For:

Tanzania - AU: Time Turner!AU (Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry (Challenges & Assignments)) (Around the world in 31 days)

Elara Merandus: (ability) Mind Reading, (word) whisper, (word) sadistic. (Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry (Challenges & Assignments)) (Writing Club)

Ollivanders Wand Shop: Lily Potter: A Popular Character's Insecurities (The Golden Snitch)

Word Count: 513


Hermione Granger does not like time-travelling.

It's useful, there's no denying that, but messing with time is never a good idea. She had gotten the lecture from Professor McGonagall in her third year, when she had received her time turner, and she had never forgotten it.

There were other things she had forgotten as well, she thinks, as she sees Teddy hold the small device in his hand, ready to throw it. The movement of the object in the air—going up, curving down—plays out in slow motion. She thinks it crashes into her chest, but she's not very sure. Her world goes black after that.

/

When she wakes up she is in the Hogwarts Infirmary and she knows something is wrong. Had she simply fainted, she would have still been in Harry's apartment. Had something worse happened she would have gone to Mungo's. She would not have ended up here.

The room is alight but nobody is in it with her. She turns her head and sees chairs haphazardly placed next to her bed—people had been in them, and fairly currently as well, if the indentations on the seat cushions were any indication to go by. The table next to her head holds a collection of cards and chocolates, and she blinks repeatedly looking at them. She has friends, but not that many.

She is about to grab a card, but a footstep sounds in the hall outside and she quickly shoves her hand back under the creamy white covers and closes her eyes, faking sleep. Somebody enters and lets out a loud sigh. "Hermione, I know you're awake."

She doesn't recognize the voice or the accent. It sounds suspiciously higher class. But they know her, so she must know them.

She raises the covers to the concerned face of Tom Marvolo Riddle and shrieks.

/

"You're not my Hermione," he whispers in her ear, "I know you're not."

"I don't know who your Hermione was," she mutters back, "she must have been horrible, to love a sadistic bastard such as yourself."

He stares at her face for half a second before she can feel herself being breached. He doesn't voice, mouth, or whisper the word, but she knows Legilimens is in his mind. She was never good at occlumency.

/

"I—am I really like that, in the future?"

When she nods he puts his head in his hands and crumbles against the wall. He doesn't show his weaknesses in front of others but for some reason whenever he breaks it is in front of her.

"How—" he murmurs, "how did that happen?"

/

She learns that she is in 1944, that she is still eighteen years old, that she is a pureblood. She learns that she is in love with Tom Marvolo Riddle, or that she was.

He is the same person. He has killed and destroyed and maligned and he is the same person but he is capable of love.

And he is scared.

"I don't want to become that person," he whispers into her hair. She doesn't care enough to push him away.

/

a/n: i probably messed up a lot of tense in this.

-dee