Grow Old Along With Me

"How old are you, Tom?"

Tom laughs, and makes an exaggerated show of counting on his fingers. "I am seventy-four. I am eighteen. And I am sixteen..." he whispers, leaping off the bench to crouch before Draco. "I will always be sixteen."

Tom's hands on his body are not like those of a sixteen-year old. Draco knows that, remembering with a painful flush his own sixteenth year, virginal as milk and souring swiftly. Days spent staring a hole into the crotches of those muscular Hufflepuffs, into the thin lips of the delicate Ravenclaws. Blaise Zabini had taken pity on him and showed him what a woman could do before Draco could allow himself to weaken and steal a glance at the Gryffindor table. Draco could taste the disappointment still.

But that was before Tom. Draco's artful lover, pressed like lavender in a dry book, his scent captured for the decades until it was freed - slightly old, slightly perverse, but without a hint of staleness to mar his youthful body.

"It feels good to have a body again," Tom had said slowly, stretching pale arms over his head. "That Potter boy took the girl from me before..." And his eyes had lit on Draco.

"Your wand, Lucius," he had murmured, his eyes raking Draco's features. "Quickly."

And Lucius had handed it over without demur.

Draco had been paralysed with fear as Tom had casually Avada Kedavra'd his father, and then advanced on him. His fingers had closed about Draco's throat... only to begin caressing a line to his collarbones, soft, sweeping strokes from deft fingers that opened up his shirt before Draco remembered to breathe.

"Wuh-what are you doing?" he'd croaked, and Tom had stilled his hands for a moment as he chuckled into Draco's eyelashes.

"To think a Malfoy should be so innocent..." he'd remarked, as if to himself. Then Draco was upended screaming into the midnight air and came down flat on his stomach. His breath had only returned for torn gasps over the next few minutes, which started out as "Stop! No!" and and soon turned into "Oh, please, yes... Oh! Oh, fuck. More. Just like - that! Ohhh."

The kisses didn't come until later.

So Tom wants to play like he always does, the black cat to whom Draco belongs and whose eyes glitter blue when fascinated. And Tom is fascinated by so very much in this modern world, the world in which he will stay perfect forever.

Draco thinks he's got a white hair. It's mostly lost in all that blond, but it's there all the same. And in a few years his hair will probably start to thin, so it'll show up more clearly, and what's worse is there'll probably be more of the blighters then.

Draco starts watching his diet. He's twenty years old now, he's done all the growing he's going to do and those calories aren't just going to disappear, oh no.

Tom's body doesn't change, of course, no matter how much food he eats or opium he smokes. Draco sometimes wonders: if Tom's had been hungry when he was frozen in the diary, would he be hungry forever now, never satisfied and never dying?

Tom would have found a way to deal with it, Draco decides, as he shivers his tongue along the underside of Tom's slender arm. He likes his body to be a source of pleasure.

Tom seems to be faithful, which surprises Draco a little. He's heard stories about the pre-war Purebloods, how they spent most of their time in any bed but their own.

But then again, Tom isn't a Pureblood. It's easy to forget sometimes, especially when you look at his hands. Veins in a delicate filigree of blue, too fastidious to spill.

It's some years later in Aberystwyth when it happens. They have to keep on the move, making sure Harry Potter, the one man living who could identify Tom, doesn't come across them. It's not so hard now the war's over; Lucius never told Voldemort about his plan to raise Tom, fearing failure, and he was dead before he could claim his success. So they don't even have to leave Britain, and Tom always did like prowling around these Muggle college towns. Knotted tie; immaculate blazer; he looks like the scion of old money; of fine port, extensive lands and scholarship. Nothing at all like the orphanage scum he was, like his modern-day equivalents who threw a beer bottle at him in Manchester and called him a shirt-lifter. Sometimes Draco reflects with pleasure on how much better his lineage is than Tom's, but he always stifles the thought before long, a little afraid of it. It's not the way things are now.

Now is a redheaded girl walking towards Tom with a nervous smile pasted on her face.

She takes no notice of Draco.

"Are you thinking of coming here next year? I know I am!" she trills. Draco is confused. The girl goes on. "I've seen lots of seventh years up here now, for the Open Day, of course. I hope you liked it!"

"Actually," Tom says drily, "I've got better plans for next year."

The girl looks disappointed, and turns to look at a woman who's hurrying up to them. Her blonde hair is obviously dyed, and her lipstick is a little too perfect. The girl's mother, Draco thinks - she looks just like Narcissa did, the last time he saw her.

"Ah, showing the boy the ropes, are you? I went here myself, you know, wouldn't think of recommending anywhere else to Louise. You're an alumnus yourself, I suppose?" she asks, eyeing Draco speculatively.

Draco's so embarrassed he wants to blast somebody, preferably this idiotic woman with hormonal imbalances. Tom's sized up the situation directly, he realises with a sinking feeling.

"I'm not his father!" he says hotly, trying to keep calm, trying not to let the blood rush to his face, to keep it still and proud like Malfoy marble, like Tom's amused, perfect face.

"Oh... I didn't think you were..." the woman stammers. Draco can't tell if she's lying or not, but it doesn't matter. He said it. And after a time that for Tom will only be a fractional drop of eternity, he will look like Tom's father, and even older...

Tom, unexpectedly, reaches over and puts his arm around Draco's waist.

"Actually," Tom says coolly, "our relationship's quite a bit different to that." And he kisses Draco, a quick and deep kiss that's purely for show.

Tom starts toying with Draco's crotch as the women scurry off. "God, that was brilliant!" he chuckles. "You couldn't act like that in the 1940s. Of course, everybody did it - you couldn't get to sleep in the dormitory at night for the screwing, any of the dormitories. It's funny, sometimes I think there's less queers around today than there were back then - but you can do it all in the open." Draco can feel Tom's erection pressing against him.

"Not in public," Draco says, and Tom withdraws from him, a look of disappointment on his face. "I mean," Draco amends quickly, "we can't risk publicity. If Potter saw a picture of you..."

"Ah yes," Tom murmurs, and slips his arm through Draco's. "Would you like me to tell

you about Harry Potter, Draco?"

"Hmm?"

"He wrote to me, you know. Told me his deepest thoughts... desires..."

"He was only twelve," Draco mumbles, and tries not to catch Tom's icy stare.

Tom laughs shortly. "At twelve, Draco, I had already been - educated - in schoolboy desires by an elder Ravenclaw. My alter ego eliminated that depraved pestilence quite thoroughly before he met his own messy end."

A vision of Potter as he was at school shoots swiftly through Draco's mind, and he feels deliciously weak at the knees for a second.

Tom looks at Draco with the eyes of a lecherous old man and says, "Do you want to know what he confided to me about you in that diary, Draco?"

"Why not?" Draco tries to sound careless.

"He said you were pathetic. He said you weren't worthy of a moment of his time, not even as an adversary, no, you were a mild irritation, a running sore, nothing else..." Tom's grip tightens on Draco's elbow. "He said I was his only worthy adversary."

"You told me before he thought I was the Heir of Slytherin!" Draco protests weakly.

"So? Perhaps I lied to you. Perhaps I'm lying to you now. But you know it's the truth. You never would have had a chance with Potter and you wanted him all the more for it, to hold him down and rip all that nobility away with your tongue -"

"And you can't stand it, right?" Draco says clearly. It's not a question.

Tom steps back abruptly, flinching away from Draco. Two red spots begin to stain his hollowed cheeks, and he suddenly looks very young.

"That's - not it," he manages.

"Oh yes it is." For the first time in - ever, actually - Draco feels a stab of pity for his cruel, beautiful lover. "You thought I closed my eyes at night with you and thought of Potter, didn't you? You did the same thing yourself once or twice."

"He was just like I was!" The words burst forth from Tom like flames from a failed spell. "He took a different path to me, the path of ignorant belligerence, faithful as a dog to that dead old schemer Dumbledore, but I saw it in him, he was just like me!"

"No, he wasn't," Draco says quietly.

Tom draws a deep, jolting breath, and then looks up at Draco with eyes like shards of river ice.

"No? Well, perhaps you're right, old boy. Perhaps he was just somebody who never lived up to the promise of his blood. Somebody who avoided the real struggle and now loafs around leading a rather pointless life, eh, Malfoy? Each day takes him further away from his youthful victories, and each day he gets that bit uglier, that bit weaker, that bit more useless. He's tormented occasionally by thoughts of what might have been, but really never rises much above the dismal business of his basic pleasures, because after all, he's not very clever, nor of much consequence, and he never was..." Tom's eyes dare Draco to look away, but Draco holds his gaze steadily. "Yes, perhaps there's where Harry Potter belongs."

"Perhaps it is," Draco replies. His heart's beating wildly and he knows he can't sustain this for long, but - in a terrified way, he feels more alive than he has in years.

Another second, and Tom breaks the connection. He pulls his dark blazer closed and turns on his heel. "I'll take what I want from the Manor. You won't see me again -" Tom kicks viciously at the cobblestones. "Unless you really piss me off.