the gift of fear (tomarry) (harry x death)

a life he's gonna keep

He is still adopted.

Partly, he had feared that Harry would watch Wool's crumble and then turn to Tom. He does seem the type to leave no job unfinished. He would die, age nine, at the hands of a man who can create fire from the will to want to... and then, nothing. That would be it, he would be dead, and his story would be added to the long list of instances that could not fit into the Bible but very well belong in it.

But that doesn't happen.

He is still adopted.

Harry teleports them -- however unsure Tom is to use that word -- to a large, grandiose house. They have no neighbors. A fence stretches around the property twelve feet high. When, later, the house elves help him up enough to peer over it, he will be faced with a white, static nothing.

They are in the middle of nowhere. It's even more true when it is no longer exaggeration, no longer phrasing. In every sense of the world, it is true.

Tom is still afraid, still convinced that Harry will stricken him from this life and it won't even matter if it is done righteously or not -- and this house, its location, its somehow fitting aesthetics, does nothing to lessen that fear. It is not exactly the old, broken down murder-shack from the moives, but it doesn't have to be. The fact that it isn't is somehow more alarming.

Harry takes off his own coat and hangs it on a rack by the door. Tom stands there, still and frozen and, against himself, against his better nature, afraid. Harry is... delicate, in the way that he slips Tom's coat off his shoulders barely touching his skin. He places the coat on the rack, beside his own, gently, making no noise.

The two of them. Side by side, smelling distinctly of smoke. It's... -- and the idea does disturb him -- homely, in its own strange sort of way. It nearly looks like the warm, welcoming palace he had first expected. And that thought and the knowledge that it isn't is enough to erupt an unexpected warm laugh from Tom's throat.

Harry gives a small smile in response, the curls of his lips exacerbating his wrinkles. He almost looks normal. It is a dangerous thought.

The living room is large. There is a fireplace, two large recliners, a couch, and a book shelf,

The room itself is not surprising. Harry dresses as a wealthy man; his home, from the outside, looks like this is the type of living room it'd contain. So the fanciness -- the absurd expenses that such a room, in such detail, might entail -- is not surprising.

It's what is in this room, what lounges about the pristine furniture.

Little men -- are they human at all, with their skin so wrinkly it hangs off their bones and eyes, large enough to bulge out of their heads? Are they like Harry in the way that Tom, an already seasoned academic for his age, can never really hope to understand? -- sit, scattered about the living room. Some are reading, others napping, others coloring. Tom can smell, from the direction that the kitchen must reside in, food cooking, and voices chattering.

They are all dressed well -- not as egregious as Harry, but not in the way you could mistake them as anything other than upper class.

And... Tom thinks he gets it. This picture. He's able to see it.

Family. Home. So many words that should be ill-fitting and so many that aren't.

Tom clears his throat and says, voice somehow steady, "I thought I wouldn't have siblings."

The little people beam up at Harry -- smiling, yelling, like children greeting their father after a long day of work, paying little mind to Tom -- and Tom is unreasonably disgusted.