you on the train with a soothing hand on your shoulder, and doesn’t ask what’s rendered you into a comatose husk since March. There’s no crying. You chew numbly on soft caramels from the trolley and stare out the window onto the hills.

That summer is spent in your bedroom unless you’re forced elsewhere. A new girl with skin so white it’s nearly translucent sleeps in the bed beside yours, taking meals on trays like you did in your first days here, tracing the cracks in the tiles, humming to herself in the dark. She makes you feel less pathetic for doing much the same. 

You’d been right in your assumption that there would be more dead upon your return, and wrong that there would be more empty rooms. There are always more orphans being made.

And then you receive a letter. It isn’t delivered by owl (only for secrecy, you assume, because there are no muggles who’d be writing to you) but it’s stamped with a vaguely familiar crest. Not Hogwarts’ waxen seal, but something undoubtedly magical. A cockroach and a cup, you think, squinting. Transfiguration.

You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.

It’s from Dumbledore. Some of it melds together, but the key words stand out.

Spoken to Dippet… Exceptional promise… N.E.W.Ts… May be reconsidered… Upon dispensation… Be well.

Be well.

You are not. You are something half-drowned and half-burned, never enough of one to quell the effects of the other. Sunlight is sparse through your side of the orphanage. On the radio, they warn a pattern of one bomb every second hour. The only other warning is the sound when they fly overhead, and if you can’t run fast enough —

You write your answer in a crowded tube station with a spotty ballpoint pen. Tom is there, looking between you, the dust, and your shaking hands as if to say: tell me I was wrong.

Some of your letter melds together but the key words stand out.

Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.

It’s a shock that you live to seventh year. It’s a shock that you do it without him — though he watches, and in his gaze you feel regressed. You’re alive, yes, but there’s something there… his dead weight, death-grip; his haunting. They always speak of the dead as something heavy. Something that holds onto you even after it’s gone.

You find that to be true.

Dippet’s condition that you remain in Dumbledore’s N.E.W.T class is that you achieve more than the standard requirement. Essentially, your final exam will be much harder than everyone else's: Human Transfiguration, mastery of petty Transformation (through the means of Wizard’s Chess pieces), Conjuration and Vanishment of various delicate objects — all done nonverbally.

Even Dumbledore seems sceptical, but it translates to more rigorous practise rather than resignation, assignments he doesn’t even task to Mari, though she’s just as good, and you can’t begin to understand why he cares so much. 

“I’ll entrust you with these while I’m away,” he says before Christmas break, sliding a sheet of parchment your way with a flick of his wand.

You frown, unfolding it. His instructions are always short now — you’ve learned to decode his meaning well enough without much exposition. 

Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.

Inanimatus Conjurus spell (cockroach and cup, as instructed) to be Vanished when perfected.

Study Antar’s Doctrine. Miss Wright will act as your partner.

Due February.

It’s far too much to be done in that time. “Sir?”

Dumbledore lugs a messenger bag over his shoulder that appears small, but he carries it in such a way you suspect it’s magically extended. He smiles wistfully, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You know, I often regret how much this war asks of me. A consequence of my own doing.”

Right — Grindelwald. Sometimes you forget between awaiting the next muggle paper. War is everywhere.

You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”

Another half-smile as he twists open a jar of Floo Powder, and then he shakes his head with something you almost decipher as amusement. A brittle sort. Tired. “Good luck to you.”

And then he’s gone, in a swath of green flames that do nothing to inspire any desire for Floo travel in you.

Antar’s Doctrine is simultaneously prosaic and grandiose. They read like excerpts of a journal and you yawn into them over your morning tea, stirring amongst the first-years, who are the only people at the Slytherin table you can stand to sit with. Your blood status is apparently nullified by your age, and the worst they do is look at you funny. You aren’t sure what Abraxas’s — Tom’s (the new hierarchy never fails to stagger you) — lackeys would do if you sat with the other seventh-years instead. A part of you longs to know. They certainly don’t bother you in class the way they used to, you aren’t tripped in the corridors, but you wonder how far Tom’s influence can stretch. He is the Heir of Slytherin, and he’s earned them. But you are nothing.

You’d like it if he would let them hurt you. You think the incentive would be enough to hurt him back. And God — God, you want to. You want to hurt him almost as much as you want him.

You practise through the doctrine with Mari, as Dumbledore directed. When you’re able to sever Antar’s egotism from his abilities, you can see why Dumbledore would recommend his book to you. It feels like slipping through a crack in glass without shattering the whole thing. You weave in and back out, and Mari grins when she returns from the shape of a teapot to her body without you needing to utter a word to do it.

In the back of your mind, you’re aware what you’re doing is nearly unprecedented. It’s spring, you’re months away from eighteen, muggle-born, and mastering nonverbal Human Transfiguration like it’s a Softening Charm. Mari tells you you’re the smartest person she’s ever met. It makes your cheeks go hot to hear such open praise, worse when you snap out of the thought that you believe her.

Grindelwald falls. The school celebrates in whispers until the evidence is in front of them — Dumbledore, returned without a scar, a new wand in his hand — and then they’re cheers. The feast that night is a great one, and he toasts to you from the end of the staff table, a discreet tilt of his cup before he takes a sip and returns to converse with Professor Merrythought.

You take from your own, and your eyes land on Tom, spine of his goblet tight in his hand. He’s looking at you like you’ve affronted him somehow. You could laugh — by choosing Dumbledore. Of course. As if it was a choice at all.

But if it bothers him… if it feels anything at all like the betrayal you felt, then — good.

You drink, and don’t look away.

By the time your N.E.W.T.s arrive you have a renewed confidence that you’ll succeed, even with the obstacle of performing each exam wordlessly.

There are only twelve students who came out of your sixth year class, so to divide resources for the tests is no grand task. You’re given a Wizard’s Chess set, a desk with assorted vases and goblets, an intricate epergne (you had to whisper to Mari to learn its name), and a Ministry worker borrowed like some laboratory mouse. You suppose it makes sense, though — you’re all capable enough of Human Transfiguration not to mutilate anyone, and performing on a classmate could obfuscate the results. It’s far easier to Transfigure someone you know than someone you don’t.

You start with the chess set, Dumbledore and the Ministry worker observing you as you turn pawns to knights and rooks to kings, the minutiae of the pieces drawing sweat to your brow. They change, and change, and change, and you don’t mutter an incantation once. The Ministry worker puts the set away and directs you to the glass. You Switch the vases with the goblets, Vanish them, and Conjure them again. The Ministry worker takes notes. Dumbledore nods affirmatively at you and you can exhale. The epergne is the hardest; so kitschy and elaborate you don’t know where to start when you’re tasked to Transform it into an animal. 

An animal — like that isn’t the vaguest instruction you’ve ever received.

You look at it on the desk, mirrors and glass and gold on protracted arms, and you go for the first thing you think of because the Ministry worker is staring at you like you’re inept and you see it in his eyes — this is the muggle-born one, this one can’t do it. 

You’re better than them. You can do it forever.

The epergne spins at the dip of your wand, and emerges more than an animal. A big glass tank appears in its place, round and gold-rimmed, water lapping at the sides. Inside it is a jellyfish. Emerald green, bobbing, tentacles and oral arms coiling against the glass like the limbs of the epergne had spanned its centre.

The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.

“And — and back?” the worker says, like that will be the thing that stops you.

You point again, mouth tight with irritation, and reverse the Transformation. A droplet of water smacks your face and you’re lucky to be so hot you can disguise it as sweat. You suspect even an error that small would cost you a mark.

You wipe it away. A strange thing happens; you imagine Tom brushing the water from your cheek at the Black Lake. You imagine his fingers in the rain.

The Ministry worker steps closer with a shameless frown. He tells you to turn his hair red. You do. He regards himself in the mirror and scribbles something down. He tells you to turn it back. You do. To grow him a beard, to change his clothes, to make him taller, shorter, this and that — all read from a list he does not appear enthused to recite. You do it all.

He shakes Dumbledore’s hand when it’s done, duplicates his notes for him to keep, and follows the other Ministry workers through the fireplace when everyone’s exams are finished.

You find out you’ve passed with an Outstanding on your birthday.

Mari drags you to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate, butterbeers on her. (They always are.)

“Can’t believe we’re about to graduate,” she says into her cup, froth on her upper lip.

You sigh into your own, partially giddy and mostly nervous.

Mari squeezes your face between her thumb and finger so your frown is puckered. “Chin up, genius. You’ll be excellent.”

You push her hand away but can’t help a small smile. “Outstanding,” you correct.

“Outstanding!” She bursts out laughing. “Bloody ego on you now…”

“Well, I am the smartest person you know.”

“I take that back.”

She pushes out of her chair with a slightly inebriated wobble. “Going to the loo. Don’t touch my chips.”

Your hands raise in surrender, and you steal only one when she’s gone.

You aren’t the only ones here to celebrate. (Your birthday and your mutual achievement, yes, but the Three Broomsticks is filled wall-to-wall with seventh years drinking their final nights at school away.) There’s music charmed to reach every corner, even yours at the little alcove hidden from plain sight. It’s nice to watch from here — the stumbling, the kisses meant for mouths that land drunkenly on cheeks and noses, the barkeeps that roll their eyes as soon as they turn away from all the newly adult customers, not yet learned or careless in their drinking manners.

It is not nice to be occluded from plain sight in such a way that you don’t notice Tom Riddle until he’s inches away from your table. It is not nice that no one else notices either.

On instinct you don’t make any impressive exit. He slides into the booth next to you and your brain short circuits for a moment at the warm familiarity of his presence beside you. Then it occurs that it’s been more than a year since this was remotely commonplace — that you cannot forget the reason why.

There’s not much time to decide whether you want to be vicious or indifferent or to debate on past precedent which would bother him more. You haven’t attacked him despite being concealed enough to do it unnoticed, and you haven’t shoved furiously out of the other side of the booth.

Indifferent it is. 

“Can I help you?”

“You’re causing quite the stir,” he says, taking one of Mari’s chips.

You’re allowed. It’s infuriating when he does it.

“Am I?”

“It’s enough to fail a N.E.W.T level class and be expressly petitioned back, but to have a special criteria set for your exams and manage an O on top of it all…” He inclines his head as if to appreciate your face so close after so long. You should not let him. “You are incomprehensible. It terrifies them.”

“They’re afraid of the wrong mudblood, then, aren’t they?”

Indifference effaced. You’re angry.

He seems to have come prepared, and shrugs your scorn off like a scarf you would have forced him to wear winters ago. “Of course, they have no reason to suspect Dumbledore might have ulterior motives.”

Ulterior — you certainly hope he isn’t suggesting this is based on anything but your merit, but then — you couldn’t begin to understand why Dumbledore cared so much, could you? You’d made brief inspections of his disdain for Tom in second year, his waning shades of kindness and the matter of his stolen encyclopaedia, but you hadn’t… you hadn’t thought at all about how his dedication to your progress only begun after you’d stopped sharing a class with Tom, how it had developed as you began to drift from one another in fifth year and accelerated in sixth after the first petrification and Myrtle’s death. How Tom had worn you down with a weighted glare at Dumbledore’s little toast.

It wasn’t because you had chosen Dumbledore, you realise. It was because Dumbledore had chosen you.

“Why don’t you worry about your pets, Riddle?” you snarl, “I’m sure there are bigger problems with your lot than my exam results.”

Something in his face shifts at the name. You swell with distorted pride.

He mends the reaction by looking you over in more detail, his features schooled into something he must know you can’t deduce. You try not to squirm under the intensity of it.

He reaches almost mindlessly for your collar (there is nothing mindless about it, you’re sure) and smooths the fabric gently with his fingers. “I always liked you in this colour.”

You blink. His thumb just barely brushes against the skin of your neck before retreating, and your mouth falls open.

“Don’t do that,” you say. Truly a sad attempt. Your repulsion is more with yourself than him, and that’s not at all right.

Where is Mari?

“Your friend was at the bar, last I saw her.”

You stare at him with wild eyes. How the hell — ?

“You were always easy to read,” he supplies, and leans in so you can follow his line of sight to the tiniest sliver of the bar visible between two columns, where Mari looks deeply engaged in conversation with Leo Ndiaye, one of the Gryffindor Chasers.

You take a sharp, exasperated breath at her antics. She might be more in love with the competition than the boy himself. They’d never last without Quidditch to bind them, but you can’t fault her for wanting a bit of fun.

“Well then —” 

Right. Tom hasn’t actually moved away. You turn and his face is just there.

His eyes dart forthwith to your mouth, and — no. No, he won’t be doing that and neither will you.

“...I’m off to bed.” Stop talking to him like he’s your friend, you think miserably. Stop looking at him like he’s your —

“That would be wise.”

He’s still looking at your lips.

No one else is looking at you at all.

It could exist in just this moment, you deliberate; separate from everything else.

Except nothing about Tom exists in its own moment. He’s all over you all the time, skin and bone and soul. You hope you still have a place in the broken fragments of his.

“So I’ll be going now,” you say again.

“I haven’t protested.”

But he’s leaning in, and he has to know that’s impedance enough.

“But you will.”

His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”

You grab him by his shirt and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing each other like either of you know what the hell it means to kiss anyone, but you’ve learned the rest together, haven’t you? Your noses bump and you don’t care. You just need to kiss him, and — God, you make some noise against his mouth and the hand cupping your face spreads to capture more of you, greedy and wayward — he needs to kiss you too. It’s a horrible thing to know. It leads you to pose too many questions.

The need must have begun as want, and when did the want begin? How long has he looked at you and wondered what you’d feel like to kiss, touch, mark? (He’ll never have the latter. You swear that.)

You’re pulling away in intervals. “You don’t have me, you know.”

“I know,” he responds, lips on the corner of yours.

“You still lost me.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.”

He pauses for a moment. “I know.”

You kiss him again. Long and soft, memorising his cupid’s bow and the tip of his tongue, and when one of his hands moves to your waist you part from him like you’ve been burned.

“I —” You resist the urge to touch a finger to your lips, standing abruptly from the table and adjusting your shirt. Your body feels like an evolutionarily faulty vessel, too easy to please, though you can’t imagine it responding to anyone else this way. Or perhaps your mind is the problem. Not wired well enough to resist an evidently bad thing. “Goodnight, Tom.”

You thought there wasn’t a word for your goodbye, but that’s it. So simple it sinks you. Goodnight, Tom. I’ll dream of a morning where I wake up beside you, but you won’t be there.

He grabs your hand before you can go, licking his lips and it haunts you to think he’s savouring you. It stings a place deep in your chest you’d spent all year trying to heal.

“My door is always open,” he says.

He lets you go.

You graduate with Mari’s hand in yours, and you aren’t afraid.

Dumbledore requests that you stay for the summer to help him prepare for the first year’s curriculum in the fall. It’s a ridiculous opportunity for someone your age — free lodgings and a stellar impression on your resume, and — you can only accept it with an ire you haven’t felt since the spread of influenza in muggle Britain.

If he’s offering you lodgings now, he could have done it all along.

It sends you down a horrible train of thought while you move your things from the Slytherin dormitories to a little chamber a few doors down from the staff room; Tom will be removed from Wool’s this year. Will he stay at Malfoy Manor? But Tom is still publicly muggle-born — Abraxas’s parents would never allow it. Will he find a job, a flat? Will he swindle muggles once he turns eighteen and the Trace is no longer an obstruction?

You think of him often. You think of his offer.

My door is always open.

Plenty of doors are open to you now. Why should you want to go back to his?

Still, the Second World War ends in November and you feel like you can breathe at a depth you never could before. The school doesn’t celebrate like it did with Grindelwald. No one but you seems to care at all.

It’s a tempting door.

The year passes in a blur of graded papers and lessons Dumbledore sometimes involves you in and sometimes does not. Most of the first-years care little for you, but there are two Slytherin muggle-borns who look at you like a new sun to orbit. Everything is worth it for that.

You see Mari when you can, and find she’s training with the Italian Quidditch team, who apparently are smart enough to care more about skill than blood. She says she misses the complexities of Transfiguration, but any career in it was always going to be yours. Smartest person she knows, she reiterates. Biggest ego too.

The next summer Dumbledore informs you of a posting at the Ministry. Something small with a smaller wage. He emphasises the weight of his personal recommendation, but that you won’t be respected unless you claw tooth and nail for it. You don’t take long to consider a chance to make an actual income with an actual career doing something muggle-borns simply don’t do before you’re nodding assuredly and asking him what you need.

Better clothes are first, and all you can afford until further notice. You take to Gladrags with intent to purchase for the first time in your five years of wandering in the shop with eyes bigger than your wallet, and the owner looks at you with distrust when you slide her your sickles.

The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant. 

It’s far down in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. You’re a glorified secretary, and you recall the few times you’d worked as a mail-sorter during the war. It’s some sick irony that you’ve landed yourself in a pile of paper once more.

But the money, though offensively scant to someone with better options (and it’s infuriating the options you deserve), is more than you’ve ever had, and within the next year you’re able to leave the castle and take a cheap room at an inn in Hogsmeade. You’re close enough to Dumbledore to aid him when he needs you, but far enough to feel like your school days are departed, and you need not worry about memories lurching unexpectedly at every corridor. 

A sick part of you still reaches for your mouth sometimes to remember what it felt like to be kissed. That part of you wishes for Tom. You could kiss him into oblivion. You could find a way to make it hurt him back.

My door is always open.

Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.

Mari invites you to her first professional game and you cheer for her in the stands, a green, white, and red scarf around your neck in place of her old blue.

She wins and you get drinks in a muggle pub. You kiss a man at the bar. You go home with him. His hair is dark, but not dark enough. His lips are soft, but the shape is wrong. He makes you feel good, but you wonder if in another life, the dream is true; you roll over in the morning to Tom beside you, and he makes you feel better.

When you can find time between the monotonous demands of your job, you’re in the Transfiguration classroom, staying behind to help the Slytherin muggle-borns with their Switching spells.

It’s one stupid accident the next fall that changes things.

A muggle bank has been robbed, and whatever idiotic, panicked witch or wizard was behind it apparently found themselves incapable of getting the deed done with a simple Imperius Curse (you can’t imagine, based on the scene, that they’re above Unforgivables), and somehow ended up leaving the building half-charred and teeming with at least six bank tellers Transformed into birds, two chirping into the floor tiles with broken wings.

“Renauld’s on it, though,” your coworker says when the news finds your department.

“Renauld?”

He’s a year older than you, a pureblood with parents in high places, and endlessly fucking hopeless.

“Well, yeah —”

You push out from your desk, files fluttering behind you. “Renauld will expose the whole damn wizarding world if he touches that building.”

“But McCormack sent him.”

“Where is it?”

“I… McCormack said that —”

“Where is it, Flack?”

“Um. Um, near King William, I think. Moorgate or, um —”

That’s good enough. You toss the Floo Powder into the fireplace and go.

The place is a mess. You don’t even have to look for it. There’s some ward around the street, bouncing muggles away like an invisible end to a map they don’t even register is there. At least that’s handled right.

But you slip through it and curse under your breath at the muggles trapped inside the wards. They’re like fish prodding at the dome of their bowl, and some run up to you demanding explanations when they see you unaffected by it. You brush them off — Obliviation is not your strong-suit — though you do shout at a pair of DMAC wizards uselessly standing guard outside the bank.

“What the hell are you doing?” you ask on approach. “Renauld’s supposed to handle the inside, yeah? You deal with fixing them.”

You point toward the frantic muggles, and the officials just regard you with vague confusion at your presence. “Renauld said —”

“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”

You afford nothing else before pushing past them to enter the bank.

It’s quite impressive, actually; Renauld, the result of generations of foolproof breeding, is waving his wand around like he’s just stepped out of Olivanders for the first time.

“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.

Renauld jumps. “What? What are you doing here?”

“Heal their damn wings. They’re easier than human limbs and healing magic’s the only thing you aren’t completely shit at.”

“Who authorised you?” he hisses.

“I did.”

In hindsight, it should have gone horrifically wrong. Your wand could have been taken and your life might have been over in all ways that matter, flung back into the muggle world where you’ve always been told you belong.

But Renauld vouches for you. You Transform the walls, you fix the burns, you mend the bank to something presentable. A muggle robbery — dangerous, financially tragic, but believable. And your suggestion to heal the injured bank tellers in their animal forms might be the thing that saved them. When Renauld mends their wings and regenerates their blood, you Untransfigure them, and the other DMAC officials alter their memories with haste.

You were completely out of line and utterly right.

It isn’t something people like you are allotted.

Your probation period is dreadful. You hide in your room at the inn most days, Vanishing little stained panes on your window to feel the warm breeze of air before you Conjure them again. You help grade papers, though Dumbledore is displeased with you and the night is a silent one. He assures you curtly that he’s doing his best with the Ministry to amend this.

And… he does.

With Renauld’s help and the corroboration of the other DMAC officials, you’re back at work by the start of the school year.

It’s a slow process — almost eight months of meaningless paperwork — before the next incident occurs and you’re hectically ushered to the scene like a belated understudy. And then it happens again. And again. And again.

There’s really no choice but to promote you.

Your heroics are torn from a Gryffindor cloth, so says Flack. You urge him never to say such a thing again.

By your twenty-first birthday, you think about Tom almost exclusively in your sleep. You’re much too busy to think about him anywhere else.

The summer is warm and Hogsmeade is lively. You’ve vacated your room at the inn for a little house on the outskirts of the village, decorating it how you like — discovering what you like. You’d never had a chance to find out before.

Mari visits when she can once you have your fireplace connected to the Floo Network (you yourself prefer Apparating) but her name is slowly working its way from the Italian papers to the British ones, and she has so much to tell you there isn’t possibly enough time in her days to tell it. There’s also the matter of Leo Ndiaye, who has, recently, gotten on one knee and proposed to her. If there had been a bet on them ending up together, you would have been out enough galleons to put you in debt.

After especially gruesome days at work, you and a few colleagues make a habit of getting sherries at the Siren’s Tail, complaining that sometimes the nature of your work is akin to an auror’s but without the notoriety and pay.

“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “You seen the shite the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a bloody Unspeakable.”

“You’d have to be able to keep your mouth shut for that, Alves.”

Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.

“What are the aurors up to?” Flack asks.

“I dunno much. There was a murder all the way in Albania, s’posedly. Reeked of dark magic.”

“Nothing new,” you join, and then frown. “Why’s our Ministry dealing with it though?”

“I dunno. I got word from Hillicker that the Albanians didn’t know what to make of the mess. They’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Hillicker’s not a source,” Renauld scoffs.

“Yeah? How about you ask your daddy for something better?”

“Alves, I’ll have you know —”

You lean in over the counter. “What do you mean they’ve never seen anything like it?”

She grins. “Why? Storming a bank robbery wasn’t exciting enough for you?”

You roll your eyes, taking a drink.

That ought to be the end of it. One extraordinarily lucky incident to push you up the career ladder was rare enough — there is absolutely no way digging around a case that has nothing to do with you or your department could ever end well.

But something about it itches.

You make nice with Hillicker. She’s a year younger than you and far too kind for her own good, and she gushes freely about her husband’s work as an auror (they must be a perfect match for him to gush freely about it with her). It’s a bit manipulative. You have no excellent excuse for it, but… ambition, and all that, you suppose. Flack’s Gryffindor theory is studded with holes.

You are green, through and through.

Emilia’s updates are meaningless when you garner so much information that you’ve already heard everything she has to say over drinks, and at this point her and Hillicker might be a step behind you. Emilia still only knows about Albania; peppery little details of half a story. Hillicker discusses an assortment of murders with no real string between them, and Dumbledore regards you with cool heeding when you bring up the matter with him.

You see him little nowadays but you’ve never been close in any true sense, traces of resentment budding over the years like rainwater collects on glass until the stream finally slips.

You visit Hogwarts mostly for your Slytherins, fourteen or fifteen now, unafraid of the distinction of their blood.

And then there’s one night after you turn twenty-two where drinks take place at yours for a change, Mari and Leo included and happily wed. You have no sherries but your ale is just as well, and it’s only you and Renauld who are sober by the time everyone else is vanishing into the fireplace and going home.

That makes it much worse when you sleep together. 

There’s no excuse of having had a glass too many — so sorry, I’ll be on my way then, and him stumbling over his trousers to get out of your hair. Of course, he does that anyway, scratching the nape of his neck when he reaches your doorway in the morning.

“Thanks for the — well, you have a nice home — I do think I should —”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Oh!” He turns around at the last second. “Er — I know you’ve become a tad obsessed with… Hillicker mentioned another, anyway. Hepzibah something. Killed by her own elf, the aurors suspect.”

“Oh,” you echo, sheets pulled up to your shoulders. “Thanks, Renauld.”

“I thought you might like to know. Don’t be daft about it.”

You’re incredibly daft about it.

There’s something reminiscent about Albania in this case that wasn’t there with the others. The tide of dark magic ebbing across the scene, the cherry-picked information released in the Prophet, the claim of an old, dumb House Elf who poisoned her mistress like the Albanian peasant killed in some insoluble accident. 

The itch exacerbates.

You see him in your dreams again. He peers over Runes in a stolen encyclopaedia, he whispers to an adder on his shoulder, he kisses the corner of your mouth and it isn’t enough. He kills you, again and again. You kill him too.

You wake up and he isn’t there.

It’s a new low when you’re invited to the Hillicker’s anniversary dinner and you end up digging through the drawers of their study halfway through the night.

The Albania file offers nearly nothing. There was the charred residue of dark magic imprinted on a hollow tree in the fields of the peasant’s hamlet, but nothing detailing more than a blank imprint of the Killing Curse in his eyes. Still, you tuck the knowledge away for the file of one Hebzibah Smith, whose tea did indeed have traces of poison, but whose den was also ripe with a layer of darkness that didn’t line up with the Ministry’s tale of senile elf.

And then there’s the forgotten matter of her being a purveyor of ancestral artefacts. The file doesn’t recount whether any are missing, since the woman was wise enough not to proclaim all her possessions to the world, but it’s something. A scratch.

You travel to Albania that Christmas. The neighbours in the peasant’s hamlet have skewed memories, so they provide little help, but the man’s house was left almost untouched.

You tear the place apart and Transfigure it back together when you’re done.

All you find, in the end, is a scrap of an old envelope in a suitcase.

R.R

It could be that it’s old. The cursive seems ancient enough. But you swear the letters have the distinct shape of quill ink — too artful for any pen — and maybe that wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for half a wax seal stuck to the torn edge of the envelope. Stained but silver, the barest hint of two ribbons, a crest, and the letter H.

You return to Hogwarts posthaste.

It’s snowing in the courtyards and you waddle with a duotang under one arm to pretend you’re here for something scholarly, an array of excuses prepared in case you run into Dumbledore, but you don’t.

The Grey Lady is as beautiful as she’s rumoured to be. 

You ask her about her mother, and she’s silent, an expression on her face like you’ve struck her.

“Is it found?” she whispers. The snow floats through her.

Your heart hammers as you consider how to approach this. She thinks you know more than you do, which means there’s something to know.

“Yes,” you say. And you dare further with the context you know, “In Albania.”

“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”

And if she means to say more she doesn’t seem able, washing away through the balusters, then the walls. You think of your house ghost and what he did to her, and you feel sorry for a second.

Madam Palles expels you from the library the moment you find what you’re looking for, and you rush past a throng of staring students to the staff room fireplace. It’s too far a walk to the border of the castle wards to Apparate. You bite back the preemptive sickness, get swallowed by the flames, and go home.

There are blanks to fill in but you do it easily. Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Hepzibah Smith and her assortment of unregistered artefacts. The stain of dark magic. Something so rare not even the aurors recognized it.

But you do, because he told you.

You wonder on your search to find him what object he used when he killed Myrtle Warren. Nothing special, you think — maybe even the closest thing he could find. These murders involved more preparation. He got to mark them however he wanted.

It’s almost disappointing to find him here. In a little flat over Knockturn Alley with a view of charmed coalsmoke and the brick wall of another shop. 

It’s as tidy as his room at Wool’s, the only dirt the irremediable age of the building itself. The whole place looks almost slanted, large enough only for the bare necessities; a kitchen, a toilet, a bedroom that looks more like a closet, and a study/dining room/den you can’t imagine he hosts many gatherings in. You rescind the mere thought. Whatever gatherings Tom Riddle is having these days, you’re sure you can’t begin to imagine at all.

You wait, legs crossed on an old loveseat, fiddling with your wand.

The door clicks open when the snow has turned to hail and there’s no light but the few scattered candles you’d lit on the mantelpiece. 

It strikes you only when he’s standing before you that it’s his birthday.

You’re in Tom Riddle’s flat, on his birthday, adorned by the orange glow of half-melted candles, and you know everything.

He eyes you carefully, a hint of surprise at the sight of you after four years that even he needs a second to recover from. And then he's even, inscrutable Riddle again, and you dare to think, come back.

“I placed wards," he says, hanging his bag on a rack by the wall.

“I thought your door was always open.”

You see his posture change from just his silhouette.

“Wards never work in Knockturn,” you offer additionally, “not really. There's too much conflicting magic; one border cuts into another; leaves a little sliver behind if you’re smart enough to find it. You should know that." 

He turns to you. You take in a moment to acknowledge how he's changed. It's hard to see in the curtained moonlight, and it seems unreasonable to imagine he’s grown, but you think he has. An inch taller, perhaps. Two. Maybe the dress shoes. His arms are bigger under his button-down, but not enough to consider him muscular. His black hair isn't as perfect as you remember, and you suspect a long day of work undoes his curls. You always liked him better that way in school, after a night duel at the Black Lake, his robes askew and his hair a mess. Evidence that you were the only one to dishevel him. Now you were — what? Did he even think of you anymore? Yes. You'd always think of each other.

“Duly noted. What are you here for?” He tries your surname like a foreign language.

You cross your arms, and you're acutely aware that he's observing your changes too. You're not the matchstick witch he once knew. Your emotions are cultured now, taut to mirror his. You wear dull, formal grey, and that glowing green tinge that should be gleaming on you is under a thick carapace. That’s for Mari, Flack, Emilia — even Renauld. Not for Tom.

You wonder if he knows it was Dumbledore who put in the word that got you this uniform. You wonder if he resents you for it.

“There’s been talk at the Ministry," you say finally, “A string of murders. Whispers of something — some dark magic they don’t understand. And you know they're careful about things like that after Grindelwald."

“A string of murders... Hm. That might imply you understand a connective thread. Is there some sort of accusation being made?”

“Oh, I'm sure you'd be flattered by accusations. There’s not enough there, as it stands. Just whispers." You sink more comfortably in the seat and the springs make a concerning sound. “But I know you."

His hard, sharp gaze falters for a moment. You watch the flames dance behind him, the firelight playing against the lines of his shoulders, and feel your heart skip a beat. “Who else is speculating?"

“No one." Your fingers brush over the book spines on the coffee table. “I guess their attention hasn't been drawn to a book clerk yet, even if you have taken residency... here." You say it with no shortage of disapproval. 

Knockturn was never where Tom belonged. You'd once imagined a flat together in muggle London, taking the telephone booth to the Ministry together, changing the world together. It's a wish that's a lifetime away now.

“Is this a warning? I assure you, I don’t need the condescension.”

“I'm not warning you," you scoff, “I — I'm seeing you. God knows I'll probably never get the chance to do that again once you get yourself locked up in Azkaban, which you will." 

You sound exasperated. You sound half-pleading. “What are you doing, Tom? Is this — this is really what you want?"

“Yes."

You shake your head. “I don't believe that." And then some of that fiery spit returns to you, and you feel like a child again, stuck in the London tube stations holding his hand at every plane that flew overhead, scowling that you needed his reassurance. Scowling that you were afraid.

“Well, your conjecture is ever-appreciated. Shall I lend you mine? Shall I congratulate you on your revolutionary position at the Ministry? Or is it Dumbledore I should afford my thanks?”

“I earned this,” you hiss.

“You deserve it,” he amends. “But do not lie to yourself and pretend that’s why you have it.”

“Fuck you.”

He smiles. “There you are.”

“I don’t need your congratulations, Riddle. Dumbledore doesn’t need your damn thanks. But,” you say, biting back the snarl that wants out, “you could thank me. After all, I could turn to the Ministry any minute with the truth of your heritage. I could tell them about Myrtle, the Horcrux — Horcruxes.”

The humour dissolves from his face and you despise the immense glee it brings you.

“Oh, did you think I didn’t know? Didn’t understand the connective thread? You are sentimental under all that… fucking posturing, you know. I’m sure it’s all very romantic to you — making Horcruxes out of Hogwarts artefacts. Shame it’s such an insult to your intelligence.”

“Very good,” he says after a long, terse silence. You’re sure he’s thinking just the opposite.

You hum, meddling with your nails. “So what’s your plan?”

“I’d need a Vow for that.”

You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”

“You’re also not an auror, are you?” He tilts his head appraisingly. “And yet you’ve found your way here.”

“How many do you plan to make? How many people do you plan to kill?”

“A Vow.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tea, then? Biscuits?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t. I read in the paper the other day about a poor old woman who had her tea poisoned.”

“Hm. Terrible shame.”

Your fist clenches around your wand. “Is it paying off well, Riddle? It must be a good life if you’re willing to split your soul to hell and back to have more of it.”

He smiles at the barb in your words. “You never were good with subtlety.”

“I wasn’t trying to be subtle. This place is horrific.”

“I was referring to your inability to see more than what’s directly in front of you.”

“Oh, really? And what more should I see than a boy who’s very good at getting weak men to bow and do very little else? I’d try to see the bigger picture, but I reckon it wouldn’t fit in here.”

Tom regards you colourlessly. You are slate, Ministry-grey, impermeable like palace portcullis. 

“I suppose I should have killed you.” He says it with the nonchalance of a forgotten chore. He says it like you’re a stain. 

He doesn’t say it like he feels any terrible urgency to remove you; and you think, this time, you’d feel more powerful if he did. You think it’s far more debilitating to sit here and be looked at like he regrets wanting you alive more than he wants you dead.

“Yes,” you concur, “I suppose you should have.” 

You place your wand down on the table and scoot your chair away for good measure. “It’s never too late to rectify your mistakes.”

Tom, for a moment, looks surprised. That makes you feel powerful. You’d take more of that.

“You have wandless magic,” he tries. A weak recovery.

“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”

He doesn’t move for a moment, then fixes his wand in his hand and rises, doused in the same inscrutable calm that always used to drive you mad. Now something in you gleams with the knowledge that he only ever looks like this when he’s trying not to look like anything at all.

He steps closer and it gleams brighter. It trembles inside you and you know, distantly, that this is insane. You’re weighing your life on a childhood trust that was shattered years ago, and you don’t think you’ve ever been that good at faith, but he’s approaching you and that gleam you feel is reflected in his eyes and you just… know. Your spilled blood once crawled with his. There’s no undoing that. Half of you is made of the other.

“I should have killed you,” he repeats.

It’s a murmur. Stilted. Angry, even. Angry that you made him this and there’s no fucking rectifying it — what a joke that is. What an immensely you thing to suggest.

“Yes,” you agree.

It’s a breath. Low. Proud, even. Proud that you’re his only mistake and he’s going to make it again.

Tom kisses you. It’s a murder of its own kind. You kiss him back, and — you were always going to kill each other like this, weren’t you? It’s you and him whether you like it or not.

There should be no love in it. You know that. Love is far behind the both of you, stifled in a gasp at the back of your throat on your eighteenth birthday and the soft, selfish hands of a seventeen year old boy. This is mutual destruction. Spite and teeth and skin that’s cold under your fingers.

He was your first in everything but this.

You push back at him and feel the hunger, the need in him, like a flame as he kisses you deeper and harder, and you find yourself losing yourself to it all over again, like you're back in the dark alcove of a pub where you told him goodbye, pushing to extend the juncture. And then he lets out a hitched, gravelly sound; not a moan but enough to make you shudder.

You pull him onto the sofa and crawl onto his lap.

“How long?” he asks thickly.

You don’t have to ask what he means. You bite against his neck, nails under his shirt as you struggle to pop the buttons open. There must be a violence in all your want for him because if there isn't it's just loss. It's just another thing you'll give him without taking anything back. 

“Sixth year," you pant, “in the Deathday ballroom when we fought for the first time. You — ah — you put your thumb on my mouth. Since then."

You hear a sharp intake of breath, and his hand moves up your back to pull you impossibly closer. His voice is ragged. “Should I tell you how long I’ve wanted you?"

You shudder a breath. “Since —" And it's a bit hard to talk with the way he's rolling your hips — “Since when?"

His lips twitch into a mirthless smile, hands spanning your thighs as you start to rock against him. “When you burned me, and I sent you into the lake." 

You swallow, agonised by the slow pace his grip forces you to keep when all you want to do is go faster. 

“Your uniform was terribly wet,” he says, mouth tracing your jaw. “Did I ever apologise for that?"

“N-no.”

He tuts, the hushed sound warm and deadly on your neck. “Bad manners. I must have been distracted."

Oh. Oh, you think. It seems pointless to flush in the position you're in now, but the knowledge that he wanted you then and you hadn't even known is... all the more devastating. 

But you shiver at the question of how he’d wanted you, in what amount of detail, in what precise way. You almost want to ask. See it for yourself. 

You don't think you'd manage the words. He’s hard underneath you and your head wants to lull toward his shoulder but a big hand holds you from one side of your jaw down the length of your neck, his tongue laving up the other. Instead you’re balanced only by his hands and his mouth, rolling against him because it’s all you can do like this.

He’s marking you, you realise with a gasp, and your fingers bury in his hair to remove his mouth from its descending assault on your collar. Not that. You’d sworn against that.

Your fingers return to his buttons and he copies you by finding yours, pulling at the fabric tucked into your trousers until it’s discarded entirely. You press your hands to the planes of his chest and watch him, your mouth agape as his eyes linger on your chest.

His heart is pounding and he must know you’re about to comment on it because his lips are on yours again and he adjusts his position and your fingers dig into his shoulders at the delicious new feeling of him pressing into your thigh. 

You move for his belt. He moves for your zipper. It’s some sort of race, whatever you’re doing, and you’re at an unfair advantage when you’re still fumbling with his buckle when his hand is already carving a slow path to the band of your underwear. You're scalding under the journey of it, little stars pricking you under every new inch he explores.

He dips in and your eyes wrench shut, grasping frantically for his wrist.

“Shh,” he says softly, caressing your cheek with his spare hand, thumb finding your mouth how it did all those years ago and you want to curse him. The fucker knows exactly what he’s doing.

You shake your head, chest rising with heavy breaths as you return to his belt and scrabble to unbuckle it.

“So tense,” he murmurs. The hand at your cheek draws over your lower lip before it falls to your back to hold you closer. “Breathe for me.”

And his fingers trace you where you want him most, brushing past your clit as he pulls his face back to watch you.

You sink into the feeling, still swaying on his lap, a half-efforted attempt at finding friction in the hardness between his legs that feels fruitless because it won't be enough until he's inside. Your hand just grips onto the fabric of his unzipped trousers and stays there. It’s a pause. An obstacle on your path to him that you need just a moment to recover from before you’ll make him feel just like this. Better. Worse. It’s hard to tell which is which.

He’s stroking at you now, pleased by the way you lurch against him with every touch.

You have to recover, you have to make it even, you have to… you…

A finger presses inside and you moan.

“You came back to me,” he whispers, close enough to be kissing you but there’s just the stutter of his breath. It's a fucking religious thing to say, the way he does it.

“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.

He shakes his head. “I know. You’ll still take it though, won’t you?”

Oh, fuck.

He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”

Good. Fine. Your hands slip from his zipper to the meat of his thighs, pushing yourself forward so the shape of him is firmer against you, and Tom slips another finger in.

Maybe you don’t need to tear him at the seams to make it even. Maybe this is punishment enough. That he can have you like this and it still won’t make you his, that he’ll give you everything and you’ll lap at it with half the greed he possesses. Maybe you're trying to convince yourself.

You ride his hand, clutching his shoulders, rocking your hips. You take all of it, and it builds something delirious inside you, that it’s finally him, his perfect fingers, the shape of his lips, the soft dark of his hair when you find your hands in it again. The feeling makes you stutter, and he has to move you by the waist himself to keep the momentum when you can't do it yourself.

He’s painfully stiff, pushing up against you with a degree of self-control that feels like it can only end disastrously for the both of you, and you start smattering kisses down his cheek. You tilt his head back and lick a stripe down his neck. Breathe for me, you'd say if you could.

But he adds a third finger and your head falls, a cry planted in his collar when you come, and you don't think you say anything.

Tom holds your legs steady, guiding you through it like this is just another one of his studies. You are what he knows better than anything else, and still he wants to learn more.

“Look at you,” he mutters, dipping you back to press his lips down your chest, unclasping your bra while you’re still breaking, the sensation swelling again when he takes a nipple into his mouth.

“Tom,” you try to say. Your mouth is the sticky sort of dry that words refuse to come out of.

“Will you give me more?”

Give, not take. You fuss into a stolen kiss, grappling again with his trousers, pulling them down until you can palm him through his boxers.

He hisses, gripping your wrist like he hadn’t just done the same to you, and then he’s pulling you up and off the couch, trousers discarded with what must be magic because you blink and they’re gone. Greedy boy. (You have no room to judge.) Your back is to the wall an instant before his fingers are on you like they despised to ever be parted, pushing your underwear down your thighs until it falls at your feet. You arch to feel him press against your stomach, pushing off the wall so that you can meld to him but he just closes in on you to do it himself.

He goads the heat from you when his fingers push in again, still wet, coiling how you like, where you like —

“Want you,” you protest shakily, hand on his abdomen.

That must kill him a little, because he curses under his breath (a thing he never does) and the immediate absence of his touch is cruel when he goes to free himself from his boxers. You reach for him without thinking as he does, and he pins your hand beside you when your fingers so much as graze the length of him.

You sound frail, but you have to ask. “Is this how you wanted me?”

A cruder version of you would go on for a while. Is this how you pictured it? Taking me against a wall? Have you waited for it all this time?

And you don’t belong to him but you’re so incomprehensibly, contradictorily his. You’ll want him forever. He could do anything and you’d be his. You could haunt him into his lonely eternity, and he’d be yours. Then, you suppose — haunting him makes him yours by principle.

Maybe you already do.

Tom practically growls into your mouth, pressing against you and — God, it’s skin on skin. He's right there. You could push forward and —

He slides in. You gasp into his shoulder at the feel of him inside you, the angle of it like this.

“I wanted you,” he says lowly, your legs wrapped around him, “everywhere.”

You’re gripping him so tight you think he’ll bleed under your nails and somehow you still feel on the brink of collapse when he thrusts deeper.

“I thought mostly of your mouth,” he rasps. “It felt depraved to imagine it wrapped around me, but then I thought of you splayed out before me instead. That maybe you’d like it if it was my mouth on you.”

You whimper.

“You would, wouldn't you?” he asks, hands spanning your hips to snap them into his, like you are a piece removed from him he seeks to reattach.

If you wanted to answer you couldn’t. You’re clinging to him and the rising surge inside you, carved between your legs like something sweltering and unfixable. It rushes in and he pulls out of you. He pushes in and you cry for the release of it, the moment the wave lurches over the edge, but he won’t let you have it.

“But,” he says, and your eyes want to roll back at how heavy his restraint is, callous in the tone of his voice, some leash at his neck he must tug himself lest you take it from him — “If I knew how well you’d take me like this, I would have thought of it much more.”

Taking him, again — you don’t feel at all like that’s what’s happening. You feel possessed. You are buoyant in his arms: his and his and his.

“You can — ah — you can — ”

"Hm?" He brushes down the slope of your brow, your cheek, back to the edge of your mouth, wiping a trail of saliva from your chin. “Poor thing.”

And he slams into you again, drawing a mewl from you that slices your unfinished thought.

You clench around him, flames wild and fluttering at every contact of his skin on yours, and there are too many to count. Too many points where they intersect, just some blend of bodies connected at every curve.

“You’re going to give me more,” he says, like it’s an epiphany when you already told him you would.

You feel him twitch inside you, his pace stilling for a moment, and the thumb on your lip slips into your mouth. Your lips close around him and he curses again.

He fucks you with a finger in your mouth and his teeth clamped over your shoulder, soothing the sting with his tongue. His pace is too slow when he drags his free hand between your legs, but you understand its purpose well enough that the mere recognition almost destroys you. 

He’s patient in bringing you to the edge because there's time here. A slow agony that severs you from the rest of the world until it splits you down the middle. And he may not ever have it again.

You have to promise yourself he’ll never have it again.

But the movement of his fingers against the same spot he’s hitting inside you is too much at once, and you won’t last. You drool around his thumb. You let him mark you. You can see on his neck you’ve marked him too. And you hope impossibly there’s a scar. You hope the little death you coax from him claims him as yours for eternity, keeps him even when you're gone. You tighten, lurch for the edge, and make him mortal once more.

Tom holds you there, your cries reverberating as he sinks another finger in your mouth, and then he’s gasping at your neck, peeling back to look you in the eyes when he spills into you. Your eyes screw together and he releases the sounds you make by holding you by the jaw instead.

“Look at me,” he says, and for the strained need in it you do.

You come down to earth and you kiss him, wetness dripping down your thighs as he pins you to this moment. You love him. You’ll always love him.

He brings you to his bed after and you let him, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.

You love him and it isn’t enough. Not even to look at him, the sleepy hint of the boy you knew in his eyes, and know that he loves you too.

“Goodnight, Tom,” you say, finding home in the warmth of his chest.

This guy is a big walking warning sign that glares “Do Not Touch”

You’ll go to touch him for the first time and he’ll grab your wrist faster than you can blink, his teeth bared and eyes full of icy murder

“Touch me and I’ll break your goddamn hand.” (Sigh….so romantic) 

No one touches him and you are included….for a time

You respect his boundaries

And you hold back your desire to touch him even when your fingers and heart itch to feel over his skin

But damn does he make it hard because why is he one of the clingiest assholes you’ve ever met?

He’ll grumble and huff and hiss at you to stop touching him

But then he’s got his hands on you like they might just be another part of him

Is his touch necessarily romantic in the typical sense?

Hell no

But he’ll be pushing you out of the way of danger or of someone not paying attention on the sidewalk

He’ll shove your head down in the heat of battle

He’ll wrap his body around you to shield you from harm

He’s grabbing your upper arm and guiding (pulling) you around

Grabbing the back of your neck to do the same thing

IF, and that’s a very big if, he grabs your hand it's gonna be a little too tight and it’s only going to happen so you don’t fall off a cliff or stumble into the road

He’ll brush his arm against yours, hands shoved into his jacket pockets, as you two walk side by side

You feel the chill of his fingers brush over yours as he passes you something

He is pretty much the decider on when the two of you touch

But he’ll allow you to pick his hat up during the rare moments it's knocked off

He’ll even let you put it back on (but if the other Crusaders are teasing him too much, his hat will be snatched from your hand and hand swatted away)

He lets you straighten his jacket and dust it off

He will grumble the whole time you do so

But guys he’s the biggest softy on the inside, it's a fact

And you know who the literal embodiment of his soul is?

Star Platinum 

Expect Star Platinum to actually be the clingiest 

like he beats Polnareff for the most sappy partner award

Star Platinum can almost always be found holding your hand, hugging you tight, and nuzzling his face into your neck

Get ready for kisses planted to your lips and cheeks and forehead from the Stand

Kisses you are unfortunately almost always knocked onto your ass by because the big guy doesn’t understand you can’t spot him as he’s whizzing up to you faster than any bullet

Platinum brings you little gifts he finds, holding your hands in his before revealing it to you

Jotaro hisses and snaps at his Stand to leave you the hell alone….but it doesn’t have any real bite to it

Because he can feel you through Platinum’s touches and it makes his stomach all fluttery like he’s some love-sick idiot

Jotaro watches as Star Platinum nuzzles your cheek with his nose, pulling a wonderful giggle from your lips. He grits his teeth in annoyance as he watches his Stand wrap his arms around your waist, pulling you off your feet like he’s an overgrown toddler. 

It was embarrassing. 

Jotaro had been able to gain complete and utter control over his Stand in the short time he appeared, yet here he was completely and utterly out of control of the damn thing. 

Jotaro thanked whatever god might be floating around up there that none of the other Crusaders were around to witness another one of Platinum's disturbances. To watch you run a hand over Platinum’s cheek and nuzzle him right back. 

Touches Joatro could feel ghosted over his skin. Touches he was growing more and more pissed off were being gifted to his fucking Stand. 

The line in the sand was when your lips pressed an overly, smooching kiss to Platinum’s cheek. It sent Jotaro into an angered frenzy. 

He stormed over, grabbing you a little too roughly out of Platinum’s grip and all but wrestling the damn thing to disappear back into himself. 

“Jotaro--he wasn’t doing anything--”

“Would you shut the hell up?” He hissed, grabbing your cheeks in his hand and forcing you to look up at him. You felt your breath halt in your throat at the beauty of Joatro's face. A beauty that only was amplified by his sharp, green eyes bearing down into you. “Platinum needs to learn some fucking manners.” And then he was letting you go. The absence of his strong hold and presence left you feeling a little disappointed, but you only smiled Joatro’s way teasingly.

“Oh…I see.” You murmured, crossing your arms behind your back as you turned on your heels, starting for the location where you were meant to meet the others. Joatro was quiet as you walked. Quiet until he was grabbing your upper arm and pulling you to a stop in a way that made your heart begin to flutter all over again. 

“See what?” He demanded, that ice beginning to fill his eyes. Ice and that look you had seen only moments ago. You smiled, bringing a hand up to smooth down his jacket which had gotten a little ruffled. 

“You’re just jealous of the poor lug,” Joatro growled, letting you go quickly. 

“Good freakin’ grief.” He huffed, pushing past you in a way that allowed his arm to brush along yours. You couldn’t help but giggle at him, quickening your pace so that you could walk beside him. To keep your arm brushing against his here and there. 

“Yep. Jealous.” 

If you are ever paired up with him and Kakyoin at a hotel, he’s going to be up in your grill and blame it on the close quarters (you all literally almost have a whole suite like--he can lie to himself but you see what he’s doing)

While you brush your teeth he’s going to brush his teeth and he’s going to have his chest pressed against your back to “let Kakyoin move around behind him” 

He’ll roughly scrub toothpaste off your lips if there is ever any and grumble about how messy you are 

Kakyoin doesn’t say much about the stolen touches he witnesses Jotaro give your way

He’ll just smile and chuckle softly (and definitely will throw you a thumbs up while Jotaro has his back turned)

A debate about who is sleeping where is going to happen and you're going to have to convince Jotaro to just sleep with you instead of on the floor

 Again, he’ll grumble out a “good grief” or two as he pulls himself into bed, arms crossed over his chest and back turned to you

But throughout the night, he’ll gruffly turn around

his leg will press against yours

His arms will uncross and his fingers will play with the edge of your shirt until he works up enough nerve to toss his arm around your waist

Then he’ll be shameless in tugging you against his chest and holding you protectively

His chin will rest on top of your head 

And with his new openness, you’ll be allowed to wrap your arms as best you can around his hulking form

Please run your fingers over his shoulders and back

Please wrap your legs around his

Pleaseeee run your fingers through his wavy hair and over his cheek

It’s the only time he’s going to let you touch him so blatantly so take as much of it as you can

He will fall asleep against your smoothing touches and unfortunately will become like a cinderblock 

Don’t expect to be able to escape his arms, I hope you used the bathroom before going to bed

You stir awake with a soft inhale of breath. Your body was held oh so tight against the solid form of Joatro, who you found once you fluttered your eyes open. A face so soft in the early hours of the morning and whose green eyes were already open and watching you. 

His eyes shifted from a look that was filled with such love it took your breath away back to their usual guarded hardness. You could only feel grateful you had been able to catch the look. One you so rarely saw but felt through his actions every day. 

“Morning.” You whispered softly, grip around his large frame growing tighter as you felt him begin to shift. You knew you would only get so many more seconds on this before he was rising from bed, grumbling about how clingy you were and clingy you would be until he did so. 

“You gonna let go?” He huffed, hands finding their way to your waist to shove you away. You shook your head, scooting ever closer. So close you could nuzzle your nose against his in a way that made him all but hiss. 

“Nope.” You said, popping the ‘p’. “Kakyoin is still asleep, no one is gonna see me snuggling you.” You said quietly as to not wake your friend up in the other bed. Joatro said your name in warning, but you could tell he didn’t mean any of it. Not when he had stopped trying to pull you off of him, muscles relaxing as you splayed your fingers over his back. 

“Just a little longer…I’m still asleep, see.” You said, pretending to fall back asleep. Jotaro sighed through his nose but said nothing further. Said nothing as he rewrapped his arms back around you, pulling you tight against his chest. 

“Five more minutes and that’s it.” You smiled against the gray shirt he wore, breathing in his scent as you savored every last bit of this you could. 

You two will only kiss in private 

Like far away from the other Crusaders and behind a locked door private

He will not be caught kissing you at this stage in his life 

It’s not because of you at all (though sometimes it can feel like it), it’s because he’s honestly so nervous and trying to keep his tough guy “I don’t give two shits” persona up

And while he’s kissing you, even if it's a simple kiss to the cheek, he can’t promise himself that persona isn’t going to slip

After the events with DIO and his Stand Users, Jotaro has changed

You all have

He’s seen death--been death

So expect him to hold your hand now

Expect him to hold your hand and hold you close so that he can keep you safe

Expect hugs that could last hours while no one is looking

Expect to wipe burning tears that somehow escape his eyes away from his flushing cheeks as he tries to keep himself composed--to not think of everything that had happened in Egypt

Will call you in the middle of the night and beg you in his own, gruffingly unique way to come over so that he can sleep next to you (But expect to wake up before the sun ever rises and get kicked out so his mother doesn’t find out)

He’ll let you touch him whenever you wish now

You’ll be able to rub his back and caress his cheeks and brush that strand of hair out of his eyes

Your touch helps keep him grounded and in this reality

Helps him remember that you are still alive 

Will still 100% grumble and keep that tough persona up (might even bat your hand away but there is no backing to it at all, just a reflex)

But you get away with much much more now