Yes

Yes

Harry Potter dreams of Voldemort. Somehow, almost everyone knows that by now, knows about the sting of his scar, the strange almost-telepathy, the visions that would incapacitate a lesser mortal with sheer terror. They are useful; they are suspect. It has been two years since the Dark Lord's return to corporeal existence, two years since the start of a great and terrible war that has polarized the wizarding world, but Harry's dreams have not led to his defeat, or to his capture, or to anything else of note. Others, who have looked to him as a savior for most of his sixteen years, sometimes avert their gazes and skirt away from him, as if afraid to make connection with the eyes that see unfathomable evil, contact with the hands that are futile to stop it. Harry feels the powerlessness more keenly even than they do, and he wakes from the nightmares drenched in cold sweat.

Harry dreams, but it isn't always of scarlet eyes and cowering, faithful servants and dark-cloaked minions. Sometimes it's of something unspeakably worse.

These are the dreams of the diary, the book whose power he snuffed out of existence with the plunge of a basilisk fang. Harry sits at his desk, quill hovering over the blank page, and begins to write. "Where is Voldemort?" he scribbles, his quill picking up speed. "Why do I dream of him? Why are we connected? What is evil? What is Darkness? Why me? Why me? Why me?"

His near-illegible scrawls fade, and a single word appears on the page: "Yes." And instantly he is transported back to the Chamber.

Tom Riddle is beautiful in his darkness. He is alabaster skin and raven hair and translucent, soulless eyes. He beckons Harry closer, and Harry is powerless to resist.

His touch is cold, yet oddly warming. Harry arches his neck with the first contact of Riddle's fingers against his jaw, his ear, his hair. His eyes close, and all awareness is focused on the sensation of chilled fingertips trailing over flesh; the hollow sound of a cavernous chamber, Riddle's not-breathing, the distant rush of water; the smell of ancient stone and timeless evil. There is peace here, and unease, and eternity.

"Yes," Harry whispers.

He can almost hear Riddle's smile as the other boy cups Harry's chin in one icy palm. They are of a height now, and Harry opens his eyes to find himself looking directly into Riddle's, their noses a fraction of an inch apart, Riddle's mouth a red, open slash in a flawless face. When that mouth closes over his, Harry is surprised at its heat, its wetness, the tongue that slithers into him. He raises his own fingers to caress the hollowed cheek of this strange boy, but it's like touching his own reflection--cold and glassy and not quite real. He moans quietly, and the sound is mirrored on the other side of the kiss.

Harry pulls away. "Am I--" he gasps. "Are you--"

Riddle's lips whisper over his throat. "Yes," he says. "Yes." And he bites.

The sensation of teeth scraping over vulnerable skin sends a lance of heat through Harry, and he almost imagines he feels the prick of fangs, the infusion of venom coursing into his veins, like sharp pain, like sharper pleasure. He is dizzy, his knees near buckling. Riddle's icy fingers trace a line down Harry's midsection, from throat, to sternum, to abdomen, and beyond. Harry's eyes are closed, and he gasps, desperate for air, receiving instead only Riddle's mouth once more--sharp teeth and insinuative tongue and the chill friction of cold crimson lips moving against his.

Harry is both inside and outside of himself, his body alive with the taste of slick heat and the smell of incipient darkness and the caress of death denied.

"Is this--" Harry murmurs.

Riddle's voice is a low, pleased hum against his ear. "Yes."

Cold fingers press and stroke heated flesh and eager tongues entwine, and Harry doesn't know anymore where he ends and the other boy begins. He is touching and touched, kissing and kissed, devouring and devoured. His head is spinning, his body a fuse poised on the edge of ignition. There is no oxygen here anymore. He can't breathe. He doesn't need to. His lungs seize and his eyes fly open in the panic of ecstasy, and his gaze is filled with the glowing eyes of a dark-haired boy, and they are green, green, green.

And it's...yes.

And...yes.

And yes....

Harry wakes with the dawn. The sky is red, and he shivers in the early-morning chill. His sheets are damp with sweat, and other things.

Ron apparently has heard his rustling, as a hesitant shock of ginger hair parts the bedcurtains. "Harry?" he whispers.

"Yeah?" Harry is weary. He doesn't feel like talking.

"Have another nightmare last night, did you, Harry?" Ron asks, concern etched on his broad, freckled face.

Harry tenses. "What makes you say that?"

"You were talking in your sleep." His voice lowers. "In Parseltongue."

"Oh," says Harry, closing his eyes. "Oh. Yes."