Chapter Text
In chess, as in life, Tom Riddle prefers strategy to sacrifice. The loss of a piece, after all, is a loss of control.
And if there’s one thing you ought to know about Tom Riddle—it’s that he is always in control.
At his very first match, Tom is seven years old. Surrounded by posh boys with chess tutors and perfectly shined Oxford leather shoes, he stands out in all the worst ways.
His blazer has been borrowed from the parish donation bin, and the sleeves swallow his thin wrists whole. His shoes, though meticulously polished, aren’t a matching set.
He wins, but it’s ugly. These children don’t take kindly to the poor and dirty—to Tom—beating them at what they’ve decided is their own game.
The game of Kings.
It isn’t Tom’s fault they’ve mistaken their entitlement for birthright. He, on the other hand, has always known he belongs at the top. That to have what the world refused to give him, he would need to take it.
They dump his bag in the bin afterward, but it hardly matters. He owns next to nothing; just the machinery of his mind and the whetted blade of his ambition.
He digs his third-hand chess set out of the trash, the rook’s turrets chipped, its barrel coated in old pencil shavings, and all he can think is: I won.
I won.
And I’ll keep on winning.
It is well before that day that Tom Riddle realizes most people are stupid.
Growing up in the orphanage, there was never enough to go around. Even basic necessities were scarce, so it seemed natural that intelligence would also be rationed. Therefore, the dull-eyed mediocrity of his peers—if you could even call them that—didn’t surprise him.
But even most of Tom’s so-called superiors were insufficient. Compared to him, who was so utterly extraordinary, it was obvious that other people were lacking something fundamental. Some essential human software or genetic strand of clarity that Tom was given in spades.
The moment Tom Riddle held his first chess piece, it was clear: he was destined for greatness.
But chess only exaggerated the divide between him and the rest of the world. These supposed grand masters were anything but—their gambits were laughably predictable, full of clumsy openings and soft-bellied midgames. Thus, Tom stayed at the top, exactly where he belonged, no matter how many polished, arrogant boys or ivory-tower academics sat across from him.
Here, it was of little consequence that he came from the slums. That his accent was thick enough to chew, and his birth a stain on the good, Christian values of tournament boards that reluctantly accepted him.
In a dull parade of papier-mâché opponents, very rarely did anyone capture his attention. Few could force him to pause, even. To make the game thrilling again, if only for a moment, the way it had felt to humiliate those boys with their finely crafted watches and thin egos. Children who had everything except for what really mattered.
So when Tom expects very little from the boy sitting across from him—even with the whispered warnings that, like Tom, he was another “wunderkind”—he can hardly be blamed.
No one was like Tom, after all.
He sizes the boy up from across the table, taking in the unruly hair and crooked spectacles; the smudged lenses and wrinkled jumper.
Even at his most debased, Tom was sure to iron out the reminders of his poverty. And this boy, clearly, had not dug that angora sweater out of a mission box so much as fished it off the floor. There’s even a smear of chocolate on his nose, and Tom feels his own wrinkle in distaste. That’s one of his many grievances with other children: not only are they unintelligent, they’re filthy.
“Nice to meet you,” the boy says with a dim-witted smile, one stretched far too easily across his face.
He leans forward, over the chessboard, to shake Tom’s hand, and Tom touches him only as long as necessary. Turning away, he quickly adjusts the back row of his pieces—the aptly titled home rank—before brushing his fingers, just once, over the time clock.
The boy watches his ritual with open curiosity, as Tom bristles. Superstition is not the same thing as fantasy. Chess is a mental game, and he’d rather honor the rituals that anchor his psyche than pay the price for neglecting them.
Not that I’m in any danger, Tom thinks snidely, watching the boy scrub chocolate off his nose with the back of his sleeve. I hope you can swallow defeat as easily as Hobnobs.
It’s with this attitude—fostered by a lifetime of winning—that Tom enters his game with Harry Potter. And it is with this same attitude—the certainty, the unquestionable arrogance—that he loses.
For the very first time.
The whole world grows blurred and distorted as the seconds drift past. They soon stretch into minutes, punctuated only by the echoing thud of his heartbeat, ticking like the rattle of a chess clock.
Unmoored, time appears warped—something happening to Tom, rather than something he perceives. The room is hazy around the edges when sound begins to filter back in, muffled and distant, as though he were underwater. Then, all at once, the noise comes rushing back.
The excitement in the room is palpable. Voices buzz and rise like steam, cloying and thick enough to choke on. Tom certainly feels asphyxiated. Sick, even, as though the loss had curdled in his chest, spoiled and rotting beneath his ribs. Everything is out of focus, and yet the lights are all too bright, leaving him dizzy and uncentered.
The room shares none of his devastation. Everyone clambers for photos, for quotes, for a glimpse of the boy who had come out on top. And Harry is right in the middle of it. Polite and smiling. Shaking his hand just like before.
Completely and totally uninterested in Tom Riddle.
Tom smiles for the cameras. He’s unable to do anything else without further jeopardizing his reputation. But as flashes pop, and bulbs snap, one thought rings louder than all the rest:
I will never make the mistake of underestimating Harry Potter again.
Tom replays that game a hundred times.
He knows every move by heart. Every misstep, every bout of overconfidence that sullied his perfect record. He’s certain it was nothing but sheer surprise—shock—that led him to this: a black mark in an otherwise pristine ledger.
He’s determined to erase it. So, he begins to study Harry Potter.
He’s an intuitive player. He favors aggressive openings and chaotic midgames. His style is scrappy, messy even, full of traps disguised as miscalculations. He leans into that fast-paced nature, thriving and undefeated: the same way Tom had been before they’d met.
His strategies aren’t structured the way they should be. He’s ruled by instinct rather than discipline, and yet—
Chess is the game of Kings, and never has this felt truer than when playing opposite Harry Potter.
There’s something in his eyes. A defiance, maybe, or a hunger; one Tom recognizes. The insatiable need to win, to consume. Eyes every bit as big as his stomach, belly always howling for more. Harry Potter will not settle for mere greatness. Like Tom, he will accept nothing but the absolute best.
The boy is a gambit—a calculated risk—that always seems to break in his favor. If Tom’s playing is surgical, Harry’s is a knife fight: unrelenting, close quarters, brutal. He keeps you guessing, always on the edge of your seat. He's impossible to predict, because even he might not know where he’s leading you until he’s got your back to the wall.
And Harry Potter always favors the knight.
Tom noticed it during their match, when Harry let a perfectly good rook hang just to set up a fork three moves later. He caught it again while reviewing old tournament footage: Harry sacrificing both bishops in exchange for a single tempo swing, trapping his opponent’s queen only four turns later.
He plays them too early, too often. Sometimes failing to control the center in favor of lateral pressure and strange, meandering side attacks.
It’s ridiculous—it’s wrong. Knights are inconsistent, clumsy, painfully slow. They’re unable to move in orderly lines. They don’t threaten power the way queens do, or control the broad, diagonal expanse of the board the way a bishop does.
Still.
When asked once, in a well-quoted blurb from Chess Weekly, Harry had simply grinned, toying with the captured knight, weaving it between his fingers.
"They're disruptive," he'd said. "People never see them coming."
And it’s true. They’re the sort of piece no one expects to bring down a game. Underestimated, just like the boy himself. So Tom learns, the same way he’s learning Harry Potter, to pay very, very close attention to his knights.
He studies every one of Harry’s games. Memorizes their tempo: a war ballad, a series of quick surges punctuated by long, tactical silences. His gameplay is ruled by a strange kind of emotional logic. Improvisational, yet intentional.
Harry isn’t stupid. He’s brilliant, just like Tom. So, the next time they meet—when he sits across the board from Harry Potter for the second time—he is prepared.
He will not be surprised again.
The room smells faintly of varnish and dust. The maple floors echo with the occasional shuffle of feet—but Tom only has eyes for one person.
“Hello,” he says.
First, this time.
They’re sitting at the farthest table, near a tall, arched window. Outside, rain pools in the warped stone gutters. You can hear the soft rap of the sky knocking on the glass, which is bubbled with age. Everything beyond it is distorted; cold light filters through the overly warm room.
“Hello,” the boy returns, smiling placidly once again. “My name’s Harry.”
He reaches across the board to shake Tom’s hand, and his grip is loose and warm. Casual. Almost mocking—like a reminder that, to Harry, Tom is nothing exceptional.
Not even worth remembering.
“I know,” Tom hisses, a particularly vicious scowl brewing.
The chessboard between them is scarred, a thin, pale vivisection running along its spine. The wood is otherwise dark, its corners worn smooth by years of play, and across the length of it, Tom wraps his fingers around Harry’s palm. His grip is coiled far too tight. Squeezing until the boy is forced to take notice.
“I’m going to beat you,” Tom says, simply.
The pieces stand like sentries, their thick coats shining; an oily sheen against the alternating squares. And this time, when Harry looks at him, his gaze is focused.
Delighted, even. Startled in a way that borders on amused: caught off guard by Tom and his complete disregard for niceties. Finally struck by a familiar kind of unpredictability, the same weapon Harry wields so well.
Now serious and intent, he watches Tom, intrigued by whatever predatory shine has overtaken his eyes. Harry’s are glittering too—not with fear, but with anticipation. As if Tom were suddenly poised to strike, and Harry had been waiting all day for a fight.
“Alright,” Harry says.
His smile has lost all its placidity. There’s something else in those eyes now, something wild and bright. They’re as green as sea glass, formed in the mouth of the ocean. As beautiful as they are dangerous, like the tides, which kill as easily as they carry.
He, too, is an animal. Caged and quiet, until Tom had shed his skin. And now, permitted, Harry bares his teeth. No longer looking through him, with a polite, distracted gaze, but watching Tom directly; staring at him the way he only ever looks at a chessboard.
So Tom runs his fingers over home rank—straightening his back row, caressing the lever of his clock—and makes good on his promise.
RIDDLE TRUMPS POTTER IN EXHIBITION SHOWDOWN: WHICH OF BRITAIN’S BRIGHTEST WILL RISE TO THE TOP?
By L.C. Fairchild, The Times – London Chess Weekly, Vol. XLIII
Harry is paying attention now.
They develop a reputation.
A wealth of online forums crop up, all devoted to analyzing their matches. Frame-by-frame, every interaction is dissected. Every touch-move and glance across the board is slowed, then replayed, then scrutinized.
All of England is talking about them, the wunderkinds dominating Europe’s chess circuit. Anyone who’s ever picked up a pawn has an opinion on who will reign supreme.
Harry plays increasingly more aggressive openings as time goes on. He knows chaos is where he thrives—and where Tom does not. But the so-called ‘Golden Boy of Chess’ is used to getting away with murder on the board. He gets sloppy sometimes, bull-rushing, too eager to close the midgame.
And Tom takes great pleasure in punishing these lazy aggressions.
The press prints less and less about them as individuals, and instead, they focus on sensationalizing the pair. Tom & Harry. Riddle & Potter. Their rivalry earns them their own brand of mythology.
Harry sharpens under Tom’s rigid structure. And Tom, in turn, learns to bend—if only slightly—in order to surpass him. But they maintain their contrast, and it’s these differences that define them. That gives the other an edge, and a handicap, all at once.
Tom favors a Caro-Kann style defense: solid and structured, bolstered by long-term strategies. Cold and precise, just like him.
Harry, on the other hand, prefers Vienna games. Creative and slightly offbeat. He’s practically a Sicilian himself, for all he keeps Tom guessing.
Harry Potter is a gambit like no other: risky, bold, sacrificial. All feints and half-traps and sudden reversals.
It’s the most fun Tom has had playing since he learned the rules.
It’s also the worst thing that has ever happened to him. And as they go head-to-head, it’s never clear who is winning the war.
TIME runs an excerpt on the pair, calling them “Petrov’s Defense in miniature.” Because, together, they are a calculating kind of symmetry. Steady in the way they develop—and, especially for the rest of the world, immeasurably annoying to face.
Can Anyone Stop the Young Kings of British Chess?
But chess is a lonely game. It’s a war of the mind, and they cannot win as a team.
Who, Between Them, Will Emerge Victorious?
Sometimes, Tom thinks it might kill them both to spend the rest of their lives losing to each other. Or worse—to watch one fall, as the other goes on alone, without anyone to truly challenge them.
Only Time Will Tell.
Still. It would be far more painful to lose to anyone else.
When Tom and Harry are twelve, they both make the cover of CHESS TODAY magazine. They’re hailed as Britain’s youngest contenders for Candidates in the history of the game.
They play a mock match for the cameras. At least, that’s what the studio calls it. Tom and Harry both know there is no such thing as an inconsequential game.
The click of the chess clock echoes between them. The magazine has gone all out in the name of realism—wooden set, vintage board, replica Staunton pieces—so Tom supposes there could still be some integrity left in journalism.
His notation journal is pristine: shorthand, with neat, calligraphic strokes. Harry’s is dog-eared and written in a strange hybrid of pencil and pen. He scribbles too big at the start, his letters thinning as the game wears on; cramped in the margins by the time the game has reached its conclusion.
Tom collects these things—the curiosities that mark them different. Their distinctions in a world that insists on viewing them as a matched set.
Don’t you see? he wants to tell these so-called journalists. I would never annotate in pen.
“What do you do to unwind?” one of the reporters asks, smiling too wide.
Her voice is full of false cheer and condescension, and she looks at them as if they’re barely out of nappies. Paired with the indulgent, empty-eyed expression, it’s obvious she’s only humoring them. The way adults always do when faced with particularly precocious children.
“When you’re not playing chess.”
Immediately, Tom and Harry glance up, sharing a look over the board. They’re united by confusion, evidently, and for a moment, tethered by this silence: touching without touching. The rare, disarming flicker; that mortifying ordeal; the feeling of being known.
It’s clear to Tom that neither of them has any idea how to answer.
What is there but chess?
They make something up, of course—football or films or video games. Tom can hardly remember.
It doesn’t matter.
The only thing he does remember is this:
The way Harry’s face had twisted, ever so slightly, before he’d caught Tom’s eye. Alone in the feeling, for just a moment, looking so out of place that he resembled a stranger. And then Tom had looked back at him, with familiar disquiet, and it softened the edges of his expression until he was Harry once more: confident and steady and as tall as the universe.
Perhaps there’s something to be said about having a single person who understands. It is, after all, lonely at the top.
And lonelier still, when you realize there’s only room for one.
Post-match interviews are never pretty.
Shoulder to shoulder, endgames still fresh in their minds—the sting of near-misses and almost-had-you’s left to fester—they sit behind the microphones. Stiff-backed in matching chairs, sweating under the glare of studio lights, they try very hard not to look too obviously pleased or terribly furious about the outcome of that day’s match.
“Perhaps it’s time to loosen your grip,” his coach mutters, once the reporters have abandoned Tom in favor of the day’s victor.
Tom sits in silence, arms crossed, jaw tight. His latest loss—a very narrow one—is still raw and blistering under the surface.
Abraxas sighs, but Tom isn’t listening. There’s only one person in this room who can hold his attention. After all these years, his coach should really know better.
Harry is still seated at the long table, elbows hooked over the back of his chair. He’s smiling for the cameras, charming as ever, the lighting smoothing out every crease Tom has left on him over the years.
From where he sits, just beyond the cluster of folding chairs, Tom can’t make out the words. But he can hear the soft hum of Harry’s voice, low and warm.
His shirt sleeves are rolled up to the elbow, revealing toned, sun-warmed skin. His collar is slightly askew, and his hair is a mess—made worse by the hour he’d spent running his hands through it, trying to outmaneuver Tom.
And succeeding, a bitter voice reminds him.
Tom wants to demand a rematch. He wants to demand a hundred.
He wants to stalk across the room and fist his hands in that hair—wants to tug until Harry’s head tips back, tanned throat bare and bobbing under the pressure of Tom’s grip, waiting to see who caves first.
When he finally drags his gaze away, he realizes Abraxas is staring at Harry, too.
“You could learn a thing or two from him, you know.”
Harry laughs—a honeyed sound, so obviously fake—and Tom’s fingers twitch. He never laughs like that when it’s just the two of them. It’s not the one he saves for Tom, for the moments where the cameras are gone. When it’s only the two of them, brilliant and bleeding and almost human.
The reporters smile back, like he’s already won them over—practically in love with him.
Tom grits his teeth.
“Please,” he sneers. “The only thing he could teach me is how to blow through pawns in the front half.”
Abraxas just sighs again, heavier this time. The disappointment in his eyes hardly registers. Tom had long since stopped caring about pleasing anyone but himself.
“Your pride,” the man says at last, “will be the death of us all, Thomas.”
And Tom doesn’t even blink.
“Is that so?”
He leans back in the folding chair, picking up the cheap, Styrofoam cup he’d been given. The water they’d offered him is lukewarm, tasting of dust and fluoride, and he swallows it down to the dregs.
He’d devour the world whole if he could wrap his lips around it.
“Then I guess Potter’s coming down with me.”
Just once, at a local tournament, Harry convinces him to play a blitz game.
It’s an unofficial match, no clock or arbiter. Just a battered board borrowed from the lobby and a sea of their peers crowded around them, eager for blood.
Tom knows better than to agree. These are Harry’s waters: fast, dirty, volatile. Blitz games are tourneys of instinct, not precision.
But Harry grins, his smile as taunting as it is eager, and nothing tempts Tom more than proving he can live up to the challenge. Especially this one.
The game is chaos. Harry rips Tom’s endgame to shreds, dismantling his pawn structure with ruthless efficiency and smiling the whole way through. Tom finds himself on the back foot before he ever realizes he’s been pushed.
It’s over in seven minutes.
Tom’s king is boxed, the check unmistakable. Harry’s knights are still dancing on the back rank, and the center is a war zone, half the pieces gone.
“I want a rematch,” Tom hisses the second his King tips, pieces not even scrubbed off the board yet. He can’t stop staring at Harry’s final position; the well-laid trap sprawled across the board, invisible until it had snapped shut.
Harry leans back, arms crossed loosely over his chest, still smiling. Around them, the crowd is murmuring, the distant buzz of their voices like gnats. He wants them all gone. Wants the world to disappear, until there’s nothing but the board left between them.
“You never learn from your mistakes, do you, Tommy?”
Tom doesn’t make mistakes. There is only this boy—this singular, impossible, infuriating boy—who has the power to shake him. To bend his will, fracture his focus, unmake him in real time.
To force him to question things he once thought were fixed: logic and progress and invincibility. The notion of his own limitations. What they are, and if they even exist.
No, nothing, none at all. I’ll swallow the world whole and then devour you too.
“Again,” Tom insists, and Harry—pleased, shrugging—starts setting the board.
At least he knows how to take direction.
Only once does Harry lose to someone other than Tom.
It’s an early-round upset. A fluke, the media calls it. The boy he lost to is solid, but nothing remarkable—an overperformer in a moment of luck.
Still, the damage is done.
And when Tom finds him—after the closing buzz of the match, after the reporters have moved on and the hall has emptied out—Harry is wandering the upper floor of the venue.
His caretaker, strangely enough, is nowhere to be found, and he’s uncharacteristically dour. There’s an odd, old look on his face, staring at a framed photo on the wall: an archival black-and-white shot of some grandmaster, frozen mid-game in a long-forgotten tournament.
Harry isn’t really seeing it. His gaze is far away. Distant, like the first time they’d played, before Harry knew he mattered—seeing through the world rather than into it.
Tom is furious.
Striding up, his teeth are already clenched, both fists curled. His footsteps echo down the hall, the heavy clack of his shoes coming down too hard on the tile floor.
“Get your shit together, Potter,” he hisses, and Harry’s whole body freezes.
He doesn’t turn around. His hand tightens around the half-smashed protein bar he’d rummaged from some vending machine, however, and the crinkle of the wrapper is overly loud in the narrow space.
Tom shouldn’t be here. He wasn’t scheduled to play today. By all accounts, he should be in his hotel room reviewing footage, studying tomorrow’s brackets, then turning in early.
Instead, he’s standing in this ugly, abandoned hallway—nothing but a long row of doors leading nowhere and a strip of overworked fluorescents humming above their heads.
“Your losses are mine,” Tom says, voice low and dangerous. “Nobody else deserves them.”
You are mine, he thinks, and for a moment, he wonders if Harry hears him. If he understands Tom half as well off the board as he does on. If he knows what Tom isn’t saying, the same way Tom knows the flutter of Harry’s fingers before interviews, or the microsecond pause before trading queens.
After all, aren’t I yours, too? Are we not each other’s creations—terrible and strange; both lovingly broken open by the other's hands?
Harry doesn’t respond. He never even turns around. But some of the tension leaves his shoulders. Slowly, deliberately, he tucks the barely eaten snack back into his pocket—reminding Tom so suddenly of the little boy from all those years ago, with a smear of chocolate across the bridge of his nose—and walks away.
Once more filled with determination. Headed down the hallway, away from Tom and the burden of Kings.
He can’t be certain, but he thinks Harry understood him perfectly.
Chess is sixty-four squares worth of discipline.
It’s a game that rewards precision. One that exalts structure, and Tom, for his mastery over order.
Here, he is in charge of his destiny.
He can still vaguely remember the orphanage—the grey corridors and endless hunger. The years when his life was barely his own. A world of noise, of shrieking children and wailing babes, punctuated only by the clipped voices of overworked staffers and doctors eager to medicate them into obedience.
Before chess, Tom was a half-formed thing. A shadow without a source of light. A changeling without anchor or name. And then everything, including himself, was transformed. Cast in the crucible of Kings.
Tom loves chess. The smell of old wood and varnish. The satisfying thunk of knights landing on their squares.
The freedom it gave him, the power, when everything else in his life had been built by someone else’s hands.
On the board, he became himself. The naming of Abraham, the binding of Isaac. Reunited with his purpose, one found in the burning bush of Wools—only a diamond could hide in soot and still know the light would find it.
But with Harry, the board begins to feel too small. He doesn’t fit inside sixty-four squares. He spills over the edges, messy and unstructured. He turns strategy stifling; the same exacting discipline Tom had used to overcome his circumstances, now his hamartia.
He makes Tom feel like the board was never enough to begin with. And Tom—who has always sought control beyond all else—tries very hard not to think about how right it feels.
It’s not all acclaim.
They’re asked to attend all sorts of useless charity events and community showcases. Tom has learned to accept, if only to protect his image—no one likes a prodigy with a stick up his arse—but he loathes wasting his time.
This is how he finds himself here.
The local town hall offers cheap, store-bought bagels and dozens of plastic folding tables. Children at the far end chew with their mouths open, coloring in blank, stylized chess pieces with sticky fingers and oversized crayons.
And then there’s Tom. Trapped inside. Teaching chess to apes.
His only saving grace is that Harry has shown up. Tom had spotted him earlier, laughing with one of the organizers, and he’s certain he’ll be able to corner him into a game later. He’s actually looking forward to it.
Their current score is 390-376. Tom keeps track of the running tally in his journal—for the last time, Potter, it is not a diary—and the moment it starts to dip too far in Harry’s favor, Tom is quick to correct the imbalance.
For all that Harry claims to find it “odd”, he regularly asks after the total. So Tom has to stay ahead of the curve before Harry can learn to be smug about it.
Unbidden, his eyes dart over to where he’d seen Harry last, just a few minutes ago. When he finds him, however, his stomach twists.
Harry is leaning over a boy seated at one of the tables. Even standing, Harry hardly looms over the stranger—clearly tall and about their age. The boy is bracketed in Harry’s arms as he bends over to show him something on the board.
Harry’s hands are gentle as they move around the pieces. He’s patient, even, as he suffers through what is sure to be a moronic assault of questions.
The stranger is what most people would consider handsome: thick, dark hair, and a pleasing smile. He offers it up to Harry now, and as Tom watches him smile back—a soft, easy tug of his lips, the kind one usually has to earn—something hot and mean twists in his gut.
He can barely restrain the sudden, juvenile urge to interrupt them. To topple the board or steal away Harry’s attention: back where it ought to be, and on whom it’s worthy of.
The boy is clearly out of his depth. Harry’s got him in mate in three—Tom can see it from across the room. And sure enough, Harry trails his fingers over the man’s rook before gesturing at his own knight.
He’s explaining something, and despite not being able to hear the words, Tom stops to watch the lush curl of Harry’s mouth as he speaks. He can’t stop thinking about how foolish it is that the boy doesn’t know to keep an eye on Harry’s knights.
Why are you smiling at him? He doesn’t even know what pieces to watch.
But Harry doesn’t seem to notice what a phenomenal waste of time this boy is. Instead, he laughs at something the stranger says—leaning closer, their arms brushing—and something curdles in Tom’s chest.
Harry really should know better. This boy is clearly an idiot. Harry’s too intelligent to be fooled for long, obviously—to be blinded by nothing more than a technically pretty smile—but as the seconds drag on, Harry stays right where he is. Curled too closely behind the stranger’s back. Smiling as his knight cuts a quiet path across the board.
Tom glares at the pair, jaw tight, hands curling into fists beneath the table. He was supposed to have moved on to the next philistine attempting a Sicilian backwards, but he’s feeling sick all of a sudden.
Harry doesn’t look back at Tom until the match is finished, and Tom stays right where he is.
On the outside of everything. Watching, invisible, as Harry drifts further away.
Make it 391-376.
Tom hates Harry Potter.
The way his hands never linger over a piece. As if the board speaks to him, in the call of serpents, sinuous and old.
Isn’t that how Lucifer tempted Eve? Eat this apple, the angel had whispered, forked tongue dragging along the fruit’s waxen skin. You’ll have your answers.
Harry doesn’t need instruction. He’s not the one looking for answers, for order. He’s always certain, always charging ahead without needing a plan, perpetually led by that twice-damned intuition.
Tom wants to press his fingers into the grey matter of Harry’s brain and shake his genius loose. To find how deep madness lives under his skin, and if it’s anything like Tom’s.
He wants to disassemble him like the face of a clock, until each gear is known to him; so well that he could put him back together again, whole and perfect once more: an engine of motion and miracles.
To press him down, arms crossed behind his back, until he confesses—I always knew you were exceptional, Tommy—
He wants, wants, wants—
To whisper in his ear; to be his only source of praise; to run a palm down the bare stretch of Harry’s lower back; to press his teeth to Harry’s shoulder, hips twitching against the tile floor, hungry for something they won’t call a game.
He hates Harry Potter. He does.
He hates how badly he wants him.
The door rattles beneath his fist as he knocks—much harder than necessary. He’s still smarting from his Hastings loss and eager for a fight.
There’s nothing to be said about just how eager he is. How tension is so often confused for desire.
When Harry opens the door, however, he just looks amused. As if he could have predicted Tom’s arrival and was unbearably smug to have been proven right.
I know you, those eyes taunt, green as the moss that grows over corpses. Like ivy crawling over tombstones, fed on the rot, its limbs fattened by intimacy. Even better than you know yourself.
Tom barrels in without waiting for an invitation.
“Seriously?”
Harry laughs. “You thought taking out my knights meant you were going to win. Admit it.”
“I certainly didn’t think you’d underpromote!”
Tom paces along the length of the main room, his loafers wearing a groove into the floor. The soft click of his shoes against the tile can’t smother his huff of irritation.
“Not my fault you stopped looking out for my knights as soon as you thought they were off the board,” Harry teases. “Had to make one out of a pawn just to keep you from getting cocky.”
Tom opens his mouth to keep arguing, uncaring that Harry is correct.
He had, in fact, stopped looking out for the danger in Harry’s knight formations as soon as he’d bullied him out of both pieces. He’d felt rather smug about it, too. Like they had been worth more, winning what was most precious to Harry: his most coveted pieces.
Suddenly, however, he pauses. Confused, he spies a chessboard laid open from across the room—the barely-cold remnants of tonight’s match scattered along its husk.
“You’re replaying it?” he asks, incredulous, his pacing abruptly aborted.
‘Already?’ goes unsaid.
“Just from the midgame,” Harry answers.
When Tom looks over his shoulder, Harry’s leaning against the doorframe. His hands are shoved loosely inside his pockets, and he’s kicked off his shoes. In his t-shirt—forearms bared, with socked feet—he looks unbearably exposed all of a sudden.
They’re alone. As far as Tom can tell, Harry never invites people back to his hotel rooms, so the space is bare, save for a suitcase in the corner. Its mouth is gaping open, cotton and corduroy spilling onto the floor.
Tom spies a flash of red cotton tangled up in the slacks Harry had been wearing earlier—an elastic waistband just visible—and looks away quickly, throat gone dry.
Surely, Harry is old enough to put his underwear away properly.
“But you won,” Tom grits out, slumping into the armchair by Harry’s bed. He keeps his eyes fixed on the board in front of him, neck flushed.
Red flickers on the edge of his vision every time he blinks. He’s determined not to let his gaze wander back over to the suitcase, even as the flash of color lingers, playing on the backs of his eyes. Taunting him from the edge of his peripheral.
He finds himself remarkably grateful that they’re alone, all of a sudden. That Harry, like Tom, has no overbearing parents to hover over his shoulder.
Despite the caretaker often lurking nearby—nanny, Tom takes great pleasure in lording over Harry—today, there’s no one else to be found. Perhaps Harry’s godfather had deemed the man unnecessary now that Harry was nearly an adult.
He’s sure Harry is grateful for it, too. He’d dubbed the man Kreacher with an uncharacteristically sour look on his face, and though Tom would hardly admit it, he quite agreed.
“True,” Harry agrees, and Tom could throttle him. “But you almost pulled a zugzwang.”
“A zugzwang?”
“Well, yeah,” Harry says, blinking. “You had only left me the one pawn. Not to mention my king was trapped on your beloved back rank. I was arsed in nearly every direction.”
Tom throws his arms up. “Being near you is zugzwang!” he complains. “I lose my patience no matter what I choose.”
And sweet, impossible Harry smiles at this, as though it’s the nicest thing Tom has ever said.
“You’re the one who barged into my room, Tom,” he murmurs, eyes soft, still fixed on the chessboard. “Nobody’s keeping you here.”
Tom breathes and breathes, the rough scratch of his lungs like static as silence stretches out between them.
Harry glances over, perched lazily on the edge of the desk. Outside, the sun has melted in the middle; dripping down the sky, painting the glass with the last of evening’s dying light. Harry’s profile has been softened by the hotel lamps—lashes casting shadows on the highest points of his face, cheekbones the perfect place to rest one’s thumbs.
“I think you’re like an en passant,” Harry says gently. “Rare and obscure. Often misunderstood.”
Tom’s face burns. Pressing his knees together, he tries harder than ever to avoid glancing at Harry. To keep his eyes away from the lines of his profile, the long-since memorized slant of his jaw.
Tom fixes his gaze on the board between them instead. He can still remember the move that sits, frozen in time, across its belly. The way he’d felt as Harry nudged his knight into play is still burned into his mind, even hours later.
“Would you like to try it again?” Harry asks, and he shouldn’t.
It’s all the advantage Tom needs to get an edge over him, once and for all. To use against him the next time they go toe to toe.
Harry knows.
He offers anyway.
“…Yes,” Tom says, so softly the words are nearly lost amongst the cold air.
The whir of the aircon is at full blast, droning in the background; white noise to muffle the quiet sounds of chairs creaking and Tom swallowing against the renewed dryness in his throat.
The curtains get pulled shut, thick and blocking the city view, but light seems to pour in anyway. It seeps under his skin, warming the space behind his ribs; hollowing out the loneliness he’d felt just hours ago, lying in an empty hotel room and knowing Harry was only a few doors away.
This moment, this match, is different. And as the world turns, the faint clack of pieces slotting into place the only thing between them, his heart wobbles. Quivering to the tune of kings against queens, of pawns traveling across the board.
They play for hours, quiet and uninterrupted, until even the lamps seem to grow dim. The rest of the world forgets to exist, from their place high above the city; receding until only Tom and Harry remain.
It’s the beginning of a tradition.