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Tom’s first Samhain as Hogwarts’ Defense professor was proving…trying.
Dumbledore, in his boundless wisdom (and also what was, Tom strongly suspected, a subversive campaign to drive him to resignation before his full benefits package even kicked in), had strongly encouraged all the teachers to create festive lesson plans for the 31st, and much to his horror, instead of staging a mass walkout like any self-respecting academic faculty, everyone had eagerly gone along with it. Really, he wouldn’t care so much that McGonagall was doing a unit on bat transfiguration—the animals’ mix of mammalian and avian traits made them a fine challenge for upper years—or that Slughorn was letting the students waste an hour brewing magical sweets, but Charity Burbage just had to make her class on “Muggle Hallowe’en” everybody else’s problem. Thus, Tom had dealt with four successive waves of first years arriving for DADA dressed in cheap costumes crafted without magic, chorusing “Trick or Treat!” and staring at him like kicked Crups when he refused to give them candy for the amazing feat of showing up in violation of the dress code. He’d eventually set out a bowl filled with Pepper Imps and a card labeled Please only take one, hexed to cause persistent low-level burning on the hands of anyone who got greedy. His lecture for the day was on the appropriate countercurse. Educational in multiple ways, as all teachers should strive for.
His mood was lifted significantly, however, by the sight of Harry at the Halloween feast, laughing with his friends with a pair of Transfigured antlers on his head, the first to volunteer when the demented old fool announced a round of apple-bobbing. His entrancing lover had then proceeded to bend over far more deeply and ostentatiously than necessary, hands behind his back, plucking the gleaming red fruits from the tub of water with his teeth and catching Tom’s eye on the way up every single time.
Perhaps there were some holiday treats he could get behind, after all.
As a member of staff he was obliged to stay for most of the night, but when he made his way back to the Defense Tower to get some extra marking done before bed, he noticed immediately that his bowl of candy, full to brimming just two hours ago, was now completely empty. His warning card had been folded into an intricate origami raven which, when he snatched at it, flew off down the hall, cawing at him tauntingly. When he followed after, shooting Immobulus charms that it dodged easily, he discovered a trail of the little black Pepper Imps, unwrapped and scattered on the floor, leading down the spiral staircase and through a slightly open set of doors.
Hmm, tonight was shaping up to be rather more exciting than he’d anticipated. After all, there was only one wonderful, infuriating person with the skills to disarm Tom’s custom traps and the daring to challenge him like this.
He descended the stairs two at a time, wandlessly Summoning the sweets as he went—he wouldn’t want anyone else following him and his darling, with what he suspected they’d be getting up to at the end of this little chase.
Let the Wild Hunt begin…
*
Harry’s trail—after a number of dead ends, fakeouts, and Imps charmed to breathe fire at Tom when he tried to grab them—eventually led him to the second floor, where he heard an echoing snicker and just managed to spot the fluttering edge of that marvelous Invisibility Cloak disappearing into…a girls’ bathroom, marked OUT OF ORDER.
He only hesitated for a minute before sighing fondly and darting inside himself. Love was about trust, after all, and his own was richly rewarded near-immediately, as Harry whipped off the cloak and leapt into his arms, sprinkling his face with kisses that strongly smelled as if he’d had more than his fair share of the candy.
”Ha! I knew you’d come!”
”When have I ever not?” If Tom had a fatal flaw, it was that he had never been able to resist Harry Potter’s provocations. Not when he’d been an overzealous prefect determined to punish a miscreant, and certainly not now. “Care to tell me why this little rendezvous is taking place in a broken ladies’ toilet, dearest?”
Harry grinned. “Because it’s the last place anybody will look even if they hear something suspicious, and because it’s not actually broken—I just cast some temporary Unfixable Charms on the pipes earlier. We’ll have all night.”
Tom didn’t require much more encouragement than that. Harry hadn’t had a Defence class or visited his quarters for an extra-credit project in three days, and combined with the pent-up frustration of dealing with sugar-mad preteens all day, he was craving his little lover fiercely. Readjusting his grip on Harry’s arse and thighs, he dove in to claim those lips that tasted of spiced apples, relishing in the younger man’s moans of pleasure as he backed them further into the room, toward the elegant octagonal marble sinks that were at just the perfect height for perching. Harry hopped backwards onto the rim and wrapped his legs snugly around Tom’s waist—but not before slipping his hand in between them and brushing his fingers against his professor’s half-erect cock.
“Fuck,” he couldn’t help but groan, wrapping Harry’s tie around his hand and yanking it upward, tilting the boy’s chin up and demanding entrance to his mouth. At this rate he might not need all night to ravish his darling, at least not for this first round; he was desperate to be inside his lover in some way as soon as possible, whether it be with his tongue, fingers or now rock hard cock. He gently let the teen’s back and shoulders lean back against the mirror and taps and plunged his own hands downward, feeling for the buttons on their trousers—
Harry twisted away, pulling his knees up to block his crotch and turning his head, mouth pressed tight against entry. For a moment Tom’s heart leapt into his throat—had he done something wrong, misread the situation, upset his treasure?—but then he saw the green eyes sparkling with mirth, the laughter struggling to escape even through his firmly sealed lips. He was teasing him.
“Darling, what—“
“What do you say?” Harry was sniggering fully now, actively bobbing and weaving to dodge Tom’s attempts to capture his smirking mouth. “It’s Halloween, Tom, you can’t have the sweets until you say the magic words…”
Tom pulled back and cocked his head in bewilderment. He was usually the first to relish—and solve—a good riddle, but right now his arousal was making it frustratingly difficult to concentrate or think logically. “What in Salazar’s name are you on about now, you maddening creature?”
“C’mon, kids have been saying it to you all day. Isn’t that why you were so surly at dinner?”
For a single moment more, he continued to draw a blank—he’d actually been in a fairly fine mood by the end of dinner, after Harry’s lovely apple-bobbing performance—but then the Knut dropped, painfully.
”Oh, you cannot mean—“
”Oh, but I do.”
”I am not saying that ridiculous Muggle phrase!”
”Tough. Rude kids don’t get any candy.” Harry ducked under Tom’s arm and danced away with his tongue stuck out, a dozen identical messy-haired gremlins all taunting him similarly from the mirrors around the bathroom.
Tom growled and dropped into a predator’s stance, matching Harry step for step as he stalked him across the tiles. “Careful, love. If I remember correctly, that expression”—he’d almost slipped up and actually said trick or treat like an insipid child—is as much an implicit threat as it is a request.”
”Yeah? Then let’s see what tricks you’ve got up your sleeve tonight, Professor Riddle.”
That was the start of several minutes of absolute foolishness, Tom chasing his elusive lover around the room, both of them cackling madly as they charged, feinted, hurdled obstacles (that was mostly Harry) and shot minor jinxes at each other, the only implied rule being that neither of them could leave—not that they remotely wanted to. At one point Harry snatched up the Cloak again and slid through the gap under one of the cubicle doors, stumping Tom until he used a heat-detection spell and crept forward on silenced feet, throwing the toilet stall open with a dramatic bang; he grabbed for Harry but his hands slipped off the liquidy fabric of the Potter family heirloom, and his boy was off like a shot again, shrieks of glee echoing off the walls.
Finally Tom cornered him (or Harry allowed himself to be cornered, more like) against another of the sinks in the middle of the large space, pressing their bodies flush so the other could feel every inch of his desire. Harry groaned and bucked his hips but continued to stubbornly clamp his legs and lips together, breathlessly chanting “Say it, say it, say ‘trick or treat’—“
Tom may be just as unyielding as his partner and equal, but he was not necessarily averse to asking nicely for things he wanted. §Open for me, you know you want to,§ he hissed low in Harry’s ear, slipping into Parseltongue in the heat of his lust—and that was when the ground quite literally shifted beneath their feet.
He didn’t get much of a chance to process the loud grinding noise of porcelain sliding against marble sliding against metal; or the way the octagon of sinks spun once, twice, like a carousel, sending his body reeling back almost into a toilet stall, before folding, collapsing, and disappearing entirely into the new troll-sized hole that gaped in the middle of the floor. All of that would have been quite fascinating to Tom at any other time; but right now, the only thing he saw and heard—as it happened, and then again and again as it instantly replayed in his mind—were Harry’s wide, startled green eyes, his arms windmilling in a futile attempt to grab something, his shout of panic as he tipped backward into the opening, falling right after the sink Tom had playfully pressed him up against seconds earlier.
”Tom—AAAGGGGGHHHH!” The cries reverberated, the way sounds do when they travel through a very long, very deep well, getting fainter as Harry hurtled further away from him.
Tom didn’t need to think for even a moment about formulating a plan or calling for help from another professor, or perhaps asking for a set of §Stairs§. In the time it took for him to regain his footing and cross the (now cracked and buckled) floor, he had thrown himself after his treasure headfirst, the air whistling rapidly past his plummeting body serving as a reminder of why he’d always, always despised flying. But there was no time to dwell on that. He hadn’t yet gotten around to testing his unaided-flight spell in a situation like this, but all his theory and Arithmantic calculations pointed to its being far more effective than an Arresto Momentum. Even though a substantial part of him wanted to accelerate faster, to make a mad attempt at catching up with Harry and clutch him tight, breaking his fall with his own body, he forced himself to concentrate, breathe in, and think the incantation.
When he hit solid ground again (uninjured, though not without awkwardness, as he hadn’t been able to fully turn himself right side up in the air), he didn’t even pause to consider what the oddly dry, stiff thing he’d landed on was. “Harry—HARRY!” he shouted the moment he’d gotten air back into his lungs, impatiently waving his hand for a wandless Lumos. “Where are you, love, are you hurt, please just make any sound you can so I can find you—“
“Tom!” He nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard Harry’s voice right behind him, at the same time as a hand reached out and touched his shoulder. He spun around to find his boy standing there, miraculously unharmed except for a few scrapes and smudges on his cheeks, holding his wand aloft with a glowing orb of its own. Not trusting his own eyes, he pulled the teen close and began running his hands up and down his small body—no longer with any thought of giving or receiving pleasure, just sensing with both fingertips and magic for hidden injuries.
”Tom, I’m okay.” Harry took Tom’s face between his hands and forced him to look into his eyes, giving him a crooked smile. “If you wanna keep groping me, you’ll have to come up with a better excuse.”
”But…how?” Tom asked, scoffing at the puerile joke when they’d both just narrowly escaped death. “You went straight into the opening, Salazar, I tried to catch you but there was no time—I’m going to kill that bloody sink—!”
Harry raised a cocky eyebrow at him. “I survived the same way you did, you egomaniac. Did you really think you could show off that floating spell back at the beginning of term and I wouldn’t try and master it myself?”
He furrowed his brow. “You mastered unaided flight on your own, after only seeing me do it once—you never said anything! Why didn’t you just ask me to teach you?”
”You’ve got quite enough teaching to be getting on with these days, don’t you think? Plus I knew if I just learned it from you, you’d be an insufferable berk for the rest of our lives about it. It wasn’t that hard to reverse-engineer the spellcrafting theory.” Seeing the awe and adoration that must surely be showing on Tom’s face by now, he bit his lip and added a little guiltily, “I mean, I haven’t got it perfect yet. The landing was still a bit rough, it’s mostly thanks to this weird crunchy thing that I didn’t break anything.”
In unison, they raised their lights and looked down at their feet, finally taking in the “weird crunchy thing” that had helpfully broken both their falls. All several dozen feet of it, as it was wider than the two of them side by side and stretched into the darkness in both directions down the damp, cavernous tunnel they’d found themselves in.
”Harry, dear,” Tom said faintly, when he was capable of moving his jaw again. “Did I actually sustain a very serious head injury without realizing it, or is that what I think it is?”
”Er, that depends,” Harry answered, eyes growing wider and wider behind his somehow-uncracked glasses. Eyes that were, incidentally, the same vivid emerald green of the mysterious object they were standing on. “Are you also, maybe, thinking that it looks an awful lot like a shed basilisk skin…?”
*
“I can’t believe this,” Tom said for the dozenth time, repeating it again in Parseltongue for good measure. It was difficult to keep his languages straight, between the adrenaline racing through his veins and the countless carvings, statues, paintings and mosaics of serpents that adorned every inch of the large chamber the tunnel had eventually emptied out into. §This is the discovery of a lifetime!§
“It really is pretty brilliant,” Harry agreed, spinning around and craning his neck to follow one of the many pillars where it disappeared up into the shadows.
“‘Brilliant’ doesn’t even begin to encompass it.” Tom crouched to examine some fine detail work near the floor. “This is the Chamber of Secrets, Harry. Salazar Slytherin’s greatest remaining legacy at Hogwarts, thought to be a myth for over a thousand years. Do you have any idea how many hours I spent searching for this, during all seven of my years at school?”
”You may have mentioned it a few times…”
”And you found it, just like that,” he went on, not even registering the other’s playfully sarcastic tone. “In a girl’s bathroom, talk of ‘the last place anyone will look’…!”
”Well, technically you found it, while hissing at me to ‘open up’ so you could bugger me properly.” Harry stepped closer, just a hint of suggestiveness creeping into his voice now. “Remember?”
Tom looked up; something else had caught his eye down at the far end of the chamber. “Merlin and Morgana, is that a statue of Slytherin? It would have to have been created contemporaneously, this may be the most accurate depiction of a school Founder we’ll ever—“
“Tom!” Harry’s hand shot out to grab his wrist, stopping him short before he could make for the larger-than-life likeness of his ancestor. He turned at the sudden urgency in his love’s voice, only to find the shorter teen gazing up at him from under his lashes with equal parts fondness, exasperation, and pure desire. “This is all really interesting, honestly. It’s sure to revolutionize scholarship on Slytherin and get you a ton of renown and influence, probably speeding up your grand plan to turn your students into some wizard army and take over the world, or whatever, by at least a decade or so.” He grinned and tightened his grip, tugging Tom down just slightly so that their faces were almost level. “But I did not spend four hours breaking the enchantments on your dumb candy bowl, leave a trail of Pepper Imps halfway across the castle, and then barely survive the world’s most lethal plumbing cockup just for you to spend the night in professor mode and not fuck me.” He narrowed his eyes. “The Chamber has been here for a thousand years, Tom, you just said so yourself, and it’ll probably be here at least a few hundred more. My arse will not, especially if you leave me hanging for any longer than the fifteen seconds it’ll take to magic my pants off. Is that clear enough for you?”
Apparently he still wasn’t sure if it was, because he reached out his other hand and firmly palmed Tom’s cock through his trousers, very quickly bringing it back to its fully erect state from just before the impossible sequence of events that led to their discovery of the Chamber.
Tom cut his eyes between Harry’s face and his small hand, so boldly resting on his now-very-tented crotch. All thoughts of Salazar Slytherin had fled from his mind in the space of a heartbeat; familial relations were the last thing one wanted to contemplate at a time like this. “My, darling, you’re quite tantalizing when you’re so worked up and demanding.”
Harry flushed a bit, but smirked proudly. “And you’re really hot when you’re nerding out, Godric help me. So will you please, please push me up against one of these crazy snake pillars and slither in to me already before I lose my mind?”
“Oh?” He stepped forward swiftly, using his own leg to nudge Harry’s apart and dipping his head further, their lips once again only millimeters from each other. Not so coy anymore, are you? Let my other hand free, and I’ll give you an answer I think you’ll like. §Open,§ darling.”
Harry did as he was told, and Tom wasted no time plundering his mouth while pulling his trousers and underwear down in a single motion, pushing just a bit of magic into the action so that the fabric slid easily over the golden, Quidditch-toned thighs. He made sure to let his fingers trail along his lover’s cock as he did so, running his thumb down the shaft’s thick vein to the slit, feeling the slick precum that was already beading there. He was rewarded with a throaty moan and Harry’s hand tightening on his own erection, the teen pulling at Tom’s buttons for a few seconds before letting out a huff of frustration and Vanishing the fastenings all at once, causing the pressed wool to fall to the ground at his feet.
Tom laughed and stepped out of the pants, kicking them away. I can always Transfigure new buttons. He pulled his boxer briefs aside and canted his hips forward, encouraging Harry to touch him more directly even as he redoubled his efforts on the boy’s member, so that within no time at all they both had each other firmly in hand, waves of mutual ecstasy flowing between them like a live wire. Feeling his legs starting to tremble, Tom rotated and shifted them slightly until he had Harry exactly where he’d so politely requested: up against a column carved from top to bottom with writhing serpents, trapped between the stone and Tom so they were both supported as they pleasured each other.
”Mmm—Tom…I’m gonna—“
§Yesss,§ come for me,” Tom finished for him when he lapsed into heavy gasps and sighs, once again mixing his two native languages. He had a feeling that his use of Parsel alone would have brought Harry straight to his peak, regardless of what he’d said; he’d barely hissed out the first sibilant word when his lover arched his neck and back against the pillar and ejaculated wantonly into his hand, drenching his fingers with pearly fluid that was perfectly suited for what he planned to do next.
§So good, so considerate…you’ve given me exactly what I need, haven’t you?§ he rasped, barely hanging onto his control as Harry’s hand spasmed around his cock; he couldn’t let himself go, not when he hadn’t even been inside that tight, glorious heat yet. He held the smaller boy firmly in place with his right hand while sliding his left, now slicker than any lubrication spell could accomplish, even further between those shaking legs, fondling Harry’s bollocks and running a finger along his sensitive perineum until he reached the tight, puckered ring of muscle.
”Yes—Merlin—whatever you just said, yes!” Harry bucked his hips hard enough to launch his feet clear off the ground, wrapping his legs around Tom’s waist again and locking his ankles securely at the small of his back. The motion pushed Tom’s hand the scant remaining distance to Harry’s hole, two fingers breaching him at once and gliding all the way past the second knuckle without resistance; Harry gasped but arched into the contact, silently urging his lover to go further.
Tom scissored his fingers and added another at a slightly slower rate, methodically exploring the velvety inner walls until he found that magic spot that made Harry’s entire body seize up against his own, creating an almost unbearable friction along his throbbing cock. §Fuck, darling, I won’t last much longer like this,§ he groaned, and then, barely retaining the presence of mind to switch back to English: “Are you ready for me, Harry?”
“Yes, yes, I’ve been ready, I want you inside me now Tom, please!”
He didn’t need to be told twice. Withdrawing his fingers after one last indulgent stroke of Harry’s prostate, he braced both of his hands beneath the other’s thighs and hoisted him higher, trusting his partner to hold tight and keep his balance as he lined his cockhead up with the entrance, now stretched and prepared so perfectly for him. When he felt those small but strong Seeker’s fingers digging into his shoulder and gripping his hair, pulling just hard enough to send exquisite tingles over his scalp and down his spine, he at last gave in to the urge building inside him for what felt like hours now and snapped his hips forward without a shred of remaining restraint. His eyes rolled back momentarily when Harry’s body gave way to him and he was fully seated, making his vision flash black and white in between glimpses of his lover’s beautiful, euphoric face.
Tom wasn’t even ashamed that he only lasted five minutes or so, each thrust swallowing his cock down to the root and drawing shouts of Parseltongue from his lips, §Yes§ and §Harry§ and §Fuck, fuck, sweet Salazar you’re incredible,§ which in turn caused Harry to let out exultant cries of his own. The boy’s cock had hardened again at some point in the haze of pleasured touching, and now it was bumping and rubbing between them, soon cumming a second time in a warm, wet gush on Tom’s stomach. As if leading by example, that was the last straw that sent the older teen over the edge, finding his own release while pressed to his deepest point in Harry’s core.
§Merlin and Morgana, Harry—!§
“TOM!”
With the last of his strength, Tom kept them upright through their shared climax and lowered them to the floor in a kind of controlled collapse. Their bodies were still intimately connected as they slid down to the stone below, Harry’s back scraping lightly on the pillar and Tom slumped against him, panting hard but making sure to land first and break his partner’s fall. The flagstones were wonderfully cool against the fevered flesh on his arms, legs and back; he rolled them gently to the side, so Harry could feel the relief too.
”Mmmm,” the Gryffindor sighed, hazy green eyes shining at Tom in gratitude from beneath heavy lids. “S’nice isn’t it? Slytherin did a good job on his little hideout…not bad at all for being built right under a toilet…”
Whether from exhaustion, golden afterglow, or the simple fact that it was Harry, Tom couldn’t even bring himself to take offense at his great ancestor being spoken about like a third-year with a childish secret fort. He pulled his darling closer and let their breaths mingle in the space between their faces, drifting half-awake on a cloud of apples and Pepper Imps.
Maybe I’ll spare that sink’s life after all.
*
After they’d recovered somewhat and cleaned up, and he’d quite literally floated a blissful Harry back up the entrance pipe and into the bathroom, then seen him safely back to Gryffindor Tower under the Cloak, Tom was honestly tempted to drink a Wide-Eye potion and return to the Chamber immediately. Have a better look at that statue and what might be archaic Parselscript on the pillars, not to mention the other doors he’d seen branching out from the main room, leading to untold wonders—Slytherin’s personal library perhaps, or a storage space for artifacts frowned upon by the more close-minded Founders. But the inconvenient fact that tomorrow was a Tuesday, and that he’d never even started marking the papers that he’d come to his office to see to in the first place when he picked up Harry’s trail, stayed his hand. His dream job really was a mixed blessing sometimes; knowledge, influence, and lifetime access to the first and greatest home he’d ever known, yet so much less free time to enjoy it than when he’d been a student.
It wasn’t until the following weekend that his schedule slowed down enough to return to the second-floor girls’ loo. Conjuring up a fresh OUT OF ORDER sign with the access to the wards granted only to professors, he slipped inside late on Saturday night and made directly for the sinks, which had moved seamlessly back into place before he and Harry had even left on Halloween. Standing confidently before the correct basin, he pictured a serpent in his mind’s eye and hissed, §Open.§
Nothing happened.
He spent much of the next ten minutes trying various methods (and trying not to panic): repeating himself with clearer enunciation and different synonyms for “open”, moving to each sink in turn just in case he’d misremembered, even pressing physically against the porcelain in an attempt to recreate Harry’s leaning on it last Monday. None of it worked. Had his setting foot within the Chamber been nothing but a dream, a hallucination borne of sheer longing and holiday stress? No, Harry had found several ways to subtly reference their tryst in class discussions over the past week. Had Slytherin’s magic judged him unworthy, a callow and disrespectful Heir who’d defiled a sacred space, giving in to his carnal desires rather than investigate his magnificent surroundings? That would be highly hypocritical, given Salazar’s well-known affinity for sex magic.
Finally, reduced to crouching before the original sink in a frankly undignified manner, he saw it. A tiny but realistic etching of a snake—confirmation that this was, indeed, the intended entrance—and, tucked between two small pipes next to it, a scrap of parchment of a much more recent vintage. Tom pulled out the note and unfolded it, scanning the handwriting he knew by heart, both from the author’s Outstanding-worthy Defense essays and all the notes they’d passed in secret for going on three years now:
You still haven’t said the magic words.
He stood. No, this was not possible, Harry was a brilliant wizard but there was no way even he could “reverse-engineer” a Parselmagic working to change the password…
But the longer he stood there, locked out of his own bloody birthright, it seemed that his wonderful, infuriating, miraculous lover had indeed done just that. Leaving Tom with three very imperfect options:
Degrade the noble tongue of serpents by using it to speak the idiotic Muggle phrase trick or treat.
March up to Gryffindor Tower this instant, haul Harry bodily out of bed, and threaten him with no extra-credit projects until Easter break unless he reset the password.
Or—he fingered his wand lovingly, liking this option the best but uneasy about the penalty for a staff member willingly damaging school property—he could cast his best Bombarda Maxima and make good on his word from last week to kill this bloody sink.