[This is an early draft of a scene from the seventh Mary Potter book that probably won't end up actually being included. I wrote it like a year and a half ago, and I'm thinking that Tom's characterization is following a slightly different trajectory now, and I'm clearing out some of the random docs I have saved, so, um… I guess have some random Tomione smut, just because? This is the most explicit sex scene I've ever written, btw, so feedback would be appreciated.]

Hermione Granger lay on an extraordinarily large bed, marveling at the lengths the Room of Requirement could go to in satisfying a resident's 'needs.' The bed, clearly not meant for sleeping, though sleep in it they had, was resplendent with fine silk hangings and linens which she was certain had a thread count of at least a thousand. Their color was a deep burgundy shade which her lover (so-called, despite the fact that love hardly entered into the affair) insisted was more aesthetically pleasant than any other against her warm golden skin and unruly curls.

She supposed he had a point. And of course the contrast of his own paleness – long, lean limbs, tangled in the sheets – and currently-disheveled dark hair against the rich, heart's blood red was incredibly dramatic. Tom Riddle was nothing if not suited to drama.

It was in everything he did, so far as she could tell, that particular flair and sense of style that had been his even since his own days as a student. It was the source of his charisma, she was almost certain, an instinct (or perhaps a hard-won habit) to turn every action into a production, every interaction into a seduction. In one life, he had won over the most bigoted of purebloods despite belonging to a class they despised more than any other, then rose to terrible power before being defeated by his own daughter's hand and a false assumption. In another, he had charmed the Lady herself, stealing a second chance, and built a new identity, a new self, before returning to Britain and Hogwarts to finish off his alter ego and get to know the girl who was both his granddaughter and his 'twin.' Drama should, she thought with a grin, be his middle name.

The only word more fitting was 'impossible,' and that term had a somewhat distressing tendency to lose all meaning around him.

The room grew chillier, and she snuggled closer to him, closing her eyes and burrowing her face into his shoulder, wondering whether he truly was asleep or not. His eyes were closed and his breathing even, but even in sleep, there was a certain sharpness to his features, as if he never fully relaxed. Perhaps he didn't. She knew that even if he was asleep, should she move too far from him, or reach for her wand on the bedside table, he would wake in an instant, pinning her beneath him before he was fully conscious of his actions, preventing any attempt at an attack. Not that she ever would attack him.

That she knew exactly who he was, and continued to fuck him – to sleep with him – anyway, should be proof enough of that. She didn't wake at the drop of a hat, after all. It probably said something about her sanity that she was willing to be so helpless in his presence, but she didn't care to think about that too closely. Because she did know him, intimately. She had done for years, through his reputation, of course, and even better, through second-hand, first-person memories.

In those memories, stripped of Ginny's emotional investment, she could see a desperate boy, now years younger than herself, terrified of oblivion, ignominy and failure, striving for survival, for life, at any cost. He was cocky, yes, and ruthless – completely unsympathetic to his victim. But beneath that, as it had taken her years to see, there was a defensiveness born of being an outsider his entire life, and that overwhelming drive to be the best, to prove himself that she knew all too well.

She had entered into their liaison with her eyes wide open. He was a sociopath, and would, she suspected, never truly care for her. (That was probably for the best – he did not know love, but obsession? Possessiveness? After months in his bed, she was certain he would want to own anyone he cared about in a way she would abhor.) The best she could hope for, she suspected, was that he might see her as a useful partner. If he could use her to his own advantage, he would, she knew. He was Dark, from his magic to his politics to his sense of humor, and more than a little sick and twisted, but he was brilliant, no less so as a professor than as a teenager, and that mattered far more to her than anything else.

It had to: everything about their 'relationship' (such as it was) was wrong. He was a professor and she was a student. He was, by some people's estimation, the incarnation of evil itself. He had never hesitated to kill to attain his goals. He was born and raised forty years before her, and even now appeared to be about eight years her senior. His touch (always slightly cooler than her own) and the heartbeat beside her were nothing but an exponentially-destabilizing magical construct, and there was every chance that he would be disembodied again before she graduated. He couldn't die, but he wasn't really alive. He couldn't love her, and she was absolutely certain that she was better off not loving him.

But she was nineteen, even if no one talked about it, and had long since surpassed the level of work expected in even his lessons, so there could be no complaints of favoritism or of his taking advantage of a minor. She did not, after all these years, particularly despise 'evil' – any such idealistic polarizations of the world had long since been driven out of her in favor of pragmatic acceptance of different shades of grey. And if she was honest with herself, the fact that he was older and had more experience of the world – that he always had something new to teach her, and a different perspective from her own – was one of the most fascinating things about him.

It was one of her worse failings, she thought, that she would sell her very soul for the sake of curiosity.

She looked to his face again to see that he was now staring at her as well, his breathing unchanged from when she'd thought him asleep, arms and legs still beneath the blood-red bedding, no difference at all, save for the intense, now-open eyes, watching her watch him. The barest hint of curiosity as to what she would do next marred the blank expression which was his default. This was, she suspected, rather the equivalent of an unconcealed leer on anyone else.

She smirked and nipped at his collarbone. If she had any sense of time at all, they still had hours before breakfast, and Padma had long since given up any semblance of minding Hermione's business. She was more than up for a second round.

She was rewarded with an extremely thorough snog – nothing so invasive and all-consuming could be referred to as a simple kiss – in the course of which she ended up pressed to the mattress beneath him, his half-hard length and the smooth planes of his chest separated from her only by the tangle of sheets which he had neglected to sort out before pinning her.

A moment's concentration on her part and the offending cloth vanished, courtesy of the Room. Her triumphant smirk was lost at once to a moan of pain, desire, frustration as he positioned himself teasingly, barely probing at her entrance, then took one breast into his mouth, licking and nibbling, before biting it hard enough to bruise as his fingers played gently over her other nipple. The contrast of sharp pain and light caress turned her on as nothing else did – a fact which he well knew after many months' experimentation and shamelessly exploited, beginning anew his favorite game. She bucked under him, straining, unwilling to cave to his silent demand.

He pulled back with a smirk that said he knew exactly what she wanted – him, and now – and was not inclined to give it to her, or at least, not until she gave him what he wanted – the same thing he always wanted – admission that she wanted, needed him, inside her, taking her, filling her, overwhelming her – pleas for his attention, his mercy for her aroused flesh.

The power play, he freely confessed, was half of what made it fun for him.

She growled at him and he abandoned her breasts to tangle his hands in her too-long-again hair, pinning her down, his elbows on her shoulders, knees and shins and thighs holding her down – holding him up – holding that most essential part away from her, just close enough to brush and tantalize: far enough for torture. She closed her eyes – his own were too near, too dangerous. Looking into those eyes, she knew, was an invitation to lose. Her Occlumency was good – good enough for battle, good enough to stand up to interrogation – but sex was a different beast altogether, one she couldn't help but lose herself in, opening up her mind to his influence against her best efforts.

Her arms were free, and she struggled, of course – to struggle and fight, to compete, even here, for dominance over the other was, after all, half of what made it fun for her – raking her nails down his back in the way she knew he could never resist. He shuddered and pressed himself against her – not where she wanted, of course, but tucked into the crease of her groin, growing harder against her pectineus, caught between them, twitching, his body clearly longing to be inside her every bit as much as she wanted the same.

"Say it," he whispered harshly.

She bared her teeth at him in an almost-grin. "Never!"

She straightened her leg, denying him the same friction he had so cruelly denied to her, before twisting violently from her hips, a desperate attempt to take the high ground and gain control of the situation. He shifted his own weight in compensation, foiling her efforts, and sank his teeth into the place where her neck met her shoulder. Her eyes flew open and she whimpered needily, nearly raising the both of them off the bed as she arched against him. She wasn't half the pain slut he was, but God, she liked it rough, and he was far, far better than the twins ever had been at meeting that desire.

She felt him smile against her skin before drawing his tongue up to the soft spot where her pulse beat frantically in her carotid artery. She went limp and then froze as he hesitated there – a thrill of fear working its way through her – a bite like the last one, at that far more sensitive point… that would hurt, and not in a good way, even as turned on as she was at the moment. Her already-racing heart sped faster and she felt him twitch again, crushing himself against the sharp edge of her hip bone as he sensed her fear. After a short eternity of suspense, he pressed a feather-light kiss to the spot, and moved to nibble at her earlobe as she melted beneath him again.

"Say it!"

"Make me!"

He could.

He could force himself into her mind, possess her, own her, move her mouth to shape those four little words he so-wanted to hear: Please, fuck me, Tom!

But he wouldn't.

To do so would be cheating, just as much as it would be cheating for her to touch herself – her fingers trembled at the thought and she buried them even deeper in his dark locks, pulling harder at his scalp and he groaned – but cheating was losing – the same as if she begged for him, or if he gave in and fucked her without her 'please.'

They both wanted it, and they both knew it – the eternal question was which of them would move to finish it first.

And then suddenly they were eye to eye, and hard, glinting blue filled her vision as he slipped past her shields, feeding her thoughts and sensations, driving her toward heady madness as she felt his arousal on top of hers, driven by the pain of the pressure he was putting on his own sex and the scratches he could still feel burning along his back as he tensed his muscles, and the high of control and power in denying her – no, both of them – release, and the prospect of taking her like this, mind to mind as well as body to body.

She gasped, biting back a plea for him to just fuck her already, and felt him smirk, in his head and hers, his lips moving against her own a distant sensation.

He ground himself against her pelvic bone, the bloody bastard – more pressure, more tension – so close, and yet so impossibly far from her clit, from her entrance, from being exactly where she wanted him to be. She angled upward, hoping to make even the slightest contact, to relieve the impossible, unsustainable need to touch, to rub –

He grinned and pulled away, enjoying every second of her frustration, the utter sadist, his satisfaction funneled directly into her mind, driving her to ever-greater heights of arousal.

"Mmm," he hummed agreeably, forcing a coherent thought into her mind along with the mirrored sensations: I thought you liked that about me.

"Not fair," she whined.

"You like that about me, too," he whispered, tickling her ear. She did, gods and powers help her. She fucking loved that he took exactly what he wanted, rules and fairness and propriety be damned. Almost as much as she loved the fact that he would never, ever tell her she was going too far.

She un-knotted her hands from the sheets and his hair – when had they even got there? – and drove her nails into the thick muscles of his arse, with all the strength she could muster. She would undeniably consider the resulting stimulation 'bad pain' had he done the same to her, but she had yet to reach his limits. The sensation he funneled into her mind (pressure, awareness, the most basic barrier – his skin – broken, longing – no striving – an inarticulate need to transcend the limitations of his embodied form) was devoid of any negative associations and accompanied by the thought oh, God, more. He still defied her attempts to maneuver him where she wanted him to go (ratcheting up the pain by pulling against her demanding fingers, hard enough to tear and bruise), and hissed something which she strongly suspected was a Parseltongue explicative as his hips thrust involuntarily against her.

She dragged her hands up his back again – deliberately digging into the muscles with the pads of her fingers this time, rather than her nails – two could play the denial game (harder, he whispered inside her head, demanding more, frustrated by her deliberate restraint – almost-but-not-quite as much as she was by his continued refusal to put his goddamn cock in her sopping-wet cunt and fuck the living daylights out of her. He chuckled at her mental ire – it didn't count unless she said it aloud) – and knotted both of them in his hair, consciously, this time, pulling him into a kiss hard enough to bruise as she writhed beneath him.

He pulled away, replacing elbows with hands, breathing hard, pupils blown, lower lip swelling slightly, and broke the legilimency connection. The sudden lack of his presence in her mind was like stepping away from a roaring fire: shocking, almost painful. "Beg," he ordered her, coldly, as though entirely un-moved by their shared passion. An ultimatum: cave, now, or neither of us will have what we so greatly desire.

She could say no, but Gods and Powers and magic help her, she wanted him, far more than she valued her pride.

"Please," she sighed, imbuing the single word with all her desire and frustration and half-embarrassed willingness to submit to his demands and those of her own body, putting them before her principles and all-consuming desire to win.

"Please what?" he asked, his tone the same, but a light of triumph in his eyes.

"Please, Tom, fuck me," she said, more strongly. Her initial reluctance overcome, she turned to begging as confidently as anything else, voice rough with wanton need.

He knew it, too. "You can do better than that," he teased.

Never let it be said that Hermione Granger didn't rise to a challenge. After all, she knew how to push his buttons by now every bit as much as he knew how to push hers. "I want you inside of me, Tom. I want you to own me, to take every inch of me, inside and out. Drive every thought from my mind but you. I want to be yours. Carve your name into the stuff of my soul, burn yourself into my memory, mark my flesh so the world will know – this witch belongs to –"

Tom's composure buckled and she grinned as he cut her off, attacking her mouth as though he intended to crawl inside of her tongue-first, parting her knees roughly with his own, pinning her hands and her head to the pillows behind her with one of his – strong fingers wrapping around both wrists, trapping them in her own hair, holding her down (though she gave only a token resistance). And then, another teasing brush, fingers parting her folds, allowing him inside, and a thrust – almost painful, sudden fullness – so tight, untouched, unready, but so right, to be taken forcefully, perhaps not by anyone, but with him… she could not imagine any other way.

Teeth dragged over her collar bone, a tongue probed at the bruise from his earlier assault on the mound of her breast, and a voice whispered, hoarsely, "Beautiful," before he began to move, pounding into her with no regard for her own comfort, hitting the end of her with every thrust, as though he would break her apart from the inside out. She moaned, eyes closed, pain and discomfort warring with overwhelming pleasure as the force of him built within her.

"Look at me," he commanded, compelling her to meet his gaze through a fog of lust.

He forced himself past her shields again, this time not content to tease her with his own arousal in addition to her own. She had already lost – the game was ended, and with it, the rules. He wrested control from her, taking over her body's movement as well as his – though she had already surrendered, for the most part, to instinct, reacting unconsciously to his actions, every nerve firing, impossible to think. She floated in a sea of feeling and being and not thinking as he moved her against him, flipping the two of them, giving her the illusion of control only after any truth of it had gone entirely, fucking himself with her body, possessed, movements growing more erratic as his concentration faltered, but still flawlessly manipulating both of them toward the peak, perfectly coordinated, coming, closer, closer until, finally –

The world stopped, flying apart, dissolving around her into a rush of burning cold – Tom's magic, escaping his hold, burning them alive, or freezing them, or simply overwhelming yet another sense – and pleasure as her body twitched and shuddered in release, no longer possessed, but certainly not within her own control, either, her mind still lost in the details – from the way the sheets felt against her knees as her body rode his to the tiny, involuntary sounds they made to the rush of endorphins at the point of orgasm.

When she came back to herself fully at last, it was to find herself lying on her side, staring blankly at the way the light reflected off of blue irises and dark hair fell perfectly across sharp cheekbones, too perfect to be real, though she had seen pictures, and the construct was, in fact, incredibly accurate.

He grinned, clearly pleased with himself.

She was still too pleasantly buzzed to mind the egotism. As far as she was concerned, the few minutes after sex where she was completely incapable of coherent thought, lost in a post-coital haze, were as much the point as the endorphin rush and physicality of it all.

"I am not an egotist," he remarked, false-offence belied by his tone.

Hermione groaned and shoved him out of her mind, raising her mental shields against him and the rest of the world, clawing her way back toward functionality. "You're the world's biggest narcissist," she informed him.

"I thought I was a sociopath."

"That too." Great. He'd obviously found the time to rifle through her recent thoughts and memories at the very least. She sighed. It was one of her least favorite things about him, that he was so bloody intrusive – no sense of boundaries or privacy whatsoever, at least when it came to her. Snape had warned her about the dangers of 'making herself vulnerable' around a legilimens of his ability, but she hadn't really realized the full implications of that warning until after she found she had no secrets left from the man whose bed she now shared.

"You're right, you know," he said conversationally, apparently no longer tired at all.

Hermione was torn between answering and going back to sleep. "I often am. Care to be more specific?" She performed a few basic cleaning charms, then a tempus. There was plenty of time for a nap.

There was a hint of amusement in his tone as she squirmed back down in the bed. "I don't love you. I do like you though. You're quite brilliant; I know you know it. And there's something I've been wanting to ask you."

"Wassat?" the witch mumbled, intent on taking advantage of her remaining nap-time.

"Eva, would you like to take over the world with me?"

As the question registered, which did take an embarrassingly long half-second, she sat bolt-upright. "You're not joking." It wasn't a question. "You actually want me, of all people, to take over the world with you?"

He nodded.

"Ignoring the practicalities of that for the moment –" ("I have a plan," he interjected.) "Aren't you forgetting something?"

"What?"

"Your… body problem. I know you can't die, but it'd be awfully hard to take over the world with no body."

"We'll start with England. The Old Man's managing well enough."

"Speaking of…"

Tom rolled his eyes. "After we kill him, obviously."

"What about Elizabeth? And Severus? And… everybody?"

"What about them?"

"Well, do you really think they're going to be chuffed with killing one version of you to stop him taking over the world, only to have the other turn around and do the exact same thing?"

The man actually looked somewhat offended at that. "You take that back. It would hardly be the same thing at all." She just raised an eyebrow at him. "You have no idea how much the world has changed in the last fifty years, Eve – nine hells, the last five. You're already planning on voting the Potter seat, aren't you?"

Hermione nodded cautiously.

"When this thing is over, you're going to be positioned as well as any muggleborn ever has been in the Wizengamot. You'll be able to introduce legislative changes that have far-reaching consequences for every facet of society."

"I know that. Draco and I have been working on it for years. Since Sirius started the Third Party."

Tom smirked. "Yes, well, I don't think you're thinking quite big enough. Legal reform is all well and good, but for true social change, you'll need to do what Dumbledore did."

Hermione froze as her mind raced through his possible implications. "Hogwarts," she nearly whispered. "You want Hogwarts."

The man nodded slowly, his smirk transforming beautifully into a smile that she would be hard-pressed to call false. "You have to admit, I would make an excellent administrator."

"You know you wouldn't be able to experiment, or anything. Hogwarts' Headmaster needs to be above reproach."

"I wouldn't be able to get caught. Which, let's be frank, I'd never intend to be, anyway."

"Why?"

He sighed, propping himself up against the headboard and refusing to meet her eyes. "Don't think I haven't asked myself that a dozen times or more. Several reasons, I suppose. It's the premier clearing-house for young magicals – can you imagine having complete control over what they learn and how? Not just the curriculum, but the culture. Hogwarts is responsible for introducing new muggleborns to the magical world – just think how much we could do if we changed that process! And it's the oldest institution in Magical Britain. Older than the Ministry. Older than the Wizengamot, at least in its current form. It's like a little kingdom all to itself. It doesn't just have a Charter, it has a Treaty defining its relationship to the government. Like the goblins or the centaurs. Within the Castle and the boundaries of its magic, the Headmaster's word is law. Obviously it's within everyone's interests if the Headmaster cooperates with the Ministry and observes their accreditation standards – those Educational Decrees – but it's the principle of the thing. And…" he hesitated.

"And?"

"It's – this place is the closest I've ever had to a home. It's mine and… I just want it, for reasons beyond the practical." He finally met her eyes again, his face carefully neutral, clearly guarded, this last statement clearly less well-rehearsed than the previous speech.

Hermione grinned. "All right. Assuming we figure out a solution to the body problem and you actually do manage to become Headmaster, I'm sure my Ministry will see its way toward a successful working relationship." Tom mirrored her grin. "One thing, though."

"Oh?"

"Hmmm… the way I see it, you're taking over the world with me, not the other way around."

"Oh, is that how it is?" Tom scoffed.

"Uh huh." Hermione pulled him down into a quick kiss before snuggling into the blankets again.

He laughed, and ruffled her already-messy hair before slipping out of bed. "Semantics."

He always did have to have the last word.