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Chapter Text

3 August 1996

“They’re a right couple of bastards, I’m telling you,” Ron declared to Diagon Alley at large, kicking a bit of rubbish out of his path as a means of venting his feelings.

“Uh-uh,” said Harry, clearly not wanting to get into it. Unfortunately, Harry’s lackluster response was all the encouragement Ron needed to carry on with his tirade.  

“And when I asked them for a family discount, right, Fred told me to cram it up my—” A stooped little granny coming out of a nearby shop fixed Ron with a beady look, and although Ron met her glare defiantly, his closing remarks were notably free of profanity. “Anyway, you get the general idea, yeah?”

“I’ll bet all of London’s got the idea,” Harry muttered, and Ron gave him a perfunctory shove before turning to appeal to Hermione.

“And what’d you have to do to get complimentary merchandise, huh, Hermione? Did you bewitch Fred and George? Promised them your firstborn, maybe?”

This last suggestion was spoken in tones that Hermione couldn’t help but interpret as hopeful, as though Ron had already calculated how many of his own unborn children he’d have to hand over to his brothers in order to secure a free crate of Weasleys’ Wildfire Whiz-bangs.

“Don’t be absurd, Ron.” Hermione turned the Patented Daydream Charm over in her hands in order to examine the warning label. “All I said was that casting a charm of this complexity and staying power would require an extraordinary bit of spellwork.” She looked up from the garishly painted box, fixed Ron with a beady look of her own, and said, pointedly, “It’s almost as if treating people nicely will prompt them to treat you kindly in return.”

The hopeful expression ran away from Ron’s face. Far from seeming heartened by Hermione’s advice, he appeared to deflate.

“Nah,” he grumbled, scanning the cobblestones on the off chance that another stray bit of garbage would spontaneously appear and give him something to kick. “If I tried complimenting Fred and George, they’d only think I was smarming up to them. They wouldn’t give me a free Daydream Charm for that; in fact, I’d bet you anything they’d charge me twice whatever’s on the price tag, and then maybe jinx me to drive the point home.”

Hermione pinched her bottom lip between her teeth. She wanted to tell Ron that Fred and George weren’t that petty, but—well, they were, was the thing, and Ron knew it. Hermione gave Harry imploring eyes over Ron’s shoulder, but Harry just shrugged and shook his head unhelpfully.

Oh, honestly.

“You can have it, then, if you’d like.” Hermione thrust the colorful box at Ron, who eyed it as if it might grow fangs and bite him (which, it being a Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes product, was not entirely outside the realm of possibility). “No, really. I haven’t got any use for it, so if you want it that badly, take it. Just promise me you won’t use it during your lessons—”

“Nah,” said Ron, straightening his posture. He had the sheer nerve to look insulted, as if he hadn’t been moaning over the scarcity of free joke shop merchandise mere moments ago. “Nah, Hermione, you keep it. I don’t wanna give my money to those two pricks, anyway—”

Hermione shuffled the Daydream Charm into her left hand so as to poke Ron in the side with her right.

“What—you’re not going to lecture me about my language, are you? Honestly, Hermione, you’re as bad as Mum. Anyway, suppose I do take that Daydream Charm. I wouldn’t have to pay for it, sure, but using it’s as good as giving those prats free advertising, isn’t it? What is it with you two?”

Harry had just elbowed Ron in the ribs, and Ron was dividing a look of towering betrayal between him and Hermione.

Wordlessly, Hermione pointed.

With the start of term looming so close, Diagon Alley was evocative of nothing so much as a congested artery. Wizarding Britain’s preferred shopping district was positively clogged with Hogwarts students and their families: everywhere you looked, arms were laden down with neatly wrapped parcels and colorful shopping bags, parents pressing dripping ice cream cones into their children’s hands as a means of keeping them complacent in the afternoon heat.

Two people, however, had broken off from the bustling crowd and were turning down a rather infamous side street, and it was to this pair that Hermione had pointed.

“What do the Malfoys think they’re doing, skulking around Knockturn Alley?” Hermione curled her fingers around the hem of Ron’s t-shirt and gave it an anxious tug. “Don’t they care about keeping up appearances, at least? Never mind that an underage wizard like Draco hasn’t got any business perusing Dark products.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like anyone but us is paying them any attention.” Absently, Ron reached down to unstick Hermione’s fingers from his t-shirt. His eyes had gone narrow and speculative, and so had Harry’s. “What’re they doing down there, d’you reckon?”

“Only one way to find out for sure, isn’t there?” said Harry, and the glint in his eyes had Hermione darting forward to grab him before he could take so much as half a step. “What, Hermione?”

“You mustn’t, Harry!” Harry was clawing at Hermione’s fingers, trying to unhook them from his t-shirt, but Hermione would not budge. However, for all that Harry was a terribly skinny thing, he was also an athlete, and Hermione was not; how long it would take him to shake her off wasn’t a question of minutes, but a question of seconds.

“It’s dangerous down there and you know it,” Hermione pressed, clinging for all she was worth. “I shouldn’t have said anything about Draco being too young to shop there—Lucius Malfoy is an adult, and if he wants to take his underage son shopping in Knockturn Alley, that’s none of our business. At least—at least wait for Sirius and Mrs. Weasley to get back from—”

“Are you mental, Hermione?” Focused though she was on her grappling match with Harry, Hermione would have had to’ve been blind to miss Ron’s look of exaggerated disbelief. “Wait, never mind, don’t answer that. Obviously you’re mental, or else you wouldn’t be suggesting that my mum—you know, short, red hair, bit of a temper, maybe you’ve met—would be okay with us traipsing all casual-like into Knockturn Alley—”

“Your mum wouldn’t,” Hermione conceded, “but Sirius might.” She frowned as she said this; Hermione stood with Mrs. Weasley in that she’d never quite approved of Sirius Black’s parenting.

Harry seized the opening provided by Hermione’s wandering attention and successfully untangled her fingers from his t-shirt. He took a giant step out of Hermione’s reach, but he didn’t immediately sprint off to Knockturn Alley, so perhaps Hermione might talk some sense into him yet.  

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” said Harry, eyeing Hermione’s hands with no small measure of suspicion. “Sirius being all right with us strolling into Knockturn Alley, I mean. He talks big about all the trouble he got into when he was our age, but d’you remember that time I thrashed Malfoy and nearly got banned from playing Quidditch ever again?”

“As if I could forget,” said Hermione. “You’re not helping your case by bringing that up, by the way.”

“That’s not fair, Hermione,” said Ron. “Malfoy provoked Harry, didn’t he?”  

“Yeah, tell that to McGonagall,” said Harry, preempting Hermione’s retort. “Anyway, you can’t have forgotten the Howler Sirius sent me, can you? Said Dumbledore needn’t bother banning me from Quidditch, as Sirius’d be Flooing to Hogwarts to snap my Firebolt in half?” 

Hermione, who could recall in detail the contents of every Howler that her two best friends had ever received over their time at Hogwarts—fourteen between them, by the way, and they still had two years to go—pursed her lips in silent condemnation of every reckless thing that Harry James Potter had already done and would inevitably do again.

Harry rolled his eyes at Hermione’s spot-on impression of Mrs. Weasley, turned on his heel, and said over his shoulder, “Well, the two of you can come if you want; I really don’t care. I mean, if something awful happens to me while I’m down there, you’re bound to feel lousy for letting me go alone, but—”

Ron, who had gone whiter than usual under his freckles, jogged to catch up with Harry. After all, where Harry went, Ron went, even when he preferred to stay put. 

Harry spared a fuming Hermione another glance, grinned, and said, “Still don’t want to come along?”

Hermione badly wanted to stamp her foot, but she controlled herself with some effort. And as she went where Harry and Ron went, even when her good sense told her not to, she hurried to close the distance between them. She glared back when Harry and Ron grinned at her, daring them to comment. They didn’t.

“Wish I’d brought my dad’s Cloak along,” said Harry, leading the way as the three of them hooked the corner into Knockturn Alley. The day seemed to blink immediately into night: Diagon Alley had been bright and glittering with afternoon sunlight, but as Knockturn’s buildings were crammed together cheek-by-jowl, much of the light was blocked out, draping the area in thick, atmosphere-appropriate shadows.

“Yes, well,” said Hermione, blinking as her eyes adjusted to rapid shift in lighting, “our being out in the open like this ought to motivate you to get in and out as quickly as possible, oughtn’t it?” Even to her own ears, she sounded quite snotty, but she didn’t particularly care.

Harry and Ron shushed Hermione, and it was possible that they did so for reasons outside of simply wanting her to shut up in general. Aside from the occasional creak of unoiled hinges or the sporadic scrabbling of unseen vermin, Knockturn Alley was deathly quiet—and whereas Diagon Alley had been packed to the gills, its dodgy neighbor was virtually deserted. As Hermione was proud to say that she had little firsthand experience with this awful place, she had no idea if this was normal, or if Knockturn Alley was experiencing a steep downswing in business.

Perhaps its usual clientele preferred to do their shopping after the sun had set.  

“Which shop d’you think they’ve gone in?” Harry asked, hushed, as he and Ron and Hermione paused to survey the immediate area. The criminally narrow street necessitated that they all but stand on top of each other.

“There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?” said Ron, looking put out by what he was about to suggest. “We keep walking and looking into windows till we spot them. And then we hope that they don’t see us before we see them.”

“Yes, Ron, and what could they do if they spotted us first?” Hermione was hesitant to raise her voice, so she compensated by talking in an especially harsh whisper. “The school term hasn’t started yet, but Draco would still get into loads of trouble for attacking fellow students—and never mind what would happen to Lucius Malfoy if the Ministry found out that he’d harmed underage teenagers. Besides—” Hermione’s mouth thinned. “They’re not the sort to dirty their hands.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Ron’s shoulders relaxed a touch. “If they caught us, they’d sooner spin things to make it look like we’re in the wrong than try to hex us.”  

“I don’t see how even those two could manage that, though,” said Hermione. “They walked down here first, after all.”

“Yeah.” Ron was now eyeing an empty spider’s web with great trepidation, possibly expecting its tenant to return at any moment and take a flying leap at his face. “But could we prove that?”

“We won’t be able to prove anything if we lose track of them now,” said Harry, who was all but vibrating at the prospect of catching Draco Malfoy in the act of something nefarious. He resumed his stalk down the street, legs eating up great bites of space so that Ron and Hermione had to jog to catch up to him.

The trouble with Knockturn Alley was that it curved like a coiling snake so that you could see only a little ways ahead of you at any given moment. As trying to look too far ahead would be in vain, Hermione concentrated on scanning the grimy window displays as she passed them, hoping to spot a gleam of blond hair. She saw a table crowded with foul-looking candles the color of human waste, dummies that appeared to shift whenever she blinked, and, most revoltingly of all, a collection of shrunken heads strung up in a vulgar parody of an infant’s mobile—but no Malfoys.

“Wouldn’t fancy a trim in that place,” said Ron, nodding at a sign that claimed the building over which it hung was a barbershop. “Bet they’d take your scalp along with your hair.”

“Yeah, or your entire head,” said Harry. “And then sell it to that lot.” He pointed at the display of shrunken heads, the look on his face a match for what Hermione was feeling.

Ron snickered a touch hysterically, as though laughing at the inappropriate was the only means by which he could cope with the situation, but Hermione recoiled.

“Don’t be vile,” she snapped, and then clapped her hands over her mouth when she heard her own voice bounce around the alley in a terrible echo. Harry and Ron were staring at her, alarmed, and their fears were seemingly confirmed when there came a great clattering racket from behind them.

It could have been an especially large rat, whatever was making that noise, but Hermione doubted it, and so, apparently, did Harry.

“Run,” Harry said, prodding at Ron’s and Hermione’s backs to get them moving. “Get going, go—”

Hermione required no further encouragement. She ran.

The awful shopfronts blurred in her periphery as her feet smacked far too noisily off the uneven cobblestones, and she nearly tripped every few paces over debris that she never saw coming but seemed to sprout out of the ground with the deliberate intent of sending her sprawling. Things would have gone a bit more smoothly, at least, if the street had been more uniform so as to allow her a straight shot, but what with all these random twists, Hermione had to slow herself down whenever she started to gain momentum. She was likely to hit a grimy wall nose first before she and the others could find a proper hiding place—and she couldn’t hear a bloody thing over the entwined rhythms of her pounding footsteps and her thrashing heartbeat, so she was bound to run into unsavory persons unknown before she noticed them coming at her—

Hermione flung out a hand, groping for a hold on an overturned wheelbarrow, and stumbled to a halt. There was an awful stitch in her chest and another in her side. She hated running. Loathed it.

Harry, though—Harry could outrun anybody, and Ron’s gangling legs were the longest in their year. Hermione had got a head start, but Harry and Ron ought to have overtaken her by now.

They hadn’t.

Hermione released her death grip on the wheelbarrow, pulling a revolted face at the grime that’d rubbed off on her palm, and reeled around on the spot. Her eyes bounced from the nearest shopfront, to the bend in the alleyway, to the sliver of sky visible between the crooked, looming rooftops—as if Harry and Ron had summoned their brooms with the magic they were forbidden to use over the holidays and taken to the skies.

They’d been separated. But how? Knockturn Alley was sinuous and gloomy, yes, but there wasn’t a lot to it, not like Diagon Alley. Had they taken shelter in a shop? But they wouldn’t have done, not without Hermione.

Hermione wobbled forward a few steps, clutching her Daydream Charm as if it could somehow anchor her. Running hadn’t done her hair any favors, and she shook it out of her eyes as she squinted around, hoping that she’d somehow missed Harry and Ron and that they would pop up any moment now.

They didn’t.

Well. Well. She’d just have to retrace her steps, now, wouldn’t she? And if she ran into anyone who wasn’t Harry or Ron, what could they say to her? She wasn’t doing anything wrong, exactly; there weren’t any rules barring underage wizards and witches from taking a stroll down Knockturn Alley, for all that it was generally discouraged. And if someone unsavory tried to accost her, she’d give them a good kick—Ginny had taught her where to aim so as to yield the most devastating results—and run for it.

Yes. That was what she would do.

Nodding to herself a little frantically, Hermione began to march back the way she’d come—only to hesitate.

Voices.

Hermione could hear voices coming from around the corner, the corner down which she’d nearly ran before she’d noticed that Harry and Ron were no longer with her. And those voices simply couldn’t belong to Harry and Ron, not if they were coming from that direction. Hermione had been quite sure that they hadn’t overtaken her; blinded though she’d been by panic, she’d have felt them bump her shoulders as they squeezed down the narrow street.

And though the voices in question had been largely incomprehensible when Hermione had first noticed them, they now clarified into snatches of crisp speech.

 “—how, exactly, am I supposed to attend school with this thing on my arm? They’re bound to notice eventually, even that idiot—and Pomfrey’s sure to—”

“You’ll just have to keep your sleeves rolled down at all times, then. If anyone asks, tell them you’re prone to catching chills.”  

“Yeah, but if I get injured playing Quidditch—”

“Then you’ll do your level best to avoid the necessity of a trip to the hospital wing, won’t you? You said that you’d take this seriously, Draco.”

“I am taking it seriously. But couldn’t you have waited until I’d finished—”

Draco Malfoy’s complaints cut off as abruptly as if he’d been forcefully silenced, and Hermione never found out what he’d wanted the other speaker to wait for. However, she had heard enough to recognize the voice of the person with whom Draco had been arguing.

And it didn’t belong to Lucius Malfoy.

Hermione’s throat was so dry that it audibly clicked when she swallowed. She ought to turn around. Her good sense was screaming at her in a voice oddly similar to Mrs. Weasley’s that she ought to get out of here and find an adult before doubling back to fetch her errant friends.

But it wouldn’t hurt to have a look, would it?

Hermione would just peek around the corner, match the face to the voice, and then leave. She wouldn’t linger. All she wanted to do was confirm her suspicions. She had to make sure.

With apologies to her common sense, Hermione dropped into a crouch and waddled awkwardly around the curve in the alley. Three questionably steady towers of corroded cauldrons offered cover, so she ducked behind those and sat forward on her knees to peer through a gap in the stacks.

She had to bite her tongue to keep from crying out.

Draco Malfoy’s back was flush against a wall papered in gruesome advertisements, and his left arm was being held at a painful-looking angle by—yes, Hermione had been right about the voice, because that was almost certainly Tom Riddle who’d pinned Draco in place like an insect to a corkboard.

Riddle’s pale hand covered most of Draco’s paler forearm, and Hermione couldn’t say what he was doing, but it must have been awful, must have felt awful—the sharp angles that made up Draco’s face had rearranged themselves into crumpled lines of agony. And while Hermione couldn’t see Riddle’s face, his knuckles had bleached white from the force he was exerting on Draco’s arm.

Draco’s lips parted, and a loud, whistling gasp trickled out from between his clenched teeth.  

Hermione’s brain kicked into overdrive.

She couldn’t use magic. She was underage. She wouldn’t turn seventeen for another month. She couldn’t Stun Riddle, couldn’t Disarm him, couldn’t knock him off his feet.

Her hands tightened on her Patented Daydream Charm’s colorful box, crumpling the thin cardboard. Hermione glanced down, registered the dent she’d made, dismissed it. She returned her attention to Malfoy and Riddle, grasping for a thread of inspiration, but she kept coming back to what she couldn’t do.

She couldn’t Stun Riddle. Couldn’t Disarm him. Not with magic.

Not with magic.

Hermione dropped her eyes from the scene before her and gave the Daydream Charm a long, considering look.

She was a witch, yes, but she’d been a Muggle first, in practice if not in actuality. Magic was nice, but she didn’t need it. It wasn’t a crutch for her the way it was for people who’d grown up in the Wizarding world.

She weighed the box in her hands, considering.

It would have to do, wouldn’t it?

She reared up from behind the cauldrons, wound back her arm, and hurled the Daydream Charm at Riddle’s head.  

But Hermione was not an athlete, and had little in the way of upper body strength, and the momentum she’d put into her throw was not enough to carry the box very far at all.

The box landed several feet short of where Malfoy and Riddle stood, and the dull thunk it made was, most unfortunately, just loud enough to draw Riddle’s attention.

Riddle dropped Malfoy’s arm—Hermione got a fleeting impression of a dark splotch that might’ve been a bruise before Malfoy’s sleeve slipped back into place—and wheeled around, dark eyes flickering over the tragically squashed box before fixing unerringly on Hermione’s cauldrons.

Hermione could have gone. Riddle might have given chase, and he might not have. The point was, she could have tried to escape.

She didn’t. Feeling rather like a sad excuse for a jack-in-the-box, Hermione popped up from behind the cauldrons, took firm hold of her sense of righteous anger, and said, “Just what do you think you’re doing, Riddle? Unhand him this instant.”

The warbling quality of her voice possibly ruined the intended effect, if the tick of Riddle’s arched eyebrows was any indication. He certainly didn’t look shocked or fearful to see her. He hadn’t even blinked.

“Hermione…Granger, is it?” Riddle asked, as if getting her name right was the real concern here. “Your concern for Draco’s wellbeing is admirable, if misplaced, but I think you’re a bit confused? As you can see—” Riddle raised the hands that were decidedly not touching Malfoy. “—I’ve already unhanded him.”

Hermione’s cheeks stung. Where did Riddle get off, trying to make a fool of her when she’d caught him in the act of—something. Something dreadful, if Malfoy’s drawn, damp face was any indication.

“Only because I distracted you.” Hermione’s voice grew gradually steadier as her anger ate at her fear. She stomped around the cauldrons and marched right up to Malfoy to take a closer look at his face. “What on earth were you doing to him? He looks like he’s going to faint.”

Malfoy was, in fact, swaying like a paper ornament in a strong wind, and Hermione suspected that the wall at his back was all that was keeping him on his feet. Still, he marshalled himself enough to croak, “Piss off, Granger.”

“Now, Draco.” Riddle’s pleasant voice was right beside Hermione’s ear, and she all but tripped over herself to put some distance between them. “Is that any way to talk to the girl who thought she was coming to your rescue? It was admirable of her, wasn’t it, to overlook House rivalries in the name of chivalry?”

Hermione bristled. Riddle’s tone had been polite, even kind, but she hadn’t liked the inflection he’d put on chivalry. It was almost as if—well, it was if he was mocking her.

But Hermione had never had much patience for Tom Riddle, had she? Oh, his marks were the highest in the school—higher, even, than Hermione’s—and most students could vouch for him being the nicest Slytherin they knew, but Hermione had always thought that his polite demeanor came across as rather insincere. How nice could Riddle be, really, when he associated with thugs and bullies and vocal blood supremacists?

And how nice could he be if he cornered his classmates in dodgy alleys and caused them inexplicable pain?

Hermione momentarily shunted that aside, though, in favor of parsing what Riddle had said.

“What do you mean by that?” she asked, turning to look up at Riddle’s politely querying face. “That I thought I was coming to Malfoy’s rescue?”

“Quick on the uptake, this one,” Draco muttered, and then went silent at a flickering glance from Riddle.

And what sort of person could silence their friends with a look?

“I apologize for not explaining myself more clearly.” Riddle offered Hermione a small, warm smile that she did not return. “You took the situation entirely out of context, Hermione—is it all right if I call you Hermione?—not that I can blame you, of course. Now that I think about it, it must have looked quite dodgy to you—but I wasn’t hurting Draco. I was healing him. I was having a look at my handiwork when you turned up, you know, making sure I’d done it properly.”

Hermione gawped up at Riddle, noting vaguely that he seemed quite keen on maintaining unbroken eye contact. It was—it was unnerving, was what it was, far too weighty and far too probing, but Hermione hated to look away. She felt quite strongly that if she looked away, that if she so much as blinked, Riddle would have won.

Won what, exactly, Hermione couldn’t say, but if she was certain of anything just now, it was that she hated to lose.

“And what were you healing him of, exactly?” Hermione’s eyes were starting to sting from the strain of not blinking—and this discomfort so effectively stirred her sense of spite that she tacked on, acidly, “And, no, you may not call me Hermione. Granger will do.”

Riddle’s perfect smile flickered.

“Cut myself,” said Malfoy, grudging and perfunctory, and Hermione at last broke eye contact with Riddle to shoot Malfoy a startled look. She’d all but forgotten he was there. “What’re you looking at me like that for? There was a nail, about this long—” Malfoy held his thumb and forefinger three inches apart. “—sticking out of one of those carts, and I brushed against it, and it cut me.”

Hermione squinted at Malfoy’s pristine sleeve. “It tore through your skin, but not your robes? Or did Riddle mend those as well?”

Malfoy’s thin lips compressed. “My sleeves were rolled up. It’s a bit muggy today, which you ought to have noticed, Granger, seeing as your hair has managed, against all odds, to expand even further.”

Reflexively, Hermione rushed to pat down her hair, and Malfoy outright laughed at her, looking worlds cheerier than he had mere seconds ago.

Hermione’s hands dropped to her sides and fisted on her hips.

“I hope Riddle had the foresight to clean that cut before he healed it,” said Hermione, trying and failing to ignore her prickling cheeks. “I expect this place is positively crawling with Clostridium tetani.”

“Clostri—” Malfoy broke off before he could fail to pronounce Clostridium. “And what in Merlin’s good name is that supposed to be? Some sort of imaginary creature? Loony Lovegood’s been rubbing off on you, has she, Granger?”

“Obviously not,” said Hermione, channeling McGonagall at her most scathing. “It’s a bacterium. You know, the causative agent in tetanus?” Malfoy’s face went blank, and Hermione’s mouth twitched into a superior smile. “Lockjaw, Malfoy. Muggles immunize their children against it, of course, but as the Wizarding world is so technologically stagnated—”

That put some color in Malfoy’s pasty cheeks. “Watch your filthy mouth, you Mud—”

“Draco,” Riddle said quietly, and Malfoy’s teeth clicked as they came together, biting off the foul word he’d been about to call Hermione. “Slytherin has a reputation for fostering blood prejudice as it is—and not unfairly, I’ll admit. I’ll ask you not to tarnish our House’s name any further with your free use of blood slurs.”

The agitated color that’d suffused Malfoy’s cheeks drained away.

Hermione’s eyes bounced wildly to Riddle, but he was still smiling pleasantly. Neutrally.

Hermione’s fingers curled against her palms.

“If you were healing him,” she said, choosing her words for maximum effect, wanting to desperately to provoke a proper response, “then why did he look like he was in pain?”

Riddle’s smile didn’t falter. “Draco’s got a low pain tolerance.”  

Malfoy let out a little huff, but did not contradict Riddle.

Hermione was not discouraged.

“All right,” she said, allowing her skepticism to come through loud and clear. “What are you two doing in Knockturn Alley, then? It’s not very safe, this place.”

Riddle’s smile broadened.

“I could ask you the same question, Granger.” The way he formed her last name on his tongue was precise. Deliberate. He was following her order not to call her by her given name, but Hermione got the distinct impression that he was making fun of her. “It’s a bit—well, it’s a bit out of character, isn’t it, for a rule-abiding girl like you to come traipsing all alone into a shopping district that boasts a not-underserved reputation for pandering to practitioners of the less—how to put this diplomatically—mainstream magical arts?”

Hermione’s bottom lip trembled. She firmed it, but not, she suspected, in time to stop Riddle seeing it quiver.

“Perhaps I fancied a change of scenery,” she said. As tries went, it was fairly pathetic.

Riddle glanced over her shoulder.

“Ah,” he said, sounding—satisfied? Whatever he was feeling, Hermione didn’t like it. “But you weren’t alone, Granger, were you? I’d forgotten; you never go anywhere without them.”

Hermione jolted, half expecting to see a Dark wizard come skulking down the street with Harry’s and Ron’s mutilated corpses in tow, and she wasn’t—she wasn’t entirely wrong, either.

Lucius Malfoy was striding toward them, lacquered walking stick punching the cobblestones with each step that he took. Flanking him, wearing twin expressions that suggested that the Cruciatus Curse would be preferable to keeping their present company, were Harry and Ron.

At least one of the anxious knots that’d sprouted in Hermione’s stomach uncoiled; so strong was her relief at seeing Harry and Ron safe and whole that it didn’t even occur to her to scold them.

“Hermione,” said Ron, the relief Hermione felt reflected in the lines of his face, and he and Harry both made to rush at her, but then Lucius Malfoy spoke, and they froze in their tracks.

“Ah, Miss Granger.” Mr. Malfoy stopped just short of the squashed Daydream Charm; the buffed toes of his shoes grazed the cardboard. “Yes, I expected that I’d be seeing you shortly. After all, where you go, Mr. Potter and Mr. Weasley are sure to follow. Such devotion.”

Clearly well enough recovered from—whatever it was that Riddle had done to him—Draco snickered. Mr. Malfoy smiled patiently at his son, and then flickered a glance down his long, aristocratic nose. Hermione followed his gaze, and saw him nudge the Daydream Charm.

“Does this bit of rubbish belong to you, then, Miss Granger?” Mr. Malfoy asked this in cultivated tones of polite curiosity, but his mouth was sneering. “Only it seems rather…out of place.”

Mr. Malfoy wasn’t wrong: painted as it was in garish colors, the Daydream Charm’s packaging stood out against Knockturn Alley’s rather monochromatic landscape like a colorful pattern stitched into a set of tatty dark robes. Harry and Ron both rushed forward to pick the Daydream Charm up for Hermione, skulls nearly colliding in the process, only for Mr. Malfoy to draw his wand from his cane and send the box sailing into Hermione’s arms.

“Clearly the three of you have been shopping in Diagon Alley,” Mr. Malfoy went on, perhaps taking advantage of the fact that he had Harry, Ron, and Hermione well and truly cornered, “and so I can’t help but wonder how Mr. Potter and Mr. Weasley came to be patronizing Noggin and Bonce?”

Harry and Ron shuffled away from Mr. Malfoy and over to Hermione as though to physically flee from his drawling account of their misadventures. Ron grabbed Hermione’s wrist; his palm was clammy.

“Mr. Bonce was quite vexed with them, you know; they made quite a mess of his window display—I suspect that were it not for my intervention, Mr. Bonce would have pressed these fine young men into indentured servitude—that, or he’d have taken their right hands as fair payment for his damaged goods.”

Harry’s face drained of color. Ron gulped, fingers twitching on Hermione’s wrist.  

“Mr. Bonce sets store by some rather—outdated practices,” Mr. Malfoy said delicately.

So, as Hermione had suspected, Harry and Ron had ducked into a shop without realizing that Hermione was no longer on their tail—and Mr. Malfoy had caught them.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. See, this was what Hermione had meant when she’d warned them of the trouble they’d be sure to get themselves into.

“It’s not your business where we shop,” Ron piped up, rallying himself. “You’re not our dad.”

“And thank heavens for that,” said Mr. Malfoy, and this time, Draco’s snicker was more of a cackle. In her periphery, Hermione thought she saw Riddle fix Draco with what might’ve been a scathing look.

“Of course,” Mr. Malfoy said, “as your father figures are not here to do the duty themselves, I suppose it falls to me to see the three of you safely back to Diagon Alley.”

Mr. Malfoy had yet to put his wand away. What exactly would he do to the three of them if they failed to come along quietly?

He wouldn’t, she told herself. He wouldn’t risk a stay in Azkaban.

At least he hadn’t pressed them; at least he hadn’t asked them what they were doing here. Openly admitting to having deliberately followed the Malfoys would be pushing their luck to its breaking point.

And what about Riddle? He hadn’t been accompanying the Malfoys when they’d turned into Knockturn Alley, which meant he’d already been here.

Why had he been here?

“That’s kind of you, Mr. Malfoy,” Hermione said, and she sounded robotic to her own ears. Mr. Malfoy smiled at her wordlessly, so she took two unsteady steps forward, pulling Ron with her and hoping that Harry would follow without a fight. “Let’s get going, then.”

Ron opened his mouth, but Hermione stepped on his foot before he could dig them any deeper. Clamping his teeth together and looking mutinous, Ron shook Hermione off and marched up the street. Harry followed in Ron’s wake, sparing Hermione an unreadable look.  

Draco shouldered roughly past Hermione to catch up with his father, whose long strides had put him at the head of their little procession. As Draco went, Hermione glanced at his left arm, but unless there was a spell to give the caster X-ray eyes—Hermione made a note to look that up in Hogwarts’s library—she wouldn’t be getting a closer look at it any time soon.

“As you’re clearly bursting to ask,” Riddle said right in Hermione’s ear, making her start, “Mr. Malfoy brought us to Knockturn Alley with the intent of procuring me a gift.”

Hermione worked her jaw, wanting badly to say that she hadn’t seen Riddle turn down this street in the company of the Malfoys—but she couldn’t admit to having seen anything, could she?  

Riddle’s friendly smile grew, showing teeth. Hermione’s fingers twitched, full of pins-and-needles, buzzing with the magic she wasn’t permitted to use.

“A gift?” she parroted. It was the safest response she could think of.

“Yes.” Riddle traced his fingertip across the green and silver badge that was pinned to his chest. His fingernails, Hermione noticed, were cut close to the quick, but clean—most boys tended to let their nails get grubby, but not Tom Riddle. “I—well, you’ll forgive me if I sound like a braggart; I really don’t mean to—I was lucky enough to make Head Boy this year. Mr. Malfoy sees me as a sort of foster son, and he insisted on buying me a congratulatory gift.”

Your taste in father figures is rather poor, Hermione thought, and Riddle’s smile grew, almost as if he’d somehow heard her and found her uncharitable thoughts amusing rather than insulting.   

Hermione looked away. This street was too cramped. Riddle was too close.

“And I suppose your next question,” said Riddle, “will be ‘why Knockturn Alley’?”

Hermione stuck out her jaw, feeling a bit like Ron at his most mutinous. And speaking of, Ron himself kept craning his neck around to glare blatantly at Riddle, who appeared to be quite unaffected.

“It’s not as bad as it seems, Knockturn Alley.” Riddle gestured at their surroundings, surroundings which did nothing to support Riddle’s argument. “Oh, its reputation is well earned in some respects, but not every product sold on this street is inherently Dark, you know. Take Borgin and Burkes, for example—”

“I’ve heard of it,” said Hermione, cutting Riddle off, and was that a frown marring Riddle’s high, smooth forehead? “One of its more famous items for sale is a cursed necklace, I believe?”

“Kills its wearers instantly, yes,” said Riddle, grimacing apologetically as though he hated to talk of something so vile in polite company. “But there’s more to Borgin and Burkes than a cursed necklace, Granger. Everything in that shop is terribly valuable, of course, but most of its wares are neither Light nor Dark. Some haven’t got any magical properties at all, but are simply valuable on account of the famous names to which they were once attached.”  

“And which of these entirely neutral antiques,” said Hermione, the gritty feeling in her eyes telling her that she’d once again refrained from blinking for an inadvisably lengthy period of time, “did Mr. Malfoy select as your congratulatory gift?”

Riddle blinked—Hermione took the opportunity to blink as well—and then exhaled sharp and quick.

He’s laughing, Hermione realized belatedly. She didn’t like how it sounded: it was too high and cold, too unlike his voice and his looks, and it raised the fine hairs on Hermione’s arms.

“I don’t know, Granger,” said Riddle, still laughing under his breath, “as Mr. Malfoy hasn’t given it to me yet. I expect he’s got it somewhere on him, though.”

Hermione immediately squinted at Mr. Malfoy’s cloak and robes, thinking again of that hypothetical X-ray spell.

“It’s a shame,” said Riddle, as a growing square of buttery light heralded the nearing entrance to Diagon Alley. “You not being in seventh year.”

Hermione frowned at him. Did he enjoy making her work for clarification?

“And why,” she said grudgingly, “is that?”

“If you were in seventh year,” said Riddle, again brushing his fingertips over his new badge as though ascertaining that it was still there, that it hadn’t somehow fallen off, “I’m positive that you’d have made Head Girl.”

Oh. That. Well, obviously she would have done. Who else was there?

“Thank you.” Hermione didn’t really want to thank him, but she also wanted to maintain her modesty. “But I expect I’ll make Head Girl next year, so it’s not really a shame.”

“Quite certain of your chances, are you?” said Riddle, but there was nothing mean about his tone or his expression, so Hermione tried not to bristle. “Yes, I suppose you’re a shoo-in, but what I meant to say was that it’s a shame you’re not Head Girl now.”

The square of sunlight was growing brighter and whiter, and Hermione hastened her steps, thinking of wide, friendly, breathable Diagon Alley. Sirius and Mrs. Weasley would be looking anxiously all around for Harry, Ron, and Hermione, and Hermione would finally have an excuse to part company with Tom Riddle.

“And why,” said Hermione, wishing desperately for Harry and Ron and the Malfoys to budge out of the way so as to give her a clear, open exit, “is it a shame?”

Riddle wouldn’t stop touching his badge, and Hermione wanted to snap at him that he’d get his grubby fingerprints all over it if he wasn’t careful. But Riddle’s fingernails were clean, and his hair was tidy, and his cloak and robes—secondhand though they clearly were—were obviously well cared for, so Hermione supposed that he could manage the care and keeping of one little badge.

“If you were Head Girl,” said Riddle, his smile gradually shrinking till it had gone, his dark eyes intent on Hermione’s face, “then you and I would be counterparts, wouldn’t we? And I’d love to work more closely with you, Hermione.”

Hermione stumbled a step, then cursed herself. That was what she got for not keeping her eyes front. Riddle made to help her balance herself out, but she waved him off, not wanting him to touch her even fleetingly.

“Sorry,” said Riddle airily. “Slipped up. I meant to call you Granger. Wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

You already have, she thought, but the cobblestones were sloping sharply upward, and the unbroken sunlight was falling over her face. Diagon Alley was as packed as it had been half an hour ago, but she could finally breathe.

Without offering Riddle so much as a by-your-leave, Hermione jogged over to Harry and Ron, who were waiting for her with anxious looks on their faces.

“All right?” asked Ron. Obviously he’d decided that his concern for Hermione meant more to him than a sore foot.

“Yeah.” Hermione reached for Ron’s hand, and he took it. Hermione’s other hand was full of Daydream Charm, so Harry clasped her elbow. “I mean, yes. I’m perfectly fine.”

“You sure?” Ron pressed, squeezing Hermione’s fingers. “Because I’ve seen the family ghoul perkier than you’re looking right now.”  

Hermione shook off Ron’s hand, scowling, and glanced over her shoulder. Mr. Malfoy was pressing a square, flat parcel into Riddle’s hands, and Riddle’s lips were forming what were doubtlessly effusive thanks, but his eyes—

Riddle’s eyes were wide and greedy.

Well, of course they were. Riddle was poor, and the Malfoys were obscenely wealthy, so it was only natural that Riddle would be eager to get his hands on a lavish present. Hermione was reading too much into it. She looked away.

“So what d’you suppose,” Ron was saying, only to break off. “Ah, fuck. Mum’s on the warpath.” He went to step behind Harry, but Harry had already stepped behind him.

“And Sirius’s with her. Shit.”

“Think we ought to do a runner?”

At once, Hermione grabbed Harry and Ron by their collars and held them still, determined to face the oncoming lecture with dignity. She had more immediate concerns than Tom Riddle.

Chapter Text

1 September 1996

“…and if you spot any students attempting to vacate the train, apprehend them yourselves if it’s within your power to do so. If you can’t manage on your own, be sure to contact the trolley witch; she’ll sort them right out. Now. Any questions?”  

The gathered prefects all shook their heads mutely—all save for Hermione, whose hand had shot into the air before Tom Riddle could finish talking. Probably having foreseen this, Harry ducked to the side, the better to minimize the chances of an elbow-to-the-nose collision, a potential accident which unfortunately had some precedent. 

Riddle fixed the brunt of his attention on Hermione, a tiny smile playing at his mouth. Much as Hermione wanted to squirm under Riddle’s scrutiny—the memory of whatever it was he’d done to Draco Malfoy hadn’t faded over the last month, and had in fact remained as vivid as a wizard’s photograph—she firmed her lip and tilted her chin and kept her hand hovering stubbornly in the air.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got a question, do you, Granger?”

Riddle’s tone was not at all malicious—not on the surface, anyway—and he sounded for all the world like a close friend who knew her well enough to subject her to a bit of gentle teasing, but Draco Malfoy snickered, and Harry sat up a little straighter in his seat as though he were physically preparing himself to jump to Hermione’s defense.

Hermione ignored them both.

“Yes, actually, I do.” Hermione dropped her hand into her lap—careful not to knock Harry’s glasses askew on the way—and laced her fingers. “Suppose the trolley witch—” Someone really ought to tell Hermione what that woman’s name was one of these days; she’d asked several times already and nobody had yet to give a satisfactory answer. “—isn’t anywhere in the vicinity. What are we to do in such a situation?”

Someone groaned—Hermione couldn’t tell who, but that didn’t matter, as everyone in the carriage save for Riddle was eyeing her with mounting exasperation, even Harry.

And if Riddle was exasperated or irked, it didn’t show on his handsome face. If anything, his smile warmed.

“That’s a very good question, Granger—one that the rest of you lot could have stood to ask.” As admonitions went, it was gentle, but Hermione saw several of the other prefects sink a little lower in their seats as though feeling properly shamed. “But the trolley witch will know when there’s trouble. She’s been at this for a very long time, that woman, and she’s got excellent instincts.”

“But suppose—” Hermione pressed, but Riddle raised his hand, and, grudgingly, she shut her mouth.

“If the trolley witch fails to arrive on the scene in time to be of any use,” said Riddle, exhibiting all the patience of a seasoned professor in the face of a crowd of rowdy first years who never stopped asking why, “and the students in question prove to be—belligerent—you’ve got my blessing to hinder them with spell work. Incarcerous only, please, and then you may go and fetch the trolley witch.”

Malfoy had sat up from his slump at the mention of using spells against fleeing students, but now he scowled and sank back against his seat. Clearly he was disappointed to hear that he hadn’t permission to do lasting damage to his schoolmates.

Hermione was quite dissatisfied as well, but for reasons different than Malfoy’s. She couldn’t find any thread in the weave of Riddle’s logic that was worth picking at, and it set her teeth on edge to admit that he was shaping up to be quite well-suited to the post of Head Boy.

Well. It was only the first of the school year, and term had yet to technically start. There was still time to find something concretely wrong with the way Riddle went about things.

“Any further questions?” Riddle asked the compartment at large, but his eyes were all for Hermione. She shook her head, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of a verbal no, and he went on, “Right, then. Patrol for a bit, and then you’re free to meet up with your friends—just be sure to look in on the corridors every few hours thereafter.”

Hermione’s compartment had been the last in the prefects’ carriage to receive a briefing from the Head Boy or Girl, and it was into a deserted corridor that Hermione and her fellow stragglers filed.

“All right,” said Riddle, sliding the compartment door shut behind him. “Goldstein, Patil, Granger, and Potter—why don’t you patrol the carriages nearest the locomotive? The rest of you lot can come with me—we’ll patrol the carriages at the end of the train.”

Giving a parting nod to the Gryffindors and Ravenclaws, Riddle headed in the direction to which he’d assigned himself, the Hufflepuffs and Slytherins trotting along in his wake.

“Let’s get going, then, shall we?” Harry said to Hermione, one hand coming up to massage his shoulder as soon as the Hufflepuffs and Slytherins were out of sight—Malfoy had deliberately bumped into Harry on his way out of the carriage. “Think I saw Ron and Ginny pick a carriage up toward the front. We could look in on them while we’re patrolling; say hi, maybe.”

Hermione didn’t answer Harry straightaway, but rather stared off in the direction opposite the one she’d been instructed to patrol, gnawing anxiously at her lower lip. Anthony Goldstein and Padma Patil had already gone, so only Harry would know if Hermione chose to—

Harry’s knuckles bumped Hermione’s wrist as he curled his fingers around her sleeve, and she jumped, biting down too hard on her lip and tasting blood.

“Hermione, what’re you—blimey.” Harry ducked down to get a proper look at Hermione’s mangled lip. “You’re bleeding. Did I startle you? Sorry—”

“No, no, it’s nothing.” Harry was fumbling for his wand, but Hermione had already drawn hers, and pointed it at her lower lip with a muttered, “Episkey. See, I’m quite all right. Just—lost in thought, you know how I can be.”

“Term hasn’t even started,” said Harry, with the longsuffering air of someone who’d been best friends with Hermione Granger for most of their adolescence. “What’s there to get lost in thought about—” Harry’s bright eyes narrowed to slits. “Say, Hermione…”

Hermione waited for Harry to complete his sentence, and when he failed to follow through, she said, a little testily, “Well, what? What have you got to say, then? You can’t just start a sentence and then leave it dangling; that’s really quite irritating. We’ve got patrolling to do, or have you forgotten?”

“Is it Riddle?” Harry asked, a hard, shrewd look molding his face, and Hermione flushed hot and then cold. “It’s Riddle, isn’t it? He’s what’s on your mind, isn’t he? Hermione, what did he do to make you so—”

Hermione held up both hands as though to physically shield herself against Harry’s interrogation, and it actually worked in that Harry snapped his mouth shut. However, going by the way he folded his arms and rocked back on his heels, he’d probably only silenced himself in order to hear out a proper explanation.

Well, he was in for disappointment.

“No,” said Hermione. “No. See, this is precisely what I was afraid of—this is what you and Ron do; you hyper focus on behavior that you perceive as dodgy or malicious and then your grades suffer because you’re too distracted by Malfoy or some other miscellaneous Slytherin to pay attention in class. No,” she repeated when Harry opened his mouth. “I’m not telling you what went on in Knockturn Alley because—because there’s nothing worth telling. Riddle didn’t do anything to me, all right?”

Hermione rather resented the growth spurt Harry had undergone this past year; this telling off would have been far more effective had Harry lacked the ability to stare down his nose at her.

“He didn’t do anything to you, maybe,” said Harry, apparently working it out as he spoke, although Hermione supposed that he’d had loads of time to sort through his suspicions over the past month. “But he had to’ve done something to upset you, or else you wouldn’t be acting so—weird.”

Hermione wanted to pull her hair. She wanted to pull her hair out. Harry was generally oblivious to all but that which outright punched him in the face, and this spurt of selective attentiveness had reared its head at the worst possible time.

“Have you considered that he simply makes me uncomfortable in general?” Hermione could only hope that this partial truth would sound more convincing to Harry’s ears than it did to her own. “He stares quite a lot, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

It was the wrong thing to say; Harry’s hard expression took on an edge that was at once triumphant and despairing, as though Hermione had confirmed something he’d suspected but hadn’t wanted to believe.

“Yeah,” said Harry, talking in a whisper now as though mindful of being overheard. “He stares at you a lot. Lately, anyway. Hermione—”

“No, Harry.” Hermione’s face shifted to match Harry’s hard expression. “I’m done here. Now, you can neglect your duties all you like; I can tell you off, but I really can’t stop you. As for me, I’m off to do my job.”

Tossing her nose in the air in a decent imitation of Draco Malfoy at his most superior, Hermione darted around Harry and strode off as fast as she could—short of jogging, which wasn’t without its attractions.

Harry caught up with her in no time at all, though. Of course he did.

“We could go the other way instead, couldn’t we? Just for a little bit—have a look at Riddle and Malfoy, see if they’re up to something. I can go and fetch the Cloak—”

“Absolutely not.” Harry needn’t know that Hermione had already considered doing exactly that.

“Fine, then. If you don’t want to have anything to do with it, I’ll just go and have a look at Riddle and Malfoy on my own—”

Hermione came to such an abrupt halt that Harry, who’d been following close at her heels, bashed into her. Harry swore, but Hermione ignored the pain smarting all along her back and hips in favor of wheeling around and hissing into Harry’s face.

“Try it,” said Hermione, pushing the words through her teeth so that they slurred, “and I’ll have that Cloak confiscated.”

Harry blanched, then flushed, and Hermione’s chest stung with a kind of spiteful triumph.

“You wouldn’t,” he said, but he sounded not at all confident, and his eyes darted all around the carriage as though it could yield some sort of solution to his pains.  

Feeling at once bolstered by victory and weighed down with guilt—Harry treasured that Invisibility Cloak as much as for its sentimental value as its usefulness—Hermione said, quietly but with feeling, “I think you know that I very well would, should it come to that. I wouldn’t be happy about it, mind you, and I’m sure you’d ignore me for weeks if not months—”

“I would not,” said Harry, but only for form’s sake, as he and Ron had already done as much on one or two prior occasions.  

“—but I’m willing to go to great lengths to keep you and Ron away from Tom Riddle and out of trouble.”

But Harry had stopped scowling, and Hermione knew, instinctively, that his brightened expression could mean nothing good even before he opened his mouth and said, “Dumbledore would just return it to me, you know. The Cloak, I mean.”

Hermione clenched her teeth. Professor Dumbledore was a bloody enabler, was what he was.

“Then I’ll be sure to pass it into Professor McGonagall’s care; she’s always been quite sensible in most respects, aside from those to do with Quidditch. I still think it was a bit rash of her to allow you to play Seeker in your first year—”

“…did himself in, did you hear?”

Hermione hated to speak ill of teachers, especially the ones that she really liked, so it was with some relief that she broke off her reluctant critique of Professor McGonagall in order to peer down the carriage, ears straining for confirmation of what she thought she’d heard.

“What?” said Harry. His scowl had begun to reform as Hermione had aired her complaints regarding the flouting of age restrictions, but now it dropped. “What’s going—”

Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil had strolled out of the adjacent carriage and into this one, arms linked, talking in the breathless tones that heralded fresh gossip.

“Well, this is going to sound a bit insensitive,” Lavender was saying, “but I’m not that sorry to see him gone. Oh, hello!”

Lavender and Parvati had started at the sight of Harry and Hermione, eyes wide with what might have been guilt, but now Lavender smiled sunnily and shamelessly.

“Have a good summer?” Lavender asked them.

“Yes, it was fine,” Hermione said a touch impatiently. “Sorry, Lavender, we couldn’t help but overhearing—did you say that someone’s—you know—”

Lavender, Parvati, and Harry all goggled at Hermione, possibly stunned to see her show even a passing interest in gossip.

“Oh, that.” Lavender tittered, but it was half wild, and Hermione realized that she was—that she was uncomfortable, either at the subject or at having been caught discussing it. “Well—er—it’s nasty business, really, but as you asked—”

“Evan Rosier killed himself over the summer holidays,” Parvati said, all in a rush, and Hermione’s stomach pitched. Rosier, Rosier, where did she— “You know, that Slytherin in the year ahead of ours, the one who was best mates with Tom Riddle?”

Hermione felt—nothing much at all, and that felt wrong, somehow, that she could be entirely unaffected by the news of someone’s death simply because she hadn’t known him. All she could think, as she exchanged a look with an equally blank-faced Harry, was that it always came back to Tom Riddle.

“He must be cut up something awful, mustn’t he, Riddle?” Lavender said, tucking a spiraling curl of hair behind her ear. “I don’t even want to think about how I’d feel if I—you know—lost someone like that.”

“Nor do I,” said Parvati, shuddering.

“Do either of you know how it happened?” Hermione asked, and felt Harry’s disbelieving stare drilling into the side of her head. “How he did it?”

“Nobody knows for sure. A self-inflicted Killing Curse—” Lavender grimaced. “—seems to be the popular theory, though.”

“I don’t think so,” said Parvati, face alight with a sort of repulsed fascination. “You need real talent to pull off a curse like that, don’t you, and from what I hear, Rosier never was worth much. Though I don’t suppose he’d have had any trouble with intent; he was always—I hate to talk this way about a dead person—but he was always rather hateful.”

“It happened in August, didn’t it?” said Lavender. “Early August, I think, but I’m not sure. His family hasn’t released an official statement to the Prophet, have they?”

“If they haven’t, I wouldn’t blame them; it must be quite painful, all this. Still, they really ought to squash the rumors. I heard Daphne Greengrass saying to Millicent Bulstrode that Rosier swallowed a goblet of poison. But Bulstrode thinks Rosier must’ve had someone else brew it for him, as he was useless at Potions…”

Lavender gave a theatrical little gasp, and Hermione thought she knew why. If Bulstrode was right in her thinking—unlikely—then someone had been complicit in Rosier’s suicide. Even putting that ugly theory aside, this news was entirely disturbing for reasons beyond the awful reality of suicide—

“Correct me if I’m remembering wrong, but I believe I asked the two of you to patrol the corridors? Perhaps I’m misinterpreting things, but what you’re doing here looks rather a lot like loitering to me.”

Lavender and Parvati pressed their hands to their mouths, and Harry started, and Hermione felt as rooted to the spot as if she’d been petrified.  

And then—

And then wildly, absurdly, Hermione could think of nothing but those vintage cartoons, of how the little animated anthropomorphic animals could, on occasion, be so badly frightened that they’d literally leap out of their skins from the shock of it, and that—

That was how Hermione was feeling right now, as though escaping her skin and leaving it behind would be an attractive alternative to turning around and facing the person who’d come up behind her.

Harry was the first to recover: he wheeled around, knocking his elbow against Hermione’s in the process.

“Sorry, Hermione,” Harry muttered perfunctorily, and then demanded of Riddle, “What are you doing down here? You said you were going to patrol the other end of the train.”

Riddle’s sculpted brows jumped toward his hairline, and he said in tones of mild rebuke, “I am Head Boy, Potter—but I can’t blame you for being unused to my change in rank; it is a recent development. I thought I’d double back and see how my prefects are doing on this end of the train.”

Hermione’s fingers twitched.

My prefects, he’d said.

Had anyone else said it, Hermione wouldn’t have given it a second thought, and they did answer to Riddle, but hearing a possessive pronoun on Riddle’s lips in relation to them was terribly off putting.

“What about Cho Chang?” Harry was asking in reference to this year’s Head Girl. “Couldn’t’ve sent her, could you?”

“Chang was already patrolling the back end of the train, Potter.” The corners of Riddle’s mouth curled up in what Hermione couldn’t help but read as amusement at Harry’s expense. “As it turns out, I should have been up here from the start.”

Reflexively, Hermione wet her lips. Beyond the throwaway line about loitering, Riddle had yet to make any explicit references to their partaking in gossip. Had the memory of what’d transpired in Knockturn Alley been less fresh in her mind, it was possible that Hermione wouldn’t’ve picked at Riddle’s motives—as it was, she couldn’t help but fancy that he was deliberately drawing things out, trying to see if he could make them squirm.  

Well, bollocks on that.

“We were only—” Riddle’s eyes flickered to Hermione and fixed unblinkingly on her face, and she was struck by the itching suspicion that he’d been waiting for her to speak, waiting for an excuse to stare her down. Stamping out the quiver in her voice, Hermione tried again, “Yes, well, you caught us out, but it’s not as if we were doing anything wrong. We only stopped for a bit to say hello to our friends.”

Possibly in reaction to Hermione’s nerve, either Lavender or Parvati made a breathless little noise.

“Talking of your friends,” said Riddle, looking over Hermione’s shoulder, “I really think they ought to return to their compartment. If the two of you will move along, please?”

With muttered apologies to Harry and Hermione, Lavender and Parvati scurried off at once, probably not keen on receiving detentions before term could start.

For their parts, Harry, Hermione, and Riddle had begun to draw attention; people were pressing their noses against their compartments’ frosted glass windows and inching hopefully toward their shut doors as though wondering how to discreetly crack them open an inch. Hermione’s nape itched, but none of those curious looks could compare to Riddle’s unblinking stare.

“Potter,” said Riddle, not taking his eyes off Hermione, “sorry, I meant to tell you earlier—but Chang’s asking for you. Turns out we split the prefects up unevenly, and they’re one short down there. Why don’t you go on? I’ll keep Granger company for you.”

No, was all Hermione could think. No, thank you.

“I think I’ll stay here, actually.” Harry’s voice was as cool as the first bite of winter, and when Hermione gripped his arm as though to hold him in place, she felt more than saw Riddle’s eyes track the movement.

“Now, really, Potter,” said Riddle, at once exasperated and patient, as though Harry were a recalcitrant first year. “Term’s not even started, and I hate giving out detentions, especially to prefects.”

Hermione’s fingers trembled where they clasped Harry’s arm. If there was anything she was less keen on than being alone with Riddle, it was Harry getting into trouble before term could start. Worse still was the possibility of an altercation between Harry and Riddle; Hermione had seen Harry in a rage, and it wasn’t pretty.

More disturbing still, what had transpired on the third of August rose to the surface of Hermione’s mind in a graphic flash. It had been discomfiting enough to see Malfoy in such obvious pain; the very thought of Riddle putting that look of agony on Harry’s face turned Hermione’s stomach.

“Go on, Harry,” said Hermione, thinking that she’d be perfectly fine, that Riddle couldn’t do anything to her, that they were never truly alone aboard the Hogwarts Express.

“Hermione—”

“If they’re really in need of another prefect at the other end of the train, you ought to go on.” Hermione’s fingers curved into claws that pinched, and Harry jerked out of her grip. “Really,” she insisted, staring him full in the face.

“I don’t—”

“Harry Potter, if you land yourself in detention before term can so much as start, I swear to God that I won’t lift a finger to help you the next time you’re struggling through your Potions homework—and we ought to be getting quite the load of homework this year, oughtn’t we, seeing as we’ll be taking N.E.W.T. level courses?”

Hermione’s words were harsh, but her eyes were pleading. Please, she willed Harry, please don’t do this.

Harry’s eyes softened momentarily before flashing full of fire again, and Hermione knew at once that she had won, if only by an infinitesimal margin. And then Harry scowled—first at Riddle, then at Hermione—and stormed off.

Hermione suspected that Harry had no intention of going very far—that he had no intention at all of joining Cho Chang at the other end of the train—but at least she had put some space between her best friend and Tom Riddle.

Riddle was apparently unaffected by Harry’s ungracious departure, and immediately offered his arm to Hermione as though they were the dramatis personae of some silvery film out of the 1940’s.

“Shall we get going, then?”

Hermione eyed Riddle’s arm as though it were a cobra set to bite her, considered how suspicious it would look if she refused to take it, and finally, reluctantly, set the very tips of her fingers against the inside of Riddle’s forearm.

“Have a good August?” Riddle asked once they’d got going, and Hermione only barely bit back a groan. Small talk? Really?

“Good enough,” said Hermione, hoping against hope that her clipped tone would deter further overtures.

It did not.

“I quite enjoyed my summer, personally—most of it, anyway.” Apparently Riddle was determined to wring this stilted conversation for all it was worth. “But I’m glad to be returning to Hogwarts.”  

So they weren’t going to acknowledge what had gone on in Knockturn Alley. Hermione had expected as much, but she’d also considered the possibility that Riddle might want to test the waters, so to speak—to feel around for any inclinations on Hermione’s part to go to an authority figure with what she’d seen.

“So am I,” said Hermione, belated, as she considered what she wanted to say next. Well, truthfully, she didn’t want to say anything, exactly, but—

“I suppose you’ll know about Evan, then.” Riddle had been surveying the packed compartments, but now he smiled at Hermione as though to soften what he’d said. “Don’t look like that; I’m not angry. Besides, from what I could tell, it was Brown and Patil doing the gossiping, wasn’t it?”

Yes. About that.

Hermione stared hard at the floor.

“I’m sorry.” The condolence skipped off her tongue, stilted and awkward. “About—I mean—I’m sorry for your loss. You and Evan Rosier were close, weren’t you?”

And Hermione dragged her gaze away from the carpet in order to look fully into Riddle’s face, trying to convey sincerity with the assistance of eye contact, only to falter at what she saw.

Riddle’s face had gone entirely blank. No grief, no bravely playing off the sadness that he ought to’ve been feeling.

Well—well, there was nothing wrong with that, exactly, was there? Some people reacted to grief with shock. Some people numbed themselves against the flood of feeling. That had to be—surely it—

But Riddle had already rearranged his face, eyes downcast, mouth forming a sorrowful little smile. His expression had shifted so quickly, in fact, that Hermione momentarily doubted that it had gone blank at all.

But, no. Hermione was quite certain of what she’d seen.

“Thank you, Hermione—sorry, Granger—” Riddle pulled an apologetic face, but his lashes continued to droop over his eyes as though to shutter his grief. “That’s very kind of you. Evan was an only child, you know, so I expect I’ll be the primary recipient of condolences once word properly spreads—not that I don’t appreciate them, of course, especially coming from you.”

Riddle patted the fingers that Hermione had reluctantly set on his arm as he said this last bit, and Hermione wanted to snatch her hand away. She nearly did.

What had he meant by that, by saying that he was especially appreciative of her sympathies? They were virtual strangers. She meant nothing to him.

“You’re—you’re welcome,” said Hermione, forcing the platitude through a throat that’d seized tight.

“But, well—I’m sorry, I hope I don’t sound rude when I say this—I’d rather not dwell on what—on what happened to Evan.” Riddle’s voice cracked quite convincingly here, but Hermione could not rid herself of how quickly he’d shifted expressions, of how perfectly he’d conveyed his grief. “Could we talk about something else? I’d like to keep my mind off it while I still can, before, you know—”

“Before word properly spreads,” said Hermione. “Right. Of course.”

The trolley witch came trundling down the corridor now, and Riddle pulled them both out of her path, squishing them against the narrow bit of wall between two compartments. Hermione’s shoulder bumped Riddle’s, and she inhaled reflexively, expecting her nose to get stopped up with whatever cloying cologne that was fashionable amongst boys this year—and got only the clean, sharp smell of whatever soap he’d used to shave that morning.

That made sense, though, didn’t it? Riddle surrounded himself with the sons of well-off pureblood families, but he was too poor himself to waste his scarce funds on imported scents.

“Anything off the trolley, dears?” The little old witch came to a halt, her heavily lined face wreathed in a benevolent smile.

“No, thank you, ma’am,” said Riddle.

It took Hermione a moment to identify the feeling that was clogging her throat as irritation. Riddle had spoken for the both of them without asking Hermione first, and while it was true that Hermione hadn’t wanted any sweets—nothing on that cart was sugar free, and Hermione didn’t trust her sweet tooth not to betray her—she’d have liked the chance to speak for herself.

“All’s well, by the way,” Riddle was saying to the trolley witch. “This year’s lot appears to be free of flight risks—then again, the day’s only just started, hasn’t it? Best not to speak too soon.”

The trolley witch tittered at this, as easily charmed by Riddle as all adults were, and moved on, pushing her cart of sweets. Up and down the carriage, doors were sliding open as students filtered out with coins in their hands and hunger on their faces.

Riddle stepped away from the wall, pulling Hermione with him, and cut through the growing crowd of students with the ease of a knife through hot butter. Not a single shoulder so much as grazed Hermione’s, as though Riddle’s particular affinity for clearing as much space as he wanted or needed had extended to cover Hemione like a charm.

“Granger,” Riddle said once they’d cleared the carriage brimming with hungry students and moved on to a quieter corridor, “I hope you don’t mind my saying this—and I don’t mean to play up my House’s more, ah, negative traits—but that was very Slytherin of you, what you did back there. How you got Potter to cooperate, I mean.”

For the first time that day, Hermione permitted herself to scowl openly at Riddle, who smiled serenely back.

“Are you calling me manipulative, Riddle?”

“Not at all,” said Riddle, eyes widening in picture perfect shock. “I’ve offended you after all, haven’t I? I’m sorry, Granger. No, I’m not accusing you of being a manipulative person, not in general—although I don’t know you well enough to generalize—but everyone’s capable of being manipulative when it suits them, aren’t they?”

Hermione pressed her lips together, determined, for once, to keep her mouth shut for fear of what might come out of it.

“But—” Riddle’s eyes were still quite wide, but his features had shifted around them, so that he looked less shocked and more compelling, as though he was trying to impress upon her something of utmost importance. “But manipulative behavior’s not evil in of itself, is it? It can be employed for the greater good, can’t it? By goading Potter into leaving back there, you saved me the necessity of giving him a detention.”

“Yes,” said Hermione after a beat, because it seemed to be what he wanted to hear, and she’d do just about anything in that moment to stop him looking at her like that. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

Riddle nodded, apparently satisfied, and faced front again. Hermione’s shoulders wanted to droop from the sheer relief that the broken eye contact afforded her.  

“I’m glad you’re open to new perspectives, Granger,” said Riddle. “But I expected as much from a brilliant girl like you.”

Yes. Brilliant.

The thing was—the thing was, it wouldn’t even take a brilliant person to see something wrong with Riddle’s perfect grief, not if they’d seen him in Knockturn Alley on the third of August.

August. Evan Rosier had died—had committed suicide—in early August. The question was, had he died before or after the third? Because if he’d died on the first or the second, if Riddle had heard the bad news by that point, if the resultant grief had been fresh as a new wound, then why had he behaved as though nothing were wrong? Why had he been in the right frame of mind for accepting celebratory presents?

It was all conjecture, of course. Hermione had only a piece of the whole picture. She didn’t really know anything.

But it’s the not knowing that’s the trouble, Hermione thought as she glanced sidelong at Tom Riddle and then away, as the fingers that grazed his sleeve prickled as though from an electric shock. It was the not knowing that had put her in a state of exquisite, visceral unease.

Chapter Text

2 September 1996

“Here you are, Dobby,” Hermione said warmly, presenting the excitable little house-elf with a neatly wrapped if rather lumpy parcel. “I knitted them in all sorts of colors and patterns so you could mix them up the way you like to—I’d have made more, but as I couldn’t use magic over the holidays—”

“Oh, no, Miss Granger!” Dobby’s protuberant eyes were bright and damp, but he was smiling wide enough to show teeth, so they had to’ve been happy tears, at least. “Dobby would be honored to receive even a single unwashed sock from a witch as great as Miss Hermione Granger—even if it were twenty years old and smelled of toilet water, Dobby would still—”

“That’s all right, Dobby, really,” said Hermione. As much as she lived for well-earned commendations, hearing Dobby talk that way had her shifting awkwardly on the spot. “You don’t need to lavish me with praise for something like this. Besides—” Hermione gave Dobby’s bony little hands a squeeze where they clutched at the parcel in its pearlescent wrapping. “—you’re one of my favorite people, and friends give each other gifts, don’t they?”

The sheen of tears glossing Dobby’s eyes welled up and spilled over, dribbling down his long nose and giving him the appearance of a leaking tap. Hermione wanted to swear.

“M-Miss Hermione Granger considers Dobby a friend!” Dobby wailed, wiping at his tears with one hand and clutching desperately at his parcel of socks with the other. “Dobby is suh-so honored!”

“Dobby—Dobby, you needn’t cry.” Aware that it might distress him that much further but unable to stop herself offering comfort to someone who needed it, Hermione gathered the little elf up in her arms like she would a small child. Her own eyes had already begun to itch with sympathetic tears. “Please—please stop crying.”

Dobby gave a great, wet sniffle—Hermione winced when she felt her collar grow damp with something that wasn’t tears but had probably come out of Dobby’s nose—and then went quiet, apparently having taken Hermione’s request as an order. Just this once, only this once, Hermione was grateful for Dobby’s ingrained obedience.  

“There, now.” Hermione sat back on her heels and shook her sleeve out over her hand, patting Dobby’s face dry. “That’s all right, now, isn’t it?”

Dobby gave Hermione a watery smile, and she smiled back even as she silently prayed that her gestures of comfort wouldn’t set him off again.

“You’ll show your new socks to your friends in the kitchens, won’t you, Dobby?” Hermione asked, hoping that talk of elfish welfare might distract Dobby from his own histrionics. “And could you please tell them that if they’d like some nice warm socks of their own, they should head on up to Gryffindor Tower and ask for Hermione Granger?”

Dobby’s smile lost its wavering quality, but it shrank a bit as well, and his great bat ears seemed to droop.

“Dobby will try, Hermione Granger.” Dobby patted Hermione’s shoulder in an echo of the comforting gestures she’d offered him. “But the other house-elves were still quite uninterested in wearing proper clothes the last Dobby checked.”

“Oh,” Hermione managed, hoping that the sting of disappointment didn’t show on her face.

“Perhaps Miss Hermione Granger could knit Dobby’s friends some nice tea cozies?” Dobby said as he continued to pat Hermione’s shoulder with the air of a parent calming their distraught child. “They’d be very honored to receive presents—presents that aren’t proper clothes, that is—from a witch as kind and brilliant as Miss Granger.”

Hermione wanted to tell Dobby that he was missing the point entirely—she had, in part, knitted Dobby a new batch of socks because she liked him and wanted to give him something for the sake of it, but gifting him with clothes was an ultimately symbolic gesture. She wanted Dobby to wear those socks as a symbol of the freedom to which he had every right, and she wanted the other Hogwarts house-elves to do the same.

But she said, a little haltingly, “That’s a good idea, Dobby. Perhaps I’ll do that.”

And perhaps she should—perhaps gifts of tea cozies could function as the first rungs on the ladder to elfish freedom.  Yes. That was brilliant. She ought to ease the elves into it, was what she ought to do.

“Miss Granger is very kind!” beamed Dobby, and Hermione grinned back—only for the grin to fall off her face when she happened to glance over Dobby’s skinny shoulder and registered the faces of the two boys who’d just turned into the Fat Lady’s corridor.

Three times. Three times was a pattern, wasn’t it? If this was some sort of intimidation play, Hermione wasn’t having it.

Hermione shot to her feet, in part to appear taller—fat lot of good though it did her; Riddle and Malfoy both towered over her—and in part so she could step in front of Dobby as a sort of living shield. Riddle and Malfoy could try and intimidate Hermione all they liked—she could handle herself—but she’d be damned if she let them upset Dobby or any other house-elf on her watch.

“What are the two of you doing up here?” Hermione asked once Riddle and Malfoy were within earshot, not bothering to feign politeness. “This is the Fat Lady’s corridor, not the dungeons.”

“We haven’t been Confunded, Granger,” drawled Malfoy, and Hermione felt the tug on her robes as Dobby reached out and clutched them. “We know which corridor this is.”

Dobby gave a nigh-inaudible squeak of muted terror, but when Hermione reached back to pat him on the head, his violent tremors eased a bit.

“We’re patrolling, Granger, the same as you,” Riddle said in tones that were worlds politer than Malfoy’s. “It is past curfew for students below fifth year.”

“And again,” said Hermione, strangling the temper out of her voice in a sort of spiteful effort to match Riddle’s for politeness, “I’d like to know why you’re patrolling the seventh floor and not the dungeons. You know, where students in your House ought to be after hours?”

“You make a fair point, Granger.” Riddle clasped his hands behind his back and regarded Hermione with a smile that she’d have called indulgent had she seen it on the face of a friend. “But have you considered that students who’ve broken curfew are unlikely to linger near their common rooms?”

Drat. Hermione floundered for five seconds too long before marshalling herself.

“Well—well, you needn’t have bothered, as I’m the only person here. Obviously.” She’d have counted Dobby as well, but she was reluctant to draw attention to him in Draco Malfoy’s presence. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“Hang on a moment.” Malfoy craned his neck, eyes going wider and wider till they resembled nothing so much as grey marbles. “Granger—is that Dobby cowering behind your skirts? It is, isn’t it?”

Caught, Dobby made a sound like a strangled squeeze toy.

“Dobby,” said Hermione. She hated to give house-elves even the kindest of orders, but desperate times and all that. “Why don’t you return to the kitchens? Your friends must be missing you by now.”

“Thank you, Miss Hermione Granger!” said Dobby, squeaky voice gone wobbly with blatant relief, and Hermione felt more than a little relieved herself when she heard the sharp crack that signaled the elf’s departure.

Malfoy’s sneer grew two sizes. Hermione smiled grimly in return.

“Think you’re clever, don’t you, Granger?” Malfoy swaggered closer, but Hermione planted her feet and refused to shrink away. “You and Potter? First Potter steals my family’s house-elf out from under us, and then you go on a crusade for, what was it, elfish rights? They’re elves, you bleeding heart; they haven’t got any rights.”

Hermione swelled up, all thoughts of keeping her composure fleeing temporarily from her head. How privileged and ignorant could one person be, really?

“House-elves are sapient beings with magic and feelings of their own, and they’ve just as much right to live their lives unshackled as you do, you spoilt, elitist little—”

“That’s enough, the both of you.”

Riddle had spoken softly, but his talent for making himself heard clearly without having to raise his voice worked as well now as ever: Malfoy immediately backed down; and Hermione snapped her mouth shut, more from shame at being chastised like a child than any real compulsion to follow Riddle’s orders.

As Hermione’s eyes skipped away from the silently seething Malfoy to a disappointed-looking Riddle, she thought she saw Malfoy grip his forearm, fingers spasming as if in pain—but when she did a doubletake, both of Malfoy’s arms were hanging loose at his sides.

“As a proponent of inter-House unity,” Riddle was saying, “I’m quite ashamed of you both. Clearly you can’t be expected to behave like reasonable adults whenever you’re within five feet of each other.”

Malfoy flushed a blotchy pink, and Hermione, too, felt color rising in her cheeks. Riddle had an awful lot of nerve, talking down to them as if they were children—

But hadn’t Hermione done the same to her friends and peers as well whenever she’d thought they were carrying themselves with less dignity than they ought to’ve done? If she disparaged Riddle for doing as much as she’d have done, wouldn’t that make her an awful hypocrite?

“I’m sorry.” Hermione had to force the apology out of her throat and onto her tongue, and the end result was that she sounded quite strangled. “If you think that I—that we—deserve detention, then—”

“Detention?” Riddle’s frown flickered. “Who said anything about detention? If I gave out a detention for every row I came across, Mr. Filch would be in a much better mood in general, wouldn’t he? No, Granger. I’m not going to give you a detention. Nor you, Draco.”

Hermione chewed on the corner of her lip, waiting for the other shoe to drop. But when Riddle failed to do anything more than stare placidly at her, she said, “All right, then. I’ll get going, shall I?”

Hermione couldn’t resist sparing another glance at Malfoy’s arm—and he must have caught her look, too, because he wrapped his right hand around his left forearm as though to shield it from her searching look. Mouth twisting to one side, Hermione made to walk around Malfoy and Riddle, her thoughts fixed on what she hadn’t quite seen in Knockturn Alley—

“Actually,” said Riddle, and Hermione’s steps stuttered to an awkward halt. She hadn’t made it all the way around them, the upshot of which being that she now stood far too close to Riddle for her own comfort. “Actually, Granger, I was going to ask you to patrol with me. Draco, you can go and patrol the ground floor.”

Malfoy didn’t argue the point, and it was unclear if his cooperative mood had roots in wanting to please Riddle or wanting to get away from Hermione’s searching looks. Whatever is motives, he offered Riddle a mute nod—quite unlike the Malfoy who could never shut up, that—and strode out of the Fat Lady’s corridor. 

And for the first time in Hermione’s life, she was actually quite sorry to see Malfoy go. She was half tempted to call him back, if only to delay the inevitable reality of being alone with Tom Riddle, but her energies were better put to dealing more constructively with her present…quandary.

So.

“Er,” Hermione prevaricated, feeling the corridor’s walls press in on her as acutely as if they’d been enchanted to shrink, “this’ll be the second time in two days, won’t it? That we’ll be. Um. Patrolling together.”

What she didn’t say was: Why’re you suddenly paying me so much attention after five solid years of failing to exchange more than ten words with me? Still. Perhaps the subtext carried through in her tone.

“What can I say?” Riddle half shrugged, positively dripping the sort of innate elegance that his well-off pureblood peers couldn’t hope to effectively replicate. “You’re pleasant company, Granger. I enjoyed our joint patrol of the Hogwarts Express, and I wouldn’t mind repeating the experience.”

Was she coloring every word Riddle spoke with what she’d felt in Knockturn Alley, or had he a talent for weaving double meanings into ostensibly innocuous compliments?

“I thought you were cross with me.” And, truthfully, she’d have preferred Riddle’s disdain to his friendliness. “Weren’t you feeling ashamed of my behavior not five minutes ago? Have you forgiven me already?”

Riddle tilted his head and studied her. He allowed the silence to grow till Hermione felt itchy with it, before finally smiling and saying, “I’m finding it…difficult to stay cross with you. Your friends must feel the same way, I’m sure.”

Hermione goggled at Riddle far longer than was polite, and then blurted, “Actually, even Harry and Ron think that I can be quite difficult to get on with, and they’re my best friends. The general consensus goes that I’m a bit of an unbearable swot, really, or haven’t you heard?”

She’d expected Riddle to—she wasn’t quite sure what she’d expected of him. To laugh at her, maybe, or to delicately sidestep awkward talk of how widely she was disliked by those outside of her immediate social circles. She certainly hadn’t expected that he’d frown as though affronted on her behalf.

“I don’t like to generalize other Houses, Granger, but if that’s how Gryffindors treat their friends, I’m glad to be a Slytherin.” Riddle ate up the space between them with one neat stride, eyes intent on Hermione’s face. “But I reckon it all comes down to jealousy, really. Everyone wants to be brilliant—to be special—but real brilliance is innate, not learned, and when people realize that, they lash out at the truly brilliant.”

Hermione’s face locked into a frown to match Riddle’s.

“Anyone can excel if they try,” she argued. Riddle had said that he didn’t like to generalize, yet here he was, generalizing about what did and didn’t count as true brilliance. “You shouldn’t dismiss people out of hand like that.”

“Oh, I hadn’t meant to—well, you must think I’m a right prat, mustn’t you? I’m sorry, Granger, I didn’t mean to imply that our schoolmates were a load of idiots.” Riddle ducked his head, charmingly shamefaced, but Hermione wasn’t buying one iota of it. “What I meant to say was that people tend to underestimate their own abilities, and when they meet someone like you—someone to whom brilliance comes easily, naturally—they downplay their own potential in favor of envying yours.”

It was convincing, really, how he backtracked and explained himself, but Hermione had seen his face when he’d talked of innate brilliance. She’d seen his upper lip curl ever so slightly with what she suspected was deep-seated disdain for their peers. She’d seen it. She was certain. Dead certain.

“And you’re not just brilliant, are you, Granger?” Riddle was saying, his hooded eyelids dropping to half mast, his smile going indulgent again. “You’re kind as well, aren’t you? I saw you with that house-elf—Dobby, was it? Yes, I know Dobby—I holidayed at Malfoy Manor the summer before Dobby was freed, did you know that?”

Riddle paused as though to give Hermione a chance to answer, so she said, “No. I didn’t know that.”

“Right, well—I don’t mean to speak ill of Draco’s family, but let’s just say that it’s probably for the best that Potter tricked Mr. Malfoy into freeing that elf. I think it’s admirable, what you’re doing for house-elves like Dobby. Oh, yes.” Riddle’s smile grew wider, flashing teeth perfect enough to make Hermione’s parents sigh. “I’ve heard of your organization. S.P.E.W., was it? You caused quite a stir two years ago, making your rounds with your collecting tin.”

Any gratification Hermione may have felt at Riddle getting S.P.E.W.’s name right on the first try was cancelled out by a vivid image of the Slytherins gathered in their subterranean common room, having a laugh at the expense of Hermione and her tin.

“You needn’t bother telling me how many people look down on S.P.E.W., thanks,” Hermione snapped, cheeks full of agitated color. “I’m quite aware that most of our peers can’t be bothered to care about the exploitation of slave labor.”

Riddle’s handsome face became momentarily pinched. His expression smoothed immediately out again, but before it could, Hermione saw genuine irritation flash through his eyes.

“I need to choose my words a bit more carefully when I’m around you, don’t I?” said Riddle. “I suspect the fault lies with me for making such a poor impression back in August—no, I haven’t forgotten—but I’ve got to admit, Granger, your misinterpreting every single thing that I say and jumping immediately on the defensive has grown rather tiresome.”

The blood that’d risen in Hermione’s cheeks seemed to drain all at once so that she felt positively dizzy from its exodus. No, not just dizzy—she felt like she’d been slapped.

“I’m sorry,” she said, not feeling sorry at all, “but didn’t you just say that the fault lies with you for scaring me in the first place? Where do you get off, Riddle, making me feel guilty over perfectly justifiable mistrust—”

“I’ve gone out of my way to be civil to you.” Riddle’s voice was silky, but that flash of irritation Hermione had seen was back and brighter than ever. “Kind, even. I feel perfectly awful for having frightened you so badly, and—for God’s sake, Granger, all I was going to say just now was that I admired your devotion to your cause.”

If, a moment ago, Hermione had felt like she’d been slapped, now she felt as if someone had hit her with a Trip Jinx.

“Oh,” she said. Riddle had a particular talent for stealing the words on which she so relied, didn’t he?

“I also meant to ask,” Riddle went on, banking the sparks in his eyes and putting on a kinder expression as though to apologize for upsetting her, “whether you could use another member.” 

Hermione blinked at him.

“For S.P.EW.,” Riddle clarified, as though he suspected that his vague wording was the source of Hermione’s bemused silence. “I’d like to join up. I’m trying to keep busy these days because—well, you know why—and if I’m going to keep busy, I might as well do something constructive.”   

And this was what Hermione should have done:

She should have accepted immediately—she should have told Riddle that she’d be right back, that she needed to nip up to her dormitory for her collecting tin—she should have latched on immediately to someone with Riddle’s charisma and influence—for God’s sake, he’d have all of Slytherin House joining up by Hallowe’en. Not just Slytherin—half the student body and several teachers at least.

That was what Hermione should have done, but this was what she said:

“I haven’t got my tin with me. For the—for the membership fee.”

“Well, that’s all right,” said Riddle equably. “Gryffindor Tower’s right along this corridor, isn’t it? I can wait a moment.” He rocked forward and gave Hermione a conspiratorial smile. “Or you could just accept my membership fee right now, couldn’t you? You’re an upright sort; I trust you not to embezzle your organization’s funds.”

Right. Yes. Riddle was being perfectly logical, perfectly reasonable.  

Just say yes, you absolute idiot.

“How much was it, the membership fee?” Riddle asked, and Hermione saw, as though from a long distance away, his hand sink into his trousers’ pocket.

 Hermione licked her lips. “It’s two Sickles. But I don’t think—”

“This isn’t about me being poor, is it?” Riddle asked, and Hermione braced herself for defensiveness—she knew how Ron could be when the question of money came up—but Riddle only smiled a little shyly, a little self-deprecatingly. “It’s true that I haven’t got much money to spare, but I’ve got enough for a charitable cause. After all, house-elves have even less than I do, don’t they?”

Yes. Yes, that was true. Hermione’s palms itched with the urge to snatch Riddle’s Sickles and officially indoctrinate him into S.P.E.W. Someone like Riddle fighting for her cause—for the cause—that would be—that would be absolutely excellent, and she should really just—

She should really not give him a solid excuse to spend more time around her, was what she should do.

“I’m sorry,” said Hermione, and Riddle stilled, fingers clutching his coin purse. “But I’d feel awful not doing things properly—and I’d rather not run off to the dorms when I ought to be patrolling—speaking of, I really shouldn’t loiter any longer—”

“All right,” Riddle said, capitulating so easily that it caught Hermione off guard. He tucked his purse back into his pocket. “It’s your organization; I don’t want to undermine you. Let’s get moving, then.”

For the second time, Riddle offered Hermione his arm like some romantic hero out of a black and white film. 

And for the second time, Hermione took it.

“Granger,” said Riddle, steering them down the Fat Lady’s corridor to the flight of stairs. “I’ve been meaning to ask—when’s your birthday?”

Her—birthday? He wanted to know the date of her birthday?

Don’t tell him, was her first concrete thought, and then, What do you mean, don’t tell him? Don’t be ridiculous.

“The nineteenth of September. I’ll be, er. I’ll be turning seventeen.” She glanced askance at Riddle. “Er—why d’you want to know?”

“Well,” said Riddle, smiling in passing at a portrait of a young witch who was batting her long, curly eyelashes at him, “I’ve been wanting to do something nice for you, actually, to make up for scaring you. And wanting to make things up to you had its part in my motives for joining S.P.E.W.—although I really do believe in your cause, truly—but as I can’t do that quite yet, I’ll settle for giving you a birthday present.”

Hermione faltered to a standstill, fingers snagging in Riddle’s sleeve, but if she’d been hoping to see Riddle stumble, she was disappointed.

“What is it?” Riddle asked her, having come to an infuriatingly smooth stop.  

“You can’t just—you really don’t need to—”

“No,” said Riddle. “No, I don’t suppose I need to, but I want to. I’d like to.”

“You really don’t—”

“Granger. You seem like the sort who can’t stand to lose an argument.” Riddle started moving again, and Hermione trotted to keep up. “But you’ll just have to let this one lie, I’m afraid. I’m determined to make your seventeenth birthday one worth remembering.”

Hermione’s stomach rolled into a tight knot.

She was dead certain that she’d have preferred an entirely forgettable birthday to whatever it was that Tom Riddle had in mind.

19 September 1996

“Hermione, wake up. Hermione.”

Hermione startled awake, displacing Crookshanks, who’d been sleeping on her chest (so that was why she’d dreamt of being crushed to death beneath a very fuzzy boulder). She dug at her eyes with fingers gone thick and clumsy from sleep, scraping out the rheum that’d crusted overnight.

She’d got perhaps four, five hours of sleep, having devoted a great chunk of her night to her ever-rising piles of homework, and when she finally coaxed herself into an upright position, her blood rushed through a skull that felt scooped clean of all real substance.

“What’s the matter?” she rasped at Lavender Brown, who’d sat herself down on the edge of Hermione’s bed and was now bouncing with far too much energy for an overworked N.E.W.T. student. “Have I missed breakfast? Am I late to—”

“No, no, no,” said Lavender, waving her hands as though to physically dispel Hermione’s panic. “I’ve woken you up a bit early, actually—sorry about that—but your birthday presents have arrived, and I didn’t want you to have to wait till later to open them!”

“I told her not to do it.” Parvati Patil emerged from the semi-darkness that smothered their dormitory and perched on Hermione’s bed opposite Lavender. “I said that you’d only panic—”

“You couldn’t’ve been sure of that,” said Hermione, defensive. She wasn’t that prone to panicking. Was she?

“Yes, all right, whatever you say.” Parvati pointed at the small stack of parcels that’d appeared at the foot of Hermione’s four-poster. “Happy birthday. Open your presents.”

Crookshanks was rubbing his cheek against the corner of a parcel that was wider and flatter than the others, and it was this box that Lavender snatched up and presented to Hermione.

“Go on, then,” said Lavender, bouncing where she sat. “That one’s from Parvati and me. Go on, open it.”

“Oh,” said Hermione, at once terribly touched and mildly confused. “I hadn’t thought—I hadn’t expected—”

“Well, of course we got you a present,” Lavender trilled. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

And Hermione had called them that on the Hogwarts Express, but only to buoy up the excuses she’d been offering to Riddle. In reality, Hermione thought that calling Lavender and Parvati her friends would be stretching a technicality to its breaking point—they were friendly acquaintances, certainly, or at least they were most of the time—but Parvati fixed Hermione with a cool, challenging look, and Hermione hurriedly busied herself with tearing their present’s gold wrapping paper.

Lavender and Parvati had got Hermione a two-tiered box of Chocolate Cauldrons, the tops of which were iced with pink frosting so as to give them the appearance of bubbling over with sugary potion.

“Thank you,” said Hermione, privately resolving to hand the Chocolate Cauldrons over to Harry and Ron for fear of what her parents would say about all that sugar. Lavender and Parvati grinned, though, clearly pleased with themselves, and Hermione reached for the next parcel. “Let’s have a look at this, then.”

It was from Sirius and Harry, and it turned out to be a delicate rose gold wristwatch with a churning galaxy for a face.

“That’s traditional, giving a witch or wizard a watch when they come of age,” said Parvati, and Hermione nodded along—she’d already known that, of course—as she turned the lovely piece of jewelry over in her hands. “I expect Mr. Black wanted to see to it himself, what with your parents being Muggles.”

Sirius hadn’t been the only one who’d strived to fill what he perceived as a gap in Hermione’s childhood; the next parcel, this one from the Weasley family, also contained a watch, yellow gold and a bit more worn than the one Sirius and Harry had given her, but still heavy with so much meaning that Hermione’s eyes stung to look at it.   

“This one’s from your parents, Hermione,” said Parvati, handing over small, square box which resolved to be—another watch. “God—what are you going to do with all these?” Parvati wondered, giggling. “Wear them all at once?”

“That’ll be a Muggle watch, then, won’t it?” asked Lavender, peering at the decidedly unmagical but still beautiful watch face. “I wouldn’t let Mr. Weasley have a look at that if I were you, Hermione. He’s crazy about Muggles, isn’t he? He’d probably never give it back if he got his hands on it.”

“I expect you’re right,” said Hermione, smiling wryly, but the sting in her eyes had bloomed into a persistent burn.

Had her parents asked Sirius or the Weasleys about Wizarding traditions? Hermione’d have to write them a long thank-you letter straightaway—she’d have to write thank-you letters to everyone, and give Harry and Ron hugs as soon as she saw them. She was so lucky to have such a wonderful extended family—

“Oh!” shrieked Lavender. Crookshanks, who’d stretched out across Hermione’s legs to nap, jumped up, hissed, and fled beneath Hermione’s four poster. “I nearly forgot!”

Lavender bounded off the bed with a great squeal of springs—Hermione and Parvati winced at the racket—and raced over to the nearby window, the sunken ledge of which, Hermione saw, was home to a large vase of flowers.

“This turned up as well,” said Lavender, breathless, as she padded back over to Hermione, handling the vase as though it were the Crown Jewels. “I put it on the windowsill for some sun—hope you don’t mind—but, Hermione, I can’t believe you never told us you had a boyfriend!”

Hermione’s stomach plummeted. It couldn’t be—but of course it was—

Hermione closed trembling fingers around the clear, diamond-bright vase, taking on its surprisingly light weight. It was crystal, real or imitation, and the flowers that sprung from its mouth were as damp and waxy as though they’d been picked only moments ago. The vase was full to brimming with colors both bright and muted, and the viola tricolors in particular stood out if only for their sheer numbers in proportion to the others.

And sticking out of the riot of color was a note on heavy cardstock, addressed to Hermione in script that was neat and slanting and almost delicate, really.

Hermione didn’t want to read it.

Lavender burbled on, as thrilled as Hermione was uneasy.

“I had a little peek at the note—sorry, Hermione—and it looks like a boy’s handwriting, doesn’t it, Parvati? Of course, if it were a girl’s, that’d be perfectly excellent as well—what matters is that it’s absolutely romantic—well, go on! Open it!”

If she didn’t—if she treated the note as if it was a cutting of Venomous Tentacula, that would look strange, wouldn’t it? Lavender and Parvati would ask questions.

Knowing there was nothing for it, Hermione peeled the folded cardstock apart, and Lavender and Parvati leaned in close, their soft sheaves of hair swinging forward to tickle Hermione’s cheeks and neck.

Hermione’s eyesight was still a bit blurry from sleep, so she had to blink several times before the note resolved into legibility.

I’d still like to join S.P.E.W., if only for the chance to get to know you better. In the meantime, I hope these flowers will brighten your day. Have a happy seventeenth.  

-T.M.R.  

“Oooh!” shrieked Lavender, directly in Hermione’s ear. “They’re interested in joining S.P.E.W., are they? You had better snap them up, Hermione, whoever they are. And what does T.M.R. stand for? Go on, tell us!”

Hermione disregarded the ache in her ear in favor of studying the flowers Tom Riddle had sent her. Something was niggling at the back of her brain, persistent as a bug bite. Hadn’t she read something about one of these types of flowers? But which—?

“All right, Hermione?” Parvati asked, and Hermione was snapped out of her daze.

“Yes,” Hermione said. “Yes, I’m fine. Actually—” Kicking off her blankets, Hermione scrambled out of bed, nearly braining Lavender with the vase as she went, and set the flowers down on her bedside cabinet before opening her trunk. “Actually, there’s something I need to tend to.”

“But you haven’t finished opening your presents!” said Lavender, goggling. “Look, this one here says it’s from Dobby the house-elf. Isn’t he a sweet little thing?”

“Yes, very sweet,” Hermione said shortly, stripping off her pajamas and changing into her uniform and robes at top speed. “I’ll open it later; I’ve got to get to the library.”

“But breakfast!” Lavender called after Hermione, who was already halfway across the circular dormitory.

“I’m not hungry,” Hermione called back, bursting through the dormitory doors and onto the spiraling flight of stairs that fed into the common room. She hadn’t done anything about her hair in her rush to get where she was going, but as her brushed hair looked much the same as her un-brushed hair, she doubted anyone would know the difference.

The journey from Gryffindor Tower to the library was a bit of a blur; the only moments that really stood out were those in which Hermione nearly tripped over her own robes on account of taking the stairs two at a time. By the time she arrived at her destination, she’d developed an awful stitch in her side, which she clutched at as she lingered at the library’s threshold.

Madam Pince, thankfully, was quite occupied with shrieking her head off at a pair of seventh years that’d apparently been snogging in the stacks—Hermione wrinkled her nose; before breakfast, honestly—which meant that Hermione ought to be able to browse the library unmolested for as long as Pince’s attention was otherwise engaged.

Steeling herself for what she might find, Hermione pointed herself toward the library’s rarely browsed Muggle Studies section.

For all that she had the curious feeling that she wasn’t on quite the right path, Hermione pressed her fingers to an eye-level shelf and started scanning the titles of books written on the subject of Muggle botanical practices. Nothing was jumping out at her, though, and she was putting some serious thought into risking a very vague Accio—Madam Pince was still railing at the wayward seventh years that this was a library, not a den of iniquity—when one of the botanical titles at last caught her eye and held it.

The Fertile Crescent: A Brief Nonmagical History.

History. Yes, history. That might be—

Shifting gears, Hermione turned her attention to books written on the subject of historical Muggle Britain, wondering if she’d have to resort to asking Madam Pince for assistance after all, supposing she separated herself from the thwarted seventh years. Edwardian, Victorian, Regency—

Hermione backtracked. Victorian. Yes, that ought to do it.

Floral Feeling: A Dictionary of the Victorian Language of Flowers. The title leapt out at Hermione like a godsend, and she grabbed it by the spine and tugged it into her lap.

Hermione paged to the index, skimming through cramped columns and page numbers, but there wasn’t anything on viola tricolors. Hermione blew out a breath, frowned, and strained to remember the flower’s colloquial names. Johnny jump up, tickle-my-fancy, heart’s delight, heart’s ease—

Hermione skated her fingernail up the page, stopped at the H’s, and found it. Heart’s ease. She flipped to the corresponding page, dead certain that she wouldn’t like what she’d find but unable to bear the not knowing. She read the entry on heart’s ease once, then read it again, slower this time.

Heart’s ease. There was more than one interpretation for heart’s ease, or wild pansy, although one meaning reflected the other. 

Heart’s ease could be a declaration, an intimation that the giver could not stop thinking about the receiver. You are in my thoughts, it meant.

But it could also function as a plea, or an order—an order for the receiver to think about the giver. Think of me.

Hermione slammed Floral Feeling shut and crammed it back onto its shelf, for once unconcerned with the proper care and handling of books. None of the books in the Muggle Studies section were enchanted, constructed as they were to be as mundane as the subjects on which they were written, so at least Hermione wasn’t subjected to a wailing book on top of everything else.

She hadn’t really felt anything as she’d scanned the index and paged to the entry she’d been seeking, too consumed by purpose to notice her own reactions to what she was reading. But she was feeling something now, and what she felt came over her in inching little waves till she had to draw up her legs and press her face against her knees in order to ground herself.

Had Riddle been aware of what those particular flowers meant? Had he been acting with intent?

Better question: did he ever do anything without intent? Hermione suspected not.

Madam Pince had stopped screaming at the seventh years. All was quiet.

Hermione exhaled warm and damp across her kneecaps, taking a steadying breath that did her little good.

I cannot stop thinking about you. Think of me.

She felt quite sick.

Chapter Text

23 September 1996

“No, you two go on ahead,” said Hermione, waving off Harry and Ron. “I’ll catch up.”

As expected, though, Harry and Ron eschewed doing as they were asked in favor of loitering next to the scarred and stained table they’d shared with Hermione during class, having apparently arrived at the erroneous conclusion that Hermione was incapable of navigating the castle’s drafty corridors on her own.

Hermione had no intention of letting them thwart her, though: thinking that her friends’ resolve to wait up for her would wane the longer she took to get her things together, she made a show of sorting through her bag. 

“What’s the matter?” Ron peered into Hermione’s satchel as though expecting her to unearth a concrete reason for wanting to stay behind after class. “You’re not going to fuss at Slughorn about the essay, are you? Got an Exceeds Expectations instead of your usual Outstanding, did you? Must be tough.”

Hermione’s fingers stilled on the spines of her books, and she snapped, “Obviously I got an Outstanding.” Really, the only class in which she didn’t receive consistent Outstandings was Defense Against the Dark Arts, and Ron knew that.  

Harry and Ron exchanged a look, and Hermione swore internally. She should’ve just allowed them to operate under the false impression that she wanted to talk to Slughorn about her grades. Now they’d start asking questions, and then Slughorn would wander away to his office before Hermione could catch him—

“Hermione,” said Harry, but Hermione interrupted him before he could get whatever it was he meant to say out of his throat and onto his tongue.

“Well, all right, if you absolutely must know, I was going to ask Professor Slughorn if he’d be interested in receiving a short essay on the benefits and drawbacks of Blood-Replenishing Potions versus those of Muggle blood transfusions. You know, for extra points.”

Hermione was a notoriously abysmal liar, and her talk of fabricated essays sounded forced and awkward even to her own ears, but, miraculously, Harry and Ron looked convinced: their eyes had glazed over with disinterest (Ron was mouthing “extra points” as though unable to fathom why a N.E.W.T. student would possibly want more work), and Hermione’s rigid shoulders eased into a more relaxed posture.

“We’ll wait for you in the corridor,” said Harry, shaking himself out of his daze and leading the way out of Slughorn’s dungeon classroom. Hermione’s shoulders immediately tightened up again—waiting in the corridor invariably translated to listening at the door. Perhaps she hadn’t convinced Harry and Ron as well as she’d thought.

An easy enough fix, Hermione thought, drawing her wand. She pointed it at the cracked classroom door, cast a nonverbal Muffliato, and then pocketed it as she approached Slughorn, who was sorting through the contents of his dragon-skin briefcase.

Professor Slughorn glanced up at that very moment, and when he spotted Hermione, his mouth curled into a genial grin beneath his great walrus mustache.

“Miss Granger!” It was just as well that Hermione had mastered nonverbal magic so quickly, or else her Muffliato might have broken under the force of Slughorn’s booming voice. “Why do you linger, dear girl? You can’t be dissatisfied with your essay’s mark, can you? Of course, if anyone warrants a grade higher than an Outstanding, it’s you, my dear girl, but until the Department of Magical Education adjusts the scale, I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for what you’ve got.”

Despite herself, Hermione smiled in reaction to Professor Slughorn’s effusive flattery. Slughorn fawned over his favorites, certainly, but his praise was always sincere, and that, along with his warm personality and fascinating lessons, was chief amongst the reasons why Hermione couldn’t bring herself to dislike him.

“No, sir.” Hermione pinned her smile to her face and clasped her hands demurely in front of her. “Writing it was great fun, by the way. You’re always, er—you always set us the most fascinating topics, Professor.”

Hermione stumbled over the reciprocal flattery—she was laying it on a bit thick, wasn’t she?—but Slughorn’s cheeks flushed with pleased color, and he beamed all the brighter even as he wagged a faux-chiding finger.

“Miss Granger, I’ve already told you that you simply can’t earn a mark higher than an Outstanding, so there’s really no point in wasting your flattery on an old fool like me. Now, then. If it’s not your marks you’re asking after, what is it that you wanted to talk to me about?”

Slughorn laced his fingers together and rested his linked hands on top of his belly, clearly settling in to hear Hermione out. Not quite trusting how smoothly this was going, Hermione sorted hastily through the openers she’d composed over the past few days, wondering which would work most effectively in her favor.

“Well, sir…” Hermione adopted a sheepish expression, and it felt convincing on her face, as she was genuinely embarrassed. “I don’t know if it’s right of me to ask, seeing as how I’ve been turning your invitations down all these years—not that I didn’t want to attend your parties, sir; it’s only, well, I was afraid that I’d feel out of place, you understand—”

“Miss Granger,” Professor Slughorn mercifully cut across Hermione’s awkward overtures, and she subsided, red in the face. If Slughorn couldn’t be bothered to hear her completely out, then surely a polite rejection was on its way—

But Slughorn was smiling, not as though he pitied Hermione, but gleefully, and when he spoke, it was with a gentle kindness that only barely masked poorly restrained excitement.

“Miss Granger,” Slughorn repeated, stepping around his desk to wring Hermione’s hands. “Do my ears deceive me in my old age, or are you consenting to attend one of my little get-togethers?”

“Er,” said Hermione, blinking rapidly. “The second one? I mean, yes, of course I am—that is, if you’ll have me, sir.”

“If I’ll have you! If I’ll have you?” Slughorn released Hermione’s hands, the better to wave off Hermione’s phrasing as though he were batting a fly. “Darling girl, I’m positively honored! You’ve been holding out for so long, you see, I was starting to think that I couldn’t count myself amongst your favorite teachers!”

“I’m sorry I gave you that impression, Professor.” Hermione grimaced in what she hoped was an apologetic sort of way. “It had nothing to do with you, really, my not wanting to join. As I said, I was afraid that I wouldn’t, er, receive a very warm welcome from the other students. I’m not that popular outside of my own House, you see. I’ve got a bit of a reputation as a—as something of a know-it-all, so—”

It wasn’t entirely untrue, what Hermione was saying; she’d always been quite sure that Slughorn’s favorites wouldn’t welcome her intrusion on their special little society, seeing as at least half of them were in Riddle’s gang of seventh year snobs and thugs. Bad enough that she had to see them in the corridors and during mealtimes; she’d really rather not spend time with them in an extracurricular context as well.

“Oh, but Miss Granger, what a rarity this is! No, my dear, for once you are entirely mistaken.” Slughorn reclaimed possession of Hermione’s hand and gave it a grandfatherly pat. “Should you attend my little club’s meetings, you’ll be amongst peers, and they’ll be quite happy to have you, quite happy indeed—brilliance calls to brilliance, after all.”

Uncharitably, but not without reason, Hermione thought that brilliance had only something to do with Slughorn’s selection process; some of his favorites weren’t so much brilliant as they were well connected.

“At any rate—” Slughorn gave Hermione’s hand one last comforting squeeze before relinquishing it. “—I don’t abide by bullying or harassment, so you can be quite sure that the other children will comport themselves appropriately.” 

“All right.” Hermione tried to look as if she’d been convinced, but really, as long as Slughorn would have her, nothing would keep her away from the Slug Club. “Thank you, Professor. I feel better now.”

“Not at all, dear, not at all. Now, I expect you’ll be wanting the date of the next meeting?” Slughorn didn’t wait for verbal confirmation, sparing Hermione just enough time to smile and nod. “Excellent! I hope it’s not too soon—ah, but of course you’re quite eager to get started, aren’t you?—our next gathering will be on Friday—the twenty-seventh of September—after dinner, in my office. Nothing formal, no fancy dress code; your school robes will suffice. Have you got all that, my dear?”

“Yes, Professor, thank you.” Hermione adjusted her bag’s strap on her shoulder, eager to clear off. “Thank you for having me along—and I’m sorry for taking up so much of your time, really—”

“It’s no trouble, Miss Granger, no trouble at all.” Slughorn picked up his briefcase and gestured Hermione on ahead of him, face all wreathed in smiles. “But we had better look sharp, now, the both of us. Off we go.”

Wondering if this was how baubles and knick knacks felt when they were locked inside curio cabinets, Hermione crossed to the exit, at once agitated and relieved.

That was one hurdle overcome, but it was nothing, really, to what awaited her on Friday.  

27 September 1996

Hermione had come to a decision as she’d sat hunched on the library floor, fists knuckling her eyes and heart pounding at the confines of her throat.

The Sorting Hat had put her in Gryffindor for a reason, and true Gryffindors did not—did not—take anything lying down. They did not allow bloody Slytherins to stamp all over them as they waged their insidious campaigns of mental warfare.

Gryffindors fought back.

Tom Riddle wanted to toy with her head? Fine. He was free to have a go at it—she could hardly stop him doing what he wanted as long as he refrained from breaking school rules, and gifts of bouquets, no matter how disturbing, did not qualify as bullying—but Hermione, in turn, was free to defend herself.

And she was perfectly free to keep an especially close eye on him.

So. She had composed herself, smoothing out her clothes and finger combing her hair. She’d conducted herself with dignity all throughout her morning lessons, and when the lunch bell rang, she’d marched herself down to the Great hall, walked straight up to Tom Riddle, and thanked him warmly for his gift. 

“You liked them? I’m so relieved to hear that, you can’t imagine. I was afraid that I’d overstepped somehow. Sending you flowers—”

Oh, but he was terribly accomplished at playacting bashful, wasn’t he? Hermione wanted to be sick all over his buffed shoes.

“Not at all.” With difficulty, Hermione had bent her mouth into what she hoped was a convincing smile. “They made for a nice break in the parade of watches, actually. Thank you, Riddle, really.”

And Riddle had quirked his mouth, and told her she was quite welcome, but after that—after that, things took a curious turn.

Riddle stopped seeking her out. He was perfectly civil, of course, smiling at her when their eyes met in the corridors, holding doors open for her whenever they happened to be going the same way, docking points from Slytherin whenever Malfoy insulted her in his hearing, but—

But he never asked Hermione to patrol with him during the evenings, never engaged her first, never brought up S.P.E.W. Never spent more than ten, twenty seconds alone with her.

Hermione should’ve felt relieved, really. She should’ve written off the few instances of Tom Riddle paying her special attention as anomalies.

But, no. Hermione was quite certain that the friendly but distant demeanor Riddle had adopted was just another way elaborate of messing about with her head.

She’d show him.

Still.

As she stared warily at the door to Slughorn’s office, stomach weaving itself into more and more intricate knots, Hermione couldn’t help but wonder if she’d acted a little too rashly when she’d asked to join Slughorn’s club. Was the chance to observe Riddle more closely worth all this?

It wasn’t too late to turn back. Slughorn would be terribly disappointed, but Hermione could always lie and say she’d caught something nasty—only, Slughorn might check with Pomfrey, mightn’t he, so—

So, she’d just have to carry on, wouldn’t she? Suck it up and follow through.  

Hermione breathed out through her nose and raised her fist to knock—but the door swung inward just as her knuckles grazed the varnished wood, revealing a startled but delighted Professor Slughorn, posed against the backdrop of a sumptuously appointed office.

“Why, if it isn’t our own Miss Granger. I thought I heard footsteps coming up the corridor.”

“Yes.” Hermione smiled rather queasily. “That was me.” Well, obviously. “Sorry—I’m a bit early, aren’t I? I can always come back later—”

“Now, Miss Granger, do I look like the sort to turn away a young lady and tell her to come back later? No, no, you must come in straightaway.” Slughorn shifted to one side and beckoned Hermione into the overlarge room. “I was only having a chat with Tom, but don’t fret, you’re not interrupting anything—you do know Tom, Miss Granger?”

Tom Riddle rose up from one of the two sofas placed before the crackling fireplace, eyes wide and—and hungry, almost. Hermione froze on the spot, feeling like nothing so much as a hunted rabbit.

No. No, this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Hermione had rushed through her dinner so as to make it to Slughorn’s office before any of his other favorites could, not wanting to arrive to a sea of cold, unwelcoming stares on top of everything else.

Hermione darted her eyes all around Slughorn’s office, half hoping that more students would appear from behind the heavy furniture or come in from the balcony—a balcony, really?—but, no, Hermione and Riddle and Slughorn were quite alone. Honestly, Hermione would’ve preferred a horde of judgmental Slytherins to this.

“Ah, but of course you know Tom,” Slughorn was saying. “As a prefect, you must see quite a bit of him, mustn’t you? Head Boy; I couldn’t be more proud—and I was only just telling him earlier this week—was it on Monday or Tuesday, Tom?”

“Monday afternoon, sir,” said Riddle, and his quiet voice somehow startled Hermione more effectively than a shout.

“Yes, yes, Monday afternoon—thank you, Tom—it was on Monday afternoon, Miss Granger, that I told Tom you’d finally consented to join our little club! You were quite pleased to hear it, weren’t you, Tom?”

Hermione’s forced smile went brittle. Pleased, was he?

“Yes, sir, quite pleased,” said Riddle, rounding the sofas. “Sorry for taking so long to greet you properly, Granger,” he went on, holding out a hand for Hermione to shake as though they’d just been introduced for the first time. “I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon. I’m used to being earliest, you understand.”

“No, it’s all right.” Hermione touched her fingertips fleetingly to Riddle’s, then tucked them safely against her sternum. “You don’t need to apologize for something like that.”

She’d nearly forgotten how it felt to be subject to Riddle’s direct attention. It was like he’d wedged her between two glass slides and clamped her under a microscope.

“I hope I’m not being too forward,” said Riddle, ducking his head so that a thick wave of hair fell forward to graze his long eyelashes, “but I’m happy to see you here. You look very pretty.”

Hermione’s jaw nearly dropped. With effort, she clenched it, face burning fever hot.

Oh, but Riddle was absolutely full of it. Slughorn had called this evening’s gathering an informal affair, so Hermione had put only a little more effort than usual into her appearance, checking her socks for runs and wrestling her bushy hair into a thick plait. Overall, though, she looked much the same as ever.

“Now, now, Tom!” Slughorn wagged a reproachful finger, but his face was alight, and Hermione wondered, stomach sinking, if he fancied himself a matchmaker as well as a collector of the influential. “You oughtn’t to flirt in front of your teachers, you know! It’s impolite.”

Flirt. That right there was the label that Hermione had been point blank refusing to apply to Riddle’s overtures, and now Slughorn had gone and dragged it out into the open.

“Sorry, Professor.” Apparently Riddle could blush on command, because his gaunt cheeks filled immediately with bright color. He ducked his head even lower, eyes fixed on Hermione’s through the fan of his lashes. “I was just so pleased to see Hermione. We don’t get to talk much, being in different years.”

Hermione. Hermione. There he went again, and Hermione outright refused to call it a slipup. Riddle didn’t do slipups.

She had to make a retreat. A calculated retreat, and then she’d come right back. She needed to think, and she couldn’t do that properly with Riddle looming over her.

“Excuse me, Professor. I need to, er—” What was it that ladies were always saying in classy films? “—go powder—my nose. Sorry, I’ll be right back.”

And with an awkward bob that might’ve been a curtsy, Hermione turned on her heel and fled through the open door, destination the nearest toilet. She’d splash water on her face. Clear her head. She’d grown complacent in Riddle’s absence, and perhaps that was what he’d wanted all along, perhaps that was why he’d distanced himself—if she never got used to him, she’d never be able to keep her head in his presence.

But it turned out that the rhythmic click of her school shoes against the stone floor served to settle her as adequately as a cool splash of water to the face, and Hermione thought, perhaps, that all she’d needed was a truncated walk. Perhaps she wouldn’t need to retreat to the bathroom at all.

But then her schoolbag—the bag that she’d failed to stow in her dormitory in her rush to get to Slughorn’s office—abruptly split a seam and regurgitated its contents in a cascade that battered Hermione’s knees and feet before hitting the flagstone floor with a series of seismic thuds.

Hermione pressed her lips together, holding in the curses that wanted to skip off her tongue. Poor as the timing was, this had been bound to happen eventually: Hermione had favored this satchel for going on three years, and her practice of indiscriminately stuffing it with what amounted to the full stock of a fairly small bookshop had finally—inevitably—taken its toll on the stitching.

Thinking that now was probably the time to work on her Undetectable Extension Charms, Hermione knelt to retrieve her books, her bruised legs smarting terribly when they hit the unforgiving floor.

This just wasn’t her year, was it?

“Granger? What—are you all right?”

Oh, brilliant.

Hermione groped for her wand, hoping against hope to get her books all sorted and her bag mended before Tom Riddle could come any closer, but she wasn’t a quick enough draw, and Riddle was already circling around the mess she’d made to kneel down across from her.

“Bag split a seam?” Riddle asked, sympathetic, as he pulled his own wand and pointed it at her books, which leapt up and stacked themselves alphabetically by author. “Yes, I know we’re not supposed to use magic in the corridors—don’t tell Filch on me, eh?”

Hermione didn’t respond, mutely fingering the split in question. Was it just her, or did it look almost too neat? Almost as if someone had taken a knife to the stitching—a knife, or a Severing Charm—

“One more spell won’t hurt, then, will it? Excuse me.” Riddle brushed Hermione’s fingers out of the way, pointed his wand at the split, and mended it. “There. That’s all better.”

Hermione sat back on her heels, studying Riddle’s face. Their eyes met, and she saw something—something cold and alien—ripple across his finely sculpted features. Whatever it was, it had her nape and scalp prickling with unease.

“You ran out on us.” Riddle pushed his hair back from his face, which had reverted to its usual politely pleasant expression. “Were you wanting a private word with Professor Slughorn? If you were, you could’ve said so—I’d’ve made myself scarce.”

Hermione licked her lips, and Riddle mirrored her, running a red tongue over his full lower lip.

Hermione pressed her knuckles against her knees.

“It’s only,” Riddle said when Hermione made no reply, “and I hope you don’t think that I’m oversharing when I tell you this—it’s only that Professor Slughorn’s my favorite teacher. I can confide in him. Talk to him about things that I wouldn’t with other people.”  

“What were you talking about, then?” It was rude of her to ask. If he’d been anyone else, she wouldn’t’ve asked.

“Evan Rosier was one of my best friends,” said Riddle, eyes downcast, knees pressed to the floor like a penitent. “I know I haven’t really been acting as if I’m in mourning—I’m just not that sort of person—but it’s been—difficult. Professor Slughorn’s always willing to listen, and that was what I needed. For someone to listen.”

Hermione gnawed on her lower lip. Riddle certainly looked mournful enough—paler than usual, mouth grimly set, lashes touching his cheekbones—and he had, she thought, made a decent show of it over the past few weeks, acting a little more withdrawn than usual when she spotted him in the corridors. But that was how some people mourned, wasn’t it? Grief looked different on different people.

But there was something else.

For her part, if Hermione had—she didn’t like to think of this, but—if she had lost Harry or Ron or Ginny, she’d be disconsolate. Devastated. Even if she’d managed to keep herself together in public, her eyes would’ve been red and puffy from all the crying she’d be doing in private.

Riddle’s eyes weren’t circled with red. The whites weren’t veined and ruddy. He hadn’t the look of someone who’d been crying.

Perhaps he simply wasn’t a crier. Some people were like that.

Perhaps.

“I’m sorry,” said Hermione, choosing her words carefully. “It wasn’t my intention to interrupt a private conversation.”

“No, that’s all right.” Riddle finally moved, scooping up her books—she bristled, not wanting him to touch her things—and tucking them into her bag by hand. “We were just finishing up, anyway.”

Hermione drummed her fingers against her knees, knowing a dismissal when she heard one. Well, if he was going to invite a change of subject, then—

“Do you know anything about the Victorian language of flowers?” she blurted, nails digging half-moons into her thighs.

Riddle’s brows arched.

“Doing some extracurricular research, are you? No, sorry, I’m afraid I’m useless at that sort of thing. I’m surprised that I manage so well in Herbology, honestly. But talking of flowers—you’re quite sure you liked the ones I sent you?”

The flowers in question must’ve been charmed, as it’d been days and they had yet to show any signs of wilting. The petals were still plump and damp and looked not at all inclined to turn crisp and brown. Hermione had sat them on top of her bedside cabinet as a reminder, as a talisman.

“They’re lovely,” she said, because it was true.

Riddle smiled, and then moved so fluidly to his feet it was as though he hadn’t moved at all. He offered Hermione a hand up.

Hitching her mended bag over her shoulder, Hermione took Riddle’s hand, palm meeting palm, and allowed him to tug her to her feet.

“Shall we get back to Professor Slughorn?” Hermione asked, but Riddle had wrapped his other hand around hers, holding her quite still. A heavy ring on his right index finger bumped her knuckles.

“Actually, Hermione—can I call you Hermione just this once, please? Only it feels wrong to call you Granger when I’m trying to—” Riddle broke off, blowing out a breath that stirred the fringe that’d fallen back into his eyes.

Hermione curled her captured hand into a fist, a fist so tight that she could feel her heartbeat in her palm where it was jammed against her fingers.

“Trying to what?” Hermione asked. She didn’t want to know. She couldn’t stand not knowing.

“It’s bad timing, isn’t it?” Riddle’s smile was rueful, self-deprecating. “That’s why I backed off for a little while—it didn’t seem right, you understand, to feel what I was feeling so soon after Evan—” Riddle’s voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. It was all very convincing.

And Hermione had an awful suspicion that she knew precisely what was coming next.

It made sense, really. Given his recent behavior, if he’d been anyone else, she’d have assumed that he—well, boys acted a certain way in those situations, didn’t they, and Riddle had certainly been playing his part.  

Yes. If it had been anybody else—even someone as handsome and charming and as unlikely to pay the resident swot any attention as Riddle—Hermione would have thought that—

Riddle rubbed his fingers over the back of Hermione’s hand. His cheeks were full of color.

“And it’s abrupt, I know, but—this will sound awfully trite, won’t it?—but it’s the first time I’ve felt this way about anyone, and I wanted to take initiative. Didn’t want someone else to snatch you up before I got to say my piece, I suppose.”

Riddle ducked his head, not bashfully, but to put his face closer to Hermione’s, and it was the same as on the Hogwarts Express: Riddle smelled of nothing stronger than soap, but it clogged Hermione’s nostrils as effectively as any expensive cologne, dizzying her, making her go all loopy.

He wasn’t looking at her the way boys looked at the girls they liked. He was looking at her the way Ron looked at his chess pieces.

“I won’t insult your intelligence; I’m sure you’ve caught on to how I feel about you. Still, I’d like to say it out loud.” This—weren’t confessions meant to be made in whispers? And yet Riddle spoke clearly, not loudly, but clearly, so that Hermione’s ears rang with it. “I—I fancy you, Hermione. I want you to be my girlfriend.”

She’d been expecting it, but it still hit her like a physical blow to the solar plexus, and she inhaled sharply through her nose—a sound that was echoed a dozen times over from somewhere behind her as what had to’ve been a small crowd of people gasped all at once in a hissing chorus.  

It was theatrical, really. It was ridiculous.

It was all happening to her.

Riddle’s gaze went over Hermione’s head. His expression flickered before settling on a frown.

“Well, damn,” he muttered, apparently put out. His fingers were tight around Hermione’s. “I wasn’t quite ready for the whole school to know about us.”

There is no us, Hermione wanted to shriek, but her voice was lost to her. All she could do was twist awkwardly on the spot, locked as she was to Riddle, and take in, with a mounting sense of hysteria, the gathered students who were gaping openly at her and Tom Riddle.

They’d heard. All of them. Of course they’d heard.

Riddle squeezed Hermione’s hand. As if they were in this mess together. As if they were already a unit.

But Hermione had seen the way Riddle had looked before putting on a consternated mask. She’d seen that nasty, self-satisfied smile.

She was certain of two things: that Riddle didn’t really fancy her, not at all, and that getting caught in the act, as it were, had been exactly what he’d wanted.

Her severed bag. Riddle conducting his parody of a confession in a public corridor just as everyone else was coming up from dinner. How he hadn’t bothered to lower his voice.

He had, undoubtedly, orchestrated this.

Chapter Text

28 September 1996

Hermione had slipped out of Gryffindor Tower before the sun had crested the horizon, hoping that the obscenely early hour would afford her some relative peace while she ate her breakfast. The Great Hall was bound to be empty this early on a Saturday, as Hermione’s schoolmates were universally fond of their weekend lie-ins.

Her eyes felt full of grit, owing to the early hour working in combination with a night that’d yielded very little in the way of restful sleep, but as she sat down at the empty Gryffindor dining table and reached for a plate piled high with thick slices of toast, she decided that exhaustion was a fair price to pay for this blissful solitude.

Hermione slathered a piece of toast in marmalade before biting into it, closing her eyes when the flavor hit her tongue—and nearly choked on her bite of food when she felt two people drop unceremoniously down on either side of her.

Please don’t be Harry and Ron, please don’t be Harry and Ron, please—

“Hermione Granger! What d’you think you’re doing, sneaking off like this? Why didn’t you wait up for us?”

So, not Harry and Ron. Worse.

Hermione swallowed her bite of toast—it went down her throat like a hunk of lead—and reluctantly opened her eyes to survey the two girls that’d clearly, deliberately boxed her in.

She wasn’t so naïve as to think that Lavender and Parvati had sought her out for the simple pleasure of her company.

“Sorry,” said Hermione, not feeling sorry at all. “I assumed you were having a lie-in, and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Well, obviously you can’t be bothered to make time for us, so we took matters into our own hands.” Lavender’s lips were luminous with artificial color—how had she found the time to apply her makeup in her rush to hunt down Hermione?—and they were presently fixed in a pout. “She just flounced right on up to our dormitory last night, didn’t she, Parvati? Didn’t even say hello.” 

“That’s right.” Parvati helped herself to a slice of Hermione’s toast, nibbling on the corner as she surveyed Hermione with bright, calculating eyes. “We thought you were ill, actually. You looked rather peaky, you know.”

“From what little we saw of you, anyway,” Lavender said tartly, and nicked a slice of Hermione’s toast for herself.

Tamping down the spiteful impulse to pull the plate of toast closer to her chest and out of their reach, Hermione considered that she’d made the wrong move when she’d come downstairs for an early breakfast. Perhaps she should’ve stayed in bed all day under the pretense of feeling ill.

But, no. That wouldn’t’ve worked out at all. She’d have been sent straight down to Madam Pomfrey, and then people would’ve visited her and asked her questions, and as strict as Pomfrey was, she couldn’t stand vigil over Hermione every minute of every day.

“If you want to ask me about Tom Riddle,” said Hermione, thinking fatalistically of adhesive bandages and how they needed to be ripped quickly off, “you might as well get to it. I’ve got homework that needs tending.”

Actually, she’d finished the last of her homework during lunch on Friday, but it wouldn’t hurt to give her completed assignments another lookover or two. She could stack her textbooks all around her like a fortress, and that nonverbal message of unwelcome had rarely failed to stop people from pestering her.

“Well,” said Lavender, and she looked across Hermione to exchange an offended look with Parvati. “You don’t need to be so grumpy about it. If anything, we ought to be the miffed ones, oughtn’t we, Parvati?”

Parvati, who was chewing on Hermione’s toast, nodded mutely but vigorously.

“First,” said Lavender, ticking points off on her fingers, “you get a bouquet for your birthday and refuse to tell us who sent it to you. Then we hear from Ernie Macmillan of all people—a Hufflepuff, Hermione, honestly—that Tom Riddle fancies you, and you don’t bother to come to us to confirm or deny?”

“I’m sorry, Lavender.” What little food Hermione had got down sat heavily in her stomach, and she pushed the plate of toast away, deciding that Lavender and Parvati were welcome to it. “But I fail to see how my—er—presumed romantic entanglements are any of your business.”

Lavender’s mouth popped open, then snapped shut. Through her teeth, she said, “Of course it’s our business. We’re your friends, aren’t we? Can’t you confide in us?”

All but boiling with spite, Hermione opened her mouth to shut Lavender down, to say that they weren’t, in fact, friends—but then she happened to glance at Parvati, and something about the hard set of Parvati’s jaw had Hermione clamping her mouth shut.

She was treating Lavender and Parvati like convenient targets, wasn’t she? True, neither one of them had any right to push her on this—and even if she’d been in a better mood, she’d have hesitated to confide in the school gossips—but if she got into a row with her dormmates, that’d be one more unpleasant thing with which she had to cope, wouldn’t it?

Hermione propped one elbow on the table and dropped her forehead into her cupped hand. It was already going all around the school, wasn’t it? What point was there in denying the truth?

Better that Lavender and Parvati heard it from the source, anyway.

“It’s true,” said Hermione, not lifting her face, not looking up at them, “that Tom Riddle—that he asked me out last night. All right? It’s true. Ernie Macmillan wasn’t having you on.”

Lavender and Parvati squealed, and Hermione finally sat up straight, frowning at each of them in turn.

“Whatever you’ve been hearing, it’s not as interesting as it sounds—” Actually, now that they were on the subject, she might as well ask what she’d been dreading to know. “What have you been hearing?”

“Only that Riddle’s been pining for you since your first day at Hogwarts,” said Parvati easily. “Apparently he’s been in love with you this whole time and no one ever knew.”

“I heard that he cried,” said Lavender, propping her chin in her hands and staring wistfully off into the middle distance. “I wish a boy would cry over me.”

Hermione smiled grimly as she imagined how Riddle would react to that rumor. But then she set her dark amusement aside in favor of taking a pin to Lavender and Parvati’s dreamy bubble.

“I hate to disappoint you, truly, but you’re both wrong on all counts. Riddle’s eyes stayed quite dry throughout the whole—incident—and it seems that his—feelings for me—” Hermione felt again that she might choke. “—are fairly recent. No older than two months, I’d say, so you can imagine that he’d have had little time to pine.”

“But Tom Riddle,” said Parvati, undeterred. She gripped Hermione’s sleeve and gave her a gentle shake as though to physically impress upon her the momentous nature of this occasion. “He’s the best-looking boy in the whole school, Hermione, and he likes you. Aren’t you excited?”

Excited. No, that wasn’t the word for what Hermione was feeling. Uneasy, more like. Distrusting, perhaps. Utterly perplexed as to what Riddle hoped to gain from asking her out, certainly.

But excited? Not hardly.

Hermione settled on, “I’m more…skeptical than anything else, I suppose.”

Lavender broke off her dreamy staring to blink at Hermione. “Skeptical? Why?”

“Well, Parvati said it herself, didn’t she? Riddle’s good looking and sought after, and I’m—not winning any popularity contests, am I?”

“But you’re quite pretty when you can be bothered to fix your hair and do your makeup.” Lavender toyed with a curl of the hair in question, frowning at Hermione’s split ends as though they’d just come to life and insulted her mother. “Boys have fancied you before, haven’t they? I know they have.”

“Right,” Parvati chimed in. “And you’re so brainy; Riddle wouldn’t want to date someone whose marks aren’t as good as his. You’re also—er—quite a nice person once—once—”

“Once you get past my more abrasive qualities?” Hermione cut in wryly, and Parvati had the grace not to deny it. “Admit it, you two: you’re at as much of a loss as I am.”

“We are not,” said Lavender, but Hermione suspected it was only for form’s sake. “It’s only—well—”

“Riddle’s never shown much interest in anyone, has he?” Parvati supplied. “Not in a romantic sense, anyway. People will be badgering you about this for ages, Hermione—”

Because what Parvati and Lavender were doing didn’t qualify as badgering at all.

“—and if you can’t answer their questions as to what brought this on so suddenly—well, people can be awful, you know that, and they’ll start to—to insinuate things, probably.”

“Insinuate what sorts of things, exactly?” Hermione demanded, only to break off when a long shadow fell over the Gryffindor table.

“Er, Hermione? Have I come at a bad time?”

Just as well that Hermione had given up on breakfast, or else she might’ve choked on her food for the second time that morning. Lavender, who’d turned her attention to some rashers of bacon, wasn’t quite as lucky, and Hermione and Parvati both reached over to pat her on her heaving back even as their eyes remained pinned on a mildly alarmed Tom Riddle. 

“Are you all right?” he asked Lavender, hands twitching as though he was considering reaching across the table to check for himself, but Lavender’s coughing fit had subsided, and now she waved him off with fluttering hands.

“Oh!” Lavender was blushing scarlet, and even Hermione couldn’t fault her overmuch. All abject loathing aside, Riddle really was a bit overwhelming to look at. “No, I’m quite—I’m perfectly fine! See? This is me, being fine.” And she dissolved into a fit of the giggles.

“Well…that’s good to hear, then?” said Riddle uncertainly, eyeing Lavender as though he wasn’t quite sure what to do with her—and Hermione, despite absolutely everything, had to bite the inside of her cheek to hold in a bubble of laughter. “Er—good morning, by the way.”

Lavender pressed her hands to her cheeks as though doing so could hold in her giggles—it couldn’t—and Parvati stumbled over her own, “G-good morning.”

“…Morning,” said Hermione. The urge to smile had vanished, and now she found herself fighting the fidgets. Crossing her arms and pressing her fists against her sides to keep herself still, she ventured, “Did you want to—to talk with me, Riddle?”

Hermione’s cheeks felt hot, but she wasn’t flustered for the same reason as Lavender. She was still feeling terribly humiliated from last night, and seeing Riddle’s face brought it all back in stunning Technicolor.

Riddle’s mouth hitched up on a smile—probably on account of Hermione’s flushed face. Well, the smug little bastard could just stick it up his—

“It’s nice out today,” said Riddle, and Hermione’s violent thoughts derailed as she was struck by the hysterical urge to ask him if he thought he was the weatherman. He only cemented this impression as he went on, “Clear skies, moderate temperatures…with October coming up, this might be the last warm day we’ll see for quite some time.”

Hermione glanced up at the enchanted ceiling, which was, as Riddle had described, bright as a painted Easter egg.

“Yes,” said Hermione, feeling even more suffocated by Riddle’s attention than she’d been by Lavender’s and Parvati’s proximity. “Yes, I expect it’s an ideal day for a walk.”

Apparently that was precisely what Riddle wanted to hear from her; his smiled broadened, revealing unfairly straight and well-proportioned teeth.

“I was hoping you’d say that. Actually—I was going to ask you to take a walk around the grounds with me—if you’ve finished your breakfast, of course.”

Lavender and Parvati inhaled sharply, all but vibrating where they sat. Short of last night’s debacle, Hermione had never felt quite so pressured in her entire life. Riddle and Lavender and Parvati were all boring holes in her skull, and sitting her O.W.L.s had been nothing, nothing compared to this.

Under the table and out of Riddle’s line of sight, Parvati prodded Hermione in the side. When Hermione turned her head to look at Parvati, she saw that she was lifting and lowering her eyebrows as though to communicate something of utmost importance, and it couldn’t’ve been clearer if she’d held up a hand-painted sign: What are you waiting for? Go with him!

Hermione pushed back from the table, squeezing out from between the transfixed Lavender and Parvati. She looked Riddle full in the face.

“I’d like that, actually,” Hermione lied through her teeth. “Thank you for asking me.”

“You want to come along, then? Excellent.” Riddle beamed at Hermione as though she’d just given him a gift, and then spared a dimmer smile for Lavender and Parvati. “Have a nice morning, you two.”

“You too!” Lavender and Parvati said together, breathless, and Hermione fought not to roll her eyes as she turned to walk the length of the table, Riddle striding along the opposite side.

As she went, Hermione was struck by conflicting impulses—she wanted to drag her feet. No, she wanted to walk at a fast clip so as to get this over with quickly. Apparently the table was feeling as conflicted as Hermione; it seemed to’ve shrunk to a quarter of its original length, but it also appeared to stretch off into infinity.

Wonky perceptions of time and distance aside, Riddle’s long legs carried him to the end of the table before Hermione could get there, and when she at last caught up with him, he took her hand without asking—her fingers spasmed—and drew her out of the Great Hall.

From the Great Hall to the entrance hall and out through the open oak front doors, Hermione could feel dozens of pairs of eyes raking along the back of her neck and down to where Riddle clasped her hand. Students, ghosts, the bloody portraits, probably the suits of armor if they’d had any eyes—they were all staring at Hermione and Riddle.

Hadn’t they anything better to do?

“I reckon this year’s shaping up to be a boring one,” Riddle said to her as they descended the front steps, “if they’re this concerned with who fancies whom.”

Hermione glanced at him sharply. This wasn’t the first time he’d uncannily echoed her thoughts, was it?

“You’re quite popular, though, aren’t you?” she said, staring so hard at Riddle’s face that she nearly missed the bottom step. “I’m honestly not surprised that so many people are concerned with your—” She didn’t want to say love life because there was nothing romantic about this at all. “—dating habits.”

“Are we dating, then?” Riddle asked, pulling them to a halt at the base of the steps, and when Hermione stared at him, he clarified, “You never gave me an answer.”  

That—that was true. As soon as she’d finished processing what had happened to her, she’d essentially fled the scene, barring herself in an out-of-order girls’ toilet. Once she’d pulled herself together, she’d dragged her feet all the way to Slughorn’s office and found it far fuller than it’d been twenty minutes prior—and had found Riddle behaving as though nothing especially interesting had happened to either of them.

And Hermione had wondered, as she’d dragged a spoon around a dish of melting ice cream and listlessly explained how braces worked to Daphne Greengrass, if she’d badly humiliated Riddle when she’d tacitly rejected him. She hoped she had. A little rejection ought to do him a bit of good.

But apparently he hadn’t interpreted Hermione’s flight as a rejection, if he was still pushing the subject a day later.

“I—” Hermione darted her eyes to the ground, toed a pebble in the gravel drive. “I’m not—”

Riddle squeezed her hand.

“Walk with me around the lake?” he asked, and, dumbly, she nodded.

It was a lovely morning, but the grounds were scarcely populated—owing, no doubt, to those Saturday lie-ins in which Hermione had so naively placed her faith. Early morning sunlight was sparking off the lake in bright white fractals, and Hermione had to tilt her head to spare her eyes as she and Riddle turned left at the shoreline.

“I’ll admit,” said Riddle, rubbing his thumb over the rise of Hermione’s knuckles, “that I didn’t ask you out for a walk for the pleasure of your company—or, well, that wasn’t my only reason. I wanted to explain myself, actually.”  

Explain himself? Explain what? Why he’d decided to toy with her head? Surely not.

“About last night?” she guessed, and hated the intimacy of that phrasing, hated that it sounded as if they were creating a history together.

“Yes. I think I—I reckon I threw you off a bit, telling you how I felt out of the blue like that. I should’ve worked up to it, I think, but you’re always so skittish around me, and I wanted to explain why I’ve been acting the way I have. I wanted to—to clear things up.”

Hermione’s mouth twisted. Skittish. As if she were a unicorn foal and not a girl, not a person.

“You’re right,” she said at length. A light breeze picked her hair up and threw it into her eyes, and, impatiently, she raked it back. “You did throw me off. I wasn’t—I’m sorry, but up until this year, you’ve never given me reason to believe that you were interested in making friends with me, let alone—”

“I haven’t, have I?” said Riddle easily. “It’s true that I wasn’t interested in you until this year—that’s my fault, though, isn’t it, for not noticing how appealing you are.”

Hermione’s mouth twisted to the other side. Oh, this was just too much.

“But now that you know how I feel—even if you’re not ready to call yourself my girlfriend—”

He was certainly confident, wasn’t he, supposing that this relationship he was angling for was inevitable, that it was the default, that Hermione was bound to say yes because he was just so irresistible.

“—I’d still like to spend more time with you. It’s wonderful that you’ve joined the Slug Club, by the way; I was so happy when Slughorn gave me the good news—but I’ve got to admit, Hermione, that only seeing you every few weeks outside of meals and patrol isn’t enough for me.”

Hermione tugged on his hand, bidding him to stop, and swung around to face him. She made to extricate her hand from his, but his fingers tightened imperceptibly.

She swallowed the lump in her throat. “If this is about S.P.E.W.—”

“It’s not, although I haven’t given up on that, either.” Now that she was facing him, Riddle took her other hand. If he really wanted, he could keep her from going for her wand. “You’re not in any extracurricular clubs, are you, Hermione? Aside from Slughorn’s, I mean.”

“They interfere with my studies.”

“But can’t a bright girl like you manage one more obligation?” Riddle scratched lightly at the backs of Hermione’s hands, raising goose flesh. “The Dueling Club’s been reinstated this year, did you know, and it’s great fun. You’re studying nonverbal spells, aren’t you? The Dueling Club would afford you plenty of opportunities to practice silent magic.”

Hermione lifted her chin. “I’m the best at nonverbal spells in my year, actually. I’m not in urgent need of practice.”

“Yes,” said Riddle, laughing that high, cold, awful laugh. “Yes, I expect you are the best, aren’t you?”

That breeze from earlier returned with a vengeance, twisting through Hermione’s hair—and Riddle relinquished one of Hermione’s hands in order to brush the tangled strands out of her face. The heel of his palm grazed her cheek. 

“But everyone can stand to improve, can’t they?” Riddle asked, coaxing. “Even you, Hermione.”

Hermione felt pinned, cornered. He hadn’t removed his hand from her face, and she couldn’t help but linger on its proximity to her neck.

“When’s the next meeting?” she asked.

Riddle dropped his hand. Linked it with hers again.  

“Today, three o’clock, in the Great Hall,” he said. “Just to clarify, though—I take it that this means you’re willing to give me—to give us—a shot?”

There was a weight. There was a weight pressing down on Hermione’s chest, as though Muggles had put her on trial for witchcraft, as if an inquisitor were piling stone after stone onto her sternum and would not stop until she confessed to consorting with the Devil.

But.

Who had a better chance of keeping a close eye on Riddle than his own girlfriend? Who better to poke and prod and drag those snatches of his true personality into the light?

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, Riddle, I suppose I am.”  

Riddle’s eyes creased on a smile. His thumbnail scraped the inside of Hermione’s wrist.

“Excellent,” he said. “You’ve made me terribly happy, Hermione—but if we’re going to give this a try, I’d like you to call me Tom.”

Hermione looked him dead in the eye.  

“All right, Tom.”

Harry and Ron had only just forgiven Hermione for joining the Slug Club without consulting them when word of her nascent arrangement with Riddle broke. Ron, especially, was shocked and appalled to the point that he could hardly bring himself to look at Hermione—and when he bothered to speak to her, it was to rant about her poor life choices.

“I don’t get it, Hermione! You’ve never liked Riddle, and now all of a sudden you want to snog him?”

“Did I say anything about snogging? No? At any rate, Ron, it’s really not your business; these aren’t the forties and I don’t need your permission to date a boy—”

“It’s not about getting permission to date. It’s about who you’re dating—effing Tom Riddle, Hermione, honestly. D’you think I’d be this worked up over a decent bloke? Sure, I’d probably tell him to mind his manners with you unless he wanted me to hex off his bits, but I wouldn’t try and stop you from dating him.”

“Rubbish,” snapped Hermione, because on the rare occasions that boys showed even a passing interest in her, Ron inevitably sulked for weeks on end. Male entitlement, honestly.

Harry, who could be downright pathological in his avoidance of taking sides whenever Ron and Hermione found themselves at odds—yes, even when Hermione was clearly in the right, which was nine times out of ten—shouldered roughly past the both of them in his haste to get inside the Great Hall, as if he hoped that they might hesitate to argue in front of witnesses.  

Really, after nearly six years of this, one would think he’d have known better.

“And we’re not even dating, really,” Hermione persisted, although she had the good sense to lower her voice as she and Ron crossed the Great Hall’s threshold. “We’re only—considering one another. It’s a—a trial run.”

“Yeah,” said Ron, who was, in turn, only talking louder to combat the swell of several dozen students chattering all at once. “But it’s not a platonic trial run either, is it?”

Hermione flushed. If only Harry and Ron were the reasonable sort—the sort who hesitated to break upwards of fifty school rules in the span of one night, for example—she’d’ve considered confiding in them. They were her best friends, after all, and tackling Riddle all alone promised to overwhelm even her, but—but if Harry and Ron were wholly aware of just how badly Riddle had unsettled her, they were likely to forgo hexes in favor of physically hitting Riddle round the face and possibly getting themselves expelled in the process.

Not to mention that she was beginning to feel rather foolish. If she hadn’t seen Riddle pinning Draco Malfoy to that wall in Knockturn Alley with her own two eyes, she’d have convinced herself that she was reading too much into things. And perhaps she was. Perhaps she’d acted too hastily—

“There you are.”

Tom Riddle melted so suddenly out of the milling crowd that he might’ve been incorporeal, but the fingers he wrapped around Hermione’s were as solid as ever.

Ron made a noise that might’ve accompanied a dry heave, and Hermione shot him a censorious look before glancing around for Harry, wondering where he’d gone—but then Riddle gave Hermione’s hand a squeeze, pulling her wandering attention back to him.

“Er.” Hermione’s fingers were limp and clammy, and she wondered what appeal Riddle found in holding her hand in this state. “Sorry I’m late. Harry and Ron asked to tag along at the last minute.”

Asked. She was putting it diplomatically; what they’d really done was hounded.

“That’s all right,” said Riddle, looking so earnest that Hermione was put immediately on the defensive. “We’re happy to have them. Ron Weasley, isn’t it? Hermione hasn’t talked about you much, so I’m happy to get to know you in person.”

Hermione’s fingernails bit into the back of Riddle’s hand, but he didn’t so much as flinch—although he did look at her askance before holding his free hand out to Ron as though wanting to shake.

Ron, who’d turned puce, gaped at Riddle’s hand as though it were a deadly poisonous spider.

And who could fault Ron for being at a loss, really? Riddle had just levelled an exquisitely constructed insult at him, implying under the guise of friendly interest that Hermione didn’t care enough about Ron to mention him to her new boyfriend, and he’d done it in such a way that Ron couldn’t accuse him of being a prat without making himself look bad.

“What Tom meant to say,” Hermione ground out, feeling as though she was scrambling to salvage something that’d been blasted into many tiny pieces, “was that we haven’t had the time to discuss our respective social circles with one another. Our—relationship—well, it’s all very new, isn’t it, Tom?”

“No,” said Riddle, smiling to show teeth, “we haven’t done much talking, Hermione, have we?”

Ron’s face drained of all color, and Hermione considered, as distantly as an impartial third party, that she was in the perfect position to aim a good hard kick at Riddle’s shin. She’d do it. She’d do it and call it an accident. It was awfully crowded in here—was the Dueling Club really so popular?—and she could claim that she’d been pushed, that she hadn’t meant to give Riddle a bruise the size of a dinner plate.

But Hermione’s intent to do violence was derailed by Harry’s reappearance. He spared a look of open dislike for Riddle before saying to Ron and Hermione, “I was looking for Professor Lupin, but Flitwick said he’s feeling ill and couldn’t come.”

That was right. The moon had gone full on Friday, hadn’t it?

“I forgot,” said Ron, who’d regained some of his color, although he was still looking a bit white around the eyes. “Lupin helps Flitwick supervise the Dueling Club, doesn’t he? Too bad he’s not here today—ah, fuck.”  

Hermione frowned at Ron, but one glance to the left revealed the reason for his vulgar outburst: Draco Malfoy had swaggered into sight.

“Look alive, Tom,” Malfoy drawled, “I’m in need of a second—ah! If it isn’t the Idiots Two. Excellent; I was wanting a set of practice dummies.”

“Pound it up your arse, Malfoy,” snapped Ron. Harry went immediately for his wand.  

“Eloquent as ever, Weasley,” said Malfoy, but he’d pulled his wand as well, and was tapping it agitatedly against his thigh.

“Now, boys,” Riddle interjected, the pitch of his voice so convincingly soothing that even Hermione relaxed a bit despite herself. “If it’s a duel you’re wanting, you’ll have to follow the set rules. Professor Flitwick told us that we’re only to practice Disarming each other today.”  

All around them, people were pairing off, and Hermione could just barely pick up the thread of Professor Flitwick’s squeaky voice as he offered instructions as well as the occasional telling off. She badly wished that he’d turn this way, but suspected that she wasn’t that lucky.

“All right,” said Ron, beady eyed. “Fine. I’ll follow your rules, so long as I can knock the stuffing out of this ferrety little bastard while I’m at it.”

“Settle down, Ron,” Hermione said sharply, and Ron subsided, but not before scowling at Hermione, who scowled back, and harder.  

“Actually,” said Riddle, holding Hermione’s hand out as though in offer, “I was thinking that Hermione should give Draco a try. Draco—have you and Hermione ever dueled against each other during your Defense Against the Dark Arts lessons?”

“And why on earth would I have wanted to do that?” said Malfoy, scathing, and Hermione bristled.

“Scared, are you?” Harry asked, eyes narrow behind his glasses.

If Harry had meant to goad Malfoy into capitulating—and he probably had; he’d like nothing more than to see Hermione knock Malfoy flat—he got his wish. Malfoy drew himself to his full height, knuckles white on his wand.

“Seeing as Granger’s about as intimidating as a Pygmy Puff, no, I’m really not. Well, then, Granger? Fancy a duel?”

Riddle had finally loosened his grip on Hermione, so it was easy enough for her to extricate her hand and pull her own wand.

“If you think you’re up for it, Malfoy,” said Hermione, laying her superior tone on thick, and smiled when Malfoy’s eyes twitched.

Harry, Ron, and Riddle all stepped aside to make room for Hermione and Malfoy. Harry and Ron were looking bloodthirsty, and Riddle—he was politely attentive, but his eyes were slitted. Calculating?

Was this a test, then?

Having moved the recommended distance apart, Hermione and Malfoy bowed to one another—well, Hermione bowed, and Malfoy’s head twitched on his neck—and Hermione had hardly risen from her bow when a spark of red light shot from Malfoy’s wand and came straight at her chest.

He’s improved at nonverbal spells, Hermione thought wildly, and on the heels of that thought, cast a silent Shield Charm. The Stunning Spell bounced off the solid wall of air Hermione had conjured and careened off one of the great dining tables that’d been pushed against the wall to make room for the Dueling Club’s activities.  

“Was I not clear enough, Draco?” Riddle said as Hermione and Malfoy waited for the Shield Charm to dissipate, Hermione sorting rapidly through potential strategies. “You’re to Disarm each other only—if I see another Stunning Spell, I’ll start docking points.”

Malfoy’s pale cheeks flushed pink, fingers slipping on his wand. He was so agitated, in fact, that he forgot to track the state of Hermione’s Shield Charm, and when it dissolved, she fired off a nonverbal Expelliarmus that caught him so off guard it sent him falling over backward onto his bum.

Harry and Ron roared with laughter as Hermione stepped daintily forward, Malfoy’s wand in hand. She offered it to him, and with a look that might’ve killed more effectively than any Unforgivable Curse, Malfoy grabbed at it, the sleeves of his robes sliding back from his forearms.

Hermione had a fleeting impression of a scaled, coiled line—a reptile, maybe—or perhaps it was a very long, blackened tongue that was unfurling from something like a face—before Malfoy yanked his sleeve back into place and clambered to his feet, eyes pinwheeling in their sockets.  

“Malfoy,” said Hermione, but Malfoy wasn’t listening—or pretending not to listen.

“Right, well, I think I’ll go and help Flitwick with the first years,” said Malfoy, and Hermione exchanged disbelieving looks with Harry and Ron. It wasn’t in Malfoy’s nature to help anyone where it didn’t benefit him. “Coming, Tom?”

“No, you go on ahead,” said Riddle. “I’d rather stay here with Hermione.”

Malfoy shot Riddle a look of undisguised disbelief, but he didn’t linger, instead darting around a pair of clumsily dueling fourth years and snapping at them when he trod on their feet.

Warm, dry fingers curled around Hermione’s.

“Something the matter, Hermione?” Riddle asked, casual.

“No,” Hermione managed, staring after Malfoy. “No. It’s nothing.”

Only it wasn’t nothing, not at all. Because right there—right on Malfoy’s inner left forearm, exactly where Riddle had grabbed him last August—had been some sort of ugly black tattoo.

Chapter Text

29 September 1996

“Well? Have you got a signed note from a teacher, or do you fancy yourself an exception to the rules?”

Hermione jolted so violently that she nearly bit through her tongue, eyes flashing away from the roped-off Restricted Section and coming to rest, not without trepidation, on a looming Madam Pince.

“No note, then,” said Madam Pince, breathing hard through her thin nostrils. She sounded strangely satisfied, likely pleased with the prospect of throwing one more grubby-fingered student out of her jealously guarded domain. “Well. Thought you’d just duck under that rope, did you? And in broad daylight! Really, this is no way for a prefect to behave—”

“No!” Hermione’s exclamation came out louder than she’d intended, so that her voice echoed alarmingly off the library’s cathedral-like ceiling. Madam Pince’s nostrils flared wider, and Hermione hastened to carry on with her explanation in a quieter voice, “Er, no, sorry, Madam Pince. I was only—I was on my way to the Arithmancy section, you know, for—for a bit of supplementary reading, and I got—I got—lost in thought?”

Madam Pince pursed her lips so hard they bleached an awful shade of white. She hefted her tatty feather duster in a threatening sort of way, and Hermione wisely stepped out of walloping range.

“A likely excuse,” hissed Madam Pince, and Hermione put on a terribly genuine set of pleading eyes, breath short and panicky at the thought of being slapped with a library ban. But then Pince lowered her feather dusty and said, grudgingly, “However. The unfortunate company you keep aside, it’s not like you to so flagrantly violate school rules, Miss Granger.”

Hermione held her breath, not quite daring to believe that things might actually go her way, and also mildly surprised to hear that Madam Pince had bothered to learn her name, seeing as she approached the unfortunate existence of students as an infestation comparable to that of the silverfish that wedged themselves between the pages of her precious books.

“Which Arithmancy text were you after, then?” Madam Pince barked, beady eyes going wide and searching, studying Hermione’s face for signs of a clumsily constructed lie.

Well, damn, Hermione thought, even as she stuttered, “N-New Theory of Numerology. Ma’am.” Harry had got her that very book last Christmas, but Pince wasn’t to know that.

Apparently convinced, if still blatantly suspicious, Madam Pince marched off to the Arithmancy section. She returned before Hermione could cast the Restricted Section one last longing look, clutching New Theory of Numerology to her thin chest.

“Will you be wanting anything else?” Something in Madam Pince’s tone dared Hermione to say yes.

Deciding that she’d pushed her luck as far as it was likely to go for today, Hermione mutely shook her head, and, tucking the book for which she had no need under her arm, hurried back to the isolated table over which she’d spread her morning’s finds.

Setting New Theory of Numerology down with a particular reverence that was extreme even for her—best not to tempt Pince into seeing that library ban through—Hermione turned her attention to the book that’d led her into eyeing the Restricted Section in the first place.

The trouble was, for all that Hogwarts’s vast library had rarely failed Hermione entirely, the authors preserved within its millions of pages had a bad collective habit of making obscure and uncited references to unnamed spells and ambiguously described magical objects.

Take the lushly illuminated volume through which Hermione was currently rifling. Indelible Ink was perfectly happy to provide Hermione with a detailed history of magical body art and its myriad purposes—it described tattoos that sang with the voices of sirens, tattoos that burned at the approach of hidden treasure, tattoos that functioned as self-updating maps, tattoos that were imbued with pure gold—but it was also content to limit its descriptions of Dark tattoos to cramped, badly worded footnotes that functioned as warnings more than anything else.

Frustrating though it was, it was also understandable. Justifiable, even. Most respectable wizards hesitated to name Dark spells and objects, let alone describe them in loving written detail for impressionable young schoolchildren to stumble across, and the headmasters of Hogwarts’s past had been quite meticulous in culling anything and everything that reeked of dubious content from the library’s unrestricted shelves.

Hermione drummed her fingers once against the tabletop, compulsive, then flattened them out and forced them still, wary of drawing Madam Pince’s attention. Which of her teachers, then, would be the most receptive to signing the note that Pince had wanted? Hermione was closest with Professor Lupin, but he was too clever and knew her too well, and he’d ask questions—ditto for Professor McGonagall. Professor Slughorn, though—he was shrewd enough, but he had something of a blind spot where his favorites were concerned, so—perhaps—

Gnawing on her lip as she considered how best to approach Slughorn, Hermione glanced idly up from Indelible Ink—and almost swore aloud when she spotted the tall, dark-haired figure that was heading this way.   

Hermione’s nerves twisted into a panicked tangle, but Riddle hadn’t seen her yet, and, what was more, she’d been prepared for this eventuality. Hermione clapped Indelible Ink shut and stuffed it into her bag along with New Theory of Numerology, filling the empty spaces they’d left on the table with The Essential Defense Against the Dark Arts and a sheet of parchment. By the time Riddle had spotted her and come striding over, Hermione was, apparently, looking through her finished essay on the subject of silent spells being less potent than their spoken counterparts.

“I thought I’d find you here.” Hermione was quite determinedly not looking up, trying to give off the impression of being totally immersed in her studies, and when Riddle spoke, she gave a little jolt that wasn’t entirely disingenuous. “Finishing up the week’s homework, are you?”

“Oh, Tom. You startled me.” Hermione glanced up at Riddle’s face, trying to look pleasantly surprised to see him but probably appearing to have stomach pains. “And, no, I’m not—I finished it ages ago, actually. I’m only doing some final edits. That’s all.” And, though it pained her, Hermione made a show of crossing out the first sentence she saw, which happened to be one that she’d rather liked.

“Can I sit?” Riddle asked, and Hermione tried to look pleased as she nodded—only for the pleased expression to freeze on her face when Riddle circled the table to sit directly beside her. Hermione’s hands were busy with the essay that didn’t need editing, so Riddle didn’t try to hold them, but his knee bumped her thigh as he shifted in his seat. Nodding at her essay, he said, “Would you like me to give it a lookover? It might benefit from another pair of eyes.”

“What are you implying?” Hermione snapped, then wished she hadn’t. She was supposed to be playing the enamored girlfriend, wasn’t she? In her experience, newly infatuated couples tried their level best not to row; the incessant bickering came after the shine had worn off.

“I’m not implying anything,” said Riddle, whose eyebrows had climbed his forehead at Hermione’s snappish response. “I’m dead certain your work’s superlative, and I’d never hint otherwise. But reviewing our own work—well, we can miss things, can’t we, especially after the third or fourth reread? It all starts to blur together after a while, doesn’t it?”

“I—I suppose you’re right.” And perversely, Hermione suddenly wanted Riddle to take a look at her essay, if only for the chance to show him up. “But aren’t you—er—haven’t you got enough of your own work to look over? I mean, being in your final year—”

“It’s really no trouble,” said Riddle kindly. He tugged on the corner of Hermione’s essay, sliding it out from under the hands she hadn’t thought to unclench. “If I can maintain top marks in my own courses, I can give one little essay a quick lookover.”

Little was not an accurate descriptor; as Riddle pulled Hermione’s essay closer, the three feet of it that spilled over the edge of the table flopped into his lap, every inch crammed with Hermione’s neat, miniscule handwriting. Riddle traced the length of the parchment with his eyes, mouth twitching before his expression shifted into one of preoccupied neutrality.

“Huh,” he said after what felt like several hours, though a glance at her galaxy-faced wristwatch informed Hermione that it’d only been a little more than ten minutes. “This is brilliantly worded and thoroughly researched. Well done, Hermione.”

Despite herself—despite who was complimenting her—Hermione couldn’t help but perk up a bit, and she even started to say, “Thank you—”

“But it’s also a bit—how to put this constructively? Some of this information’s a bit—extraneous. It’s almost as if you prioritized proving your knowledgeability over answering Professor Lupin’s prompt.”

Hermione clamped her mouth shut, and then, with some difficulty, prised it open again.

“And what’s wrong with proving my knowledgeability, exactly?” Hermione curled her fingers around one corner of her essay, too angry to risk yanking it back for fear of accidentally rending the parchment. “We’re supposed to know the subject; that’s the point of learning—”

“There’s knowing the subject, Hermione, and there’s sounding as if you ate the textbook.” Riddle’s face was earnestly apologetic as he pressed his hand to Hermione’s knee, making her flinch. “I’m sorry, Hermione; I don’t want to sound harsh. I only want to help you bring out your best academic performance, and I think you could benefit from prioritizing quality over quantity. You really don’t need—” He glanced at Hermione’s essay. “—four feet of parchment to prove you’re the best in your class.”

But—but Hermione wasn’t the best in Defense Against the Dark Arts, was the thing; oh, her grades were consistently excellent, of course, but she hadn’t Harry’s natural affinity for the subject. She never had.

But what she did have was the ability to read and write circles around Harry and everyone else, and now Riddle was telling her that the strategy that’d served her so well for so long was wrong?

“Your argument’s flawed, Riddle,” said Hermione. “It’s not as if I sacrificed quality for word count, and as I’ve never received a failing grade on an essay in my entire academic life, you’ll forgive me if I don’t jump to take your well-intentioned advice.”

Riddle pulled his hand off Hermione’s knee and sat back in his chair. There was something curiously birdlike about the way he titled his head.  

“I’ve upset you again, haven’t I?” he said. “I only wanted to help you, Hermione.”

Had he been anyone else—had he been anyone else at all, Hermione would have felt ashamed of herself for lashing out at someone who’d only meant to help her.  

But Riddle.

Riddle—

Riddle braced his hands on his thighs, leaned forward, and put his face so close to Hermione’s that the tips of their noses grazed.

“And I told you to call me Tom.”

Hermione inhaled sharp and quick, eyes darting away from Riddle’s. Something gold was gleaming at his throat, tucked behind his starched collar.

She licked her lips.

“What do you know,” she said, slow as dripping treacle, “about magical tattoos? Tom?”

Riddle pulled out of Hermione’s space. He shifted his long legs, propping his left ankle on his right knee.

“They’re against the dress code,” he said lightly, “aren’t they? Why? You’re not hoping to get one, are you?”

Hermione frowned.

“No,” she said. And what she said next wasn’t exactly a lie, so it spilled easily enough off her tongue. “No, I’ve been doing a bit of extracurricular research. You know. For the fun of it.”

Riddle tilted his head the other way, and this time, Hermione wasn’t reminded of a bird, but of an automaton.

“N.E.W.T. level courses aren’t enough for you, then?” 

“Aren’t you the one who told me I could stand to participate in more extracurricular activities? If I can fit the Dueling Club and Professor Slughorn’s parties into my schedule, then I can make time for this.”

“I expect you’re right,” said Riddle. “But that’s an oddly specific topic, isn’t it, magical tattoos? I can’t help but wonder what brought it on. What—inspired you.”

It wasn’t a direct question, so Hermione neatly sidestepped a direct answer, saying, “Yes, well, our professors tell us that the best essays are built on specifics, don’t they? The narrower your topic, the better, isn’t that right?”

“Still,” Riddle pressed, “I’d like to know what planted this idea in your head. It’s only—sorry, I don’t like to make assumptions, you know that, but—it never occurred to me that you’d be interested in this sort of thing.”

“I’m a Muggle-born, Tom. I’m interested in every aspect of the Wizarding world—I want to know everything about it.” Hermione exhaled slowly, and her breath stirred a lock of hair that’d got stuck to her cheek. “But if you’re really that curious—”

It was a gamble. Who even knew how Riddle would react to hearing it? But he was dead clever—cleverer even than Hermione—and he had to’ve cottoned on to her motives.

They were in a library. They were in public. He couldn’t do anything to her.

“Yesterday—” Hermione met Riddle’s dark, dark eyes, searching, searching. “Yesterday, during Dueling Club, when I Disarmed Malfoy, I—saw something. I saw something on his arm, his left arm. It looked a bit like—well, it looked like a tattoo, and as I doubted that a pureblood like Malfoy would go out and get a Muggle tattoo—”

“I shouldn’t be jealous, should I?” said Riddle, looking politely bemused. “Only I hadn’t realized you were so invested in Draco’s, er, life choices—”

Hermione pulled a revolted face, and it was genuine. “You absolutely should not be jealous, as there’s nothing to be jealous of.” Disclaimer made, she went on, carefully, “I don’t suppose you know what I’m talking about, then, do you, Tom? You haven’t seen it? Malfoy’s tattoo?”

“Let me think. The last time I saw Draco’s arm…” Riddle cast his eyes upwards, deep in thought, as he scratched idly at his throat. “No, I’m dead certain it was entirely tattoo-free. The left, you said? No, there wasn’t anything there.”

He was lying. He was lying so well and so convincingly that Hermione might’ve believed him if not for what she’d seen in Knockturn Alley. There’d been a dark smudge on Draco’s arm left arm back then as well. She was sure of it.

“I see,” said Hermione. Riddle shifted, and the line of gold around his throat flashed in the sunlight streaming through a nearby window, bright as a Snitch. “Then—”

“Curious, are you?”

Hermione gave a guilty little start. Riddle had caught the direction of her gaze, and now he was tugging on that bright line, pulling it out from under his collar to reveal it for what it was—a thick golden chain.

“I don’t suppose you remember asking me what it was that Mr. Malfoy had bought for me at Borgin and Burkes? You do? Would you like to see it, then?”

Hermione knew she was being derailed. She knew it. But Riddle had played her natural curiosity expertly, and, thinking stubbornly that she wasn’t going to let the subject of Draco Malfoy’s tattoo die here, she nodded.

Tucking his fingers more firmly around the chain, Riddle drew from the neck of his shirt a heavy golden locket.

“Go on, then,” said Riddle, coaxing, when Hermione failed to do anything more proactive than frown. “Have a closer look. It won’t bite.”

“Well, you can never be sure, can you?” Hermione mumbled. Riddle laughed his cold laugh, but Hermione was too preoccupied with what was in front of her to feel the usual spurt of unease at the sound. 

Leaning forward in her chair but keeping her hands clamped around the edges of her seat so as to stave off the temptation to touch the locket, Hermione did as Riddle bade and took a closer look.

It was—well, putting it diplomatically, it certainly wasn’t to Hermione’s taste. Glancing at the ring Riddle wore on his right hand, Hermione couldn’t help but wonder if he had a special predilection for old, ugly jewelry.

In addition to being terribly ugly, the locket was big—big enough to fill Hermione’s palm. A curving line of fat emeralds was embedded in its surface, forming a serpentine S.

Wondering what use Riddle would have for a locket, wondering what it could have contained—a photo of a loved one? Not likely—Hermione lifted one of her hands impulsively, automatically, itching to prise open the locket’s clasp—

Riddle curled his long fingers around the locket, covering the emerald S, and tucked it away again. Hermione blinked, feeling rather as if she’d been shaken out of a trance.

Fanciful though the notion was, it wasn’t without basis. If Mr. Malfoy had bought that thing in Borgin and Burkes, strong was the chance that it’d been imbued with powerful magic—Dark magic, even.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Riddle said, and Hermione only realized that she’d been staring at the chain around his throat when she finally glanced up, startled, into his face. “If it came from Borgin and Burkes, then it must be full of Dark magic, mustn’t it? The truth’s far less interesting, I’m afraid—Mr. Borgin bought it off a rich old gentlewoman with a liking for priceless antiques. There’s no magic in this locket, Hermione, Light or Dark. It’s not even goblin made. Perfectly inoffensive, you see?”

“I see,” Hermione said slowly, tucking her hands into her lap. “Sorry for assuming the worst, then. It really is just a bit of jewelry, isn’t it? But—but it must be of some significance, mustn’t it, if it’s so valuable?”

“Well,” said Riddle. “You could say that it’s of some historical significance to my House. To Slytherin,” he clarified, as if that weren’t apparent and Hermione was an idiot.

“Oh,” said Hermione. Her hands were still buzzing to pull on that chain and take a closer look at the locket. “That explains the S, then, doesn’t it? I’ll bet your Housemates are terribly envious.”

“No, I don’t expect they are, as I haven’t shown it to them. You and Draco are the only ones who’ve seen it, come to that.”

Smiling fondly, Riddle slid his fingers over Hermione’s cheekbone, tucking that forgotten bit of hair behind her ear. Hermione held herself very still, face going numb wherever Riddle touched it.

“Tom! You promised Malfoy that we’d come and pick him up from Quidditch practice, and if I’ve got to suffer through that, so do you.”

Talking of Riddle’s Housemates, one of them had just shuffled out from behind a bookcase, glaring sulkily at Riddle and unashamedly ignoring Hermione. He had a long, pallid face, and Hermione thought his name was Dolohov.

“Sorry, Antonin,” said Riddle, already scooping up his bag. “Hermione—you won’t mind terribly if I go, will you? You can always come along—”

“No, thank you,” Hermione said, as politely as she could. Antonin Dolohov was looking at her now, and a stolen glance proved his expression to be that of the carefully blank variety.

“Yes, I expect you’ll want to carry on with your—er—extracurricular research, won’t you? That’s fine.” Riddle got up, but then leaned back down, and Hermione flinched back against her chair—only to go very, very still when she felt Riddle’s cool, dry lips bump her cheek.

What? What—

Dolohov made an impatient sound.

“Sorry, Antonin, just a minute.” Riddle’s breath—clean and fresh and smelling faintly of mint toothpaste—puffed across Hermione’s lips as he spoke. “Hermione—I’ve been meaning to ask—there’s a Hogsmeade weekend coming up. You’ll come with me, won’t you? I’ll buy you a butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks.”

“Yes,” Hermione said distractedly, not really listening, eager to see him gone. “Sounds lovely.”

Riddle smiled to show teeth. “I’m glad you think so. See you later, then.”

Hermione waited for Riddle and Dolohov to disappear from view, and then—only then—did she take a deep, relieved breath.

5 October 1996

Hermione had had the dormitory to herself for all of five blissful minutes when Lavender and Parvati came bursting back in, breathless and giggly.

As Lavender and Parvati seemed to exist in a near-constant state of synchronized giddiness, Hermione couldn’t be bothered to spare their paroxysms of excitement so much as a second thought—until they made a beeline for her four-poster and all but physically accosted her.

“Hermione!” Lavender clambered onto the mattress, her additional weight tipping Hermione’s thankfully sealed inkwell onto its side. “Your boyfriend’s waiting for you outside of the portrait hole!”

Hermione, whose head was swimming with the facts and figures of her Potions homework, said rather doubtfully, “My what?”

Lavender’s face went blank, and Parvati frowned and said, “Your boyfriend? Hermione, are you—er—are you feeling all right?”

Boyfriend? Hermione thought, poking mental fingers all around her usually quick mind. I haven’t got a—

Hermione’s fingers went slack around her quill.

Oh.

Right.

That.

“Sorry,” Hermione stuttered, scrambling to save face. “Sorry, it’s just—it’s all so new, what I have with Tom. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a proper relationship, so—”

And although it wasn’t her relationship’s nascence that’d thrown Hermione off so much as the fact that it was an absolute farce, apparently her explanation had been good enough for Lavender and Parvati. They visibly relaxed, putting on twin expressions that were almost condescending in their kindness.

“Oh, that’s understandable,” said Lavender, patting Hermione’s hand as though she were comforting a maiden aunt. “If I were dating Tom Riddle—sorry, Hermione—well, I don’t think I’d really believe it, either.”

“It’s almost like a fairy tale, isn’t it?” said Parvati, grinning conspiratorially at Hermione.

“Um.” Hermione scooped up her quill and tapped the dried nib against the corner of her parchment. “Yes. Of course. Absolutely.”

But now that Parvati had brought it up, Hermione couldn’t help but linger on all of the fairy tales that’d ended gruesome and bloody (Rumpelstiltskin tearing himself in half in a fit of pique came to mind, because presently, Hermione could empathize).

“Er,” said Hermione, as Lavender and Parvati hadn’t departed and were in fact looking at her expectantly. “Did he say what he wanted? Tom?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?” Lavender breathed, eyes wide as saucers. “Tom—d’you think he’d mind if I called him Tom?—he said the two of you’d made plans to go into Hogsmeade together.”

“Merlin,” said Parvati, taking in the look on Hermione’s face. “You have forgotten, haven’t you? Really, Hermione, I know it’s been a while since you’ve had a proper boyfriend, but you can’t’ve forgotten that relationships take effort? You can’t go around taking Tom for granted, you know.”

“He’ll ditch you if you do,” said Lavender, nodding sagely. “Boys’re terribly insecure; they want you to show that you care.”

Chewing on her tongue so as to not inform Lavender that being ditched by Riddle would actually be the ideal outcome to all this, Hermione grudgingly put her school things aside and climbed out of bed to search for her shoes.

“Wait, wait, wait!” said Lavender, and there followed a great amount of stamping and clattering. “At least do something with your hair first!”

Hermione looked up from lacing her trainers, and immediately wished she hadn’t: Lavender had about half a dozen ribbons in a rainbow of colors wrapped around her fists, and Parvati was clutching several glittering hairclips stylized to look like butterflies.

Hermione drew a fortifying breath.  

Five minutes and one smarting scalp later, Lavender and Parvati linked their arms with Hermione’s and marched her down the spiraling staircase to the common room. Neither of them had been keen to take no for an answer, and as those butterfly clips had been absolutely intolerable, Hermione had allowed Lavender to plait her hair and crown it with the simplest red ribbon she owned.

The common room, when they reached it, was scarcely populated, but Hermione still cast a rather desperate look around for her friends—but of course, Harry and Ron had left for Hogsmeade more than half an hour ago, secure in the knowledge that Riddle couldn’t get to Hermione as long as she remained cooped up inside of Gryffindor Tower.

And as hard as Hermione tried to convince herself that this was what she’d wanted—that one more chance to watch and possibly question Riddle could only work in her favor—her churning stomach and jangling nerves sang another tune.  

As foretold by Lavender and Parvati, Tom Riddle was, indeed, waiting for Hermione outside of the portrait hole, looking the picture of patience with his hands in his pockets and his eyes turned thoughtfully downwards. Those eyes darted upwards as Hermione and her escorts came clambering through the portrait hole, creasing into half-moons as he smiled.

“There you are,” he said, strolling over. “Thanks for fetching her, girls.”

Lavender and Parvati giggled as Hermione struggled not to scowl openly. Thanks for fetching her, he’d said. Something in that phrasing made Hermione feel like a parcel that’d been flown to Riddle via owl post.

“Sorry,” said Hermione, so abruptly that Riddle looked curiously down at her, and Lavender and Parvati broke off giggling to listen in. “For, er, forgetting about our—our—our date. When you asked me to go into Hogsmeade with you, I was still quite preoccupied with my—with my research, so—”

“Oh, that? Don’t worry about it; I’m not fussed.” With a magnanimous sort of air about him, Riddle held out a hand to Hermione—only to pull up short when Lavender and Parvati carried on with clinging to both of her arms. “Er—Parvati, Lavender? D’you mind if I—?”

“Oh!” Two flickering aside glances proved what Hermione suspected—both Parvati and Lavender had flushed to the roots of their hair, probably at Riddle’s use of their first names. Parvati was the first to recover, though, and the first to let Hermione go. “Sorry! Of course you want to hold hands with Hermione, Tom, don’t you? C’mon, Lav, let Tom have Hermione’s hand.”

Blinking rather dazedly, Lavender relinquished Hermione’s arm and stepped aside to absently link her fingers with Parvati’s. Riddle immediately stepped into the space vacated by Lavender and wrapped his hand around Hermione’s, thumb brushing her knuckles in a hair-raising parody of tenderness.

“Would you like to walk down to Hogsmeade with us?” Riddle asked Lavender and Parvati. They exchanged wide-eyed looks, apparently unable to believe their ears.

“If—if the two of you don’t mind,” Parvati rushed out, gleaming eyes belying her reluctance. “We wouldn’t want to intrude—”

I’ll just bet you wouldn’t, Hermione thought.  

“Oh, it’s not an intrusion, is it, Hermione?” Riddle looked to Hermione, who shook her head stiffly. “See? Neither of us mind. You’re Hermione’s friends, and I’d love to get to know you, so you’re doing me a favor, really.”

For a moment, Hermione thought that Lavender, at least, might faint. But then she gathered herself, and she and Parvati both breathed out thank-yous, and the four of them headed for the staircase. Riddle let go of Hermione’s hand only to run his fingers down the bumps in her plait, and then rested them lightly at the small of her back.

“You’re wearing your hair in a plait again,” he said, quiet but carrying, and Hermione gave him a questioning look. Smiling, he said, “You wore it like this when I asked you out, remember? You look as pretty now as you did then—that ribbon really suits you.”  

Lavender and Parvati inhaled sharply, and then immediately started whispering fiercely to one another. Hermione wanted to tear the ribbon from her hair and fling it in Riddle’s face.

All in all, though, Hermione was actually happy to have Lavender and Parvati along: with their giddy exchanges serving to fill the silence, Hermione didn’t feel compelled to try and make halting conversation with Riddle. In fact, the walk out of the castle and into Hogsmeade seemed to pass quick as a blink, and they were coming to a halt outside of the Three Broomsticks before Hermione knew it.

Lavender and Parvati went abruptly silent, and they hovered awkwardly. Hermione opened her mouth to invite them inside for a butterbeer, her treat, but Riddle beat her to the punch.

“Would you like to join us?” he asked, and Hermione hastily pinned on her most welcoming smile. “It wouldn’t be an intrusion at all, would it, Hermione?”

That was what he said, but—

Riddle’s words might’ve meant one thing, but his tone—rueful, a little embarrassed, maybe—conveyed quite another, and it was that other thing that Lavender and Parvati picked up on, because they both shook their heads, Parvati saying kindly, “Oh, no, we couldn’t. This’ll be your first proper date, won’t it? You two deserve some privacy.”

Lavender nodded her support of Parvati’s sentiment, looking only a little disappointed.

Riddle smiled in a way that was at once bashful and apologetic, and Hermione wanted to scream at Lavender and Parvati not to be taken in by him.

“If you’re sure?” said Riddle. “Only I feel a bit bad—”

“No, no, you shouldn’t,” Parvati insisted. “We’ve been meaning to drop by Honeydukes, anyway; they’ve got a new stock of Sugar Quills that’re supposed to last four whole hours. C’mon, Lav. Bye, you two.”

“It was nice talking to you, Tom!” Lavender called over her shoulder as Parvati linked their arms and pulled her off toward Honeydukes.  

“You too,” said Riddle, lifting a hand in parting. Then he dropped his eyes to Hermione, a curious little smile playing at his mouth. “Come on, Hermione. I’ll buy you that butterbeer.”

“Right,” said Hermione faintly.

Satisfied. That was it. His smile had looked…satisfied.

He’d wanted to get rid of Lavender and Parvati. And he’d had the perfect excuse for ditching them, hadn’t he, playing the besotted boyfriend who wanted time alone with the girl he fancied.

With effort, Hermione tamped down on the violent surge of hatred that promised to curdle her tongue and lay waste to her own clumsy playacting.

They’d been late getting down to Hogsmeade, and that was especially evident inside of the Three Broomsticks, which was so packed to bursting that Hermione and Riddle only barely managed to squeeze their way inside. Hermione was actually briefly glad that she’d worn her hair in a plait; the combined body heat of dozens of students and adults was bad enough without the heavy weight of her hair clinging to the nape of her neck.

“There’s an open table over there, in the corner,” said Riddle, who was tall enough to see over most everyone’s heads. “It’ll be a bit cramped—sorry—but it’s better than standing, isn’t it? Can you get there on your own, or d’you need me to—?”

“No,” said Hermione sharply, not in the mood to put much effort into pretending. “No, I’ll manage.”

“I’ll go and get our butterbeers, then,” said Riddle, apparently unaffected by Hermione’s tone, and ran his fingers down her plait in parting before squeezing through a wall of overexcited third years.

Taking a breath as though preparing for a deep dive into the lake, Hermione tucked in her elbows and started battling toward the spot Riddle had indicated, muttering apologies whenever she accidentally trod on someone’s foot—but when the crowd finally spat her back out, she saw that her efforts to get to the open table in a timely fashion had been in vain.

Because if there’d been an empty table when Riddle had looked this way, it had filled in the meantime. There were several larger tables, all full, and one smaller table paired with two chairs. One of those chairs was empty, but the other—

The second chair was occupied by someone with pale blond hair and a natural sneer to his mouth. Someone who was for once quite alone, unaccompanied by his usual sycophantic bookends.

Hermione hesitated. She considered turning around and telling Riddle that they were out of luck, that they were better off stopping somewhere else for a drink—she’d like to see him keep his practiced composure when she brought him to the grime-laden Hog’s Head—but, no, this was actually perfect.

Hermione stepped into Draco Malfoy’s line of sight, pulled out the free chair opposite him, and dropped onto the seat. Lacing her fingers together and resting her joined hands on the tabletop, she smiled a little grimly into Malfoy’s face, which was crumpled with open dislike.

Odd, though. She’d expected a look of unpleasant surprise as well, and—and his eyes hadn’t gone all wide. He’d hardly flinched at the sight of her. Weird, that, seeing as he’d been doing something rather a lot like avoiding her ever since she’d caught a glimpse of that—that thing on his arm.

“Granger,” Malfoy drawled, expression smoothing out into one of indolence. “Now, it’s not as if I expected any better from the likes of you, but for all you know, I could’ve been saving that seat for someone else.”

“Were you?” Hermione countered, leaning forward as Malfoy leaned back, elbows bumping the rim of the table. “Because both of these seats were unoccupied when Riddle spotted them.”

“Here with Tom, then, are you?” Malfoy pressed a hand to his cheek, feigning wonder. “And what of the Idiots Two? Ditched them for your new boyfriend, eh? My, my. The fickle nature of Gryffindor loyalty.”

Hermione rolled her eyes. “Do save the theatrics for someone who’s interested, Malfoy. Harry and Ron don’t care if I want to make new friends.” No, they only cared that she wanted to make friends with Tom Riddle specifically.

“Have you got any friends aside from those morons, though?” Contrary to Hermione’s advice that he try for more subtlety, Malfoy twisted his expression into one of overexaggerated thoughtfulness. “Offense entirely intended, Granger, but you’re not exactly winning any popularity contests, here.”

She hadn’t the time for this; crowded bar aside, it’d only be so long before Riddle returned with those butterbeers in hand. She leaned farther forward still, until uninformed bystanders could be forgiven for thinking that she was trying to kiss Malfoy.

“I’ve seen that tattoo on your arm, Malfoy, and you know it.” She spoke very, very quietly and watched Malfoy’s face very, very closely. “What does it mean? And don’t tell me you got it for the fun of it—I suspect your parents wouldn’t approve of any deviation from upright conformity.”

To Hermione’s frustration, Malfoy wasn’t quite as expressive in his wariness as he was in his disdain. His eyes darted to one side, and the skin around them tightened and blanched even whiter than usual, but he didn’t gasp, didn’t flinch, didn’t upend his chair in his haste to escape Hermione’s questions.

But then Malfoy met Hermione’s eyes again, and he bent his mouth into a particularly nasty smile as he said, quietly, “Ask your boyfriend.”

Hermione’s stomach pitched. Was this an acknowledgement, then? A confession? Was Malfoy admitting that Riddle had something to do with his tattoo?

“I already have,” said Hermione, fighting to speak normally, to not let her excitement and unease show in her voice, on her face. “He said he didn’t know what I was talking about. He said that your arm was unblemished the last he saw it.” 

“I take it,” said Malfoy, nasty smile blooming till it reached his eyes, “that you didn’t believe him?” When Hermione’s frown only grew more pronounced, Malfoy cackled. “You didn’t, did you? Merlin, Granger, where’s the trust?”

Hermione drummed her fingers on the tabletop, eyes darting from Malfoy’s face to his crossed arms. His sleeves were long and dark and pulled firmly over his forearms.

“Of course,” said Malfoy, and the relish in his voice drew Hermione’s eyes back to his face, “I really can’t blame you. Not trusting Tom. Why should you? I mean, you can’t actually believe that he’s with you because he, what, likes you as a person, can you?”

Malfoy was smirking outright now, and Hermione’s mind was so busy that she didn’t even think longingly of smacking that look off his face. Was Malfoy going to tell her what Riddle wanted with her? No. Surely not. He was only lording it up, rubbing the fact that he knew more than she did in her face.

“What’re you playing at, Malfoy?” Hermione tried to imitate his bored tone, tried to sound as uninterested as possible, to sound as if she was only humoring him. “Tom’ll be back any second now, so if you’ve got something to say, you had better—”

“C’mon, Granger, use that busy little brain of yours.” Malfoy’s drawl was fading, giving way to something more snappish; evidently he was peeved that she wasn’t lapping up his every word. “Why the sudden interest from Tom, eh? Surely you’ve been wondering. I mean, d’you honestly think he’s ever given a genuine fuck about you? D’you think he meant what he said about Mudbloods—sorry, Muggle-borns—deserving a safe space to, what was it, learn and grow?”  

Hermione’s fingers curled convulsively, nails scratching the tabletop with an awful little screech that would’ve made her cringe if she hadn’t been so transfixed.

“What’re you talking about—?”

“Come on, Granger, you’ve got loads of flaws, but stupidity isn’t one of them—or so I thought.” Malfoy’s pale face was flushed pink, and he was talking faster and faster, though still in an undertone that compelled Hermione to lean closer and closer. “Fourth year, Granger. Tom gave loads of lip service when Slytherin’s heir was on the loose, threatening Mudbloods, but if you think he was genuinely, personally invested in your safety, you’re madder than Weasley’s scum-sucking father. If Tom didn’t care about you then, why should he care about you now?”

Fourth year, he’d said. Fourth year.

It’d been an awful year, the worst of Hermione’s life, one that she’d spent peering around corners for some monster that might or mightn’t’ve been real—a monster that, according to legend, had been bred to kill people like her. They’d all been jumpy and snappish that year, even the purebloods and half-bloods, because monsters didn’t think rationally, and who was to say that Slytherin’s beast would discriminate when it came to a convenient meal?

The tension had built and built, but nobody had actually been hurt till June, when a third year Ravenclaw turned up dead in a girls’ bathroom—but there’d been no marks on her body, no rent flesh, no signs of poisoning, and the Ministry authorities had eventually decided that it hadn’t been a monster that’d got her, but a Killing Curse.  

The culprit hadn’t ever been apprehended—surely it couldn’t’ve been a student, and each member of the staff had submitted themselves one by one for questioning until they were all declared innocent—but Hermione had never forgotten that the person who’d killed that Muggle-born might yet be roaming free within Hogwarts’s walls.

But why was Malfoy bringing that up now? The obvious answer, of course, was that he was taunting her.

Unless. Unless there was something else he was trying to convey—

Sharp pain knifed through Hermione’s lungs—she’d stopped breathing. She inhaled hard now, through her nose.

“Has he shown you the locket yet?” Malfoy asked, eyes hungry as they studied Hermione’s face, searching for something, something.

Hermione blinked. She’d filled her lungs, but they felt—shriveled, somehow.

“If you mean the gold locket with the emeralds,” she said, “yes. Why?”

Malfoy surveyed her. She was struck by a very Ron-like impulse to leap across the table, seize him by the collar, and shake clear answers out of him.

“Homework, Granger,” he said. “Put that brain of yours to use and have a good, hard think on that locket and what it could possibly have to do with Tom’s, er—utter indifference toward Mudblood welfare, yeah?”

Malfoy pushed back from the table, and Hermione unfroze, grabbing for his left sleeve, but he’d snatched his arm out of her reach, sneering.

“Do me a personal favor and keep your grubby little fingers off my clothes, won’t you? I only just got these robes; I’d hate to have to burn them.”

“Malfoy—”

But Malfoy had successfully squeezed into the crowd before Hermione could completely rise from her chair, and she sat back in a slump, stomach tight and jittery, brain whirling in circles.

Malfoy had gone, but Hermione could hear his voice drifting over the din, hailing Riddle. Riddle was finally on his way back with the butterbeers, then. And Hermione—

Hermione decided that she would benefit from another readthrough of Hogwarts: A History, with special attention paid to any mention of Salazar Slytherin’s name.

Chapter Text

31 October 1996

Whether by luck or by providence, Hermione managed to detach herself from Harry and Ron without incident, although she wasn’t so arrogant as to think that her smooth escape had a great deal to do with her advanced powers of stealth; the crowd thronging toward the Great Hall was dense as brick, and Harry and Ron were so caught up in debating the Chudley Cannons’ chances for the season that they wouldn’t’ve paid Hermione any attention if she’d hauled off and kicked them in their shins.

As her legs were much shorter than theirs, it was easy enough for Hermione to slow her stride and allow Harry and Ron to carry on ahead of her, their argument growing more heated as Harry expressed his uncharitable opinion of the Cannons’ Seeker. She didn’t retreat to the staircase straightaway, though, waiting until enough people had squeezed between her and her friends to effectively mask her departure in the event that Harry or Ron should break off quarreling long enough to turn around and look for her.

Hermione’s faith in this strategy wavered, though, when she spotted Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil walking a little ways ahead and to the left of her. If Harry and Ron saw her darting up the stairs, they’d assume she was retreating to the ladies’, or that she’d gone to fetch something or other from her dormitory, but Lavender and Parvati would not be so easily shaken off. They were like giggly little barnacles, the both of them, and Hermione’s chances of peeling them off her person in time to get anything done were as good as the Cannons’ chances of finishing first in the league this year; that was to say, dismal.

Thinking fast, Hermione ducked behind a tall, burly seventh year, and then turned quickly round to fight against the current pouring down the stairs and toward the Great Hall with its tempting promise of a lavish Hallowe’en feast. Her stomach gave a gurgling little squeal as her mind turned toward food, but then she thought resolutely of the task she’d set for herself, and immediately lost her appetite.

She’d have run all the way to her destination had she not feared drawing the unpleasant attentions of Mr. Filch—or worse, that dratted Peeves. Keeping her ears pricked for Mr. Filch’s flat-footed shuffle as well as Peeve’s grating cackle, Hermione managed to make good time with the aid of several shortcuts, and when she eventually came to the empty first floor corridor that’d been her aim, her heart gave an agitated little leap—only to sink into her stomach.

The corridor was flooded.  

She’s having one of her bad days, then, Hermione thought, and seriously considered turning round and joining her friends at the feast, even going so far as to halfway construct a flimsy excuse for her tardiness—but, no. Few were the days of the year that promised Hermione this degree of privacy, and she was entirely unwilling to wait for the Christmas holidays and the largely vacant castle they promised.

It had to be today.

With the terribly grim determination of one who would have preferred disembowelment to what lay before her, Hermione set to navigating the length of the corridor, dodging deep puddles that were just as likely to be the products of a sink as a toilet. Unfortunately, the patch of floor nearest to the girls’ bathroom was nothing but puddle, and Hermione had no choice but to hike up her robes and go splashing through it. There was no recourse for her shoes, though, which promptly soaked up the dirty water leaking out from under the bathroom door.

Still holding up her robes with one hand, Hermione lifted the other to push open the door, snorting derisively at the out-of-order sign that forbade her from entering upon pain of docked points. Really, if Hogwarts’s staff truly wanted to prevent students from walking in and out of this bathroom as they pleased, then they should have put enchantments on the door. 

If the corridor outside resembled a half-drained swimming pool, then the bathroom itself was evocative of a very shallow lake. All of the taps were running at thunderous full blast, and murky toilet water was leaking out from under every stall.

No, there was no question about it. Moaning Myrtle was very out of sorts today.

Hermione couldn’t hardly hear herself think over the sound of all the taps running at once, so she approached the wall of sinks and set to twisting them off one by one. As Hermione shut off each tap in its turn, the sound of violent crying grew louder and clearer.

Myrtle had to’ve noticed that someone had invaded her bathroom, between the abrupt silencing of the running taps and the splashing of feet through ankle-deep puddles, but she seemed reluctant to greet her guest. Hermione had expected as much; Myrtle had always been what might be generously described as difficult.

Bending her mouth into a decidedly awkward smile, Hermione pressed her palm against the door of Myrtle’s stall—it wasn’t locked—and pushed, so that it swung slowly open and bumped against the adjoining wall. And there, squatting on the leaking toilet, was the ghost of the girl who’d died in Hermione’s fourth year. 

“Er, hullo, Myrtle,” Hermione said in the excessively kind voice she tended to use with first years and house-elves. “Having a nice Hallowe’en?”

Myrtle squinted at Hermione, wet little hiccups ceasing momentarily as she took her measure—and then, possibly because she wanted to prove to her company that she’d properly earned the nickname she’d had since before she’d died, she screwed up her face and stared to sob still more loudly than before.

So. Not having a good Hallowe’en, then.

“Um, Myrtle?” said Hermione, forging on. “Why aren’t you down at the feast, if you don’t mind my asking? The ghosts are welcome to join in—all except for Peeves, anyway.”  

“Well, of course not!” Myrtle said abruptly, making Hermione start. Myrtle’s voice was scraped raw from all that crying, though it still carried that peculiar hollow echo which was characteristic of all ghosts. “

“Well, of course not!” Myrtle said abruptly, voice scraped raw from all that crying, though still carrying the peculiar hollow echo characteristic of all ghosts. “That awful Bloody Baron put his foot down, didn’t he? And that nasty poltergeist’s not really a ghost, is he? Why should he be invited with the rest of us?”

In her indignation, Myrtle had forgotten to carry on sobbing, but Hermione doubted the reprieve would last. If Hermione wanted to get anything of value out of her, she’d have to act quickly.  

“Well, as Peeves won’t be there, why don’t you come and join us? I’m—er—everyone’ll be pleased to see you, I’m sure—”

“Don’t lie!” snapped Myrtle, rearing up off her toilet to hover over Hermione. “When has anyone ever been pleased to see awful, ugly, moaning, moping Myrtle? The last time I attended a Hallowe’en feast, I was still alive, and Olive Hornby threw treacle tart in my face!”

Hermione’s smile froze in place. She might’ve felt a bit sorrier for Myrtle had she not know that she’d spent a great deal of last year haunting Olive Hornby’s every step till Olive, understandably at the end of her tether, had gone to the Ministry with a formal complaint, consigning Myrtle to her bathroom.  

“O-oh, but no one’ll throw anything at you this time, I promise—and even if they tried, you wouldn’t be able to f—” Myrtle swelled dangerously, and Hermione swiftly changed tack. “You know, I think it’s rather tactless of them, but the other students like to celebrate Hallowe’en by asking the school ghosts how they died. And I think they like the attention, the ghosts. They like to be remembered.”

Hermione half expected to be doused in toilet water for her troubles, and as Myrtle’s lips wobbled dangerously, she feared she’d overstepped. Myrtle had been terribly uncooperative when the Ministry officials had tried to quiz her about her death, and they’d eventually given up, squelching in their shoes as they’d filed out of the bathroom and into the corridor. After all, it wasn’t as if they could detain a ghost.

So Hermione was quite shocked when Myrtle floated back down to her toilet and said, in a remarkably sedate voice, “I don’t know about going down to the feast—I’ve never liked crowds of people—but if you’re really that interested in hearing how I died—”

“I am,” said Hermione, all in a rush, and then backpedaled, trying to sound less keen and more sympathetic. “I mean to say—that is, if you’re all right with—er—reliving something that traumatic. I wouldn’t want to upset you.”

Myrtle gave a derisive little sniff at that, but carried on in a hushed voice. “Those Ministry officials wanted to hear all about it too, you know, but I wouldn’t’ve been of much use to them. I was all woolly headed, those first few days. I could barely remember my own name. I was coming back in bits and pieces, not all at once.”

Hermione chewed on her tongue to stop herself saying something she’d regret. She couldn’t rush Myrtle through this, not if she wanted to hear what she’d come for.

“I don’t remember much about it,” Myrtle went on, still hushed, still dreamy. “Dying. I expect what happened to me won’t make for as exciting a story as Sir Nicholas’s botched beheading.” 

“I’m sure it’s very exciting,” Hermione told her, and Myrtle actually smiled at this. It wasn’t an especially pleasant smile.

“Do you think so? But you haven’t heard it yet.” Myrtle drew her knees against her chest and nestled her chin between them. “Only a couple of things really stand out. Something I heard, and then—something I saw.”

Hermione’s empty stomach gave a giddy little leap. “Something you heard?”

“Yes,” said Myrtle, eyes rolling upward and glazing over as though she’d fallen into a trance. “I was crying, you know, in this very stall—” She gestured at the stall’s moldy walls, and Hermione tried to project patience. “—because Olive Hornby had teased me about my acne and my glasses. That awful, awful girl; if the Ministry hadn’t told me to leave her be—”

Trying not to think of Ron’s toweringly insensitive habit of saying that Myrtle should’ve waited a few more years to bite the dust if she hadn’t wanted to be afflicted with bad skin for all eternity, Hermione gave a restrained little nod that tried to be sympathetic.

But then Myrtle said, with uncharacteristic self-awareness, “I’ve gone off on a tangent, haven’t I? The point is, I locked myself in this stall, and I was crying very loudly, but I could still hear the lavatory door open and shut, and at first, I thought it was Olive, come to tease me some more—but then I heard—well, it sounded like a snake had got in. I could hear it hissing.”

Feeling at once excited and queasy, Hermione said, “Is—is that right? A snake? Did it—did it get loose from Care of Magical Creatures, d’you think?”

Myrtle’s pearly little pigtails bobbed as she shook her head. “It wasn’t a snake, though—it only sounded like one. Actually, I was dead certain that it was a person who was talking. Not just a person—” Myrtle leaned forward, and with the air of someone imparting a massive scandal, she said, “It was a boy.”

When Myrlte failed to elaborate, and simply allowed the silence to hang there, Hermione said, a touch impatiently, “And?”

“And?” Myrtle’s mouth popped open, forming a little O. “And it was a boy, wasn’t it? In the girls’ toilet. Well, of course I wasn’t having that, so I unlocked the stall door to tell him to clear off unless he wanted me to call for a teacher, but then I saw—”

Hermione gripped a corner of the stall, white knuckled. “Saw what? What did you see, Myrtle?”

“I don’t remember what it looked like,” Myrtle breathed. “Not really. I think I died too quickly for that. What I do remember are its eyes—a great ugly pair of these awful yellow eyes. I’ll never forget that. And then—well, I died.” Myrtle sank back onto the toilet seat, looking terribly pleased with herself—or with the look on Hermione’s face. 

Upon returning to the castle from the year’s first Hogsmeade weekend, Hermione had temporarily set aside her dive into the lore of magical tattoos in favor of reading up on the life of Salazar Slytherin and, as she would have with any other project, she’d set herself a series of questions to guide her research.

Question: what sort of monster could kill without leaving a mark?

Better question: what sort of monster could be held in check by a human?

Even better question: what sort of human could hold a monster in check?

To this day, Salazar Slytherin was best known for three things: helping to found Hogwarts, deeply distrusting Muggle-borns, and being born a Parselmouth. Hermione had lived and learned in the Wizarding world long enough to know that a Parselmouth was a witch or wizard with the power to speak to and control serpents both magical and mundane. The ability to speak Parseltongue was terribly rare as well as hereditary, so it stood to reason, didn’t it, that a descendant of Slytherin would have inherited their progenitor’s rare talent? 

But Hermione hadn’t stopped at Hogwarts: A History. No, if she was to identify which serpentine magical beasts were best suited to murder, a history of Europe’s foremost school of magic would not provide her with the answers she sought.

Deciding that it was best to start with the basics, Hermione had proceeded to crack open her copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Fantastic Beasts had described to her all manner of serpentine beasts, but only one of them—the greatest, the most terrible—was possessed of the dreadful ability to kill without a touch, but with a look. Just a look.

A look from a pair of what Mr. Scamander described as bulbous yellow eyes.

“What’s the matter?” said Myrtle, staring curiously at Hermione. And then, with a wavering voice and a trembling lip, she said, “You didn’t like my story, did you? I knew it—I knew it would bore you—no one ever wants to talk to miserable, moaning—”

“No,” said Hermione sharply. “No, Myrtle, sorry, I only—I got lost in thought.” Her nails were biting into the corner of the stall she’d grabbed, scraping off paint that hadn’t been touched up in over a year. “Please, Myrtle—you’re certain you can’t remember anything else? You didn’t—you said all you saw were the yellow eyes? You didn’t see its body, or—or the boy who came in here, the boy who was hissing?”

“I told you what I saw,” said Myrtle crossly, and, oh, no, her eyes were welling up. “You could stand to be a trifle more sensitive, you know—you’re just like those awful Ministry people, pressing me for answers I haven’t got, asking me questions I don’t want to answer—”

“You were perfectly happy to answer them a moment ago,” Hermione snapped, temper overtaking her tongue. “In fact, I suspect you were rather enjoying the attention, weren’t you?”

The tears that’d been hovering at the rims of Myrtle’s eyes spilled over, and Hermione reached out for her as though she could actually hold her in place, starting at the icy shock that leached into her fingertips as she stammered, “Oh—no, Myrtle, I’m sorry, I’m really—”

But Myrtle didn’t care to listen to Hermione’s apologies. With an ear-splitting wail, she rose up several feet, flipped herself upside down, and dived into the toilet bowl, where she proceeded to gurgle morosely, deaf to Hermione’s pleas that she come back out.

Biting off another I’m sorry, Hermione stood in the stall’s open doorway, fuming. It’d been awful of her to say something like that, yes, but Myrtle could stand to tone down the dramatics. It was Myrtle’s delight in her own misery that’d prevented Hermione from ever feeling truly sorry for her back when she was alive; it hadn’t been Myrtle’s fault that she’d been bullied, but she’d always seemed to rather like being upset, to the point that, if someone else wasn’t visiting misery upon her, she’d create a bit of misery for herself.  

Myrtle’s uncooperative nature aside, not all was lost. Hermione had got what she’d come for, hadn’t she?

Myrtle Warren had been murdered, all right, but not at the point of a wand. No, she’d run afoul of the lethal stare of the King of Serpents.

Hermione gave a nervous little hiccup. A basilisk. A bloody basilisk was lurking somewhere in this castle, possibly hibernating—did basilisks hibernate? Fantastic Beasts hadn’t been very clear on that point, but it had stated that basilisks could live for hundreds of years, and that would certainly explain why a monster hatched in Salazar Slytherin’s time could have survived to see the twentieth century.

And what was Hermione to do with this information, now that she had it? Go to Professor Dumbledore? But Dumbledore was the cleverest person alive; surely he already had his suspicions regarding Slytherin’s monster, and if he hadn’t gone to the Ministry with his thoughts—possibly ruling his theory as useless so long as the Chamber of Secrets remained inaccessible to all but Slytherin’s heir—then what was Hermione to do?

And what was that wretched noise? It wasn’t the drip of water. It sounded a bit like a gas leak, going by that particular hissing quality, but this was a magical castle, not a Muggle home, so that couldn’t—

Hissing. Someone, something, was hissing. But where was it coming from?

Hermione stumbled in her haste to turn around, and had to clutch at the sides of the stall so as to not slip in a puddle and land on her face. She blinked, stunned, as the hissing died, and as the grind of stone on stone took its place.

And she knew, at least, where this noise was coming from, because, right in front of her, one of the sinks slid into the floor as though pulled by some unseen mechanism. It disappeared from sight, leaving a gaping hole in its place.

Hermione stared at it.

Was that—? No. Surely not. In a girls’ bathroom?

But then—but then, it made sense, didn’t it? The thing that had got Myrtle had been inside the girls’ bathroom, and someone would had to’ve noticed a massive snake slithering through the corridors. And if the thing had used pipes to get around the school—yes, of course that made sense. The evidence was right in front of her nose, wasn’t it?

Hermione took a cautious step forward, water lapping at her ankles and drenching her already damp socks. She peered sharply around, demanding, in a voice that echoed off the ceiling, “Who’s there?”

Nothing. Nothing but Myrtle’s gurgling, anyway.

“Myrtle,” said Hermione. “Did you hear something?”

Myrtle sobbed that much harder by way of reply. And Hermione—

Hermione got moving, pushing into every stall, wand drawn and held aloft before her, eyes narrowed in case—in case something came crawling out of that gaping hole—but—

But she swept the bathroom, once, twice, and saw nothing. Heard nothing, save for the intermittent drip of water and Myrtle’s choked crying.  

Hermione gave the exposed hole in the floor a long, wary look, and started to edge toward it. Every fiber of her being strained against getting closer, but her feet seemed to move of their own accord, until her toes were brushing the hole’s ledge. She lit her wand tip, and peered inside of it.

It was a chute. No, not a chute. A pipe. It was a wide pipe, big enough for a person—or, God, a massive snake—to fit inside of.

Hermione’s fingers trembled around her wand.  

She was going to fetch a teacher. That was the thing to do. What other choice did she have? She’d be lucky if her punishment was restricted to a hundred docked points, lucky if she didn’t get expelled, but this—this thing was gaping open, and she knew of no way to shut it, and a basilisk could come slithering out of it at any moment—this was an emergency—

She had just begun to shuffle away from the exposed pipe when she felt something collide with her back, stealing her breath and pushing her forward with enough force to send her stumbling, tripping. Her heels bumped the ledge of the exposed pipe, and then the floor was falling completely out from under her, and then gravity took hold of her ankles and gave a great yank—

She shrieked, and fell. Fell into the pipe.

Her back and bum collided with the pipe, and she knew, somewhere under the hysteria that had taken hold of her senses, that everything from her shoulder blades to her thighs would be nothing but one massive bruise tomorrow—if there was a tomorrow. The shriek she’d let out as she’d fallen was stuck in her throat, silenced, strangled, and the pipe that’d looked huge from an outsider’s perspective was actually far too tight, what if it got narrower as it went farther down, what if she got stuck inside of it, what if what if what if—

But then, the pipe that went on forever, the pipe that would not end—ended. Hermione was ejected from it without ceremony, landing with another bruising thump on a stretch of slimy, curiously textured floor.

Lifting her hand from where she’d instinctively braced it on the floor, Hermione registered the white, brittle flecks that were clinging to her palm.

Bone fragments.

Choking on a noise that was far too like a whimper, Hermione frantically shook her hand clean, and then swept her still-lit wand—thank God she hadn’t dropped it on the way down—around the chamber—no, the tunnel—into which she’d fallen. She immediately understood why the floor was so strangely textured.

It was littered with a carpet of skeletons—tiny, quadrupedal skeletons. Animals. Rodents, from the looks of them. Mice and rats.

Hermione’s gorge rose.

Swallowing convulsively, Hermione sat forward on her knees, and then scrambled onto her shaking legs, amazed that they were functioning well enough to support her weight. She turned on the spot, and hunched, peering up the length of the pipe that’d brought her here, wand just managing to illuminate the first five feet of it.

She squinted. Was that possibly—? Hermione put her wand out and then gave the pipe another look, willing her eyes to adjust quicker—yes, that was the barest suggestion of light pouring down the pipe. It hadn’t closed up. If she could only—

Tucking her wand up her sleeve, Hermione hiked her knees up onto the lip of the pipe and tried to scramble up its length. She made it all of two feet before the pipe became too steep to climb, the fact that it was positively coated in slime helping not at all, and Hermione, sweating and crying, slid slowly backward till her heels hit the tunnel floor.  

She couldn’t despair. She mustn’t. There had to be a way to get out of here, or else Slytherin and his heir would’ve been trapped here, and no one would have got killed in the first place. Perhaps—Hermione bit her tongue, hard, to restrain an unhinged giggle—perhaps Slytherin and his exalted heir would have simply put a saddle on the basilisk and ridden it out.

Perhaps—perhaps a Summoning Charm would do it? She could—she could Summon one of the school brooms. It might take a while for it to get here, but as long as there was the barest chance—

Hermione’s ears pricked, straining to pick up a distant sound that had startled her out of her thoughts. She groped for her wand and narrowed her eyes to slits, praying, praying—but, no. It wasn’t the slither of a great serpentine body that she’d heard, but the grind of—God, shit, no, the sink was closing up, and as Hermione ducked to peer up the pipe’s length, she saw that barest sliver of light blink out.

Straightening up and clutching her wand the same way she would a severed lifeline, Hermione repressed the scream that stirred in her chest. She wasn’t getting up that pipe, and nothing was getting down that pipe, and—

And there was nothing else for it, was there?

She could only go forward.

Hermione faced the tunnel again, cursing herself for not being the sort to carry around hand mirrors; she could’ve used one to peer round corners. It was the direct gaze of the basilisk that killed you, wasn’t it? Perhaps an indirect look would only hurt you badly, possibly paralyze you—

Yes, and then the basilisk could tear into your petrified body at its leisure, couldn’t it? Comforting thought, that.

Well, someone had pushed her down here, hadn’t they? Perhaps they would come down here after her, and then she could—she could force them to let her back out.

Right.

Lighting up her wand again, Hermione moved cautiously forward, eyes only just open enough to see what was directly in front of her, ready to be slammed safely shut at any moment. She tried very hard not to think of how the basilisk, with its poisonous fangs, wouldn’t need to meet her eyes to kill her.

The tunnel, like the pipe that preceded it, seemed to go on forever, twisting and turning at random intervals so that Hermione, half blinded, nearly walked into a wall once or twice. But, like the pipe, the tunnel was not without end, and in what could’ve been an hour or half an hour, bruised legs aching with strain, Hermione reached a dead stop, and dared to open her eyes wider, if only for a moment.

The wall before her wasn’t blank, as she’d thought before she’d opened her eyes and focused her vision, but carved with a pair of emerald-eyed snakes that seemed to flicker and waver as though not quite bound by concrete reality. But Hermione slapped at the snakes with her open palm, they proved to be quite solid indeed, and Hermione doubted that they’d open for anyone but Parselmouths.

The scream that Hermione had leashed earlier fought free and burbled out of her mouth. It had weakened in the interim, and wasn’t as loud as she’d expected it to be, but it wasn’t an entirely sane sound, either. What was she going to do? She was bruised and trapped and as likely to die from starvation as a basilisk’s stare, and to add insult to injury, she was grimy down to her socks.   

Hermione’s brain stalled. Skipped. Socks. Her socks were dirty. Her socks—

Dobby.

What if—?

But Dobby was free, and at any rate, Hermione wouldn’t’ve been his master if he had been enslaved. No, the Hogwarts house-elves answered to the headmaster, and were bound by their strange, extraordinarily versatile magic to follow his commands.

But what harm was there in trying? Perhaps Dobby would come when Hermione called, not out of duty, but out of friendship. Hermione squeezed the first syllable of Dobby’s name between her teeth, only to swallow the second half of it when she heard someone calling her name.

“Hermione? Hermione!”

Hermione stumbled in her haste to turn around, holding her lit wand high. Could it—could Harry and Ron have found her on the Marauder’s Map? No. No, they’d never seen the Chamber of Secrets on that Map, and Harry and Ron had certainly looked. Still, perhaps, out of sheer luck—

But the person who came hurrying round a bend in the tunnel, looking as grimy as Hermione felt, was neither Harry nor Ron.

It was Tom Riddle.

Every muscle in Hermione’s body locked up, fastening her to the spot, but Riddle, under no such paralysis, sped up his steps at the sight of her, a look of abject relief softening his face.

“God,” he said, choked, arms coming up as he approached her. “Thank God.”

And he pulled her into a hug.

One of his hands came up to cup her shoulder, and the other clasped her hip. He tucked his face against the bend of her neck, breathing quick and damp against her skin. It was intimate, this hug, nothing at all like the careful hugs you shared with friends and family, the chaste sort of thing that kept your hips and thighs apart.

Hermione stood stiff as a plank in Riddle’s arms, staring over his shoulder. Staring off into the twisting tunnel that’d led him to her.

Curious.

“Tom,” Hermione said in a terribly steady voice. “How did you find me?”

His arms constricted around her, squeezing, as though he were shaken at the reminder of just where he’d found her, as though reassuring himself that she was here with him and whole.

“I—God, I’m not sure.” His voice was trembling. So were his fingers where they bit at her skin through her clothes. “Luck, I suppose—you weren’t at the feast, and I wanted to ask you to come and sit with me at the Slytherin table, so I asked your friends—Lavender and Parvati?—where you had gone. They said they saw you going up the stairs, so I came up here and started looking into every room I passed—and I know it wasn’t appropriate to look in on a girls’ bathroom, but I was starting to get worried, and—”

He exhaled shakily against Hermione’s neck, and then drew back, not to let her go, but to press his forehead hard against hers.

“—God, there was water everywhere, and I hadn’t taken two steps inside when I heard this—this awful hissing noise, and then the sink—the fucking sink just retracted into the bloody floor, and there was this pipe, and something—someone pushed me down here, Hermione. Is that—is that what happened to you?”

“Yes,” Hermione said mechanically as she thought, distantly, that she’d never heard him swear before. “Yes, that’s what happened to me.”

His face was too close to hers, close enough that his features blurred together, close enough that she couldn’t read him—but she doubted that she’d be able to decode them even if she pulled far enough to try.

He was a terribly accomplished actor.

Hermione shifted her arms, wedged them between their torsos, and pushed—gently—at Riddle until he got the hint and stepped back, although he kept himself anchored to Hermione with one hand on her shoulder and the other on her hip.

She looked him in the eye.

“Lavender and Parvati didn’t see me leaving,” she said, clear and precise. “If they had, they would’ve come after me. We’re too clever for this, you and I. Now, Tom, the truth this time, if you please. How did you find me?”

To Riddle’s credit, he didn’t immediately concede defeat. “I—sorry? I don’t know what you—”

“But it’s not that you found me, is it?” she pressed, voice losing its measured quality, going a bit shrill. “Is it? No, Tom, I think you followed me. I think you were there in the bathroom the whole time I was talking to Myrtle, or at least standing outside of it. I think you put on an Invisibility Cloak, or, or cast a Disillusionment Charm, and then I think you spoke Parseltongue and opened the Chamber of Secrets, the same as you did over a year ago, and I think you came up behind me and pushed me down that chute.”

Riddle blinked, and within the span of that blink, his face, still clearly and remarkably handsome under all that grime, underwent an unnerving transformation.

Everything that made him human, that made him normal, seemed to drop away bit by bit. The careful scrunch of his brow, the warmth in his eyes, the quirk of his mouth all melted away, till his face was wiped clean of all expression, till Hermione saw, unmasked, that which she’d been catching glimpses of since the third of August.

And what she saw—was Tom Riddle at his purest, at his truest, unburdened by the façade he wore for everyone else’s benefit. Without the weight of it bearing him down, without the need to extend careful attention to every detail, to every word or look or action, he seemed to hold himself differently. He looked, somehow, taller. Gaunter.

And now he was tilting his head, just as he had when they’d met in the library. Hermione had thought that he’d looked like an automaton then, and she thought it again now.

He slid his hand along Hermione’s shoulder, palm grazing her neck—she flinched; she couldn’t help it—and then he flicked his fingers against her cheek.

“You must think you’re terribly clever, mustn’t you?” he said, voice devoid of any human warmth, so that it, along with his transformed face, finally suited his laugh—cold and unfeeling and fit to raise every fine hair on Hermione’s body. “And you wouldn’t be wrong.”

Hermione swallowed. Her throat clicked.

“I want to ask you something,” she said.

“What? Not going to raise your hand first?” Riddle’s mouth curled, but his amusement lacked warmth. “Go on, then. Ask.”

Hermione wet her lips.

“Do you practice acting like a normal person in the mirror every morning, or does it come to you naturally?”

Riddle stared at her, and the cant of his mouth might’ve been incredulous, might have finally shown genuine emotion—

But then he was barking a cold laugh, lips spreading to show teeth. Straight, perfect teeth, brilliantly white in his grimy face. Odd, how the grime failed to diminish his looks. With a face like that, was it any wonder scores of people had been taken in by him? All he had to do was smile, and the world would fall at his feet.

“It comes naturally,” he said, “although I very rarely bothered before coming to Hogwarts—Muggles aren’t worth charming, on the whole, not when fear works just as well as adoration. I suppose I’m lucky. Some people are charming but ugly, and others are good looking but a chore to talk to. As for me, I’m—”

“Not nearly as charming as you think you are, or else I’d’ve been taken in by you along with the rest of your sycophants.” If she made him angry—if she finally chipped away at his control and made him really very angry—perhaps his guard would go down, and she’d be able to—

Riddle’s smile disappeared, there and gone, easy as flipping off a light switch.

He hadn’t drawn his wand. He didn’t need to, not when he could speak Parseltongue. Not when he had a basilisk at his command.  

“Hermione,” he said. “Sweetheart. There’s something I’ve been wanting to show you. I know you’re impatient to get out of here, but if you could humor me for just a little while longer?”

“Do I have a choice?” she asked, not bothering to hide the revulsion she felt at the sound of an endearment on Tom Riddle’s lips.

Riddle tugged his mouth back into a smile, a smile that didn’t fit his face. He didn’t answer her, but instead used his hold on her to turn her on the spot, so that she was facing the wall and its carved snakes.

Riddle stepped in close behind her, fingers biting sharp as fangs into her hips, and hissed.

It sounded—well, it sounded like nonsense, at least to Hermione’s ears, but she thought it might’ve sounded rather like the noise she’d heard in the girls’ bathroom—the noise that had opened up the Chamber—

Then the wall, the dead end that’d kindled Hermione’s hysteria, split down the middle and opened up, and Hermione’s wand sputtered and went out from the shock of what she was seeing.  

“Go on, Hermione,” said Riddle, reverting to English. His nose was pressed to Hermione’s cheekbone, his lips were grazing her jaw. “Say hello.”