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Chapter Text

“You need to learn how to leave well enough alone,” someone had once told her. 

She couldn’t even recall who it was, or what the context had been. Just that it was burned into her brain now, a warning as much as a benediction. Because for most of her life, Hermione Granger had a habit of meddling. She’d never quite figured out how to resist it, that urge to tug on a thread until it unspooled. Part of it was curiosity, yes; for she was insatiably curious, always asking why, why, why. But there was more to it than just that. 

Hermione was, for better or worse, an observer first, and the world had never let her be otherwise. She watched. She catalogued. 

She counted the seconds her elderly, widower neighbor, Mr. Chasten, stood at his mailbox, waiting for someone on their street to wave or say good morning. Some mornings only thirty, others, an unbearable minute or two. 

She noticed the month where her mother went from radiantly happy to sobbing quietly over the sink when she thought Hermione wasn’t looking. She listened as her father tried to reassure her with words– ‘We’ll try again in a few months,’ or ‘Of course it’s nothing you did, love. Maybe we were just meant to have just one perfect little girl and that’s it.’ 

Later, she saw the way Harry watched Fred and George tease Ron the way older brothers do, with a longing so poignant even she had to look away. 

She kept a running inventory of it all– people, moments, inconsistencies– until, inevitably, something inside her would reach capacity and she would have to “do.”

So one day she fell off her bike on purpose in front of Mr. Chasten’s house, when he just happened to be standing at the window. Knowing he’d come outside to check on her, and she’d ask him between sniffles to ring her mum and dad. Knowing that as a thank you for helping their daughter, her parents would likely invite the old man over for dinner, and he’d finally have people to talk to.

After that, her mum sent her over with baked goods at least once a week, and Mr. Chasten came round for dinner every Sunday until the day he passed. 

Another day, Hermione went to the library. She checked out books on adoption and left them laying around the house until her parents sat her down and told her while they appreciated her thoughtfulness, they weren’t in a place to adopt a child right now, but maybe it was something to consider in the future. They didn’t talk about the baby her mum had lost, and Hermione thought perhaps that was something even she could not fix. 

Then, one day during their second year, she could not take Harry’s loneliness anymore and cornered Dumbledore in his office. She simply insisted she be allowed to bring her friend home with her for the Christmas holidays. There were concerns about his safety, apparently, but the headmaster finally agreed that with some additional warding around her house and agreement from her parents and the Dursleys, he could join them. 

‘You drive a hard bargain, Miss Granger,’ Dumbledore had told her.

She took it as a compliment. 

And so, Harry and Hermione were like brother and sister. Even more so than before. He spent every holiday at her house, aside from when they stayed at the Burrow here and there, and her parents adored him. 

Some called it impulsivity, the things she did, as if she were throwing herself into chaos with the recklessness of a moth to flame. 

But that wasn’t fair. The problem was that her mind was a pressure cooker, observation and empathy building up until the logical next step was to act, to resolve the tension, to set things right. It was as if she’d been born with her nerves on the outside of her skin, a constant rawness that made her hyper-attuned to the endless, fidgeting sorrow of the world. How could anyone expect her to just sit there and watch? 

She rescued bugs tangled in spiderwebs, carefully replanted flowers her classmates trampled on in the schoolyard in primary school, left water and canned food out for the skinny, feral tomcat that hissed at her near the abandoned boxcar where she liked to play. 

And then, when she was seventeen, Hermione rescued Tom Riddle from himself. 

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Chapter Text

The idea first began to take root one night, unbidden, as Harry sat describing the details of a memory Dumbledore had shared with him. They were cross-legged on Hermione’s bed, the curtains drawn and a Silencing charm around them. 

Hermione could read Harry like a book, and he seemed particularly troubled after tonight’s “lesson.” He was agitated, tense, his jaw clenched as he told her what he’d seen. 

“Riddle was born in an orphanage?” Hermione asked, vaguely horrified. 

“Apparently. His mother died in childbirth, or shortly after,” Harry said. “So he grew up there, until Dumbledore came to tell him about Hogwarts.” 

“What was he like? As a child, I mean?” Hermione pressed, that damned curiosity rearing its stubborn head. 

Harry thought for a moment, brows knit together. “Odd,” he said finally. “Quite serious. In Dumbledore’s memory, it seemed like all the other children at the orphanage shared rooms, but Tom had his own. Maybe a bit lonely? But there was something off about him, Hermione, even then.” 

She leaned forward. “Off? How do you mean?” 

“Like, you know how Muggles talk about psychopaths, right?” He pushed his glasses up where they had begun to slip. “How you can spot them from a young age, oftentimes?” 

She nodded. Of course she did. She liked to read, after all. 

Harry continued, “It was like that, sort of. Like he just seemed… cold. Detached, maybe. The matron said he tormented the other children, that he was an ‘evil child.’” 

Hermione contemplated this. “Did he seem that way to you? Evil, I mean?” 

He hesitated. “I’m not sure. I mean, it sounded a bit like what the Dursleys used to say about me. That I was evil.” The words hung in the air for a brief, loaded moment. “But he was definitely a strange child. Right off the bat, he thought Dumbledore was a doctor, that he was there to take him away to a psychiatric institute or something.” 

Hermione mulled the conversation over later, as she laid in bed.

The moonlight on her duvet, watery and insistent, made the room seem almost unmoored from time. She stared at the ceiling, as if the constellations of spackling might rearrange themselves into answers if she only watched long enough. She’d been lying on her back for most of an hour, unable to quell the low hum of agitation behind her ribs. Harry’s words echoed insistently in her head. 

“It sounded a bit like what the Dursleys used to say about me.”

There were very few names on the list of people Hermione truly hated, but the Dursleys were unequivocally one of them. 

The cartoonish cruelty of them. The complete impossibility of love. She thought of Harry locked in a cupboard, or walking home alone from primary school under a sky the color of dishwater, or listening to the sounds of Dudley’s birthday party that he wasn’t allowed to join, and it made her insides feel like jagged things grating up against each other. 

The Dursleys had thought Harry was evil and strange, because he was magic, and they’d punished him for it. Off to bed, no dinner for you tonight, they’d told him, when he accidentally levitated an extra potato onto his plate. 

The children at primary school had thought Hermione was strange, because she was magic, and they didn’t like her because of it. 

That was weird, a girl with pretty braids and pierced ears had said, when Hermione showed her how she could levitate a leaf into a little umbrella for an ant. 

It’s trying to carry a crumb back to its colony, Hermione had explained. I’m just helping to keep it dry. 

But the girl had wrinkled her nose and backed away. Then she’d told the other girls not to play with her, and Hermione watched the ants clamber into their dirt hill one after another, wishing for a friend. 

What if the matrons at the orphanage had thought Tom was an evil child, because he was magic? What if, like the Dursleys, they had punished him because of it? What if the other children had teased him or hurt him and made him bitter and lonely? What if no one had ever held him or hugged him when he cried? 

She wondered, not for the first time, if there were universes where Harry had turned out like Tom Riddle, or Tom Riddle like Harry, or herself like either of them. Did it hinge on a single act of kindness, a gentle hand on the shoulder, or was it all just in the marrow, inevitable? Were some people just born wrong from the start? Hermione’s gut told her no, but she wasn’t entirely sure. 

Hermione rolled over and tried to shut off her mind, but the images kept returning– a boy alone in an orphanage, another boy locked in a cupboard, a girl on a playground, rescuing ants from drowning in a puddle. She saw the similarities as clearly as a mathematical proof, and they disquieted her. 

It was dangerous, this little thread she longed to tug, tug, tug at. 

Because it would unspool, and she would follow it. And then Hermione would “do,” as her mother liked to say. ‘You’re never content to sit with anything for awhile. You’ve just got to do.’  It was what always happened, and she was afraid of where this particular thread might take her. 

She stood, tip-toeing from her bed so as not to wake the other girls, and shined the light of her wand on her bookcase. 

Hermione had always sought comfort in books. They were both her solace and her arsenal. 

Whenever her feelings got too unwieldy, she could wedge them between the covers and let a cleverer, braver, or more eloquent protagonist shoulder the burden for a while. She had always been ravenous for stories about odd, hungry girls with no friends, stories where bits of cleverness saved the day, or where the smallest kindness could unpick the seams of a hard world and let something better in. But she also devoured stories about people with lives so vastly different than her own, princesses or peasants or angry, jaded villains who hated the world until someone burned away their armor and saw the goodness inside. 

She let her finger run along a row of spines, some more battered than others– their covers soft with use, each one a portal to a world that, for a few hours, would take her in and let her rest.

Little Women. A favorite of hers, but not what she was looking for tonight. Persuasion– she didn’t think she could handle the heartache leading up to Anne and Wentworth’s reconciliation, not tonight. Oliver Twist felt a bit too on-the-nose. 

She strongly considered To Kill A Mockingbird, but recoiled at the prospect of Boo Radley lurking in the margins– the way justice always arrived too late for some, and how children could be both keen witnesses and powerless to change what mattered most. 

She slid past The Bell Jar, a hand-me-down from her cousin Jessa, the one who wore black eyeliner and talked about existential dread at the dinner table. 

Not tonight. Sorry, Jessa. 

Her hand hovered uncertainly, finally landing on a worn, pale green spine: The Secret Garden. She pulled the book free, nestling it under her arm, and padded back to her bed. 

Mary Lennox had irritated Hermione as a child. She’d found her brattish, spoiled, intolerable, really. But still, she’d returned to that copy of the book over and over, until the corners had curled and the jacket had been mended with Sellotape. And then, eventually, she’d begun to make sense of the girl. 

She could see it now, in the lamplight, even more poignantly than usual. 

Mary’s world was ugly, all gray walls and coldness and loss, and she did not make herself easy to love. Hermione understood her brittle defenses, better now than she had as a child. Mary, exiled to a haunted manor on the moors, rebelled through small cruelties, then larger kindnesses; how she coaxed the garden back to life while secretly reviving herself too. 

The one thing that had once repelled her about Mary Lennox– the unyielding, obsessive need to have things just so– was now the very quality she found perhaps most endearing about her. 

And she saw the story in a new light tonight, as the moon peaked through the windows. She thought, just a little bit, of another orphan. She reached for a quill and underlined a passage, then another, then another. Finally satisfied, she gingerly placed the book down and let sleep claim her, if only for a few hours. 

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The following day, the resolve had crystallized into something tangible, undeniable. Do. Do. Do, her brain screamed. 

Naturally, she went to the library. That was always where she began. 

Some of her research would be review for her– Hermione, of course, had spent plenty of hours reading about Time Travel during her third year. But this time, she had a different goal in mind. 

Unbeknownst to anyone but herself and Minerva McGonagall, Hermione was still in possession of a Time Turner. She’d expected her professor would have asked for it back after everything that transpired her third year, but it was as if she’d either chosen to forget about it, or knew something Hermione didn’t. And although Hermione had almost returned it a few times, something had always stopped her. She wondered, absently,  if it was this. As if on some subconscious level, she had known she might need it again, for this strange purpose. 

So, on a pleasant, sunny October Saturday while her classmates went to Hogsmeade, Hermione stationed herself in the library and read until her eyes blurred. 

She buried herself in the canon of magical theory with the same hunger that, as a small child, made her memorize the periodic table out of boredom. She read every word ever written on the paradoxes and permutations of magical time. She scoured the library for anything that hadn’t already been covered in her feverish time-turner crash course from third year. She started with the theory– Advanced Temporal Magic, Volumes I through V, each one thicker and more ponderous than the last. Then, she excavated obscure treatises and academic journals, the types of books that didn’t make it to the main shelves but resided instead in the sub-basement stacks, behind wards and dust.

And by the end of the day, when she lifted her head and blinked rapidly, realizing the sun was setting, she had come to several stringent conclusions. 

One. Time travel required intent. In order to travel into the past and change something in the future, a person must know what they want to change. 

Two. Most Time Turners only allowed the user to stay in the past for five hours at a time. Any longer, you would risk serious harm to yourself or to… time itself, apparently. 

And three, if she was very careful not to reveal herself, not to intervene in any perceptible way, there was nothing that said she couldn’t go back to, say, 1931 merely to observe. 

Hermione re-shelved the books, gathered her notes, bade goodnight to Madam Pince, and prepared herself to travel sixty-six years into the past. 

Of course, she had to test a few theories first. 

Could she ask to borrow Harry’s Invisibility Cloak without raising his suspicions? Yes, it turned out, she could. 

Part of her felt guilty for deceiving her best friend, but she knew he would try and talk her out of it. As close as they were, there were certain things Harry just didn’t understand. One of them was what he affectionately referred to as her “cause-itis.” 

The two of them were alike in some ways– both prone to strong emotions, both at times recklessly brave, both observant and introspective; but Harry didn’t throw himself into the line of fire of injustices in the way Hermione did. He wasn’t infuriated by mistreatment or pain or exclusion in the bone-deep, deafening way she was. So perhaps he’d understand later, but right now, she truly didn’t feel like arguing. 

“I need to sneak into Filch’s office to get the book he took from me,” she explained. “It was one I wasn’t meant to take out from the Restricted section, and I don’t want Madame Pince to find out.” 

“All yours,” he said, handing it to her without even looking up from the Marauder’s Map. 

She thought about telling him he was growing too obsessed with following Malfoy’s every move, but really, she was one to talk, wasn’t she? So, she left it alone. 

The next theory she needed to test was whether she could travel back in time with the Cloak on. She didn’t want to risk being seen when she potentially landed in the middle of Tom Riddle’s bedroom, so she practiced it a few times in the middle of the Gryffindor common room. She twisted the Time Turner, traveling back in time to an hour prior. She cast a Muffliatio, too, in case she made a sound when she landed. 

Yes, that worked too, she realized with a grin. 

Neville, Ron, Seamus, Ginny, and Harry were seated around the fire, and she’d landed right in front of them. They couldn’t see her, and the Cloak had not budged. 

She even made a noise, a clearing of her throat. 

Nothing. 

“Hello!” she shouted. 

Not a blink, not even a shift in the air. They had no idea. 

At that moment, her mind was made up. 

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That night, Hermione landed soundlessly in the middle of what looked to be a garden. 

It was May 2, 1931, a random date she’d chosen. It was daytime here, mid-morning, and around her, flowers bloomed. It was lovely, actually, nothing like she’d expected. 

She heard a noise, and when she turned, there he was. Little Tom Riddle. He would’ve been five years old.

He wore a gray woolen jumper and shorts that looked two sizes too big in the waist and three too small in the legs, with long socks hitched unevenly up chicken-slender shins. He was beautiful, in the way that certain children are, all angles and shadows and grandeur yet to be realized. His hair fell in a sheet of black over his brow, but was shorn close at the sides, his mouth pursed in a line so severe she wondered if it had ever learned to curve upwards.

There was a tightness to him even now. The way he walked– measured, each foot placed with intent– suggested he expected to be observed, even in apparent solitude. He looked like a little soldier, far too solemn and stiff for a boy so small. 

Hermione pressed herself against the brick wall of what looked to be a greenhouse, her heart beating madly. He can’t see you, she reminded herself. And even if he could, he was five. What could he possibly do to her? So she held her breath and continued following him, watching as he moved carefully from one flowerbed to the next. 

She had to strain to hear it, but it was unmistakable– he was humming softly under his breath. The realization made tears spring to her eyes inexplicably, and she blinked them away. 

He’s just a boy, she thought. He was a child, once. 

Yes, but he’s a child who will become Lord Voldemort, another voice patiently explained. 

At first, she thought this would be it. That this was all she’d see, and maybe that was enough. Perhaps she just needed to humanize him– perhaps this was more for her than anyone else. But then, he spoke, and she startled. 

“Oh, hello,” he said, in a shockingly sweet, curious voice. 

Hermione froze. Could he see her? Should she respond, reveal herself? But then she saw who he was speaking to. 

A snake. 

A small, harmless black garden snake weaving its way through the garden beds, its tongue flicking around, beady eyes fixed in front of it. Would he harm it? She wondered absently. She knew psychopaths often showed these signs as children– hurting small animals, inflicting pain on those who couldn’t fight back. But instead, he crouched before the snake, sticking out his finger so it could slither across. 

And then he began to talk to it. Not in English, not in a way she could understand, but in a language she recognized, because she’d heard Harry use it. Parseltongue. She wished she could decipher it, but he didn’t seem to be saying anything malicious. In fact, the snake and him seemed to be having a… conversation. 

She tilted her head, watching curiously. She’d always thought of Parseltongue as something inherently dark. 

But this didn’t seem evil or twisted– it seemed like a small boy making friends with a small snake, and delighting in the fact that it could understand him. It didn’t seem like the first time he’d done this, either, and she wondered when he’d discovered he could speak to serpents. 

How lonely must he have been, that at the age of five, he’d attempted to make conversation with a garden snake? Did he have friends at the orphanage? Or was this the extent of his friendships? 

“Tom!” A sharp voice shouted, and he dropped the snake, turning and stiffening. 

“Yes, Mrs. Cole?” He said, a perfect little soldier once again. 

“I know what you’re doing out here,” the woman said, her voice dangerously low as she approached. 

Tom tilted his head, feigning confusion. “I’m not sure what you mean, Mrs. Cole.” 

Hermione saw it then– the darkness Harry had mentioned, the shadow under the surface. The way his eyes shuttered, a calculation almost too swift to track. She’d seen children lie before, she’d seen them deceive. But Tom’s was more elegant, an older boy’s trick honed to diamond. He rearranged his face into something perfectly blank, the only betrayal a subtle lift of the chin, a defiance that would have gone unnoticed by anyone but a consummate watcher.

The matron’s broad hands descended, wrenching him upright by the skinny arm. “Don’t,” she hissed. “Play the fool with me. You were out here talking to the snakes again. Wicked, wicked boy.” 

Her grip was merciless. Tom’s shoulder jerked, but his face remained serene, a mask. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Cole. I don’t know what you think you saw, but I was just looking at it. Honest.” 

She smacked him then, clean across the face, and Hermione gasped. “Do not lie to me. The last time I caught you, I told you what would happen. You’ll sleep in the cellars tonight.” 

Tom’s eyes widened, and Hermione knew then that this was not manipulation. He was five years old and utterly terrified.

“Please,” he begged as she yanked him along. “Please don’t make me. I’ll never do it again, Matron, I swear it–” 

The matron ignored him, marched him along by the bicep, Tom’s heels scrabbling for purchase in the rutted earth. 

He pleaded, voice small and exquisitely polite, “Please, I’m sorry, I’ll never do it again, please, Matron, I’ll be good,” but she did not answer. 

The matron was stone and iron and the only answer was a wordless drag toward the looming basement stairwell. Her face was set in a look of pure exasperated finality, the expression of someone who’d made a resolve and meant to see it through. Hermione, beneath the cloak, found herself following as if she had no choice, as if the compulsion that drove Tom to snakes was the twin of her own need to see the worst through to the end.

Other children, dressed in similar clothes to Tom, scattered as they walked through the front door, whispering and pointing, wide-eyed. Hermione was so close now that she could see the pale shimmer of sweat on the little boy’s temple, the way his ears flushed with humiliation, the unshed tears in his dark eyes. 

The cellar didn’t look especially threatening– there was no sinister architecture, no locks or torture devices, but it was dark and dank and to a five year old, it was likely horrifying. The Matron opened the door and shoved him inside, ignoring his cries as he stumbled down three steps and then grabbed the banister, curling into himself. 

Hermione clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from crying out when she got a look at his face full-on. It was the sort of moment that gutted you with its swiftness. She knew, even years from now, she would not forget the image of Tom Riddle’s face.

Then she saw, in a flash, the growing wetness on his shorts, the urine spreading down his leg in a slow, treacherous rivulet. The hollow mortification scalded his cheeks and, for a second, his eyes flicked upward and through the narrowing sliver of daylight. 

He didn’t cry. Not at first. But as the heavy door thundered shut, he seemed to age backwards, shoulders collapsing, jaw unclenching, a whimper leaking out that was so small and so private it felt obscene to witness.

Stumbling back, almost tripping over her own feet, Hermione pressed herself into the shadows. She didn’t even stop to collect herself before she reached up and twisted the Time Turner. 

She landed back in her dorm and without even bothering to check if anyone was around, she crawled into bed and spelled the curtains shut, yanking off the Cloak. 

And then she broke. 

Hermione sobbed until her throat was raw. She sobbed for the little boy in the cellar, who had never once in his life been cherished. For the ancient, horrid, bone-white thing he became. For Harry. For the innumerable lost chances in between. 

She cried for the unavoidable truth that knowing– truly knowing– made nothing better. Worse, maybe.

Why had she gone? Why had she been so determined to witness the horrors of Tom Riddle’s childhood? To what, prove a hypothesis? To satisfy herself with the knowledge that perhaps he had not been born evil, but that it had festered in him as a result of years and years of abuse and neglect and who knew what else? 

There was no satisfaction in this knowledge. There was only a hollow ache, only his wide, frightened eyes so dark they were almost black, his little mouth pressed together to stifle the whimper that escaped anyways. 

For whatever kindness she might feel, whatever act of goodness she might’ve attempted was nearly seventy years too late. 

Not your fight, her brain chided her gently, more patient than it usually was. But you can save Harry. You can save yourself. 

It’s not enough, she argued back through her tears. 

It will have to be, said her brain. Now sleep. 

And she did, but it was not peaceful. 

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It had been four days since Hermione had used the Time Turner, and she’d thought of little else since. She was distracted, withdrawn. Some of her friends noticed, others didn’t. 

Of course, Harry was among the former. And of course he prodded and prodded until she inevitably gave. 

She was in the library, of course, because that was where a person retreated when they wished to be left alone, but it was also where one’s friend might track them down and corner them until they admit something is wrong. She was hunched over her Charms essay that had been completed for days, pretending to care about last-minute revisions when Harry dropped into the chair beside her, his elbow bumping hers. 

She considered pretending he wasn’t there, but his breathing was obnoxiously loud and his robes were tickling her arm. “Do you need something?” she snapped. 

He was utterly unphased. “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong, or is this one of those times where I’m meant to guess?”

She tried to rearrange her features into mild exasperation. “I’ve been working too hard,” she said, lying through her teeth. “Not sleeping enough. Maybe my courseload is too large this term.” 

He narrowed his eyes. “Not bad. Quite convincing, actually, but no. That’s not it. Try again.” 

Hermione sighed. “Harry…” 

“Hermione.” 

He waited until the silence was nearly unbearable, then slyly offered, “Do I need to write your mum?” 

Her jaw dropped. “You wouldn’t.” 

“No?” He raised a brow. “Try me. I owe her a letter anyways.” 

She glared at him. “That’s blackmail, Harry James Potter.”

He grinned, as if he fancied himself genuinely hilarious. “It’s accountability, Hermione Jean Granger. Now, talk.” 

She wanted to keep her secret. She needed to. 

It was her burden to bear, and if she could just hold it a little longer, it would compress into something less sharp, less uncomfortable. It wasn’t something Harry needed to concern himself about, not when he was already concerned about staying alive and, frankly, keeping the rest of the wizarding world from collapse. 

She swallowed, and he shifted, leaning in closer. “Look, you can tell me. You don’t need to– er, is it Ron? Did he–” 

“No,” she said sharply. “It’s not Ron.” 

“Okay,” Harry said, and his tone was all patience. She hated it. “Whenever you’re ready, then. I’ve got all day.” 

She scowled. “No, you don’t. You have Care of Magical Creatures in twenty minutes.” 

He gave her a sidelong glance. “You’re truly insufferable, you know that?” 

“Yes,” she said mildly, closing her book with a huff. “Alright, fine. I’ll tell you. But you have to promise not to yell at me. Or interrupt. Or tell anyone.” 

He leaned forward, eyes sparkling. “I solemnly swear,” he said. 

And so she told him everything– from their conversation a week ago about Dumbledore’s memory, to her research and the Time Turner she still had, to a five year old Tom whispering in Parseltongue with a little snake, to the sight of him terrified through the cellar window. She left out the part about him wetting himself– it felt too private, something she herself wasn’t even meant to see. 

And when she was done, he didn’t look angry. Well, he did look a bit angry, but that wasn’t the only emotion on his face. He’d propped his chin in his hand and listened, really listened, the way almost no one else ever did. When she finished, a long, soft pause opened between them, a small hush like the aftersound of a bell. Only then did he draw a slow, judicious breath.

“He killed my parents, Hermione.” He said it so simply, so plainly, that it rendered her momentarily speechless. 

Hermione felt a twist of guilt. “I know,” she said, her voice low. “I know what he did.” 

They let the words hang in the air for a moment longer, and then Hermione was the first to break the silence. “I don’t know why I did it. I think it was curiosity, maybe. But I didn’t forget what he is, Harry. I could never.” 

“I know you didn’t forget,” he said, sighing. “I felt a little sorry for him too, when I saw him as a child. Even though I hate Voldemort, it’s hard to hate a boy that… miserable. And small.” 

“Yes,” she agreed. “It is.” 

There was another pause. 

“You know,” he said finally, “sometimes I think I get it. The way you want to fix things that seem stuck. Like if you just try hard enough, maybe it’ll come out right the second time.” He looked down, absently tracing a finger along the wood grain of the library table. “But there are some things you can’t fix, Hermione. Some things you just have to… survive, I suppose.”

She bristled. “I’m not trying to fix anything, Harry. I just… I had to know.” 

He frowned. “Had to know what?” 

“If I was right. That we’re shaped by the kindness we’re shown. That perhaps, if Tom Riddle had been shown some kindness, things may have turned out differently for him.” 

He gave her a look that was almost pitying, and it made her want to scream. 

“I’m not naïve. Don’t give me that look. I know what he is. I know what he became. But I just– I don’t think anyone ever loved him, Harry,” she whispered. “Don’t you think that might have made a difference?” 

His jaw was set, and he looked away from her. “I don’t know. It’s hard for me… wrap my head around that.” 

She nodded. “I know. It’s probably stupid to even think about. I just wonder–” 

“I guess I wonder, too. In some ways, he reminded me of myself,” Harry confessed. “I hate that he did, but it’s true. But if we had so many things in common, why didn’t I grow up into someone like him? Why did he end up so… evil?” 

She looked at him. Sometimes Harry managed to actually surprise her, with his capacity for both self-awareness and empathy. She didn’t know any other boys with that sort of… emotional depth, at least at their age. “I don’t know. I mean, you said it yourself, that Dumbledore didn’t seem to particularly like him, even when he was small. Do you think he was looked out for once he came to Hogwarts?” 

Harry pondered. “I didn’t get that impression, no. But I’ve only seen a few memories. And when I saw him in the diary, he was… he was all wrong. I could tell, he’d already crossed that line. And he was– what? Sixteen?”

Hermione picked at her cuticle again. “I know I should just leave it alone. But I can’t help but want to help that little boy. How is it possible that no one tried to help him?” 

“I dunno,” Harry sighed, running a hand through his unruly hair. “Maybe they did, and he didn’t want it.” 

“Or maybe people found him off-putting and odd, so they never bothered. Maybe if they’d seen past his… oddness, something could’ve been done. Maybe he wouldn’t have ended up the monster he is today,” she said. 

“Maybe,” he relented. “It’s possible. But there’s nothing we can do about that. I know you wish there was, but there isn’t.” 

She frowned, staring down at her cuticles. She’d picked at one until it bled, she realized. 

“Regardless of what he did later in his life… I don’t think he deserved it either,” he said, frowning slightly at the blood that bloomed on her index finger. “What happened to him as a child, I mean. No one deserves that. You’re not wrong for seeing that. I get it, Hermione.” 

Her throat tightened, the pressure of tears pricking again. She leaned sideways until her temple rested against his shoulder. “I wish I could forget it,” she whispered. “I wish I never saw it.” 

Harry tilted his head slightly so his cheek brushed her hair. “I know. Come on, let’s go for a walk, yeah? Maybe some fresh air.” 

She gave a weak laugh. “No. You’ve got class.” 

He shrugged. “I’ll skip. Hagrid won’t mind.” 

Hermione huffed, half exasperated and half grateful, and let him tug her gently up from the table.

If only that had been the end of it. If only she had let it go and moved on to something– anything else. But she was Hermione Granger, and she was curious and stubborn and she felt, and felt, and felt. So that was not the end of it. Not even close. 

*

*

*

On Saturday, she sat in her bed under Harry’s cloak, her heart beating frantically. She took a deep, steadying breath, cast a Muffliato, and twisted the Time Turner. 

This time, it was December 31, 1935. Once again she’d picked a random date– New Year’s Eve, of all nights. 

Tom Riddle was eight, or maybe nine, and it was snowing. She’d landed in the middle of his bedroom, where he sat staring out the window. It was dusk, and the room was grey, cheerless, the way government buildings never managed to conjure warmth. A cot, a desk, a single wobbly chair. A trunk with his initials, T.M.R., black ink on linen tape, fraying at the corners. No books, no toys, no evidence of any previous Christmases other than a brittle red ribbon tied around the trunk's handle. Hermione let her eyes adjust to the gloom.

Tom was older but not much bigger. Taller, yes, lankier and more awkward, but he still looked so small to her. He'd grown into his face in an uncomfortable way– the cheekbones had begun their sharp ascent, and the darkness of his eyes seemed to eat the dying light rather than reflect it. His hands, clasped together on his lap, were paler than she remembered, with the same faint blue roadmap of veins she sometimes traced on the back of her own. He did not fidget, not even when the cold from the window fogged his breath.

She sat beside him, watching, for the better part of an hour. And he just sat. She searched his face for signs of cruelty, for a flicker of hatred or a glint of evil, but all she saw was a careful, blank mask. Even when he was alone, he was utterly expressionless, drained of affect. It troubled her. This wasn’t how a child was meant to look. 

There was a noise from outside his door, and Tom’s head snapped up, his shoulders tensing. Bracing. The door swung open and a boy stood there, maybe a year or two older, and a good five inches taller. 

“Riddle,” he said, leaning against the doorframe. “Where are they?” 

“I’m not sure what you mean, Clarence,” Tom said calmly, his hands still folded in his lap. 

The boy strolled into the room as if he owned it, glancing around. “It’s not fair that you get your own room,” he muttered. “I guess that’s what happens when everyone hates you. No one wants to sleep in the same room as you, you know.” 

Tom didn’t flinch. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t want to sleep in the same room as them, either.” 

The boy– Clarence– looked at him, not bothering to mask his disdain. “Whatever you say. Now tell me where you put Mary’s alleys.” 

Tom tilted his head. “I don’t have Mary’s alleys. Why don’t you ask her where she put them? She’s rather forgetful, isn’t she?” 

Clarence stepped closer, giving Tom’s shoulder a light shove. “Shut it, or I’ll give you another black eye to match the one from last time. I know you took it. She’s only six, you little swine. You’ve made her cry.” 

“I didn’t take anything from her,” Tom said, voice flat as glass. “You can search if you’d like.”

Clarence considered this, his beady eyes narrowing. “You’re trying to distract me,” he said.

“And they say you’re not clever,” Tom drawled. 

Clarence shoved him again, roughly. “Don’t make me hurt you again, Riddle,” he said, towering above him. 

This time, Tom did react– his jaw set, and for a flash his eyes cut to Clarence’s hand, then back up to his face. “Try it,” he said, softly. “Just once more. See what happens.”

Clarence grabbed Tom’s shoulder, yanking him up out of the chair, digging his thumb into the thin muscle. “I could break your arm and no one would care,” he said. “Not even Mrs. Cole. You know what she says about you.”

Tom did not blink. “Let go,” he said, “or I’ll do something that will make you scream.” He lifted his chin defiantly and then, chillingly, he smiled. 

Clarence dropped his arm as though it had burned him. “You’re a proper freak, Riddle, you know that?” He stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him. 

Tom waited until his footsteps retreated, then sat back down, his shoulders relaxing almost imperceptibly. He reached into his pocket and Hermione craned her neck to see what he was holding. Three glass marbles– Mary’s alleys, she realized. He rolled them around in his hand, watching as the light from the falling snow reflected off them. 

And then, so quietly she almost missed it, he whispered to himself– “Happy birthday, Tom.” 

*

*

*

Chapter Text

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).”

–Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

*

*

*

Tom Riddle was not like the other children at Wool’s Orphanage. He knew it, they knew it, the matrons knew it. When he was much smaller, softer, it bothered him. He’d wanted to be liked, wanted the other children to grab his hand and ask him to play, wanted them to smile back when he did his very best Friendly Smile. 

But Tom was older now. He was nine years old and full of secrets, and he didn’t care that he was different. Because he was better than them. Smarter. He could speak to snakes. That was one of his secrets. And he knew how to make things move with only his mind. When Clarence and the other bigger boys tried to hurt him, he could hurt them back. He could hurt them worse. 

Wicked, wicked boy, the matrons would say. Nasty thing, you are. 

Perhaps he was. But that was alright. He would rather be wicked than weak. Tom hadn’t cried in over a year– he’d kept count. He just needed to survive this place until he was seventeen, and then he could do whatever he wanted. He would do something great, and people would look at him and they would smile. He would walk into a room and important people would stand to shake his hand. He would have money and power and all the books he could dream of. He’d go to university and he’d be smarter than everyone at Wool’s Orphanage, the matrons included. He would have nice things, clothes that fit him properly, and his belly would never feel hollow and hungry. 

He would be remembered.

Not for being strange, but for being special. Rare. Brilliant. 

It was a difficult thing, not to care. It was an exercise in willpower to keep his face indifferent, to stop it from betraying his traitorous emotions. It was a muscle that trembled under strain, a lesson he tried to make himself memorize like times tables– people do not like you, Tom, and they never will. And you are perfectly alright with that. 

But one can only repeat something so many times before it becomes a hard, gleaming truth. He wore it like a badge, or perhaps a scab, proud and ugly and his. Yes, the other children hated him, but he gave them cause. He made sure of it. He did not want to be liked by them– he had more important things to worry about. 

Like power, for example. Tom had come to the stark realization that he wasn’t completely indifferent to the other children. He hated them. He hated them for their simplicity of mind, for their weakness, the way they cried openly and fought with each other over meaningless toys. He hated them for the fact that at one point, they had managed to make him feel lesser than. He hated them for their cruelty and the fact that they had each other and he had no one. 

He was careful, with the small cruelties. The best revenge was always the one that couldn’t be traced back, and Tom was good at not being seen. Some of the children wet the bed, and for a time, so did Tom. Not anymore, though. Matrons were merciless, scrubbing knuckles raw, humiliating offenders in the morning line. So Tom learned to wake himself at dawn, to practice restraint, and then to splash water on the beds of the children who laughed at him. Then he’d watch as they were punished, feeling satisfied. 

And when he realized he could do magic, it became even easier to be cruel. He could make people trip on invisible threads, he could make their stuffed animals explode. He could pinch their arms without touching them, if he concentrated hard enough. The other children learned to steer clear of Tom, which was just as well. No one bothered him much, and that was good. Wonderful, even. 

So Tom was terribly confused when he awoke one morning to find a book beneath his pillow. 

He knew he had not put it there. And frankly, it frightened him a little. Was it some sort of threat? Had someone caught onto his magic? A way to get him in trouble with the matrons? Was it some sort of practical joke at his expense?

Strangest of all, it was a book Tom had never seen before. He knew every book in the orphanage. He’d read all of them at least twice (there were not many, you see) and this was not one of them. 

The Secret Garden. 

The cover was green, a real hardcover book with embossed gold script, although it certainly had some wear and tear. Tom didn’t mind. He flipped it open hungrily, hoping he wasn’t falling into some sort of trap. 

And then he began to read. He couldn’t help it– he never could, the way the words tumbled into his brain, filling a small, yearning pit he’d never been able to put a name to.

Tom could never stop after the first page, or even the first chapter. He read with the same wild, secret urgency with which he hoarded marbles and honed his magic. Books worked a spell on him that nothing else could– he inhaled them, and for as long as the world inside the pages lasted, he existed somewhere else as someone else, someone with a different life, a better, fuller life. 

He’d never had a book all to himself before. Even the ones he “borrowed” from the schoolroom or from the locked shelf in the Matron’s office, he always had to return. Sometimes he would copy a few lines in his notebook, his own tidy hand pretending to be the fine, effortless script in the printed text. 

But this book– this was a gift, even if he did not know who it was from. He could read it again and again. He could memorize the way the paper softened at the corners, how the gold on the spine shimmered when it caught the light. He slept with it under his pillow every night, his fingers grazing the edges to make sure it was there. Tom wondered, even, if he had somehow conjured this book for himself, as if all of his longing for knowledge and adventure had materialized into a real, tangible thing he could finally hold. 

He’d never gotten a proper present, though. And it had come on the night of his birthday. It could not be a coincidence. 

Best, and most curiously of all, whoever had left it had gone to the trouble of underlining certain passages. He couldn’t help wondering if they were meant for him. It was a silly, embarrassing thought, but no less insistent. Because these lines were ones he might have picked out for himself– secret words that validated him, that tugged at him, that made him feel. By the end of the week, he’d memorized them, copied them onto scraps of paper should someone come and steal the book away whilst he slept. 

In all, there were eight passages underlined: 

“She had not wanted to be loved or to love anyone; she had only wanted to be left alone, and as she had been left alone she had grown more and more disagreeable.”

‘Disagreeable’ was a far kinder term than the ones the matrons used to describe him, but he felt a strange kinship with Mary, despite certain differences in their upbringings. 

“She had made herself disagreeable in a hundred ways, and therefore nobody thought her worth noticing.”

There it was again, that word. But that was exactly what he’d done, wasn’t it? The more unpleasant he was, the more creative he got with his cruelty, the less he was bothered. The more he was left to his own devices. 

“She had suddenly begun to feel so lonely and to think queer thoughts which were new to her.”

Was Tom lonely? Yes, he supposed he was. But that was fine. The other children would never understand him, and they weren’t nearly as clever as him. He did not need or want their friendship. He could ignore the loneliness, and eventually it would harden into something more formidable, something that made him stronger. 

“Perhaps it is only in dreams that a child can be quite alone.” 

He was alone. He was always, always alone, and that was the way he liked it. But to his dismay, the words made something stir in him. It frightened him, because he had worked so hard to be content with being alone. 

“She made herself stronger by fighting with the wind. She made herself stronger by fighting with the rain.”

“Precisely,” he said aloud the first time he’d read that line. 

“And delight filled every inch of him, and soon his eyes were sparkling and he was laughing.”

He wasn’t sure why he liked that one, but he did. He sometimes repeated the passage to himself, under his breath. ‘Delight filled every inch of him.’ He wondered what that would feel like, to be filled with something as unfamiliar as delight. Likely quite pleasant, he imagined. 

“The sun shone and the rain fell, but the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles.”

Sometimes, he felt like he had a secret garden inside himself. Like each day that he woke up and discovered something new he could do with his magic, something wild and rare bloomed within him. No one else knew of his powers. It was his biggest and most precious secret. 

And then, his favorite– “Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes, and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us.”

He pondered that last line, tracing his fingertip over the faded ink. He wasn’t foolish enough to believe everything was truly made of magic. But Tom could talk to snakes, and that was magical. Were there people who could speak to foxes? Were there others like him, who grew secret gardens within themselves each time they called something towards them with only their minds? Were there other things, other people made of magic? Maybe so, and maybe that was the secret– the world was full of it, but most ordinary people did not know how to see it. 

Sometimes Tom thought he must have been born with a flaw in his eyes, a crack that let the magic leak through. 

Sometimes he imagined it was the other way around, and it was everyone else who was broken, who moved through life deaf to the humming undercurrent he felt at odd moments, in odd places. The book made him wonder if there might be, somewhere, a person who would understand this, who could look at him and see the magic, instead of the wicked, wicked boy. Someone like Mary, perhaps, although he was not certain they would get on very well. But he knew he would try to be friendly if he met her, if he were to meet anyone at all who was like him. Even whoever had left him this book, perhaps. 

Several times he caught himself mouthing the phrases, as if they were incantations. He wished whoever had left the book would bring another, but he knew he should not be greedy. Sometimes, he imagined where they might’ve gotten the book, if they had shelves and shelves of them and didn’t mind sharing them. He couldn’t imagine giving away something as precious as a book away simply to be… kind, but then again, he had not been raised with an abundance of them. He wondered if they’d underline other books for him, too, with words that he could cling to when the orphanage was dark and he was certain no one else in the whole world understood him the way this book did. 

He wondered if they knew that sometimes, if he closed his eyes, the book felt a bit like a friend. 

*

*

*

Hermione hadn’t meant to leave the book behind. 

Or, rather, she hadn’t planned to. 

It had been an impulsive decision, one she hoped didn’t have any lasting implications. But when she’d returned to her own bed that evening after watching Tom whisper happy birthday to himself, she hadn’t let herself stop and think it through before she was once again returning to 1935. He’d been asleep by the time she landed in his room again, his back facing her as she gingerly slipped the book underneath his pillow, her heart pounding. 

And then she’d left. 

Now, she burned with curiosity. Had he found it? Surely, he had. Had he read it? Strangely, she was certain he had. She wondered what he thought of it, if he’d noticed the underlines, if he’d pondered them. Would he find it silly, childish and beneath him? Or would he drink in the words, puzzle over Mary’s behavior the way she had as a child? Would he find bits of himself in the pages? 

She visited him two days later, but two weeks later in his timeline. He was in his room again, sitting on his bed, the book open in his lap. It was late afternoon, and the room was chilly. Somehow, she felt like this place was always cold, no matter the weather. Like it had seeped into the very fibers of the building. She imagined that no matter what one did, they’d never be able to fully shake the chill from their bones as long as they were at Wool’s Orphanage. 

Tom glanced down at the book, his eyes scanning the page. Then, he leaned his head against the wall, closing his eyes, and he began to speak, his sweet little voice low, quiet. 

“It was in that strange and sudden way that Mary found out that she had neither father nor mother left; that they had died and been carried away in the night–” 

Hermione’s stomach lurched. His eyes were not open. He was reciting the book from memory. 

“...And that the few native servants who had not died also had left the house as quickly as they could get out of it, none of them even remembering that there was a Missie Sahib. That was why the place was so quiet. It was true that there was no one in the bungalow but herself and the little rustling snake.” His little mouth turned up at the corner at that part, like it was a secret he was sharing with himself. 

Hermione didn’t need to see any more. Determination settling into her bones, she returned to Hogwarts and began to browse her bookshelf. 

In the end, she chose The Wind in the Willows. It was a bit childish, but perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps Tom needed to learn how to be a child. 

She underlined eight passages. 

“Suddenly the Mole felt a great awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror—indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy—but it was an awe that smote and held him, and without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. He knew it, and trembled, and yet he was glad.”

“As they sat by the river together, Rat told Mole about the great world that lay all around them — of the forest and the field, of the towns and the cities, and of the sea beyond. Mole listened, wide-eyed, and thought to himself that here, perhaps, was a friend who would never tire of him.”

“He saw at last, deep in the heart of the Wild Wood, the low, solid house of Badger. A sense of security, of refuge, of being at last in a place where evil things dared not follow, settled upon him as he looked at it. It seemed the very embodiment of comfort and protection.”

“It was a moment of breathless stillness. The sky seemed to grow larger, the trees taller, and the air full of something shining and invisible. The Mole felt a stirring in his heart, and a great longing that he could not name. He thought that he had been waiting for this all his life, though he had not known it until now.”

“He thought he had never in all his life seen a river before — this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, playing all the time, glinting, and gleaming, and rustling. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of his friend, and with the river whispering to him, he felt himself a part of everything, not excluded from it.”

“Here, in this place of peace, dreams thronged and deep longings rose, shivering into the air.”

“All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived and still, as he lived, he wondered.”

“The whole world seemed to be waiting for him, and the light and the warmth and the joy of it.”

Satisfied, she twisted the Time Turner and arrived silently in his room once more. She waited a moment to be sure he was sleeping, and then slipped it under his pillow, right beside The Secret Garden. 

*

*

*

Harry knew what Hermione was doing. Well, he did not know precisely what she was doing– delivering books to a young Tom Riddle like she was Father Christmas in the night, but he knew she hadn’t stopped visiting him. 

Luckily, Harry was nothing if not loyal, and the two of them had an understanding. He was allowed to be concerned, he was allowed to nag, but he wouldn’t stand in her way. And in turn, she would do the same for him. That was how it had always worked with them. When Harry became fixated on things she found foolish or concerning, she didn’t attempt to talk him out of them. Sometimes she even went along with it, but she often just let him be. Like the way she knew he spent probably hours following Draco Malfoy around, weaving his conspiracies about him being Voldemort’s youngest ever henchman, but she did not tell him he was being a bit mad. And he did not tell her she was being foolish by going on recreational field trips to visit a young Tom Riddle. 

She knew the topic was sensitive for him, that the thought of helping the child who would eventually murder his parents was not something he felt particularly inclined to do. But one thing many people failed to see in Harry was that he was deeply empathetic. His empathy looked different than Hermione’s, and it showed in different ways, but it was there, as much a part of him as his eye color and the lightning bolt on his forehead. 

Harry knew what it was like to be hungry. He knew what it was like to be utterly alone in the world. He knew what it was like to want to belong, to want to feel special and loved and valued. But instead of letting it make him bitter, he let it help him to see the world through softer, kinder eyes. 

It went like this: Hermione kept on borrowing Harry’s Cloak, and she kept leaving books for Tom. She spaced them out, one every month or so, always underlined and always left under his pillow while he slept. He’d begun to keep them locked away in his trunk, since there were now too many to fit under his pillow. 

David Copperfield, Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland. On a whim, although it was dense and probably a bit above his age range, she left Les Misérables, and she returned to find he had devoured it in two days flat. 

Treasure Island, Anne of Green Gables, Just So Stories, Huckleberry Finn. 

Some that were whimsical, full of wonder and magic, some that taught children about right and wrong and kindness and triumph over hardship. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. A Little Princess. Tom did not discriminate; he read each and every one, cover to cover, a dozen times over. So Hermione kept leaving them. She made duplicates, of course– they were her books, but now he had the twin of each one, his to keep forever if he’d like. 

And while she did these things, Harry kept on giving her looks– searching, concerned looks, but he never did anything to stop her. He never threatened to tell Dumbledore or McGonagall, he never withheld the Cloak, and he never got cross with her. He just worried. 

“What if something goes wrong, and he sees you?” 

She shrugged. “Then he sees me, and I leave. I’m not terribly concerned about that, Harry.” 

Another day, sitting in the common room. “What if the Time Turner malfunctions? What if you can’t get back?” 

She barely looked up from her book. “Then I’m stuck in the 1930s, I suppose.” 

A long silence. “You’re a bit mad, you know.”

Once, when she came to borrow his Cloak before Quidditch practice– “What if he’s not as innocent as he looks, Hermione? What if he hurts you?” 

“He’s ten years old, Harry.” 

“Yeah, and he was only sixteen when he opened the chamber and murdered Myrtle.” 

“Six years is a long time,” she muttered.

He had a point, though. She wasn’t scared of the little boy, although she was certainly… wary of him. Sometimes when she watched him, she got the shivers. There was just something about him. She was careful, though. Meticulous, even. And besides, he loved the books. She didn’t think he’d want to hurt the person who was leaving them. 

After Potions one day, when Ron had to stay late to re-do his brew of Dreamless Sleep, Harry caught up with her, and leaned in close to say in a low voice, “What if he tries to figure out who’s leaving books for him? What if you get there, and he’s set some sort of trap?” 

Hermione imagined the sort of booby-traps in the cartoons she sometimes watched as a child– a net that yanked villains into trees, a ditch covered with leaves for a thief to fall into. She tried not to giggle. “A trap? Really, Harry, you worry far too much. I’ll be fine.” 

He nodded solemnly. “I know I do. You’re all I’ve got, Hermione.” 

That made her want to cry, but instead she pretended to be very interested in the hem of her sleeve. She didn’t like being reminded of how finite and conditional the world was, how very little she could offer the people she loved, compared to all the loss they’d known. She knew what it meant to be everything to someone who had no one else. She’d always wanted to be the kind of sister Harry needed, and it rankled that instead, she was the sort of sister who made him worry.

Briefly, she considered hugging him, but he would almost certainly shove her off and wrinkle his nose, or maybe ask if she was dying. They quite rarely hugged without pretense, like many brothers and sisters did not.

“You’ve got Ron,” she said instead, as lightly as she could.

Harry gave her a look that was all eyebrows and intent, the kind that always made her want to squirm. “Not the same,” he said, “and you know it.”

She did. Ron was the third puzzle piece to their little trio, the levity they both needed, the one who always knew how to lighten the mood or when they needed a bit of mischief to spice things up. He was always grinning, always ready for a joke or a game of chess or a handful of Bertie Bott’s beans, even if it meant chewing one that tasted like earwax. 

If Hermione was the brain and Harry the heart, Ron was the lungs– he made it all breathable. Without him, they’d suffocate on their own intensity.

“You didn’t tell him, did you?” She asked, the thought suddenly giving her pause. “About my… travels?”

He elbowed her as they walked. “No, you dingbat. Of course I didn’t.” 

She exhaled in relief, then immediately felt a bit guilty. It wasn’t fair for them to keep secrets from him. Because really, she loved Ron. They both did. 

She loved the ridiculous way he ate as if someone might take the food away any moment, and the way he always managed to spill ink on his hands, and the way he knew when she needed to laugh at herself. He was the part of her that delighted in dopamine and disasters, in slipping outside the rules just enough to feel the cold thrill of freedom. He was the part of her she didn’t think she knew existed until she met him that day on the Hogwarts Express– lighthearted, mischievous, prone to laughter. He’d coaxed it out of her, day by day. 

But what Hermione and Harry had was different. Ancient, almost. Unspoken. 

Their understanding was forged not in laughter but in silence, in the places where language failed and only the shared glance, the nod, the invisible bridge between them sufficed. It was the way they could almost read each other’s minds, the way they knew instinctively why the other had done something, even when it didn’t make a lick of sense to anyone else. What Hermione and Harry had was a long, complex conversation stretched over years and years. 

There were some things that just couldn’t be explained, even to Ron. 

Because Ron had been born into magic. When he was small, his mum and dad had used it to do dishes, or mend holes, or heal skinned knees. He’d watched his older siblings receive their Hogwarts letters, and excited as he may have been, he’d known his was coming. He’d grown up playing Quidditch in the orchard with his older brothers, and he’d heard tales of dragons and merpeople and giants his whole life. 

To both Harry and Hermione, magic was a miracle. 

Magic was proof that they weren’t alone in the world, that they weren’t simply odd or just didn’t quite fit in. They’d each found Hogwarts on the tail end of a long, dark, lonely hallway; each had been told, in a hundred different ways, that their minds worked wrong, that their hearts felt things wrong, that their hunger for the strange and unexplainable was some unsightly flaw. 

When Harry’s Hogwarts letter had arrived, his entire world had changed, letting in bright, dazzling light where there had once only been darkness. 

And for Hermione, it was validation. She was extraordinary, just as her parents had always told her. It wasn’t that she was weird or a bit mad like the girls at school said. She finally felt special. Not in an arrogant, superior way, but in a way that soothed and comforted the small child inside her that had never once felt like she truly belonged. 

So it made sense, in retrospect, how instantly her parents fell in love with Harry. It didn’t feel like a choice– just as it hadn’t really felt like a choice for her, not really– to bring him into their home for every holiday, half-term, and summer break after his first miserable year. 

Some part of her suspected that her mother would have been happier with two daughters; but when she stuffed Harry with jam tarts and mussed his hair and fussed over his battered, too-small trainers, it was as though she was making up for a son she’d lost, or a wound she was trying to close with maternal abundance. Her father, for his part, never put much stock in the rituals of masculinity, but even he seemed to savor the opportunity to teach Harry to change a tire or shave his face (he’d already figured out how to do it with magic, but he’d never tell Richard that, of course). 

They never said the word “family” out loud, but it clung to everything. The spare bedroom wasn’t the spare room anymore– it was Harry’s room. For Christmas, her grandmother sent gifts for both of them, and her parents had started using terms like ‘the kids’ or ‘you two’ years ago. 

All of that was to say, not only was Harry the only person she could’ve possibly trusted to understand this, she also didn’t think she could have kept what she was doing from him if she tried. 

*

*

*

It was probably not normal, Hermione thought, how easily compulsion grew in her, blooming like wild bindweed, a tangle of obsession and care. 

The longer she visited Tom Riddle, the more she found herself thinking in peculiar time signatures– the future, her present, his past, all warping together. She told herself she could stop, that it was simple, a scientific study, a controlled experiment. Each time she said the words to herself, she imagined her eye twitching in a comical, neurotic sort of way. But she had the Time Turner. She could set the boundaries, take her measurements, and stop whenever she wished. That was the entire point of time travel– you were never, ever out of time.

It wasn’t lost on her that she was growing reckless. The voice in her head that used to say stop, you’re going too far, now said–  just a little more and then you’ll be satisfied. 

A little more, a little more, and the line between meddling and mania blurred. She wasn’t sure which side she was on anymore.

So she kept going back, and each time it became harder to wait the prescribed interval between visits. And eventually, the only reason she did wait was because she’d need to borrow Harry’s Cloak, and he’d lecture her and ask ‘didn’t you go yesterday?’ 

Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw him, saw Tom– sometimes the thin boy hunched over his desk, sometimes the younger version, cowering in the cellar, always alone. 

Sometimes she thought about the eerie, cold smile he used on the children when he wanted to frighten them, and other times she thought about him tracing the seams of the books she left him, the same way she liked to. 

She witnessed firsthand the memory Harry had told her about, the one where Dumbledore had come to the orphanage and told Tom about Hogwarts. She saw the inconsistencies, the discrepancies in what Dumbledore had shown Harry and what had indisputably happened. Harry told her Dumbledore had offered to escort Tom to Diagon Alley to get his things for Hogwarts, but that Tom had declined. 

That wasn’t what happened, though. 

Dumbledore had described Diagon Alley to Tom and said, in an almost offhand manner, ‘If you’d like an escort, I’m sure I can arrange one.’ It was the strangest thing. Of course an eleven year old with no guardians and no insight into the magical world should have an escort. It should have gone without saying. 

But Tom had frowned, his lips parting in confusion. ‘I– I think I can manage,’ he’d said. Dumbledore had just nodded. ‘Welcome to Hogwarts, young man.’ 

And then she stayed afterwards, and watched the way Tom had waited until the door closed to throw himself backwards onto the bed, a rare, genuine grin lighting up his face. And she understood the feeling. 

Magic. Magic. Magic. 

The feeling of finally belonging somewhere. The realization that perhaps all this suffering had not been for naught. That there were others like them.

She began to visit him at Hogwarts, too, although she stopped leaving him books then, for some reason. She watched him during the Sorting Ceremony, watched the way he sat alone at the Slytherin table, ramrod stiff, carefully blank mask in place. And she watched the way the other boys teased him about his secondhand robes, watched the way he’d begged the Headmaster to let him stay for Christmas holiday so he didn’t have to go back to the orphanage. He was lonely here, too, she realized with a pang.

She’d assumed he would’ve had friends, but he did not. At least, not at first. Not for years. Even then, they weren’t really his friends. Not in the way Harry and Ron were hers. 

As Tom grew older, he became magnetic. There was something about him, something that pulled you in, something that screamed magic. She watched him learn how to make people want to be in his orbit. She saw him practice smiles in the mirror until he was satisfied with what he saw. She watched him grow into his gangly limbs and his too-sharp cheekbones until he became handsome. It was shocking, actually, how handsome he was. 

He was aloof but charming when he wanted to be, clever but not obnoxiously so. Not like Hermione, whose hand was in the air before a teacher even finished asking the question. No, he was patient, biding his time, storing up everything he learned until it could be weaponized. He was a Slytherin in the classic mold, but he was also something else. He was a star pupil, and also a star, full stop. He was dazzling, like light torn from the heavens, but beneath that shimmer was gravity, a pull that could swallow you whole. 

By his fifth year, there was scarcely a trace of the little boy from Wool’s Orphanage. By then, Hermione began to notice that as he moved through the castle, the other children made way for him. Some of the Slytherins were wary of him. They had not yet accepted him, but they were wary. She watched the way he could modulate his entire personality to fit any room, any audience, any occasion. With the professors, he was earnest, diligent, his essays meticulous, his answers flawless. With the other Slytherins, he was stone-cold, aloof, but never cruel in front of an audience. He saved that for private.

Because yes, he was undeniably cruel. It frightened her. It wasn’t arbitrary– his cruelty was calculated, like everything else he did. 

Some of it puzzled her, like the time he tortured a fourth year who he’d caught beating up a first year Muggle-born boy. He hadn’t stopped until the boy was screaming, curled up on the floor, his wand lost somewhere under a desk. Tom’s face during it was chilling– impassive, detached, almost as though he was dissecting something rather than punishing it. When it was over, he crouched beside the trembling first year he’d “rescued,” brushed the dirt from his robes, and whispered something she couldn’t hear. The boy stared at him with wide, shining eyes, more reverent than afraid. 

Other times, the cruelty was transparent in its self-interest. He wanted to be Slughorn’s favorite, she noticed, and he was swift to put anyone who tried to one-up him back in their place. He wanted to be Head Boy, and when another fourth year announced casually in the common room that he hoped it would be him, Tom cornered him in the lavatory. The next day, the boy loudly mentioned that he’d changed his mind. 

And then there were the moments that seemed almost… emotional. That was what puzzled her most. She saw him lash out once in the common room when a boy mocked the patched hem of his sleeve, his curse immediate and vicious, leaving angry welts across the boy’s arms. Tom had looked shaken afterward, like he’d revealed too much. 

Hermione spent hours watching Tom Riddle. It was an obsession. Even she could admit that. 

There was something intoxicating about the control she held over the situation. She could go back and watch him trail behind the other children at age six, eyes darting between them, waiting for them to ask him to play. Then, in the same sitting, she could watch him at age fifteen, smiling pleasantly at professors and then torturing other students who got in his way. 

It became part of her routine– Shower. Eat breakfast. Go to class. Watch Tom. Study. Eat dinner. Sleep. Rinse and repeat. 

When she and Harry went home for Christmas holidays, she spent the whole two weeks without using the Time Turner once. She didn’t want to risk any additional use of magic in the entirely Muggle neighborhood, and Harry certainly would have noticed if she’d tried. While she sat with her family opening presents on Christmas morning, Hermione was horrified to realize she missed Tom. Or missed watching him. Of course she couldn’t miss someone she didn’t actually know. 

But she did know him, didn’t she? Maybe better than anyone else, even if he had no idea who she was. That was an odd thought. 

It was wrong. She knew it was wrong. She’d gone into this determined to prove a theory: evil is not a birthright, it’s a wound. But she had not anticipated getting attached. Not to him– not to the beautiful, brilliant, monstrous boy who would one day start a war. 

She stalked through the rest of December in a low, agitated fever, her thoughts like caged mice desperate for a gap.

Hermione tried, at first, to simply stop thinking about him. That was what you did with impulses that felt shameful or dangerous or simply wrong, wasn’t it? You categorized them. Filed them away. Let them collect dust behind a wall of new distractions, or if you were particularly talented, pretend they’d never existed in the first place. 

Hermione was not particularly talented at this, unfortunately. It was frustrating– she preferred to be good at everything she tried, and it irritated her endlessly that compartmentalizing was not one of them. Her mind was a librarian’s archive of every errant thought she had ever had; she could, if asked, produce a full catalogue of them, cross-referenced and annotated and seething beneath the surface.

She catalogued what she knew of Tom Riddle, and she tried to let it gather dust, tried to shove it to the back of the library that was her mind. When her parents went to sleep and Harry snored softly from the next room, she lay awake in the middle of her bed, fist pressed to her mouth, and tried to enumerate the facts. 

Tom Riddle was a monster. He was a murderer many times over. He had tortured and killed and maimed and taken things that did not belong to him. In her lifetime, he was something unrecognizable, a horrid, waxy-skinned, red-eyed serpent-like thing that could not feel or, she suspected, die. Even if the Tom Riddle she’d come to know was also beautiful, captivating, a mystery she longed to unfurl. 

Tom Riddle was Voldemort. Voldemort was Tom Riddle. As much as her mind longed to separate the two, she could not allow it. 

*

*

*

Chapter Text

“As the child's mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was growing into memory: as her life unfolded, his soul, long stupefied in a cold, narrow prison, was unfolding too, and trembling gradually into full consciousness.”

–George Eliot, Silas Marner 

*

*

*

Harry was obsessed with watching Draco Malfoy. Hermione was obsessed with watching Tom Riddle. They were two peas in a pod, really. 

When they returned for their second term, things began to change. For one, Harry loved Ginny. Hermione had known that for a long time, but it was never so obvious as it was now. Perhaps it was because they had finally, finally kissed, and Harry now walked around with a rather stupid looking, doe-eyed expression on his face almost all the time. He was mad for her, and Ginny was mad for him in equal measure, so every spare moment they had was spent together in the only way teenagers know how, which is to say: with both wild enthusiasm and a complete lack of subtlety.

It was sweet, and Hermione was happy to see him happy. But it was also sort of gross to watch her best friend snog her other best friend’s little sister in the common room. 

Ginny was dazzling, fierce, sweeter than anyone suspected, and she made Harry laugh in a way no one else could. Hermione liked that about her; she liked the way Ginny would ruffle Harry’s hair and roll her eyes at his melodrama, the way she somehow managed to be both unimpressed by his heroics and deeply, genuinely proud of him.

Hermione watched them together and felt an odd, warm ache, like watching the last scene in a favorite film– it felt inevitable and slightly mournful, but right, somehow. She was thrilled for them, and she also felt very much like a satellite, orbiting the closed system of Harry and Ginny’s new, private world. 

She had Ron, of course, but Ron was also slightly clueless, and it took far too long for him to notice what was happening between Harry and Ginny. During those first few weeks of second term, Hermione spent more time alone with Ron than she ever had before. And during that time, she found him simultaneously comforting and infuriating, a thorn in her side at times but also a wonderful, soft place to land. It was simple, spending time with Ron. They didn’t talk about hard, awful things. They didn’t exchange loaded looks or speak in codes only they could understand. They sort of just… coexisted. 

He didn’t know about Tom, and she had no intention of telling him. 

In fact, she’d successfully avoided using the Time Turner since she’d returned to school. It felt like both a relief and a wound she was ignoring, but with time, she assumed it would dull and she would be able to ignore it altogether. She wasn’t gaining anything from watching him, she reminded herself. And neither was he, especially now that she wasn’t leaving him any books. She was only tormenting herself. So she left it alone. 

She watched Quidditch matches, she studied, she went to Hogsmeade, she pretended to be fascinated with Draco Malfoy’s every move when Harry described them to her in great detail. 

“He’s spending quite a bit of time in the loo” was something he’d actually said. 

“I think you might be going a bit mad, Harry,” was what she’d said back. 

Hermione let herself drown in routine. She agreed to every chess match Ron proposed, even though she still couldn’t win, and she let him tease her about it. She made a project of teaching Ginny the finer points of Arithmancy. She filled every spare hour with something– study, debate, walking the freezing grounds with a book tucked into her armpit. When she opened her trunk every evening, she’d fish blindly past the Time Turner, wrapped tight in the bottom in a handkerchief, and force herself to leave it there.

She was getting better at compartmentalizing, she thought, but sometimes she could feel said compartment bulging at the edges, threatening to burst. She began to have vivid dreams– sometimes of Tom Riddle, sometimes of herself, sometimes of Harry, always warped and strange and colored with a cold, blue-tinged disquiet. She’d wake up with her jaw sore from clenching, hands balled into fists under the covers.

And still, she did not visit him. She did not pull the Time Turner out. 

Instead, she curated an internal schedule so dense there were days it made her head swim. And Ron, for his part, just showed up where she was and then dawdled, as if by proximity alone he might absorb a little of her urgency. 

He infuriated her sometimes, but he also made her laugh, and that was quite nice. Hermione hadn’t realized how little she laughed until her days were filled with Ron, Ron, Ron. So she supposed it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when he reached for her hand one day as they walked around the Black Lake, the tips of his ears gone pink and his eyes darting over to her as if asking permission. And she let him hold it. There had long been something stirring between them, even when they were small. He’d always looked at her differently than he did anyone else, and she’d known it. 

She was not sure if she wanted to be his girlfriend. Not in the way she’d read about in books, with swooning and handholding and writing his name on her parchment. The idea felt embarrassing, childish. There was no room for a boyfriend in her schedule, and the thought of being attached to someone in the public way of couples made her skin itch, as if she were acquiescing to a role that was not written for her. 

But it was also undeniable– she liked the feeling of her hand in his, the way he looked at her when he didn’t think she was watching, the way he sometimes said her name as if it were a punchline to a joke only he could tell. And sometimes when they were alone, she found herself saying things to make him laugh on purpose. She found herself looking for him first when she entered a room, found herself putting in a little extra effort in the mirror and thinking of him. So perhaps she did fancy him. Perhaps she did want to be his girlfriend, as strange as the word tasted in her mouth, like it was a title meant for someone else who wasn’t her. 

And then, they were in the library a few days later, tucked in the back where there was scarcely anyone else around. Hermione was reading him a section from the novel she’d just gotten from Tomes & Scrolls that very day when he’d gone with her to Hogsmeade, and when she glanced up, he was giving her a funny look. 

“What?” she said, touching her face self-consciously. “Have I got something in my teeth?” 

“No,” he said simply, and then he was leaning in and kissing her. 

It was a good kiss, she thought distantly, as she let it happen. She’d kissed Viktor several times, and a boy who was a friend of her cousin’s, once. But this was different. Ron’s lips were soft but slightly chapped, his hand tentative and warm when it cupped her elbow. She let herself lean in, and when he pressed a little closer, there was a pleasant, fizzy heat that spread over her arms and down her spine, a tingling like she’d been dipped in ginger ale. It wasn’t overwhelming or enough to sweep her off her feet, but it felt nice. 

Hermione let it last for several seconds, a slow and deliberate experiment in sensation. She catalogued the facts: his heart was pounding, she could feel the thud of it through his uniform. His hair, always a little wild from the wind, tickled her cheek. He made a small, nervous sound in his throat, almost a whimper, but endearing. She inhaled. He smelled vaguely of soap and something sweet, something familiar. 

And then, in the middle of it, this sweet, pleasant kiss, her brain– her bloody, overactive, intrusive brain– offered up a vivid, unbidden image. Tom Riddle, his gaze darkly intent, the exact angle of his jaw and the pale, unyielding set of his mouth a sharp overlay on Ron’s softer features. It was so vivid she actually flinched and made a tiny, involuntary yelp, drawing back without really meaning to. 

Ron’s lips hovered uncertainly, arrested in the space she’d just occupied, and for a moment his face looked so stricken and hurt she forgot her own panic. 

“…Ehm, sorry,” she said, voice sharp and unnatural in the quiet. “Something in my throat.” She coughed, once, twice, to make it convincing.

Ron’s face colored, sheepish. “You sure? I should’ve– sorry. I should have asked first.” 

“No,” she said quickly, reaching for his hand. “No, you didn’t do anything wrong. I… I liked it.” 

His face lit up. “You did?” 

She nodded. “Can we try it again?” 

“Of course,” he said, already leaning in. 

She forced herself to focus on this. On Ron, who was real and warm and good and kind. Again, Tom Riddle’s coal-black eyes intruded into her mind, but this time she was ready for him. Fiercely, she pushed the image away and parted her lips to deepen the kiss, and she felt Ron’s breath stutter at the shift. 

Leave me alone, she told the boy in her head that was Tom Riddle. Get out of my head.

No, he said icily. 

*

*

*

There was going to be a dance for St. Valentine’s, Parvati told her. “I can’t wait,” she said, her eyes sparkling like it was the most wonderful news in the world. 

“Me neither,” Hermione attempted. 

Parvati gave her a strange look. “Don’t be mean, Hermione,” she said. 

“I wasn’t!” She said defensively. “I am… excited.” 

The dark-haired girl studied her sharply. “Will you go with Ron, then?” 

“I’m not sure,” Hermione said. “I suppose so, but he’d need to ask me first, right?” 

“He will,” Parvati assured. She glanced around surreptitiously. “Just don’t make a big thing of it, you know? It might upset Lav.” 

“I won’t,” Hermione said quickly. Since when had she been the sort of person to make a big thing of a boy asking her to a dance, anyway? 

Parvati smiled at her. “If you’d like, I could do your hair and makeup.” 

Hermione’s instinct was to decline, but she knew an olive branch when she saw one. Her roommates had been diligently avoiding her for over a year now, since Lavender and Ron had broken up. So if Parvati was willing to bury the hatchet in a shallow grave of eyeliner and scented hair mousse, Hermione was not going to rebuff the gesture.

She hesitated for a half-second, then said, “Alright. I’d like that, thank you.” She even tried to smile, and was surprised to find that it didn’t feel entirely forced.

Parvati beamed– a real, unguarded smile that made Hermione feel, for a moment, as though she were in on something rather than outside it. “Great,” she said. “We could do a little spa night beforehand, if you want. I brought some face masks back from my mum’s shop.” 

Hermione nodded. “That sounds… fun, actually.” 

She had meant to say it as proof that she could convincingly mimic the currency of Girlhood, but as soon as the words left her mouth, she realized she meant them. The idea of sitting in the dormitory with the other girls, having her hair and makeup done– it was what she imagined she might be doing as a teenager, when she allowed herself to dream about the future as a child. 

In reality, she’d spent the better part of the last few years trying to save her best friend from a variety of murder attempts. She’d spent them flanked by two boys who sometimes needed to be reminded to wear deodorant, whose idea of bonding included mud and broomsticks and raucous games of Exploding Snap. Perhaps this could be a nice reprieve. 

So Hermione let herself be swept up in the thrill of a Valentine’s dance, the low hum of excitement that lingered in the Great Hall in the days leading up to it, the enchanted hearts and red tinsel that adorned the castle, the titter of voices wondering who had asked who, what other girls were wearing. And Parvati had been right– Ron had asked her. Nervously and a bit awkwardly, but it was endearing. She wrote to her mum and told her about it, and in response, she immediately sent Hermione a pretty red dress and insisted she simply had to wear it. 

‘Does Harry have the proper robes?’ Her mum fretted in her letter. ‘Shall I send him something, too? What do wizards wear to this sort of thing?’

Hermione smiled. 

And then it was February fourteenth, and she was hanging her dress outside her wardrobe before classes, nervously glancing in the mirror as she wondered what Ron might think when he saw her in it. 

Parvati and Lavender commandeered every available surface in their dormitory for the evening. They’d brought out an arsenal of beauty products, an array that looked more suited to an alchemy demonstration than a sleepover: taffeta-wrapped tins of hair pomade, little glass vials with handwritten labels (“Liquid Luminance,” “Midnight Rose,” “Hexproof Mascara”), and at least three jars of magical mud that Lavender swore would “absolutely clear up even the most stubborn stress spots, it’s a new formula.” There were candles in every available space (“Mood is everything,” Parvati declared, lighting them with a flourish and a murmured Incendio). 

Lavender had smuggled in Muggle champagne, and they popped the corks and drank straight from the bottles. 

It was easy, in a way, to get pulled into the current, to let herself be a girl among girls, part of the noisy, perfumed world that had always felt at arm’s length. The champagne made her feel giggly, less tightly wound, and it was a surprisingly lovely feeling. 

Padma Patil joined them, despite not being a Gryffindor, and Hermione found herself getting on with her much better than she remembered. In fact, she rarely remembered even talking to her aside from the occasional conversation in class. Padma was clever, sharp-witted but kind, and unlike Hermione, took a great deal of pride in her appearance. 

“You’re quite pretty, you know, Hermione,” Parvati said, and Padma hummed in agreement. 

“Thanks,” Hermione said, flushing. 

“What are you thinking about her hair, Parv?” Lavender asked from across the room. 

“Actually,” Padma said, grinning. “I’ve got the perfect spell.” 

Hermione turned to stare at her. “A spell?” 

“A semi-permanent straightening spell. I perfected it this year– it’ll keep your hair straight for up to two months, even when you wash it.” 

Hermione was admittedly impressed. “And you made it up yourself?” 

“Of course!” Padma said, standing behind her. She lifted a thick lock of Hermione’s hair and then let it fall. “It’s modified from another one, but mine works better. Would you like me to try it on you?” 

“Sure,” she said, without thinking. 

She wasn’t sure what she expected, but it certainly wasn’t the gentle tingle at her scalp, or the way the knotty, stubborn waves seemed to float into Padma’s hands and emerge, smooth and shining, like ribbons of molasses in sunlight. There was a scent, too, faintly floral and unfamiliar– lilac, maybe, or some more exotic blossom Hermione couldn’t name. She watched, entranced, as her hair changed before her eyes, losing its usual bushiness for a sleekness that felt not quite hers, but not entirely foreign either.

She half-expected Lavender and Parvati to laugh at her or offer some underhanded compliment about how it was so much better than usual, but when she turned to look in the mirror there was only a stunned and slightly tipsy silence.

“Oh, you look stunning,” Parvati whispered, a hand to her heart. “Honestly, Hermione.” 

“You do,” Lavender agreed. 

Hermione grinned, unable to stop it from spreading across her face. The rest of the evening passed in a blur– chit chat and more champagne and unexpected laughter. 

Mostly, she just listened, and it was enough. She liked the gentle haze of the candles, the fizz of champagne on her tongue, the hundred errands of hands and brushes fussing over her as if she was, for once, something precious. It didn’t even bother her that Parvati and Lavender kept exchanging knowing glances; it felt, somehow, less like gossip and more like kinship. 

The rest of the evening was similar– lovely, hazy, lighter than air in its quality. Ron met her in the common room, and she saw his eyes roam hungrily from her hair down to her high heels, and to her own surprise, she liked it. He’d never looked at her like that. She’d never seen him like that, either– blushing, awkward, so obviously desperate to impress. For a moment, she was the main character in a story, the one people waited to see descend the staircase, and yes, she liked that, too. 

She liked the way Ron stood up a little straighter, the way he stumbled over a compliment and then, when words failed him, simply said, “Wow, Hermione.”

The Great Hall glowed, bewitched sconces casting rosy halos through the air, fairies flitting in and out of transfigured bouquets that hovered above the tables. Ginny and Harry spun by, the redhead’s laughter trailing like a silk streamer. Hermione tried to keep her head, but everything, every sound and color and touch, seemed magnified and a little surreal. The champagne made it all a bit fuzzy, too. 

She and Ron weren’t graceful, not by any measure. He held her hand a little too tight at first, then loosened it so much she thought he’d drop her; he stepped on her foot, then his own, and they nearly toppled over together. But then they laughed and laughed and it wasn’t awkward anymore, it was just… fun. And easy. 

“Your hair is so straight,” he remarked, reaching up a tentative hand to touch it. She allowed it. 

“I almost don’t recognize myself in the mirror,” she said, laughing. 

Ron tilted his head. “It’s pretty,” he said, then blushed. “But I like it best the way it’s meant to be.” 

Warmed by the compliment and feeling a bit impulsive, she leaned in and kissed him, catching him off guard. But he returned the kiss, his arms tightening around her waist. 

Afterwards, she met Harry’s eyes by accident, and he grinned at her. She scowled at him and looked away, face flaming. But she was undeniably happy, in this moment, and she let herself relish it. 

*

*

* 

The next day, though, everything went to shite, as Harry often liked to say. 

It should’ve been a perfectly lovely day. It started that way, at first. Hermione woke with a smile on her face and the sun spreading across her duvet, realizing that for the first time in months, she hadn’t dreamed about Tom Riddle. The lovely, unburdened feeling lasted for precisely two hours. 

Harry found her reading in the common room, an unmistakably guilty expression on his face. “Hi,” he said, throwing himself down beside her with a loud exhale. 

She gave him a sidelong look. “Hello, you strange boy. What do you want?” 

He shifted. “Er. Can we… talk?” 

“We’re talking right now,” she said, feeling unusually silly. 

“Hermione. It’s serious,” he said, his voice low. 

She stilled. “Alright. Hang on.” 

After casting a Muffliatio, she turned to face him fully. “There. Now talk, Potter.” 

He grimaced. “Promise you won’t be cross with me.” 

She considered. “Fine. I won’t be cross with you.” 

Harry took a deep, steadying breath. “I’ve been… keeping things from you. Not intentionally,” he quickly added. “It’s just– we’ve both been… distracted, and you’ve seemed so happy, I didn’t want to burden you, so I just figured I could–”

She clapped a hand over his mouth. “Stop prattling on and get to the point, would you?” 

He shoved her hand away, scowling. “Fine. I had another lesson with Dumbledore, and I’ve learned some more about Tom. About Voldemort.” 

Hermione held her breath, then released it, trying to slow her racing heart. “Like what?” 

“Well,” Harry began, leaning forward. “For one, I learned who his parents are.” 

“WHAT?!” Hermione shouted. 

He shushed her, then seemed to remember they were protected by her Silencing charm. “Well, remember what we learned about him from the diary? His father was a Muggle and his mother was a witch?” 

She nodded, wide-eyed, and he continued. 

“His mother was called Merope Gaunt. She was a witch, from an old Pureblood family that claimed to be descended from Salazar Slytherin himself. In fact–” He paused, as though reluctant to admit it, “—they were, apparently. The Gaunts. They were obsessed with their lineage, living in this crumbling shack, clinging to their family name and… well, hating everyone else. Dumbledore said they were practically destitute but still thought they were better than the rest of the world. Especially Muggles.”

She frowned. “So why did she allow a Muggle father her child, if she thought that way?” 

Harry’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “That’s the thing. She didn’t. At least, it doesn’t seem that way. Her brother– Morfin Gaunt– he was the one who showed Dumbledore the memory. He said Merope was obsessed with Riddle Sr., who lived in a big manor house near their shack. He was handsome, rich, everything she wasn’t. But he never looked twice at her. Not until she… gave him a love potion.”

Hermione sucked in a breath. “She dosed him with a love potion?” 

“Yeah. According to Morfin.” He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “Dumbledore thinks she kept him under the potion long enough to marry her. And when she got pregnant, she stopped giving it to him– maybe she thought he’d stay by then. But he didn’t. He left her straightaway. She was penniless, and she sold this locket– a family heirloom that had belonged to Slytherin himself– just to survive.”

“Oh my gosh,” Hermione managed. 

“She pawned it for next to nothing when she was pregnant with Tom. And then…” His voice dropped, quieter. “She died just after giving birth. At the orphanage.”

Hermione’s throat worked soundlessly. Her chest ached with the image: a motherless baby, alone from his first moments. “So he never even had a chance,” she whispered.

But Harry’s expression hardened. “It gets worse. When Tom was about sixteen, his father and his father’s parents were found dead in their manor in Little Hangleton. Everyone thought it was Morfin– Merope’s brother, because the Ministry found him bragging about it in his shack. His wand had three Avadas when they checked it, and he confessed straight away.”

Hermione’s breath caught. “But it wasn’t him, was it?” 

“No,” Harry said, his eyes flashing. “At least, Dumbledore is convinced it wasn’t. He thinks Tom went to visit his uncle, learned the truth about who he was, and then… he killed them. All three of them. Cold. And then he framed Morfin for it by using his wand. Stole the family ring and left Morfin to rot in Azkaban.”

Hermione digested this information for a moment, leaning back against the sofa. “How does he know that for sure? Dumbledore, I mean?” 

Harry shrugged, playing with a thread on the arm of the couch. “He doesn’t, I reckon. But it’s Dumbledore, Hermione. He’s sort of… omnipotent, right?” 

“Maybe.” She couldn’t reconcile it. 

Sixteen year old Tom, only a year older than the last time she’d visited him, murdering three people in cold blood. Fifteen year old Tom had been manipulative, cold, calculating, sure. But a murderer? 

Of course, she knew he’d become one, eventually. She just hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly. What had shifted in the span of a year? What had broken inside of him so irreparably that he’d killed his own father and grandparents? 

As if reading her mind, Harry quietly added, “That was the year he killed Myrtle, too.” 

Hermione tried to picture him at sixteen, standing over three lifeless bodies, wand cooling in his hand. She couldn’t manage it. In her head, he was still the boy with the marbles in his pocket, the one who’d whispered “Happy birthday, Tom” to himself, the one who she’d witnessed watching one of his fellow orphans walk off with an adoptive family from his bedroom window, unvarnished longing on his face. Always alone in his room, always pretending it didn’t bother him to be that way. 

She remembered the first time she’d watched him reading The Secret Garden, something soft and pleasantly bewildered about his expression, and for a moment her heart stung with a raw, inexplicable grief. She wondered if it had happened that fast, or if it was gradual– a slow accretion of ways the world could hurt a person, each one layering over the last until there was no room left for anything but violence. 

Maybe it was just easier, after a certain point, to give into the coldness, to embrace it, even. 

She tried to speak, but the words balled up in her throat. “Harry,” she said finally, “do you think—" She trailed off, not knowing how to give shape to the question.

He looked at her, expectant, patient in the way he only ever was with her.

“Do you think he felt anything?” she managed. “When he killed them, do you think he was feeling anger? Or shame, or rejection?” 

Harry touched her shoulder, his expression surprisingly soft. “I don’t know, Hermione,” he said. “Dumbledore believes he couldn’t really feel anything. I’m not certain if I agree. But I do think there was something festering in him for years. From the time he was born, maybe. I think it was only a matter of time.” 

No. 

She couldn’t accept that. It simply wasn’t true, and she was determined to prove it. To herself, to Harry, to Dumbledore, to Tom, maybe. 

Hermione stood, leveling Harry with a look that brooked no argument. “I need to borrow your Cloak.” 

“Hermione. No,” he said, but she could see his resolve crumbling already. He didn’t like to say no to her. He never had. She ought not be taking advantage of that right now, but she simply couldn’t help it.  

“Please don’t make me beg,” she said, her voice low. “Just let me borrow it.” 

He sighed. “Fine. But just… Please don’t be stupid. Promise you won’t do anything stupid.” 

She exhaled. “I promise.” 

*

*

*

July 1942, Wool’s Orphanage

Hermione wasn’t sure why it hadn’t fully occurred to her that he would need to return to Wool’s in the summers. A part of her almost felt guilty for not realizing it– perhaps if she had, she could’ve left him some books during those months. It must have been terribly disappointing, going from the magical halls of Hogwarts to the grey, bitter confines of the orphanage. 

She landed on the creaking floorboard of Tom Riddle’s bedroom and nearly tripped over her own feet. The first thing she noticed was the emptiness of the space: airless and tense, as if everything inside had drawn a breath and was still waiting to exhale. She’d expected to see him– always, every time, he was here, perched like a gargoyle above the world. But this time, the bed was empty, the window bare.

Heart pounding, she reached for her wand and cast a wordless Locking charm before she set about her… research. She hadn’t known he would not be here, of course, but it wasn’t an opportunity she was inclined to waste– the chance to look through his things, to glean as much information as she could from Tom Riddle’s earthly possessions. She’d never had the opportunity to explore them before. 

She found the trunk easily, tucked in the corner and locked with a simple ward. Hermione broke it with a flick, mouth set in a determined line. The lid creaked open, and inside, she discovered a neat, precise world in miniature. His Hogwarts things were stacked with military order: robes folded, shoes polished to dull shine, each tie rolled into a perfect coil. At the bottom, in their own compartment, were the books. Every single one she’d ever left for him, from Anne of Green Gables to A Tale of Two Cities, even the battered paperback copy of Jane Eyre. 

Each was dog-eared and annotated, margins filled with a spiky, unfamiliar script. He’d read them all. He’d kept them all. 

She ran her fingers over the spines, pulling a few out to flip through and recognizing her own underlines. She felt a hot, complicated pride. He’d hoarded them all like treasures, his own personal library, curated just for him. As she flipped through The Wind in the Willows, she paused at a scribbled note on the front page. It was not in her handwriting. 

‘Who are you?’ It said. 

Her mouth dried, her pulse thudding in her ears. She opened Huckleberry Finn. 

‘Who are you? Are you real?’ 

It was almost the same, in each book. The notes varied in their questions– some sounded desolate, others almost angry. 

‘Why are you doing this? Is this a joke?’

‘If you’re reading this, please just tell me your name. Or write back, just once. Please.’ 

And finally, she found the very last book she’d left him– years ago, in his timeline, weeks ago in hers. Silas Marner. She winced. A bit of a dark choice for her last gift to him. Hermione herself had read it at twelve, so she didn’t see why Tom couldn’t manage it at the same age. 

She gasped audibly when she opened the front page. 

‘Where are you?’ It read, in his now-familiar spiky script. ‘Come back to me.’ 

Oh. Her stomach did a strange, swooping thing. Hermione did something stupid then. Her heart in her throat, she reached into her bag, rooting around for a book. She found two– Wuthering Heights and an Arithmancy textbook. She almost laughed at the prospect of leaving Tom Riddle a textbook on maths. Published in 1990, for that matter. 

Well then.

The temptation was too much. She thumbed through Wuthering Heights, the familiar dog-eared pages already trailing faded graphite where she’d underlined her own favorite bits. “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” That, and maybe a dozen other lines, all desperate with the ache of connection and loss. It felt a bit like baring her soul, presenting this book to him with her very own annotations, ones that meant something to her rather than ones she’d selected for him. As if he might read the passages and know exactly who she was. Don’t be silly. That’s impossible, she chided herself. 

She hesitated, then, on another sharp impulse, reached for a self-inking quill and pressed it to the inside cover. 

‘I’m right here,’ she wrote. ‘I’m sorry I was gone.’ 

Then she paused, glanced back through the pale morning light, and added: 

‘You are not alone.’ 

Hermione snapped the book shut and, after a pause, set it atop the trunk. 

And then she pressed herself into the corner against his bed, and waited, heart thumping so loud she was certain he would hear it when he entered. She should leave. What was she thinking? She ought to reach for the Time Turner and go back to her own decade. She had no business here, waiting for Tom Riddle to appear so she could watch his reaction to her gift. So she could, what? Prove to herself he was still human? That he was capable of caring about something other than power and dominance?

She did not have to wait long, though. The footsteps in the corridor were a staccato, brisk, and when the door banged inward, Tom’s silhouette was a slash of black against the dirty gold of the landing sun. He moved exactly as she remembered– stiff, intentional, as if every joint were a hinge begrudging its movement. He closed the door behind him and scanned the room, eyes lingering on the trunk.

He stopped short.

His eyes narrowed, and he advanced on it, every step so sharply deliberate Hermione felt the energy travel up her shins. 

Danger, her mind screamed. Danger, danger, danger. 

But still, she didn’t move so much as a pinky, pressed against the wall. She had been alone with him in this room before, but never had it felt so electrified, terrifying. She could feel herself trembling and squeezed her fists tightly to hold herself together. 

Tom hovered over Wuthering Heights, not touching, just regarding it warily, as he might a dragon’s egg or potentially cursed object. Then, quick as a blink, he whirled and stalked the perimeter of the room– under the bed, behind the trunk, even glancing up at the cracked ceiling where the water stains mapped their own history of neglect.

He circled the room three times, each loop tighter, his eyes darting over every inch. At one point, he crouched, pressed his hand to the bare floorboards, as if expecting to find a footprint, a clue. He tested the window latch, scanned the sills for fingerprints. Even checked behind the thin curtain, though anyone hiding there would have been plainly visible. She wondered if he could sense her, some minute shift in the air, a prickle at the edge of his consciousness. What if he were to reach out a hand and touch the Cloak? Yank it off her and point his wand at her? 

She had been extraordinarily stupid, she decided, sticking around like this. She really did need to learn how to leave well enough alone, and now she would likely pay for it. 

Thankfully, however, after a few moments he seemed satisfied with his efforts and returned to the trunk. He picked the book up delicately, as though it might be explosive, and thumbed the pages, eyes flicking to each underlined passage. Then to the inside cover, where her handwriting waited for him. 

Tom read it twice before his face changed. The first time, his expression was wary, even hostile. His eyes sharpened, mouth pulled tight, as if the words were a trick or a taunt. The second time, though, the lines of his brow softened, barely perceptible. He pressed his lips together, then looked over both shoulders, quick as a feral thing, scanning the empty corners. For a moment, Hermione saw with blinding clarity the smallness of him, the way his bones seemed to telescope inward; a child, not a monster, clutching at the idea that somewhere, just possibly, the world had sent him an answer. 

Tom stared and stared down at her words so long she thought he might burn a hole through the page. Then, in a motion violent and abrupt, he slammed the book shut, as if to snuff the spark before it caught. 

For a few seconds he just stood, breathing hard, lips pressed into a thin, colorless line. At last he folded, knees bowing until he half-collapsed on the battered trunk. He bowed his head onto it, hands still holding the book, shoulders tight as wire. He didn’t move for a long time, not even to wipe at the hot, bright flush that rose in his face. 

Hermione could hear him breathing. Sometimes it rasped, like he was physically restraining himself from making a noise. 

His hands were white-knuckled on the cover of Wuthering Heights; he pressed the spine into the trunk with a slow, methodical violence, as if the book might try to escape and he would not allow it. 

The clock in the corridor ticked. 

Sunlight bled around the edges of the curtains, and Hermione shifted imperceptibly in the silence, waiting for him to look up, to do something horrible, to throw the book across the room or tear it to pieces.

But he did not. Hermione watched, breath shallow, as he at last straightened and wiped at his cheek with the heel of his hand. Was he crying? Surely, not. The gesture seemed almost accidental, as if he’d caught himself mid-surrender and was determined to erase the evidence.

He stood abruptly then, every inch the soldier again, and crossed to his narrow bed. He sat, book in lap, and opened it to the message she’d left. His thumb traced the words just once before he turned to the first dog-eared page and began to read.

In less than a year, Tom Riddle would kill four people. And now, watching him lose himself in Emily Brontë, that fact made even less sense to Hermione than it had before. 

*

*

*

Chapter Text

“The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”

– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

*

*

*

Someone was watching Tom. He could feel them around him sometimes– the hair on the back of his neck would stand up, the air would shift almost imperceptibly, and he knew. But most of the time, he was alone. Not always, but often enough to matter. 

It was during these moments, the rare occasions when he was truly unobserved, that Tom permitted himself to unfold, just a bit. To touch the inside of his own mind, to inhale without the awareness of someone else’s eye upon him. He was so accustomed to vigilance that sometimes, when he relaxed, it felt like a new and precarious freedom, like a door left swinging in a wind, uncertain when it might slam shut. He was not certain he was actually relaxing even then, for his mind never stopped, and he found himself always braced for the next blow, even if only infinitesimally. 

Wool’s had not changed since he’d been away, not in any way that counted. The paint still peeled in the same leprous patches from the banister, the outhouse still stank on hot days, and Mrs. Cole still ruled the corridors in her sensible shoes and lumpy, shapeless cardigans. Tom had changed, though. He’d grown taller, sharper, shoulders stretching out the sleeves of his shirts. He had begun to develop muscles, sinewy strings under his skin, like a violin newly tuned, every movement taut with potential. His hands were bigger, too, long-fingered and corded, the knots of tendon visible even at rest. The softness of his face had been replaced by something hard and angular; cheekbones that cut shadows, a jaw that looked poised for violence even in sleep.

Sometimes, in the mirror late at night, he would study his reflection and try to predict the man he would become. Was he handsome, or was that just a trick of the light? Regardless, he knew he was different now. Gone were the haphazard, darting movements of a smaller, scared child. Now he moved in straight lines, carried himself as though he simply expected people to move out of his path. This had only made the other boys at Wool's more wary. 

Tom liked this. 

He liked having power over people. He liked seeing fear flash in their eyes. He liked being able to dazzle them with his smile and pull their strings without them even realizing it was happening. That was harder to do at the orphanage, though. At Hogwarts, he was charming, at least, most of the time. Even if he did not exactly have friends, he did not care. Most of the time, he was left alone. The older Slytherins did not pick on him with the same relentless cruelty they had at first. Some of the younger students even looked up to him. Admired him, did his bidding. And the professors adored him. He was, at the very least, significant at Hogwarts. At the orphanage, he was nothing. No one. The other children saw him as inferior, queer, and so did the matrons. 

No matter, he told himself. 

In two years and some change, he would be seventeen and free from this place. He would be old enough to do magic outside of Hogwarts’ walls, and the freedom was so intoxicating he could almost taste it. 

He whittled away the summer days before his fifth year with a brittle, pulsing restlessness. Even in late July, the air in London was so thick it could be sliced and served, and Wool’s Orphanage never failed to trap the heat like a tomb. The other boys spent most of their time outside, lobbing rocks at the wall or boxing each other’s ears, but Tom preferred to haunt the halls, searching for something more interesting. Sometimes he went to the library. Sometimes he just walked the perimeter of Lambeth, ignoring the shopkeepers who called out good morning or the girls who batted their eyelashes at him. 

When he could, he’d sneak into the office and rifle the locked drawers while Mrs. Cole was out, but the contents rarely changed: caretaker ledgers, stacks of bills, bottles of gin, and once, a pack of ancient birth control that he didn’t understand but kept anyway for the curiosity of it.

He’d continued collecting secrets, hoarding them with a zeal that surprised even himself. It wasn’t just the little cruelties anymore. It was the desire to unpick the world’s stitches, to see what would happen if you took out what was holding it together. There was something tantalizingly beautiful in the prospect of unraveling. 

Power. 

It hummed in his veins, it permeated every thought that rose in his mind. He did not know precisely what he wanted to do with it yet. He just knew it was in him, and that he would use it, and people would fall at his feet. 

That was the summer Tom began to make plans in earnest. But it was also the summer Tom got a bit lost. A bit confused, perhaps. 

He spent the first two weeks of July in a perpetual state of irritation, punctuated by a low, insistent confusion that he could not name. It started with the school forms that came by owl and the letterhead that read, in fat black type, TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE. This was no different than years past, but somehow, the name looked wrong to him now, a forename and a surname crudely soldered to a chunk of something else. 

He'd long since stopped thinking of himself as a “Tom Riddle.” The name felt borrowed from a duller boy who’d once occupied this skeleton and then been shaken out like dust from a rug. Marvolo was worse, an antique word, thick and oily on the tongue. Tom hated it, and hated even more that he did not know where it came from. 

Voldemort. Lord Voldemort. 

That was what they would call him, he decided. A name that struck fear and admiration in the hearts of the wizarding world. 

The other students at Hogwarts, even the Muggle-borns, all seemed to have some sense of their own provenance. Their families, their histories, their bloodlines. Tom had no inheritance, no ties to anyone but himself, and it frustrated him. He was the first in his year, the best, the brightest. Surely that hadn’t come from nowhere– surely, his father had been great, too. But what had happened to him? Why did no one seem to know his name, or anything about him?

You were named after your father, Mrs. Cole had told him, years ago. It was your mother’s dying wish.

Her dying wish. So surely, his namesake must have been a force of nature. And surely, his mother must have been a Muggle. He could think of no other explanation as to why she would come crawling to Wool’s Orphanage, extricate him from her womb and then simply die. He did not know anything about her either, only that she was weak, and it disgusted him. 

She simply should not have died.

That was the first and last fact Tom carried about his mother. A witch did not lay herself in a squalid infirmary bed and bleed out, not unless she was weak, not unless she wanted to die. If she had been powerful, she would not have died. If she had been powerful, she would have left him something. Protection, a memory, a secret. A name that carried something, at the very least. 

He scoured the public library, turned out every record in Mrs. Cole’s office, but all he could find was a signature– a shivering, illegible scrawl that looked like a child’s penmanship. 

Tom had read about Muggle wars. There was one happening around them, at this very moment, and he liked to stay informed. There were stories of mothers who’d lifted burning beams off their children, of women who’d thrown themselves between bombs and the babies in their prams. The idea that his mother, his supposed creator, had simply wilted in the presence of a squalling, unwanted child– her only act to leave him this wretched name, and then vanish– was a humiliation that clawed at him every time he closed his eyes. 

He became obsessed with the idea of his father, then. 

A father who had abandoned the Muggle woman whom he’d impregnated. Though some part of him resented it, Tom could not blame him, not entirely. It was shameful, he assumed, for a wizard of a certain stature to have dalliances with the sort of woman who would’ve ended up alone in childbirth in a run-down public orphanage. He hadn’t even heard of the term Mudblood until his housemates sneered it at him when he first arrived at Hogwarts. He’d parsed out its meaning quickly enough, though. They thought he’d been born to poor, lowly Muggle parents. But that wasn’t the case. Tom refused to believe it. His mother may have been a Muggle, but his father was surely a wizard. He was a half-blood, then, at least. 

He must have been remarkable, his father. He must have been pure magic himself, to produce a son like Tom. Sometimes he imagined a tall, imperious man striding through the world unbothered, unconcerned, with a face that turned heads and a mind like a razor.

Sometimes, in his most childish, private fantasies, he imagined this man appearing at the gates of Hogwarts, finally returning from overseas to claim the son whom he’d heard such tales of greatness about. 

That summer, Tom worked even more diligently than ever to uncover his father’s history. But as always, he found nothing. When he wasn’t searching for information about Tom Riddle Sr., he was plotting. Plotting about how to win over his fellow Slytherins, plotting how to gather the knowledge and spells that would make him unstoppable.

But the movement was still blurry in his mind, a shape behind frosted glass. He knew he wanted followers, yes, a cadre of the best and brightest. He wanted his own Knights of the Round Table, but where Arthur had aimed for chivalry, Tom would demand loyalty, ambition, and the willingness to do what was necessary. He spent hours in the library, tracing the rise and fall of empires, mapping out strategy and intrigue like it was a part-time job. He knew that having “pure” blood mattered, but it was only a lever– he did not truly care about it for its own sake. It was simply a tool to gather the right sort of people, and to divide the herd. If he needed to feign the sort of fervor for blood purity that would rally the sorts of influential wizards and witches to his cause, then so be it, Tom had decided. Wizardkind, he suspected, were destined to rule the world, not cower behind veils and Statutes of Secrecy. They were not made to bend to Muggles. 

So yes, power was the point, but not just for its own sake. Tom thought often about the way wizards lived: always in concealment, always in compromise, folding themselves inward so that Muggles would not fear them. It was humiliating, and ineffably stupid. Magic was the greatest inheritance of their kind, the birthright that separated wizards and witches from ignorant, shambling Muggles, and yet they squandered it, hid it, lived ashamed.

He wanted to remedy that. He wanted the world to be made anew, and he wanted to be the architect of that newness.

But the problem was– even despite all of his magic, the way he’d learned to wield his smile like a weapon, the way professors seemed to adore him– Tom was still very much alone. 

He did not need friends, he reminded himself, he needed allies. What was the difference, exactly? Sometimes, he was not certain he knew. He understood friendship only as a transactional myth, something weaker children needed to survive hardships. He’d always told himself that was the price. That he was meant for singularity, that loneliness was a matter of arithmetic– the higher one ascended, the fewer there were to share the view. He told himself it did not matter, that the ache beneath his ribs was simply hunger for more: more knowledge, more power, more control.

But sometimes Tom felt that ache keenly. He was loath to admit it, but it was, at times, difficult to ignore. 

Tom watched the others, sometimes. The groups of boys and girls who walked together, arms slung over shoulders, joking or shoving each other in the corridor. He watched as they offered up little bits of themselves– secrets, laughter, even nicknames– and felt both contempt and envy bloom in equal measure. To give up pieces of oneself so freely was surely a weakness, but he wondered what it would feel like to be the recipient, to be held in another’s mind, even if just for a moment. He wondered what it might feel like to be sought out by someone simply because they enjoyed his company, or have someone defend him not as a strategic move but because they genuinely cared for his well-being. 

He was not sentimental. He told himself this often, as if repetition alone would make it fact. But even he could not help but stare at the books in his trunk and feel the smallest, most traitorous ache. Because who was this mysterious person, who had left him books for years and then disappeared altogether? Who was this stranger, who highlighted sentences he would have picked for himself, who always seemed to understand? Why had they stopped? Why had they left him behind? 

For years he had searched for the pattern, the tell, the secret hand that turned the page. Sometimes, he imagined it was a fellow orphan– a girl, perhaps, hiding in the walls, clever and unseen. It didn’t seem like something any of the Muggle boys were capable of– too clever, too thoughtful, too precise. He constructed an image of the sender– a guardian angel, or a devious fellow Slytherin, or maybe one of the matrons who pitied him. For years he’d wondered if it was a witch or wizard in hiding, and then, foolishly, perhaps Dumbledore himself, playing some elaborate long game. 

He had left messages for them, at first, in the margins and the covers and flyleaves, sometimes angry, sometimes pleading, sometimes cruel. But there had never been a reply. He had expected– no, demanded a response. The silence had infuriated him, but it was also intoxicating. To Tom, there was nothing more alluring than a secret. But despite the lack of response, the books kept coming, always with passages underlined, always left exactly when he most needed them, and Tom began to imagine it was not a teacher or a peer but someone more singular. Someone meant for him.

It was foolish. Humiliating. Tom did not believe in love. He did not need it, nor did he want it. He had no use for it. 

Love was for the weak, the less powerful who could not stand on their own two feet and needed another to carry them. And yet, the one who left him these books did not seem to be gaining anything from the act. It did not feel like indoctrination or manipulation, but a sort of understanding. A kindness. The idea felt foreign to him– someone doing something for him without receiving anything in return– but how else could he explain it? 

He would not have readily admitted it, scarcely even to himself, but when the books stopped– when, after years of small, anonymous miracles, no new gift appeared under his pillow or atop his trunk– Tom had mourned. The vacancy hummed at the edge of his days, like the aftershock of a tooth pulled out. For a time, he convinced himself it was just another small loss, just a game that had finally bored its originator. But privately he checked his hiding places at Hogwarts every night, a ritual as compulsive and shameful as prayer. Privately, he sometimes waited up at night during the summer months at Wool’s, feigning sleep in case they should finally appear again and slip a book under his pillow. 

The silence was a wound, and he resented this person as much as he yearned for their return.

He spent months retracing the trail, interrogating every memory, every dog-eared page. He analyzed the underlines with the fastidiousness of a codebreaker. He was certain, at first, that the sender was a witch or wizard. The passages they chose always had a shimmer of the uncanny– magic peeking through the seams of ordinary life, miracles gone unnoticed by Muggles. But when he began his first year at Hogwarts and the books simply stopped, he wondered if they had been a Muggle all along. 

Even still, he kept each book. He still read them, still poured over the underlined bits, still could recite most of them from memory if he wanted to. It had been over three years since the last one– Silas Marner, and he still thought of this person, this… friend, almost every day. 

Tom was obsessive about many things. He knew this. He hoarded the things he stole from other children, hoarded anything shiny or intriguing, and this, this– was the only thing that had ever been entirely his. Something private, something he did not have to share with others, something he had not needed to pilfer or borrow but that had been given expressly for him, something cherished, even if the sender had forgotten about him years ago. 

He had learned to present himself in varying shades of truth, depending on who he was speaking to. He was never fully himself around anyone, ever. He’d learned to present himself in ways that struck fear or charmed or, in some cases, escaped attention completely. But Tom had never been known. And these books, these passages, they felt like how he imagined it would be, to be known. It was intimacy, and it made his skin itch with the desire to be worthy of it, to be the subject of so much care. 

After three years of nothing, though, three years of silence, he had accepted this loss. He had (mostly) made peace with the fact that this collection of precious books was complete, that he should not get his hopes up for more. It was a door in his life that would remain closed, and that was just fine. 

And then one day, after a day of fruitless searching for his family and disappointment in the form of missing information, he returned to his bedroom at Wool’s Orphanage and found that they had returned. They had left him a book. 

He stood in the center of the small, airless room, staring at the battered object lying on the trunk. For a moment he thought it was a hallucination, or once again, a trick left by one of the other boys meant to bait him into humiliation. The book seemed to glow with an improbable newness, although the cover was cloth, deep blue gone gray at the corners– the gold of the title, Wuthering Heights, caught on the arc of late sun and stung his eyes. He’d checked the room three times over, but there didn’t seem to be anything amiss. He felt mostly alone. 

It floored him, this book. So had the note– finally, finally, after years of silence, a response. 

‘I’m right here. I’m sorry I was gone. You are not alone.’ 

He ran his thumb over the words, as if by pressure he could uncover the sender’s actual hand, their living pulse against the page. For a moment he just stood there, feeling the book’s weight, the way its clothbound cover was worn smooth at the edges, how the inside pages carried the faintest trace of a scent not native to the orphanage– clove, something sweet, certainly not the sour starch of laundered sheets that permeated the walls here. The note had been written in blue, not black, and the handwriting was neat but not forced, the lines left where the quill had paused or where the writer’s attention had drifted in thought.

He stared and stared at the words as if he could bore a soul-sized tunnel through the page. Something fizzed in his chest, some chemical bright and urgent. He felt heat gather at the hollow of his eyes and, shocked, he dropped the book back on the trunk, as if it had burned him. He pressed his fingers to his face, and when he looked at them, there was moisture on his thumb. He recoiled. It was a childish thing to do, to cry over a note in a book, and Tom Riddle was not a child.

For a few seconds, he considered throwing the book away, or tearing it or even burning it, anything to distance himself from the unwelcome emotions it had brought forth. But he would not. He could not bring himself to.

Tom had not yet read Wuthering Heights. 

There had been no books in his life, not really, until the first one appeared beneath his pillow. There had been the ones they were meant to read for their schooling, and of course, he had done so diligently. But there was no pleasure in that, no joy. Mrs. Cole kept a narrow shelf of battered children’s stories in the main room for the little ones, the kind with illustrations of rabbits and foxes in waistcoats. None of them truly interested him, although he’d read them anyway. 

Tom had taught himself to read, even before he’d been old enough to start lessons in the schoolroom, for he had always been hungry for books. Longer books, more fantastical books, books that challenged him, books that gave him glimpses of magic and faraway lands he scarcely knew existed before. But there was a shortage of those sorts of books at Wool’s, and this mysterious benefactor had opened a whole world for him when they’d begun leaving him these gifts. He wondered if they knew what they had done for him. The magnitude of the gift. The doors it had opened in his mind, the freedom they had granted him. 

Once he’d begun at Hogwarts, there had been so much else– so much else– so many magical texts, so many secrets to unravel, that Muggle novels were not the sort of thing he reached for. Aside from his collection of books from this invisible donor, which he still turned to regularly, he read for schoolwork, or to research, or to plot. Tom did not read purely for pleasure very often nowadays. And he had not realized how bereft he had been of it until he picked up Wuthering Heights. 

It wasn’t that the book was pleasant. It was not. 

The feeling it awakened was more like the pressure behind a bruise, tender and persistent. It was not comforting, like some of the books they (she?) had left him before. There was no animal in a hat, no kindly narrator taking him by the hand. Instead, it was cold moors and sharp-edged longing, and people who were cruel and vindictive and unlikeable in ways that felt both familiar and wrong at the same time. He found it exhilarating, the way the book refused comfort, the way its people did not apologize for their wants or wounds.

He read through the dinner bell, through Mrs. Cole's knock at his door, through the shouts of the other boys in the hallway. He read as the sunlight faded from the window, as the air in the room thickened and the world outside blurred into a distant, muffled hush. It was as if the book itself had cast a spell, and Tom was helpless to do anything but surrender to its pull.

The underlined passages in this book were different from the others. They were not gentle. They were not words of comfort. They were words of a loneliness so deep it was almost madness, devotion so aggressive it was obsession, soul-consuming. The characters were not good or kind or even the sort of people you felt sympathy for. There was no discernible redemption. It was fascinating. It was crushing. 

And Tom felt, for the first time, as if he was beginning to know this person too. Some of the passages felt like they were underlined for her, not him. And the more he read her annotations, the passages she had found resonant enough to save, the more he became convinced that she was indeed a she. 

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”

She had underlined that three times, put a little star next to it, and scribbled something then crossed it out. He wished to know what it had said. 

“I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

She’d doodled two tiny moths next to it and circled the words ‘unquiet slumbers.’ There was a small stain on this page– tea, perhaps. 

“I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind. And this is one: I'm going to tell it - but take care not to smile at any part of it.”

Beside this one, she’d written ‘One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star –Nietzsche.’ 

“It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.”

This was, perhaps, the most intimate passage of them all. Next to it, she’d written ‘Am I the thorn or the honeysuckle? Perhaps both.’ It was bewitching. The simple, offhand way she asked it, the idea that she might be both villain and beauty, made him want to know the answer himself. 

For the first time in a very long time, Tom felt the weight of his own ignorance. For the first time ever, he felt an appetite not for power but for a person. He pored over every annotation obsessively, analyzed every stroke of her quill, the way her e’s looped and she sometimes forgot to dot her i’s. He reread these passages, the ones that seemed personal to her, more than any of the others. At first, he’d scoffed at the doodle of the moths, but when he went to look back at it a second time and saw the little markings she’d drawn on the wings, the tiny antennae, he felt a surprising flush of– what, precisely? It wasn’t anger. It was something finer, like a heat under his skin. An entirely new sensation. 

Other passages felt geared towards him, as they normally were. 

“Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies.”

“I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.”

“The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I’m tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.”

Oh, it was maddening. How did she know? How did she see him– without eyes, without witness? How did she peer through every mask, brush against the marrow of him, lay claim to the secret, sordid things no other soul had ever seen?

With her little underlines and annotations, it was as if she carried some hidden blade that cut straight into the private rot of him. Intolerable. Unacceptable. Intoxicating.

There were other passages that he did not understand, for he had never felt anything close to them. 

“Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!”

He re-read that passage ten, twenty times, because it did not make sense to him, not at first. He knew about wanting, knew about hunger, but the kind of hunger that had always lived inside him was a cold, dry thing– never the feverish ache that seemed to ignite every word in this book. The girl in the moors was mad, yes, but there was a grandeur to it, a magnificence in her surrender. And Heathcliff was ruined by her absence, made monstrous and sublime by the shape she left behind. 

He wondered what it would be to need someone so utterly, to be at the mercy of another person’s presence. To feel hollowed out by wanting, to ache so spectacularly it turned you mad. The idea was repulsive and compelling at once, as all forbidden things are. 

Tom did not want anything but power– clean, upward, solitary power. But now he found himself awake at odd hours, holding the book against his chest, imagining the sender. Wondering what it would be like to belong to someone, to be possessed or torn apart by longing, to lose one’s self in a hunger that was not ambition but simply desire. 

He tried, experimentally, to imagine the sender’s voice. Sometimes it was rough and imperious, like Mrs. Cole after too many cigarettes. That didn’t feel quite right, though. Sometimes it was soft and graveled, like he’d heard in the radio dramas, or sweet and melodic. He thought about the sender’s hands– was she careful with the quill, did her fingers stain with ink, did she chew the end in thought or drum it against the paper in impatience? Did she paint her nails like some of the girls in his year or leave them bare? He pictured a mouth, thin-lipped or full, sharp with wit or slow to smile. He wondered if she bit the inside of her cheek when she read, or if she said the words aloud to feel them more deeply the way he sometimes did. 

Tom tried to conjure a face and failed, again and again, so instead he imagined a presence– something nearly animal, a shadow trembling just beyond the edge of his vision, close enough to touch. He didn’t bother to hide his next note inside of the book– he wrote it on a scrap of paper, left it out on his desk. He knew she would find it. 

‘You said you were “perhaps both.”  If you are reading this, and you are not afraid, tell me: Have you determined yet, if you are the honeysuckle or the thorn? And if you are both, does it hurt to be so?

You know who I am. Tell me who you are. Or at least, tell me what you want from me, if anything at all.’

He read it over, scrutinizing every word, and then laid it there, face-up. It would be difficult to miss– the note was the only thing on his desk, all of his other possessions neatly tucked away in drawers or his trunk. He did not think any of the other children dared to sneak into his room anymore, and if they did, they wouldn’t know what to make of the note anyway. Afterwards, Tom sat on the edge of his cot and felt a new tension building in his chest, the thread of logic and risk and desire tangled so tightly it was hard to draw breath. 

He knew he ought to be careful. He knew that nothing good could come from reaching out into the unknown, not when he was so close to what he wanted and the whole world seemed poised to strike, either to knock him down or draw him up.

And yet. 

Tom must not have been quite as strong, quite as disciplined as he liked to believe. For he found he was powerless to resist this. 

*

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*

Looking back on it, Hermione would have probably pinpointed that very day– the one where she gave Tom Riddle her copy of Wuthering Heights– as the moment when things truly spiraled out of her control. 

If she had been obsessed before, she was consumed now. And it wasn’t about just watching him, either. It was about knowing him. About the sick, heady thrill she got when she read his note– ‘If you are both, does it hurt to be so?’

Oh. What a question. What a mind he possessed. Oh, she was doomed. 

She’d expected something clever, or else barbed with suspicion, but not this: not the open, hungry request for contact, the way it seemed to reach through the air and physically find her, as if his fingertips themselves were grazing her mind, begging for a glimpse into it.  

She’d stood and silently watched him devour the book, her muscles cramping but still unable to look away. Sometimes he mouthed the words absentmindedly as he read, his brows furrowed. Sometimes he paced as he read. Sometimes he would set the book down in frustration, only to pick it back up immediately. She wasn’t prepared for the ferocity with which a teenage Tom would read, the way his eyes would narrow then widen, and sometimes even close for a few seconds, like he was savoring the lines. 

Hermione left him another note enclosed within another book. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 

‘You asked a very difficult question and I cannot pretend to have a good answer, but I will try. I do not know if I am the honeysuckle or the thorn. Some days I am neither, some days I am both. And some days, I want to be only one thing– only sweet, only soft, or only sharp and unyielding, so at least I might know myself without contradiction. 

It does hurt to be so, sometimes, but I think, ultimately, I would rather hurt than reduce myself to a singular thing so that others can make better sense of me. That would be quite boring, don’t you agree? I am curious, Tom. Which one are you?’ 

The next part was harder to write, and she had to come back to it several times. It felt a bit like walking on a tightrope, this thing. She was afraid of revealing too much, but also of giving him too little and losing this thread that linked them.

‘You also asked who I am. If my answer is disappointing, I am sorry. I wish I could tell you my name, or what I look like, or where I am writing from. I wish I could show you that I am trustworthy, or at the very least, not your enemy. But I cannot. It is much too complicated. However, I can offer you a small truth. I am not a ghost, or an angel, or some trick of your imagination.

I am a girl. I am magical, like you, and I know what it means to keep that part of myself hidden, to be different from those around me. I know it is a lonely existence. 

I hope this is enough for now.’ 

She left it on his desk this time, rather than under his pillow. It felt too risky to leave them as he slept, and once, when she’d tried, Hermione had found herself tempted to reach out and stroke his hair. It was a horrifying urge, and she’d almost stumbled backwards in her haste to leave. 

She went through the days by rote, life draining steadily of its color even as she performed convincingly. She met her obligations. She read the books for class, raised her hand dutifully, wrote her essays and achieved the same high marks she’d always managed. To everyone, she was as she’d always been: a bit insufferable, sharp as a tack, slightly awkward, and reliable to a fault. 

During meals, she joined in the laughter, and when Ginny told a joke so filthy it made Harry spit pumpkin juice across the table, she giggled along with the rest of them. She let Padma cast another one of her straightening spells on her hair, even let Lavender paint her nails, though she picked the polish off within days. She kissed Ron back, brushed the fringe off his forehead, let him escort her to and from class. 

But she was numb to the world around her, everything tunneling down to one thing– one person, rather. Tom. His name echoed in her head like a metronome. She read and reread his notes when she woke up in the morning and before she went to sleep, spent her spare time plotting to see when she could next get her hands on Harry’s Cloak and return to 1942. 

‘You offer me half-truths and riddles to solve, and expect trust in return,’ he wrote. ‘You hide your name, your face, your age, your place, but you think yourself honest because you admit to pain. Clever. Do you think me so desperate for kinship that I will settle for shadows? Loneliness is not enough to bind us. Or perhaps you hope I will pity you– a girl, magical, misunderstood. But I do not pity. I do not comfort. I only learn. 

Still, you interest me. Dorian Gray thought his portrait belonged only to him, yet it was the truest thing he ever made. Words can be portraits too. I wonder if you realise what you’ve painted of yourself here.

–T.’ 

The next time, she left him Jude The Obscure. It was dark, too dark, but some contrary, reckless part of Hermione wanted to leave him something unedited, something that had not been through the filter of her own best intentions. She had highlighted the darkest, bleakest lines, the ones that had touched the most shameful, hidden parts of her, then wrote, folded into a note in the end of the last chapter: 

‘Sometimes I think it is braver to be despairing than to pretend hope is always possible. By nature, I am an optimist, but do not mistake that for naïvity. And do not reduce me to merely a girl in search of pity. If that was all I sought, I would have chosen easier words, prettier stories, something designed to make you soften. Or perhaps I would have found someone who would soften more easily. But I did not. I found you.

I would rather be challenged, even torn apart, than comforted by illusions. Can you say the same?’ 

This book did not sit well with him. She could tell by his posture when he read it, the tension in his jaw, the way he stood up and snapped it shut several times before sitting down and picking it back up again. When he finished it, he left another note in the same place. 

‘No, I cannot say the same. Because I will not allow myself to be torn apart, ever, by anyone. Nor will I be comforted by illusions. Being torn apart is what people do to you when you are soft, when you invite them in with honeyed words and let them see that you can be hurt. And illusions are for simple-minded fools. 

I do not think you are naïve, but I think you are in the habit of concealing your own ruthlessness, even from yourself. (Why else would you send me this book? Did you think the ending would frighten me? That I would be shocked at the child’s death, or by the cruelty of hope turned inward so fiercely it became self-destruction?)  

Tell me something about yourself. Something that would frighten others. It will not frighten me.

–T’

Fine, she thought furiously. If he wanted frightening, she could offer that. Next was The Yellow Wallpaper. She would not send him comfort, nor beauty, nor philosophy polished to a shine. She would send him madness. She would send him a story of what it meant to lose yourself from the inside out. Her note was folded at the end of the story. 

‘When I was very small– a child, like you once were– I used to have the same dream, over and over. In the dream, I am running barefoot through a forest, the kind with trees so old and knotted they look like they’re made from the bones of dead gods. The ground is cold and prickly and covered in a carpet of needles, and my feet bleed but I do not care. I’m in my nightgown, and the only light is the moon, and I have this sense that I’m being chased. Sometimes it’s wolves, sometimes it’s men, sometimes it’s just a shadow with claws. 

I am always frightened, but I do not let it show. And I always outrun it. In my dream, I bare my teeth and I am ruthless and wild, and I will never, never be harmed. 

Do you know what it feels like, Tom, to run so fast and so hard you feel like you could split yourself open? 

I do. I always wake up just as I reach the edge of the forest and leap, and there’s never anything on the other side, just a drop and a sky that looks like spilled ink. The dream is always the same, and I always wake up with my heart racing and my hands clutching the sheets, and for a moment, I feel like I could do anything. Like I could eat the whole world, or tear it apart, or both at once. 

Adults have always told me I am too much. Too ravenous, too curious, too restless, too uncompromising. I suspect I am too much for others my age, too. I have always, always, wanted to know what is behind a locked door, even if what’s behind it destroys me. I frighten myself, sometimes. But what frightens me more is being stilled, shut away, made small. I would rather claw at the walls, tear them down splinter by splinter, than sit quietly until I rot. 

But perhaps you will only laugh at that, since you claim nothing frightens you.’ 

And then, because she feared him more than she feared herself, Hermione’s hand trembled as she left the book and the note in his room. 

She spent the next three days in a fugue of anxiety, unable to focus on her homework, barely able to read a single paragraph in her Arithmancy book without losing her train of thought. She snapped at Ron. She snapped at Harry, even though he was so obviously worried about her that it made her chest ache. She stopped eating meals with the others and instead hid herself in alcoves around the castle, waiting for the sun to lower enough so she could slip away and visit Tom again.

The only thing worse than waiting for a reply was getting one, for then she would ruminate on it obsessively for hours, picking apart his every word, formulating her own responses in her mind. 

Hermione left the dormitory that night and walked the moonlit corridors of Hogwarts, feeling both more alive and more hunted than she ever had before. How could she explain it, this strange feeling? It sounded like madness. Perhaps it was madness. 

But still, she would not stop. She would keep writing to this boy in another century, the one who would one day become a monster, and she would keep feeling as if he were the only one who might truly understand her. 

*

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