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Harry wakes in the middle of the night, clawing at his chest, screaming his throat bloody.
Tom stirs awake easily – always a light sleeper – and pulls him into a bonecrushing hug. Still, no amount of force can distract Harry from the pain shredding his very soul apart.
===
The Heart-Hollowing Curse: thought to have been lost to the sands of time.
Until now.
It’s a slow acting piece of magic that nibbles away at his body and soul over the course of a year, give or take. The progression of the curse is tracked in how it blooms from a single dark point to a goreless void about the size of a fist. When it finishes, the absence will be marked out with a circular stamp where his heart used to be. It’ll be punched out of his chest like a shortbread cookie. Rather than leaving his interior exposed, the edges of the hole will be sealed with a dark, nebulous shadow – uncanny in its neatness.
So, Harry will not die.
He will just be… hollowed. Made into a swiss cheese man.
The awfully mellow name of the curse always bothers him. Perhaps it’s softened by how, rather than kill, it only takes. It’s clinical and clean, even if every step of the way is heart-rending agony.
The result is bearable. Survivable. Liveable, even.
With nothing left inside him but air, he could even put a hand right through his own chest and not even feel it.
But for Tom and him, it’s probably a fate worse than death.
A victim of the Heart Hollowing Curse loses their ability to connect: what’s taken is feelings of care, or joy, or love for another human being.
Harry will be cored so completely that, when it is done, he won’t even be able to comprehend what he’s lost.
Or who.
===
As the Minister’s spouse, Harry gets a private room in St. Mungo’s for his episodes. When Harry had first been wheeled inside, he’d been in too much pain to really appreciate the comfort, but now that things have settled down, he can see that it’s a really nice room.
There are four separate chairs – two for lounging and two for visitors. Along the walls is a warm array of mahogany shelves, stuffed to the brim with books and magazines. There’s even a small selection of brain teasers tucked in one shelf to while away the time. A little bell sits on the nightstand; Harry needs only tap it to summon a dedicated Mediwix – immediate service ‘round the clock.
The room is brightened by two separate bouquets.
The first is on the low table by the settee: a small vase of pastel florals in an array of colors from his godfather.
The second is a larger bundle. Tom had brought it in and placed it on the side table by the door, next to a pair of folded towels shaped like swans, without a second glance. Courtesy of the Minister’s Office, aka Tom’s Undersecretary, aka Abraxas Malfoy.
He’s still not fully used to it. How easily nice things just fall into his life. After Tom. Because of Tom.
Luxury, even for convalescence.
The bed is comfortable in the way that expensive beds are, but he still wishes he were home. A rich suite of monitoring charms glow on his skin, bright little tattoos that shine faintly into a quiet dark. Tom lies beside him, snuggled close, running his long, bird-boned fingers over the runes. Over and over as if he could somehow divine an impossible cure.
“You can’t leave me,” Tom says. It’s part of a familiar litany – soft murmurs pressed into the night. “You made your oaths. Forever is forever. I won’t allow you to break them.”
The promise to stay sits on Harry’s tongue. He swallows it.
He’s too heart-weary to call Tom out on his delusions, but he won’t lie to save them either.
“Let’s get some sleep,” he whispers instead. “I’m tired, Tom.”
Tom’s eyes sear into him, vibrant and angry, and his grip tightens enough to hurt. He huffs but does not argue.
===
The next morning, Harry is discharged. The second bouquet, with each flower still smelling faintly of pollen and charmed to last, is unceremoniously thrown into the bin. The first is brought home. Its pastel petals are already browning at the edges.
Harry sets it by the window, to give it some more sun, while an unceasing stream of Aurors and Hitwizards tumble through their floo to provide their latest reports.
Tom listens blankly. Harry sits beside him and watches him swing from a frosty calm to roaring, furniture-breaking anger.
Tom demands that the attacker must be found at all costs, drawn and quartered in the village square, a thorough example made of them.
He’s nearly impossible to contain when every investigator turns up empty handed.
Nearly.
Harry holds onto Tom’s wand hand tightly, even as it trembles with hunger to spill blood.
If Tom had taken to the field himself, there’s little doubt that the culprit would’ve already been found. Maybe in several pieces, but who would complain? Instead, Tom rages loudly in their living room and delegates with a clenched jaw.
He’s unwilling to leave Harry’s side for even a single breath.
When Tom’s campaign for Supreme Mugwump had been in full swing, and Harry’s practice schedule had ramped up for the World Cup, it had gotten pretty hard to make time for each other. But now, everything about their lives is on hold, except for each other.
It’s bittersweet.
At night, they relearn every inch of each other’s skin.
Tom grips Harry with such furious desperation that it paints livid bruises on his hips.
===
It had started with a hole the size of a pinprick.
An innocent demonstration of the pinhole experiment – just on Harry’s own flesh.
===
Tom notices it, one otherwise ordinary evening, while he’s helping Harry button up a crisp white shirt.
Harry rarely dresses up. In fact, he takes great pleasure in sprawling around the house in his half-discarded Quidditch gear. He does it because he knows it drives Tom insane.
“Darling, you’re filthy,” Tom chastises each time. And then he jumps Harry anyways.
It’s a game of theirs for Tom to manhandle Harry into the bath and then put Harry into whatever Tom feels like for the day. Tom’s favorite too-short shorts perhaps. Or a loose fitting t-shirt that becomes even softer when dampened with sweat.
For better or for worse, a formal state dinner with the Regina of Spain and her husband had demanded a little more care.
That’s how Tom finds it.
A little tunnel in Harry’s chest, almost innocuous, winking as the barest bit of light shines through.
Dinner is replaced with an evening in St. Mungo’s Curse Breaking ward.
===
Sometimes, Harry wishes the curse had hit Tom instead.
It would be logical. Harry knows that he can handle loss. Tom – wonderful, gorgeous, selfish Tom – can’t. More than losing his own heart, Harry’s terrified of what the curse will take from Tom. He thinks of the slow nights in St. Mungos when Tom had whispered, thinking Harry was asleep, that this was someone’s idea of a fitting punishment. To take away the only person that could love a ‘heartless wretch’ like him.
Tom has a monopoly on Harry.
Harry’s Mind Healer calls them ‘enmeshed,’ like it’s some kind of problem, but if it is, Harry doesn’t really understand how. He'd been a poor Potter heir by most measures. With a too-sharp tongue and two left feet, his only talents were on a broom. A life suffocated by bloodless mediocrity, until Tom had somehow found him in the shadows and pulled him into the light. Every darkened, cobwebbed corner of Harry’s soul had been stripped bare.
No part of him is unwanted.
When they’d gotten married, Harry had sworn to give Tom everything – his life, his heart, his undying love. And he loves the life that they’ve built together, brick stacked on beautiful brick. Only now the walls are washing away, stolen by an unfeeling sea, until even the clay cannot remember its shape.
It’s strange to be dying… but not.
Harry isn’t really dying even if everyone treats him like he is. Tom, most of all.
His husband is terrified of death, even if he desperately denies it. He’s unwilling, unsurprisingly, to let go of Harry at all. He stays beside him at all hours like an anchor – a pointless chain for an increasingly emptied out shell. Tom’s ready to stop living his life to sit with Harry, but Harry won’t let him idle away and hide.
Harry turns down Tom’s strange potions and refuses to have a Mediwix hovering over his shoulder all day. It’s one of the only things they still row about. Each time he does, it makes Tom’s eyes flash with betrayal; he snaps that Harry isn’t even trying to fight it. Once, he even screams that Harry’s given up on living, but Harry thinks it’s rather hypocritical. If anyone’s given up on the present, it’s Tom.
So while he knows that his repeated refusals hurt Tom, he does it anyways.
Harry’s fighting in his own way. He won’t let the rot take root.
Now is the time to stock Tom’s vault with golden memories. Things that will keep him company after Harry can’t anymore. It also makes for a great distraction, too. Without Harry to steady him, he’d still be hunting the culprit – still chasing a cure. Harry doesn’t want to waste even a minute of their precious time remaining on searching for a way out.
He teases and cajoles and tugs Tom along. They throw parties in their home, invite all the friends Tom likes to hate, and end the night with a mess of streamers and confetti in the kitchen, covered in cake.
When Tom wants to stay in and tangle together until there’s no longer a beginning and an end, Harry insists that they go out. They attend fairs and festivals all over the world. Go to places that Harry had wanted to see but Tom had never had the time for before. Now that there isn’t enough time, he somehow finds it.
When the sky opens up to pour buckets, it ruins Tom’s hand-dyed cashmere sweater. Rain seeps into delicate wool, pigments running in rivulets. Not so long ago, he would’ve thrown a fit. Today, he only has eyes for Harry. He soaks in Harry’s joy.
Love with an expiration date seems to burn brighter than ever before. Harry hates the curse for it. He hates that he’s grateful for it.
These small, finite moments can’t make up for what they'll cost him, but—
He’ll take them all.
===
Each day, the hole grows bigger.
He stands in the kitchen and can’t understand why he pulled out two mugs.
Love and longing fades in increments, like the end of summer tumbling into fall on a bed of fallen leaves. On the colder days Harry can’t recognize the husband that he had loved so much. He can’t quite recognize himself.
Memories that had once been so fundamental to him have become translucent – like thousands of glasslike flowers that he looks straight through. None of them are gone. His garden is still there. He just can’t remember why any of it used to matter to him.
Tom kisses Harry – his knuckles, his wrists, his cheeks – until his feelings flutter back to roost. Color slowly returns to his garden of fragile flowers, uneven and blotchy, like loose droplets of paint raining down from the sky.
“Hey,” Harry says, cupping Tom’s cheek with a trembling smile. “I’m here.”
Only then does Tom unspool completely. He clutches Harry, shuddering with a quiet, boundless pain.
Eventually, Harry struggles to remember why Tom matters to him more days than not. There’s more and more time for Tom to explore his many theories. The weird and empty version of Harry doesn’t know to stop him. In between the sparse handful of good days left, Tom works himself ragged. He spends many long nights hunched over his desk, quill scratching in one hand, Harry’s hand in the other.
There’s never a right moment to talk about ‘moving on.’
Harry can’t bear to take Tom’s last remaining hope away, even knowing that it could destroy him.
===
Sleep eludes Harry.
Normally, he falls asleep easily. Tonight, he’s snagged on a memory. Even in his most detached moments, this one had shone through.
One of his first dates with Tom, at a local pub.
Harry had laughed at Tom’s exceedingly overdressed self. Tom had taken it in a stride and sat down like he belonged anyway. A night when everything had still felt a touch dangerous. When Harry had done nothing but blush non-stop under Tom’s predatory stare.
Now, every detail is faded. He examines Tom’s expressions, the bubbly taste of one too many cheap beers tossed back. No matter what angle he uses to look back, everything is worn thin. Like a precious photo, tucked in a wallet, taken out so many times until its very ink had started to rub away.
His pulse races strangely. His heart would be pounding, but that part of his body is utterly numb. He’s still not fully used to the sensation. Tom quietly checks the curse every morning with steady hands that never betray his anxiety.
Harry tries not to panic.
He watches Tom’s chest rise and fall in a slow, restful rhythm. He debates waking him. It’s so hard for Tom to get good sleep these days, so he decides against it.
He holds onto the scattered threads of the memory tightly.
The barest trickle of happiness squeezes out. He hoards it like a man dying of thirst.
Minutes inch by.
Gradually, his ghostly pulse calms.
He catalogs every blemish and wrinkle on his perfect husband’s face. Tom has laugh lines. He also has two deep, sunken bags under his eyes. It’d been another battle to get him to bed tonight.
His Tom. A man Harry wouldn’t give up for the world.
“Love you,” he whispers with a sudden, startling conviction.
An unforgiving silence presses back in.
“I love you,” he whispers again.
If this time is a little unsure, that’s a secret between him and the night.
===
The next morning, like any other morning, Harry wakes up.
He finds a stranger in his bed.
Tom.
Harry rolls the name on his tongue and feels nothing.
“Morning, beloved,” Tom says. “What would you like to do today?”
Harry frowns, thinking over his schedule. “I should go back to practice. This break has gone on long enough.”
Drowsiness bleeds from Tom’s posture and he fumbles quickly for Harry’s arm. He presses his magic into a softly glowing monitoring rune along Harry’s wrist. His eyebrows knit. Hurriedly, he flips over the bedsheets to examine Harry’s chest.
A perfectly round hole has been dug through, fallow and scraped bare. The circumference is a neat black ring. There’s nothing left in it – not even a stir.
Harry watches, impatience mounting, as Tom scans it with the wand grasped from under his pillow. Then Tom scans it again, as if he’s unable to make sense of the answer. His breath quivers against the sensitive skin of Harry’s neck.
“You seem upset,” Harry says, pulling away from the discomfort. Tom’s hand pins him back in place.
“Harry,” Tom says hoarsely. “My love. Who am I to you?”
Harry huffs, annoyed. “My husband, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Tom echoes. He watches Harry for a long moment, long enough that Harry tries to pull away again. “Do you love me?”
Harry blinks. He doesn’t know how to answer. He knows the answer is no, but he’s briefly worried that it would move the man to violence.
“I want to go to practice,” he says instead.
Tom clutches him close.
“You can’t leave,” Tom pleads hoarsely. “This can’t be the end. Please.” The hug turns punishing, and Harry hisses, shoving Tom away.
Heartbreak looks like it’s shattered him into a thousand sharp-edged pieces. It’s unseemly. Harry would help put him back together, but the method slips away like loose soil between his fingers. He doesn’t know how to put anything back together.
Tom’s eyes blaze with unknowable emotion. “You swore to always love me.”
Yesterday Harry would have had at least a tear or two to share for this broken, broken man.
Today, he’s empty.
His mouth opens, and rote platitudes spill out.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Life goes on.’
‘Time heals all wounds.’
None of it helps.
Tom cries, and it feels like nothing more than weather.
===
They travel together for a while.
To the spot of their first date. Their first kiss. The little seaside town where Tom had proposed.
Harry takes a bevy of potions each day.
His Mind Healer had tried to prepare them. Much of their sessions have slipped away, but one part remains clear: Tom will need to learn how to move on.
Grief is the final battleground.
It’s not easy.
New potions are brewed, old spells are reworked. With bloodshot eyes and shaking hands, invention and creation form a restless loop. Again and again – to the edge of madness.
But Tom never gives up.
Acceptance is the one place Tom never reaches.
Strangely, Harry’s glad that he doesn’t. He’s forgotten a lot of things over the long months, but he still knows this much: it’s nice to not be alone.
Perhaps that makes Harry selfish too. Perhaps it makes him cruel.
If Tom’s going to lose his mind to anything at all, Harry likes that it’s over him.
===
Eventually, Tom brings Harry to a dark place.
“Watch your step, darling,” Tom says gently.
He holds Harry’s hand as they descend into the maw. The walls and floors are lined with glistening runes that smell of rust. In the center of a humming circle, Harry watches Tom pick up an obsidian athame, black as the night.
“Can I have a kiss?” Tom asks, eyes glistening.
The candlelight dances off the planes of Tom’s porcelain cheeks. Harry recalls the distant sensation of something in his chest, when it had thumped like a tiny rabbit. It does not move him.
Harry knows that he owes this incredibly talented and very handsome man a great deal. If nothing else, he owes Tom for the medical treatment, for their paid-off house, and for his steady and reliable company all this time with this flat, broken version of Harry.
Harry leans in and tastes salt on his lips.
When he pulls back, the grin he sees on Tom’s face is manic. In his scarlet eyes, there is a wicked gleam of crazed obsession and raw faith, so deeply intertwined that it is fathomless.
Tom plunges the athame into his own chest.
Harry blinks, startled.
Tom gurgles wetly and gasps, heartsblood overflowing onto his trembling hands.
It seems like it must really hurt.
Harry watches, frozen in place, as Tom breaks open the cage that protects his heart. Deliberately, he removes his cracked ribs, one, two, and three, to reveal the shiny red bloom hidden inside.
“Harry,” Tom says, voice thready.
Harry takes a half step forward, not knowing how to help or how to ask him to stop.
“I love you,” Tom says, blinking tears out of his eyes.
Then he drives the athame in once more. Unhesitating, he severs the ligaments and the great arterial vessels that bind his heart tight. He drops the athame, shattering into a thousand twinkling eyes on the floor. Violent trembles wrack his body; he’s moments from collapse, held upright only by the strength of his devotion.
With a broken cry, he pulls his heart out from his chest.
Cold and alone, it sits in the palm of Tom’s proffered hand. A scarlet bouquet torn out by the root.
It clenches convulsively, both strong and so utterly frail, splurting useless spatters of blood. Harry wishes he’d brought a little blanket to drape over it, to hide it from winter’s chill.
“Take it,” Tom whispers, hushed and pleading. “It’s yours.”
So Harry does. He cradles it gently, a fluttering blossom drenched in red, in desperate need of a safe place to call home.
Tom’s body crashes into the ground and lies still.
Harry tips Tom’s gift into the yawning void where his own heart ought to be, pressing it deep into the waiting earth.
Warmth and happiness blooms wildly – a dazzling meadow under a cold night sky.
Tom’s love pulses, slow and unsure.
Tom, Tom, Tom.
It grows stronger with each pump.
“You absolute fucking idiot,” he gasps, fondly, viciously, and full of love.
Then he looks around, taking in his vivid, rank surroundings properly for the first time. Blood pools in the room from corner to corner, like overwatered earth. A scene straight out of a nightmare. He laughs, breathless and hysterical, and then chokes back a ragged sob. How does Tom even find places like this?
His Tom, who lies far too quiet and far too still on the floor.
Rancid fear surges in his tender chest.
Tom.
He doesn’t have time to think.
He fists his hands into Tom’s clothes and lugs Tom’s too-heavy body to the stairs.
He’s halfway up the steps when the door at the top tears open.
He blinks, momentarily dazed by the radiant flood of overly bright sun.
“Oh, Salazar, what the fuck?” Abraxas cries.
His blond hair is pulled back into a loose ponytail that looks easy and relaxed, but his wide eyes are frantic. They grow even wider as he takes in the scene.
“Why is there so much blood?! Why is it everywhere?”
Harry grits his teeth and tightens his grip on Tom’s heavy woolen blazer, laden with much of the blood in question. If he loses his grip, Tom’s dead body is going to skitter back down the steps like they’re an infernal slip and slide.
“Are you going to help me,” he scowls, “or does Tom pay you just to gawk?”
Abraxas flushes red. “Right, uh, Potter.” He bobs his head once, calming himself. “Please put your husband back in the circle. He’s not actually dead. Well, he is but, uh.” He gesticulates vaguely, and at Harry’s blank, uncomprehending face, drops his hands with a defeated sigh. “You know, I ought to just let him explain.”
===
It takes a gallon of blood replenishing potion, one organ restorative, and eight terribly long minutes, in which Abraxas paces like a trapped panther, for Tom to splutter back to life.
He sits up, gasping. When his eyes land on Harry, he freezes, almost afraid to believe what he sees.
“It worked?” he croaks.
Harry frowns. Then he draws in a deep, necessary breath.
“How long have you had a bloody Horcrux?!”
Tom blinks and then a brilliantly red smile spreads on his lips. “Dearest, be reasonable. It was a necessary—”
“Sweet fucking Merlin,” he snaps with a roll of his eyes. “Necessary.”
He strides forward and pulls Tom into a bonecrushing hug. Abraxas quietly scuttles up the stairs.
“Yeah, well,” Harry mutters, slightly muffed by Tom’s shoulder. “Did you consider that maybe it wouldn’t be necessary if you didn’t kill yourself in front of me? For Merlin’s sake, Tom.” He draws back to examine his infuriating, know-it-all husband. Even freshly revived, he’s far too handsome. He can’t believe he’d forgotten this feeling. That this feeling had been taken from him. A feeling that Tom had given him back.
“But it worked,” Tom replies, utterly unrepentant.
Anger flares in Harry’s chest, hot and jagged.
“Who just hands someone their still beating heart and then keels over? I hate you so fucking much” he cries hoarsely. “I thought you left me for good.”
“... Only hate? After I worked so hard?”
“Do you expect me to reward you for lying?” Harry huffs. “You told Abraxas before you told your husband?”
Tom’s brow furrows, genuinely puzzled. “I thought you’d be more upset about the Horcrux.”
The fight goes out of Harry’s sails. Tom’s face is open and honest. It’s the version of him that Harry likes the most. He’s warm and solid and so achingly familiar. Harry slumps.
“I’d say I missed you, but I—” he falters, swallowing thickly. “I forgot you.”
Truth, ugly and raw, splatters out.
Tom pulls back to cup Harry’s face with his hands.
“Darling, I promise you this.” He looks at Harry like he’s the only thing in the world. Like he can’t bear to look away. “Even if you forget how to love me again, I would never accept it. I would go to the ends of the earth, beyond even the faintest star, until I can remind you of just who it is that you belong to.” Tom smiles softly and threads his fingers into Harry’s hair, stroking through the wild tufts with reverent care. “You’re mine until death do us part. And I have no intention of dying.”
“Forever is a long time, Tom.”
“That’s the idea.”
At Tom’s earnest expression, Harry pinks. “Absolutely unhinged,” he mutters. “And you gave me your heart, dramatic bastard. How am I ever meant to top that?”
Tom hums, fond. “I have no need for dramatics. Just tell me that you love me, too.”
“That simple?” Harry teases.
Tom’s look says: For you? Always.
It’s a terrifying and all-consuming love that stretches into a boundless infinity. There’s nothing sane about it. But the alternative – losing it – is even worse than madness.
He drags Tom in for a bloody kiss.
When they pull apart, the words tumble easily from his lips.
“I love you. I’ll love you always and forever.”
For a quiet moment, Tom is stunned, like didn’t expect Harry to actually follow through. His mouth curves into a devious smile.
“If you love me forever much,” he murmurs, “then how about a Horcrux of your own?”
Harry’s mouth opens with an automatic denial, but it catches in his throat.
“If I say no,” he asks dryly, “would it matter?”
Tom’s expression smooths into neutral indifference, mask back in place; the only winning move is not to play. Harry snorts and tugs his husband up and off the ground.
They’ll cross that bridge when they get to it.
===
Harry sleeps through the night. Tom drapes over him, never letting go.
Together, their dreams are sweet.