AU. One-shot. I don't own anything, JK does.
Tiveden
The Boy Who Lived...well, he does not, in the end.
Though he is hardly a boy anymore by the time he crumbles to the ground, cradled in green.
And she, she is hardly a girl anymore by the time what is left of her sanity sifts through her fingers like so much crimson sand.
It was not meant to go like this. She worked so hard, sacrificed such a lot.
Is left with nothing.
Less than nothing.
She charges at him - monster, creature cloaked in nightmares - and she does not recognise the noises she make as hers. Suicide might not be painless this way, but she hopes that she can hurt him just a bit on her way down.
As they connect they both explode then implode, and she have never known terror such as this.
When she wakes her chest is wet as if her heart is bleeding, and she pulls shattered pieces of Time-Turner out of her skin.
He is sprawled some ways away, and almost absently she notes that he has lost his distorted serpent face, is returned to the young man swirling in Dumbledore's Pensieve. White skin and black hair and eyes like portholes to hell.
He recovers faster than she does and is on her in a flash, nails digging into the soft skin on her throat.
"Where have you brought us, you disgusting, vile creature?"
Your blood is tainted too, you deluded bastard she wants to say, but she cannot, because she is choking too hard and she is laughing too hard.
They could be anywhere, anytime.
All she can see is trees, all she can hear is foreign, desolate birdsong, and the air is sharper and keener than anything she has ever felt in her life.
They have no magic here, and they find out almost simultaneously, he when attempting to cast Cruciatus
(he wants to draw it out, make it slow)
and she when shouting Avada
(she just wants it over with)
and he has to resort to physical violence.
Again.
But it's hard to truly hurt someone when that someone laughs all the while.
He sets off on foot, furious, near insane, while she takes the somewhat more practical approach and climbs the tallest pine she can see.
"Watch out for dinosaurs!" she yells after him from halfway up the tree, and giggles so much she almost falls down.
She weeps when he is out of sight.
When he is back three days later
(give or take, she is not sure what time is any longer)
she knows he has reached the same conclusion as she when he grabs her in a chokehold that she thinks will for sure kill her this time. He has got scratches on his face and dirt on his robes and his eyes are wild as he shakes her back and forth.
"Nothing but forest. We're stuck here!" he hisses, and she wipes his spittle from her face when finally he releases her.
He seems to enjoy the imprint of his fingers on the white of her throat. His gaze lingers and he smiles.
Time passes - days? weeks? does it matter? - and he whirls around the glade tirelessly, looking for solutions, answers, ways out
(she think it hardly surprising for a man so desperate for immortality that he once clove his soul to pieces)
and she does not even try. Instead she throws her wand on the fire it took her the best part of a day to start, and she enjoys his furious growl.
"It's useless now anyway," she calls across her shoulder "we've no magic. I wonder why?" she adds even though she does not. It is not important. Not any longer.
He decides to answer anyway, and crouches in front of her and grabs her chin in a vice. It will bruise, she thinks absently.
""Awful things happens to wizards who meddle with time"", he intones with a voice so low she feels her skin pebble, "and you, my dear, you didn't just meddle, you shattered it into millions of tiny fucking pieces."
But if we are here then you are not there and maybe, just maybe, the world can remain whole.
She does not speak out loud but he reads the words in her eyes just fine. He does not need magic for that.
He slaps her so hard she breaks her bottom lip on her teeth.
She smiles through the blood.
Hope tastes like copper.
She finds berries and roots and she shares them with him, because she does so enjoy the self-loathing on his face when he accepts.
She sleeps among the maidenhair ferns at night, curled under a pine with branches sweeping the ground, and she listens to the howls of faraway wolves.
He sits by the fire, and she never sees him sleep.
She notices him studying his new (old) reflection in the dark wood pond at the edge of the glade, and she stills from tending the fire, allows herself the time to look.
His face is more shadows by now, is sharper, fiercer, but his skin is alabaster, his hair is raven, he is beautiful, so beautiful, and his heart is run through with worms.
"There's a tale called The Picture of Dorian Grey, but I expect you know nothing about that," she calls across, and then has to quench a hysterical bubble of laughter
(she misses laughing)
when he whips his head around to look at her and his eyes flashes just so.
Oh, he knows.
She bathes in the wood pool, floats on her back among red water lilies, and the water is the purest she has ever felt, so cold it almost petrifies her heart, and so lovely, so soft against her skin.
She imagines slowly sinking (soaring) to the bottom, and she imagines spending eternity resting there. Watching the sky and the lily pads and the treetops and the birds through the dark water.
Suspended.
His eyes on her should make her colder even than the water.
It does not.
It rains.
They are cold and wet and furious and they spit vitriol at each other because there is nothing else to do. Rage and hatred keep them almost as warm as the sputtering fire.
He slaps her and she slaps him right back and she is not really surprised when he violently pulls her towards him and kisses her using only teeth.
There is something pure in desperation, after all, something liberating in having absolutely no way out.
She wraps her arms around his neck in return and she laughs, she laughs because they both win and they both lose but perhaps, just perhaps, she wins a little bit more than him.
He fucks her to belittle her, and she fucks him to sully him, and the birds sing above them as he ruts her into the mud, and she smiles underneath him as she covers him in it too.
She is awakened by the hoot of an owl and hunger. She rolls over and looks for him.
He is staring into the flames as usual, they are dancing in his eyes, and she realises that her entire life has shrank to this glade.
And him.
She leaves her bed of ferns and goes to sit by the fire with him.
They say nothing to each other.
At night now she will watch the heavens, for the stars shine impossible here, and she wanders the evening sky with her mind. She dances around Orion
(Bellatrix you crazy bitch if only you could see what has become your dark lord)
strokes The Big Dog behind an ear
(oh Sirius)
and soars atop Pegasus, stardust tangling in her hair.
She takes comfort in the constellations. They are familiar, she knows them, and so she knows they are still on Earth.
But the very constellations above them also means it is getting colder; she feels a sharp bite in the air and the green around them is slowly turning to copper and gold.
She moves closer to him, lies with her head in his lap. He does not push her away.
He has not pushed her away for a long while now.
They spend every night wrapped around each other now, as close to the fire as they are able, and they fit so well together in such a wrong way.
They watch the mist dance on the water of the pond, they watch the moonlight on the pines and it is so beautiful here and she almost wishes that she could not feel all of his ribs.
"There are worse tombs," he whispers as he moves ferociously inside her, "and I hate you for what you did."
She does not answer, she cannot, as she convulse around him, vibrations that can surely be felt in the bedrock beneath.
She strokes his hair afterwards, and she does not regret a thing.
There is ice at the edges of their wood pond.
They look at each other, and they are one now and they both know.
She feels her jutting collarbones, sees his hollow cheeks.
There is no way back, no way out, and they are fading away
(she sees them hand in hand, eyes open wide, suspended in ice, treetops and birds and frozen lily pads above)
and she feels peace.
She would do it again.
He digs his nails into her arm and he kisses her throat.
They watch the sun set and they see the moon rise.
It is beautiful.
AN: Hermione and Tom ended up in Tiveden, an area of Sweden that even in modern times is known to be very wild and remote. And they aren't in modern times.
Red water lilies grow naturally in wood lakes there.