Title: Blood and Wonder (Closer to God)
Rating: NC 17 (Hard R?)
Word Count: 2,691 so far.
Pairing(s): Tom/Ginny, Ginny/Harry, Tom/Harry, Tom/Harry/Ginny
Warnings: Threesome, violence, sex in the halls, all-around unreadability.
Summary: They wonder if this is what he had planned from the beginning.
Notes: As for the rating-- Will contain bad language, non-explicit sex, violence, fantasies of murder, disturbing images, underage sex, rape, possible chan, etc.

my whole existence is flawed

Tom's scent is powerful, enraged, intoxicating. Harry can feel it pull him under as the man's mouth covers his own, smothers him, kisses him with the fury of fifty wasted years.

Heat explodes in his chest and his hands search for purchase among the man's robes, finding none. He feels like he is falling, losing his grip, sliding from the edge of a cliff he won't be able to climb back up. Instead of jerking away, he gives himself over to the sensation, makes a tentative foray into the other man’s mind.

Tom laughs, and lets him in, a little. It’s a reward--positive reinforcement, Hermione would call it, but he doesn’t like to think about Hermione any more, with her mouse-brown hair and serious hazel eyes asking him questions he refuses to answer.

He really doesn’t think about much of anything, anymore, choosing instead to throw himself to his studies and sleep. With sleep comes Tom, and with his studies comes the knowledge of how to keep him away, but he isn’t trying very hard. At all, really. He holds the knowledge in trust, just in case he ever wants to use it.

He would probably have made an Occlumency student even a man like Snape could be proud of, but he didn’t really want Tom out of his head. He tells himself that it was just because of The Dream, but he knows better. He likes the cool, dry snakelike feeling of Tom slipping through his dreams, thoughts, desires, fears.

He likes it when Tom comes to him, likes the confident slide of Tom’s hand on his chest. He even likes the pain when Tom is displeased, but not too much. Too much might keep him from coming back. Too much could be dangerous. Too much might even kill him.

--

"Bitch," he hisses, biting her squarely on the neck. Ginny shudders and stills, trying not to move, not to flinch.

His wand is sharp at her throat, and she knows the ease with which the emerald-silver words roll off his tongue.

Poison floods her veins, and the sticky-sweet of blood at her throat burns, but she is silent as he works her to the edge and sends her over. She learned a long time ago to keep her mouth shut and words tightly locked behind closed eyes.

It isn't easy being the youngest of seven, the only girl, with ridiculously traditionalist parents. It's harder being that girl with a fifty-year-old secret, the kind of secret that people die to learn and kill to keep. But Tom knows that she can keep her silence.

Ginny knows she doesn't have a choice.

--

"Did you know, Potter, that you weren't born with green eyes?" Tom strolls the room, casually, as if he were the king of a castle, and not a prisoner in a book.

"Oh?" Harry asks absently, quill scratching out another essay.

"The Killing Curse," Tom continues, stalking toward the boy. Harry glances up, then ignores him. "Your eyes had been blue..." He trails off. Harry wants to tell him that all infants have blue eyes, that his eyes were exactly the same as his mother's. But he humours Tom, lets him think what he will.

"And?" Harry asks, bored with ignoring Tom's supercillious ramblings.

"And then I killed your mother."

Harry hmms, and resumes ignoring him. It doesn't hurt him to hear the man talk about his mother's death, to relate in belovèd detail her death, moment by moment. He could almost see the green flash of light now, the flying red hair, feel the hum of the curse and the pleasure of murder.

Tom is standing over his desk now, watching him write. Harry doesn't look up, doesn't slow down. His hand is steady as he places the finishing flourishes on a potions essay. Slughorn is easy to please, he thinks, and looks up into blue eyes agreeing with him.


--


She is in the Restricted Section, books piled high around her. Besides the hasty scratching of her quill, there is silence. The stillness of early morning pools around her and she glances up, looks at a clock.

She grimaces. Just enough time to get back to the dorms before the Prefects begin their early morning rounds. She scrabbles up and hastily re-shelves books, slipping one or two into her bag. They are old and musty, but the spells listed in them are anything but.

The clock strikes five, and she has never been there. The headlong dash through the corridors is as familiar as the back of her hand, as Harry's scar. She is here nearly every night, only missing a nightly session when she has fallen asleep over her work in the common room and Hermione carries her into her bed.

This does not happen often, and Hermione has been having nightmares lately.


--

The air is icy as he races around the Quidditch pitch, numbness seeping into his bones and freezing his blood. His throat is raw and his eyes burn as he flies-- dives--

The heady plunge of his stomach intoxicates him more than his scent, more than her kisses, and he nearly doesn't recover in time. He pulls up, and wonders if he should be shaking. Death doesn't scare him any more.

The threat has hung over his head since he was born, and he is, quite frankly, bored with being afraid. He tunes out Snape's roar during Occlumency ("Foolish boy, don't you know you could be killed?") and Dumbledore's worried requests for him to take tea with him ("My boy, we really are just worried for you").

Sometimes his apathy startles even himself, but all he has to do to forget is close his eyes and remember Tom. Not the Dark Lord, with his fiery letters in the air, coldly leaving Ginny to die on the muddy floor, but Tom, the Head Boy, the perfect student, with a perfect set of OWLs to his name.

He forgets they are the same person, sometimes.


--

She imagines killing Ron, of wrapping her tiny hand around his neck and squeezing, a knife plunging into his chest, of whispered words and a wand jabbing into his throat.

The vengeance she imagines is orgasmic, and she bites back a groan just as a professor calls-- "Detention!"

She doesn't care. She grins down at her work, images still flickering through her mind of Ron's screams and struggles. When the bell rings, she stands mechanically and leaves the classroom.

McGonnagall is worried about her work, she knows. She has always been clever with Tranfiguration, but her work has sharpened somehow, become diamond-hard and perfect like a photograph.

When she is bored in class she transfigures her teacup into a viper.

--


He fucks her in the hallway, after class, just takes her and puts her against a wall. She doesn't move, doesn't make a sound, just holds him as he pounds into her and cries into her hair.

She tastes his tears, waits until he is done, and holds him as he sobs into her arms. Her eyes are dry as they stand, nod to one another without looking at each others faces, and rush to their next classes.

She doesn't feel guilty as he takes the invisibility cloak with him and the world snaps into focus under her gaze. She looks Ron straight in the eye as his nose twitches and she knows that he can smell the sex on her. She doesn't care as Hermione frowns at her tousled hair.

It's strangely refreshing, the pleasure-pain of casual violence and complete apathy. He doesn't acknowledge his pain, but she knows it is there; she takes it, nourishes it, teaches it to grow. She is not a herbologist, but the little shrub of discontent in his heart has grown to a mighty tree of dissatifaction.

But now that she has it, she doesn't know what to do with it.


--

He stands behind her in the Great Hall, ghostly and transparent, but she feels him as solid flesh pressed against her back.

"Did you always mean to kill him?" she asks quietly, eyes flickering in the direction of the highest table, allowing her gaze to run over each professor before stopping at the empty space of the Headmaster, the obviously missing blue eyes.

She can feel him shrug, feel the laughter forming in his throat. "Oh yes, Ginny," he replied. "I did."

McGonnagall didn't want to reopen the school, but the Ministers and the Ministry forbade its closure. Ginny knows that its continued existence is due more to Tom's nostalgia than the need of the children of Britain to have a good education.

Still, she tells Tom that he can't have his school forever if he keeps killing off the Professors.


--


He sits beneath his invisibility cloak, staring into the night. The cloak is musty and torn, but it covers enough of him that when he looks in the window pane, his reflection isn't there.

Vampires don't have reflections, he thinks, and wonders what it would be like to taste a man's blood, to drink his life right down.

He doesn't want to admit he already knows.

Snape knows too, with that crystal-clarity of having been in someone's mind as he drank his blood and then snapped his neck. Harry wants to ask him what it's like to watch someone die through that person's eyes, to feel the world dissolve around him until he stands back in his own body.

He wonders if he should try it.

--

"I am your god," the man hisses, hand flying out, hitting him across his face. "Best remember that, Potter."

It isn't the young man in the green tie with the smooth face and thick hair. The garish skull is nothing like his dreams, but he doesn't acknowledge that, refuses to admit that he has dreamed. Dreamed of black hair and cold eyes, of solid, perfect lips and second-hand robes.

He's on his knees, and he will not, absolutely will not think of the last time he knelt. He doesn't know if this is a dream or reality and he is about to die, but he is floating as the man stares at him, eyes flickering.

Can he see? Harry has never been skilled at Occlumency. When Voldemort begins to laugh, Harry closes his eyes and tries to forget, but finds himself in his bed, with the sounds of the morning around him, after another sleepless night.

--

She is crying hot, angry tears, her fists beating uselessly against his chest. "Put me down!" she begs, terrified and ashamed at the same time.

Trapped in your own head? He asks with a smug smile. Really, Ginevra, I would have expected better. Sixteen, and still afraid of shadows.

Anger flashes through her as he grins one final time and leans in for a kiss, and she is all teeth and nails and flying hair.

He drops her unceremoniously and stalks away. I had tried to make this easy for you, Ginny. I've made it easy for Harry. He doesn't fight me. Why do you?

"He doesn't know what it's like," Ginny spat. "He doesn't know how helpless you feel when you can't control your own body, when you say things you don't believe, when your hands kill your own brother and you have to watch."

Ah. But he does know, as do you. He longs for the oblivion of my touch. He begs for it, night after night, pleads with me to take his mind from him, take his choices and make them for him. So do you.

Ginny closes her eyes and shook her head. "Please..." she whispers. "Give me time. Tomorrow. Tomorrow night. Then you can have me."

He smiles, and she hears him say Good girl as she drifts away.

--


She grasps Harry's wrist and pulls him from the table. "We have to talk," she hisses, and he follows her with dead eyes. She wonders if she should slap him. Then she decides it wouldn't do any good.

"The Dark Lord desires an audience," she begins without preamble. He blinks at her and for a moment she thinks he didn't hear.

She opens her mouth to reprimand him, but he asks, "And?"

"And what?"

"When? Why? Why me? Does he really expect me to fight him?"

"Of course not," she snarled. "You wouldn't win, anyways. But you've been contacting him, Harry. You have to know that. He wants you, and I'd like to know why."

He motions to her arm. "May I?"

"You may, but you won't find anything. Honestly, do you think I'd allow myself to be branded like some cow?"

He shrugs and turns up her sleeve to reveal an arm unmarked by brands, but covered in a crisscross of scars and bruises. He frowns. "Who did this, Ginny?"

She shakes her head and refuses to answer. She doesn't even really know who, anyways. The cuts-- Umbridge, Bill, Snape, herself. The bruises-- Tom? It doesn't even matter. She is used to hurting.

Harry frowns, but she turns the subject back to him. "He wants you because you're powerful, Harry. Too powerful to kill, too powerful in the hands of the enemy, too powerful to waste. He knows you don't want to fight for the Ministry, that now that Dumbledore and Sirius are dead that you don't have anything to turn back to. He knows that Ron and Hermione won't speak to you, that you skip classes and fly every night."

"How--"

"How do I know, Harry? It's written on your face that you don't care if you live or die. You aren't sleeping, Hermione says you're never in class, and every morning you taste of mist and rain and wood." Her glare softens. "I know what you're doing Harry. So does he. I just want to be sure you know it too."

He shakes his head, throat obviously dry. "I don't know what you're talking about."

She simply smiles up at him, turns, and walks away.

--

He is dreaming again, dreaming of three bodies tangled impossibly together, of red and black and gold. Hands are everywhere--long, thin fingers, impossibly fragile palms, nails raking gashes down his chest.

He moans, shifts, flings an arm over his face as his eyes adjust to the near-darkness of his bed. His scar aches. A dream, he thinks, but not just a dream, and he jerks himself up, staring down in horror at himself.

Blood... And so much more than blood: nips and bruises and the cut above his heart where Tom had carved his name...

Real. It had been real, the teeth on his wrist had been real, Ginny's hair twined into his fingers had been real...

He moans to himself. He is still hard--so hard--but he is disgusted, the taste of semen thick on his lips, the memory of saliva slick on his fingers.

Tom has never been able to affect him like this. He has never been able to reach through Harry's dreams, to touch his body and mar his skin.

He should be scared, terrified, quaking at the horrible possibilities this suggests.

Harry collapses back onto his bed, and wonders if he cares.

--

She holds the knife between her fingers, spinning it, feeling its cold weight. It is solid and reassuring: it holds her down while her thoughts fly above the clouds.

There is a brand burned into her arm now. She had lied--no more than he, no less than he--and the ugly black twist of serpent on her arms mocks her, reminds her, accuses her.

She runs the blade along her arm, wondering if she would bleed if she applied the slightest pressure. She tries it. She does not.

She sighs and leans back, visions of Harry's tortured face flickering through her mind. He is lost to them now, locked in the terrified secrets in the dungeons of his mind. Now he is nothing more than Tom, nothing more than the tangled black locks and narrow shoulders of regrets he refuses to feel.

She wonders if he will kill her. She is nothing more than a pawn. No. She stops herself. Less than that: She is nothing.

--

He hates Snape, hates him for the murder of Dumbledore, but he has forgiven him. He has not forgiven him for not repeating the words for Harry's benefit. He does not know why the man let him survive.

Perhaps it was some sadistic urge to let the boy suffer more, to see his cowardice and rot in it. To make the boy remember every night in desperate nightmares how he couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't stop him. To remind him that he is weak.

His scar has split, blood trickling freely over his brows. He wonders wryly if this is Tom's plan to kill him, to make him bleed to death. If it is, he wonders at the more efficient ways of going about it.

...If he should suggest them.

The school is desolate over the Christmas hols, with fewer students wandering the castle. Not safe, they say. Better at home. Harry doesn't have a home to go to.

--

He does not come to her anymore, and she is left behind the curtains of her chilly bed, lonely and terrified. She is just a girl, she thinks, young still, but the Kiss doesn't care how old she is.

There are no trials for wizards found with the Dark Mark, now. There is only a flash of green light and a hurried rush to dispose of the body.

She is quite possibly frozen in horrified terror, the breath coming in harsh gasps into her ears. Ice grips her, congeals her veins, crystallises on her eyelashes.

Breathe, she reminds herself. It wouldn't do to kill herself before some Auror can do it for her.

Her curtains are Gryffindor-red, red as spilt blood and bruised lips and Sectumsempra. She pulls them more tightly together and waits.

--

He's striding through the hallways, robes flapping behind him, but it's not him who is pacing the corridors, it's not his long-legged stride that is so out of place on his compact body. He feels his head look from side to side, but it's not his doing; he is an observer in his own body, along for the ride.

He drowses sleepily to himself, so this is what Ginny felt like, knowing that he should be terrified, furious, ashamed, but he can't bring himself to care. He doesn't struggle, but watches curiously as his voice mocks Ron, body brushing past Hermione, grasping Ginny's wrist and pulling her along roughly.

He hears her ask "Tom?" but it is an echo, faint and far away, never mind his voice replying. Ginny is frowning, and the are slowing, stopping, slipping inside an empty classroom.

He is bending her over a desk now, possessive, claiming her mouth and ensuring her loyalty with rough hands on her back. She is pliant under his palms, but Tom sees treachery is her eyes and promises punishment.

"I am the Dark Lord," Tom tells her, and she nods, biting her lip, feeling part of a great spectacle, reciting lines long memorised from muggle scripture. Her father had been fascinated with Muggle religion, forcing all his children to study it and memorise scripture. She had Psalms. Percy had Revelations. She thought that was perhaps why he was as he was.

"...Who is like the Lord? Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Most High."

He laughs, and slaps her, sanity and insanity battling behind green eyes. He bends closer--Ginny can smell the death on him--and whispers in her ear.

"Who is this King of Glory?"

"The Lord God mighty in battle." Her body is tense, waiting for the Crucio she was sure would come, but he laughs again, low and mocking.

He nods then, and pulls back, releasing her. "Very good, Ginny. You'd do well to remember that."

Now it is Ginny that feels like laughing hysterically; isn't Harry the one with the Messiah complex? But Tom's no Christ, no saviour, he is YHWH, jealous and omnipotent and unyielding.

His lips quirk as he turns away, leaving her with a final warning--"Choose you this day whom you will serve, Ginny."

[Psalm 113:5 ; Mark 11:9 ; Psalm 24:8 ; Joshua 24:15]

~~~

He is sitting in the astronomy tower again, talking to Tom. He is exhausted; Tom has been stalking the halls at night, but he leans out into the night, feels the sting of frozen rain on his cheekbones.

Soon.

The Dark Lord is coming, and soon. Ginny keeps flinching and twitching her left hand, and Harry's scar is running blood. "Not marked?" he wants to ask her, to sneer quietly with a curled lip and eyebrow, but knows it is useless. He would have the Morsmordre etched onto his forehead by now if he weren't to valuable to risk. Tom likes to display his power and his wealth; what greater prize than the Boy-Who-Lived?

He is very glad, suddenly, that the Headmaster is no longer alive. He can feel the sad blue eyes peer knowingly at him, and thinks how impossible it would be to conceal himself from the man. Snake in a lion's clothing.

He has broken into Snape's office, and goes there nearly every day. Slughorn has taken up residence in a more lighted area of the castle, and nearly all the Slytherins are gone. Those that remain have taken to hiding in their rooms at night. It's too dangerous for them to be in the halls unescorted by a teacher.

His hands slide over the stones of the parapet, memorising their jagged-smooth patterns. They remind him--

Voldemort paws through his mind then, Where, boy?, and there is a flash of imagery, not a name, a place--

The Order burns, then, and Tom lets him watch as the portrait of Madame Black goes up in flames and the Dark Mark soars into the sky, lets him into his mind enough for Harry to grasp the wand and incant, "Mors--

--

Hermione is there, now, before him, shaking him, but he can't hear a word she's saying, so caught up in the brilliant green flame of the Dark Mark flying high over London. Tom, he thinks, prays, then reaches for his own wand and slowly lifts it against the girl.

Hermione stumbles back, confusion evident in her eyes. Harry, she is asking, what are you--

He jerks the wand, short, impatient, the flash striking her as easily as a knife slices butter, and she falls lifeless toward the floor. A narrow hand catches her and silvery-grey eyes survey Harry, gently lowering the body.

"My Lord," Draco states, giving a sharp bow. "He has come for you."

Snape is there as well, a fierce scowl-smile displaying his jagged teeth. "The battle has begun, milord. We are to take you to Grimmauld Place. It is, after all, yours by right, and you should watch it burn and the Order with it."

Harry grins back, feeling suddenly grounded in his body despite the surreal feeling of Snape bowing before him and the power still humming in his veins from the Killing Curse. He is in control now, Tom is only a ghost in the corner of his mind, pleased and not a little smug.

"Is Ginevra here?" He asks, sliding his wand into his pocket.

"Here," Ginny calls, stumbling into the room and coughing slightly. Now Harry notices that smoke has begun filling the tower.

"Is it done?" Snape asks her. She nods.

"Hogwarts burns. We should leave now unless it is his Lord's wish to fuel the flames with his corpse."

Harry holds out a hand to them all, gesturing for them to take hold. When it is done, he says, "Let us go," and Apparates.

--

The Dark Lord is waiting, a monument in the street before the Black ancestral home. Although how ancestral a mansion in the middle of London could be, no matter the legions of house elf cadavers tacked to the walls, is not a question lighting Bellatrix's insane glare as she helps burn the place.

Harry's hand twitches; no matter his loyalties he still feels a need for vengeance upon the murderer of his godfather, but he reigns in his murderous impulses.

It is, after all, not enough that he should be a Lord in Voldemort's camp, or a half-blood meant to save the world, but that he must also be a traitor to the Black heir's memory.

Adrenaline is in his veins as the Dark Lord turns to his small party. He is on fire, every nerve alight with the knowledge and anticipation of this man, and he knows that Ginny's breath has caught in her throat as well. Voldemort--Tom--smiles, and it is terrible and beautiful to behold.

Snape and Draco briefly genuflect before resuming their positions in the attack--Harry carelessly notes that Draco has just issued the killing curse to his half-blood cousin, Tonks, before returning his attention to the man before him.

He is coming toward them now, and Harry resists the urge to grasp Ginny's hand, more terrified in that instant than he has ever been. But he is also, in that moment, utterly confident in his place beside this man. He wonders a his folly, but fails to care, caught up in the horror and beauty of the inhuman visage before him. He is perfect, and ugly, and Harry is not quite himself as he slides to his knees before him.

"My Lord," he says, his voice slightly strangled, and the Dark Lord smiles.

---

Ginny is watching as well, following Harry's lead, although not so afraid. She has been Marked before, and bears the sign of her loyalty on her body. There is nothing she wants quite so much as this, but she is afraid to reach and grasp it, lest it turn to dust.

She ducks her head, not quite willing to contemplate the man before them, choosing instead to hide behind her hair and remember her family. Almost certainly dead now, except Percy, whose self-righteous ambition has kept him well out of danger at the Order. She thinks of her other brothers, except Ron, fighting valiantly on the wrong side of the war, and Ron curled up in his bed in Gryffindor tower, reduced to ashes in the fire. (She thinks that even stone will burn if the fire is hot enough.)

She spares only a momentary thought for her parents--her busybody mother, her harmless and blundering father, both of them caught up too much in housework and research to notice the guillotine falling on their necks as they went about their everyday business. She wonders at her dispassionate assessment, and tugs on the hair before her eyes, a constant reminder of her status as pureblood and blood-traitor. She decides she will cut it off, or dye it black, or hide it forever under the cloth of mourning she will have to wear after this is all over for her dead family.

A hand on her head, fingers slipping through her hair, pulls her back to the present, reminds her of the pavement digging into her knees and the smell of smoke fouling the street. She looks up into His eyes, and it is like coming home.

---

The Order falls, and then the Ministry, and then a tentative alliance is formed between the Wizarding government and Voldemort's forces. Ginny's propaganda is flawless, and her appearance at all the balls and parties among the purebloods is hotly fought over as she paints the pureblood movement as tradition and beauty instead of genocide.

Harry's dutiful appearance, sincerely recounting all the abuses he has suffered at the hands of Dumbledore and the Ministry pulls the heartstrings of all the people, and when he breaks down at the trial of Minerva McGonagall he cements his image as righteous saviour and martyr for the Wizarding world, leading them to victory and a brighter future.

Voldemort occupies himself by setting up the government Harry and Ginny's work has allowed him to build. He does not mellow, but there are fewer things for him to be displeased about, and his servants can breath sighs of relief.

And there might have been a prophecy, but no one can remember it, so it must not have been all that important to begin with.