written for the @exquisitetomarrymortcorpse server's purge, with 24 hours to write for @queasys-world's prompt word ✨performance✨

Over the course of their extensive tests and invasive questioning, the Unspeakables used progressively disheartening words to describe his situation.

Some annoying, masochistic part of Harry’s brain kept diligent track, kicking and screaming against the current carrying him toward the inevitable conclusion, hurtling over the cliff’s edge.

Fascinating, became unheard of, became worrisome, became risky, until the pièce de résistance which coaxed his magic forth, lashing out in fear, in rage, in desperation.

Irreversible.

A year. Not even that. And then… something. Or nothing. They couldn’t say for sure, could only offer sympathetic looks and meaningless platitudes about enjoying the time he had left, pretending the noose around his neck wasn’t a death sentence.

The Potters took him home, let him keep their shared last name, and did their best to cheer him up. Spoke of family and Hogwarts and everything that had once offered a glimmer of warmth, had once been worth fighting for.

Harry eventually began to listen.

All because Graham had let slip the names of the new Head Girl and Boy.

Niamh Campbell.

The day breaks a cold, spring dawn—first light sinking slowly to the bottom of the Great Lake. There are flowers on its banks, and frost on their petals. Tom likes these transitional seasons. You often ended up with days like this one: belonging to two masters, opposites forced together in a way that he still finds beautiful. He feels less pain since the Horcrux, so he sees less beauty. When he does, it's sharper in contrast: in liminal hours, in things that should be neither one nor the other but are somehow both—somehow more of both. Tom turns onto his back and lifts his hand up, inspecting it in the inky, green half-light of the Slytherin dormitories. He makes a loose fist, then stretches his fingers out again, repeating the process absently, lost in thought. Pucey snores in the bed next to him. He wishes he could bottle the feeling: more of both. Can a person be like that? More of both? In his experience, people are one thing or the other.

He tries to imagine it, but all he comes up with are nonsensical fragments: raven hair, a shy but crooked grin. He grabs onto a color—emerald water mixed in a streak of sun.

@tomarrymortmicrofics | 126 words

Harry felt like he’d die any moment from sheer embarrassment. It was just his luck that he didn’t.

No, instead he had to witness each and every student sitting in the Great Hall of Hogwarts during breakfast gape at him, wide-eyed, their jaws actually dropping. It would be funny, if he weren’t so mortified.

If only he hadn’t let Tom cajole him into agreeing to this madness! If only he had taken better care of his stuff during their, ahem, the night. Last night, yes, he’d think of it only like that.

Anyway! Harry shook himself. Sadly, what was done, was done and Harry had to admit, that Slytherin green did make his eyes pop.

“So, what are these adopted parents of yours going to say to you bringing home a nineteen-year-old to meet them?”

Tom shrugs, winding his arms around Harry’s waist – because he can just do that again after waiting for over fifty years – and thinks to himself that he cannot fathom a scenario where Nicholas or Perenelle so much as raise an eyebrow; they know what Harry means to him, and what a miracle his return is.

“I suspect they’ll say something like ‘ah, at least he isn’t eighteen.”

Harry bursts out laughing. He keeps laughing, even as Tom swoops in for a kiss, and nothing has ever tasted better than that burbling laughter in his mouth.

@tomarrymortmicrofics | 527 words

One late August afternoon, Tom wandered around the British Museum, trying to look like he belonged there despite his patched up second-hand clothes.

He came here often enough, but that didn’t stop some of the wealthy patrons of taking offence of his presence. Like the posh assholes that had just wandered into the same corridor as Tom. Behaving as if the museum was theirs.

Tom sneered. One day he would be better than them, he vowed, and he would be known far and wide. Turning and walking in a different direction to avoid any conflict today – he really wasn’t in the mood to spend the day in the orphanage or outside in the rain – Tom suddenly found himself in a room he hadn’t encountered before. Paintings were exhibited on this gallery, but more interesting than them was the man behind an easel, painting.

Tom had never seen someone do something so intensely. Then again, he had also never seen someone paint, only draw. Tom quietly stalked closer to get a better look and hovered in a safe distance to observe the man and his progress with his painting.

There was something captivating, something calming, that Tom couldn’t escape even if he wanted to. Over half an hour went by before the man sighed and his shoulders visibly sagged. He turned and Tom found himself caught by the most beautiful green eyes he had ever seen.

The man smiled, “Why don’t you come over and sit with me? Keep me company, instead of sneaking around behind me, hm? Gives me the shivers.” The man exaggerated a shudder, but his eyes were still friendly and Tom couldn’t find any deception in them. Having nothing better to do and having received direct permission, Tom seated himself on the bench diagonally from the painter and his easel.

The man’s smile widened, but he did not comment and simply returned to his paints and brushes. Hours went by as Tom observed the man bringing the scene of an empty park bench on a rainy afternoon to live.

It wasn’t much, the painting rather small and the colors muted, but Tom was entranced nonetheless – until it was sadly time to leave. He bid the man goodbye and thanked him for the opportunity of watching. They hadn’t even exchanged names.

The next time Tom wandered onto the same gallery was a year later. He had murdered his father and grandparents just a week prior and felt unsettled still. He was dire in need of something familiar, something eternal, to calm his nerves and the museum was both.

And there he saw it. A small painting of a park bench on a rainy afternoon. He remembered the man who had painted it.

The plaque underneath told Tom the painter’s name was H. Potter. Unlike then, however, the bench wasn’t empty any more. A young man sat on the bench and for some reason Tom was sure that was meant to be him.

@tomarrymortmicrofics | 505 words

When Tom woke up, it was to a pounding head and a dry mouth. It was also to a man cradling him against his chest. Or more precisely, the man had his arm around Tom’s shoulder, holding him tight, while Tom was using said man’s chest as a pillow. A surprisingly comfortable and fit pillow, but still.

He wondered briefly why there was a man in his bed and then realized with a start that this wasn’t his bed. He had no idea where he was. Apart from in a bed, of course. That much was obvious. Tom was in bed with a man. A dark haired man, going by the long, sloppily braided blackish hair. A stranger. How he knew it was a man? Easy. For one, Tom wasn’t interested in women. And for the other, well… They were both naked and the blanket had apparently long since fled the bed. And not to forget, Tom was using said man’s chest as a pillow.

It was a testament to how drunk he obviously still was that neither of those facts truly got Tom’s mind to work properly. What it did get him to do was groping those delicious looking pecs the man sported. Fit indeed. While Tom busied himself admiring and groping the man’s chest, the stranger began to stir, so Tom stopped groping him, hoping he would fall back asleep. He didn’t want to be dislodged from his pillow yet.

“Oh, don’t stop on my account, princess,” a somehow familiar voice rumbled sleepily right into Tom’s hair. No falling asleep again then, probably. Tom took a moment to be baffled at the pet name and then decided that yes, this was worthy enough of moving. So, pushing himself up – ignoring further protests from the stranger – Tom half sat, half leaned on the man and looked up to see just who the hell had the gall to call him ‘princess’.

What he found – the man he looked down at, who looked at him with a lazy, satisfied smile and impossibly green eyes twinkling with merriment – was too horrific to process. His mind, Tom’s precious mind that he prized himself on, it – it simply blue screened.

Tom blinked and watched dumbfounded as one Harry James bloody Potter – the menace of Tom’s life, the idiot chief of Tom’s partner team, the eternal pain in Tom’s ass – stretched his arms above his head before moving one hand to Tom’s cheek, brush his thumb across his cheekbone and thus holding Tom in place as he leaned up and kissed him. ‘Ah,’ Tom thought, mind bordering on panicking, now he knew why he felt sweetly sore. He’d fucked his arch-nemesis. While drunk, of course. He wouldn’t have otherwise, naturally.

written for the @magical-menagerie-server's october daily drabbles for the prompt "bloody bathwater" 👀