"Tom."
He made an irritated, interrogative noise. Which was a sort of progress. The charming give me your grant money glandhanding soap-slick Poor Orphan Boy Made Good layer had not survived the close quarters of the laboratory. What was underneath communicated in a variety of imperious demands, grunts, passionate screeds, and insults that peeled back skin like a scalpel. This sort of grunt passed for yes Hermione, brilliant and patient woman, better lab partner than I deserve?
"You had pilot training," she started.
"Anyone can punch things. It was a waste of my talents."
"Let me finish a sentence," she said.
"Could I stop you?" he said. There was a nasty little undertow to his voice now, but the world was being torn apart by monsters, and Hermione had more things to worry about than a distressingly tall raised by wolves biologist and his bone saws.
"As I was saying," she said. "You were trained as a pilot. In your professional opinion–"
"Oh, well, now." He hacked at something on his table. There was a bright blue fountain of liquid that barely missed the splashguard over his face, and he gave the kaiju innards his small, personal, vicious little smile. "My consulting rates, per hour, are–"
"Shut up, Tom, for the love of God." Her own work in interdimensional physics was irritatingly free of things to stab and emphasize her feelings. She vengefully chewed the end of a pen instead. "I want to know if you think I could be a pilot."
"Absolutely not," Tom said promptly.
"Excuse me–"
"You can't even share the desk. Anyone unfortunate enough to end up in your head would go mad in short order."
"You're projecting," she said frostily. "My brain is perfectly… hospitable." A pause. "And it's my desk."
At that, he deigned to look up at her. No one–by now the thought was as weary as it was resentful–should look like that with a knife in their hand, with stinking blue alien blood splashed across their labcoat and drying tacky on their gloves. But that was Tom Riddle, first class brain, cut glass face, and a personality scraped off the bottom of a fridge.
"You're serious," he said, and something in the bleeding mess under his fine hands broke audibly. Under the clear plastic splashguard, his jaw grew visibly tight. "Hermione. No."
"No, you don't think I could?" she said. "Because you should know by now you don't tell me what I can and can't do."
"Are you doing this to bother me?" Tom said. "Because you aren't this stupid."
"I don't see what's stupid about it."
"You invented your specialty," he snarled, in much the same tone as you shat on the rug. "And now you want to go get yourself killed. Who's supposed to replace you? Nott?" Tom threw down his knife and started stripping off his gloves with harsh, jerky movements.
"Books, and cleverness. There's more important–"
"Like fuck there is."
Hermione blinked, startled. Tom was frequently irritable, now he knew being charming just annoyed her and being threatened enraged her, but he never swore. "Why, Tom. I didn't know you cared."
His jaw worked. He opened his mouth to say something undoubtedly cutting, then clamped it shut again. Calm visibly spread over him, smoothing out his forehead and easing the angry line of his mouth.
"No Marshall would ever let you in a jaeger," he said. "Not even Dumbledore would take that chance. So this conversation is pointless." He didn't move to put his gloves back on, though. In fact, he took off the splashguard, and kept his eyes on her. In that little corner of herself that had gone stupid and soft and fanciful over Lockhart, sometimes she thought of his eyes as devouring. They were a color that, ten years ago, might have been called gas fire: now that glowing, burning blue belonged to something else.
There was probably something a little wrong with her, that Tom could look at her like she was a specimen flayed on the table and it only felt–thrilling.
Hermione tugged her mind back to the very real work of preventing the apocalypse.
"I could convince him," she said. "If you helped me."
"Which I would never do," he said. "What's going on? Why are you suddenly suicidal?"
"I have an idea about how to close the breach," Hermione said. "But I have to be in the jaeger."
The explanation was nonsense.
Oh, it sounded good, the way she rambled and scrawled lengthy equations across her ludicrously huge chalkboard, gesticulating fit to fall off her stepstool. It sounded brilliant, Tom conceded, as he stood over his wholly forgotten dissection. Nonsense all the same.
It had to be. There was no way a single person, one single wholly untrained person, could be so important, could do something a good program couldn't. There was absolutely no way the explanation wasn't bullshit, and later, when his vision was not red-edged with fury, he would look over her equations and find the flaw.
For now–
"Fine," he said, clipping off the end of her interminable speech. "But if you want my help, you're getting my help."
Hermione gave him a suspicious squint. He smiled. "You'll practice with me," he said. "You'll drift with me."
Her flinch was barely visible, but he had been looking for it.
"You," she said. Flat. Disbelieving.
Tom picked up a pair of crucible tongs and threw them at her head.
Hermione smacked them out of the air without breaking eye contact. He smirked.
"How do I take my coffee, Hermione?"
"Thrown in your face by someone completely out of patience," she said.
"Humor me."
"I don't know–tepid, after being forgotten for hours–" Tom had rounded the table while she spoke. He caught up her cane in one hand, and offered her his other hand to climb down. She took it. "–and almost certainly contaminated with kaiju blood. If you put anything in it it's probably more coffee."
Hermione reached for the cane, which he held away, and she leaned on him as he supported her over to their desk. He could have stopped offering this months ago, when Medical had finally gotten her a cane that was the right length, but he hadn't, and somehow Hermione had never said a word about it. She sat down carefully, with a sigh and a slight wince, one that had her looking guiltily up at Tom. Tom raised his eyebrows.
"I do my stretches."
"You little liar. Top left drawer."
Hermione pulled out a bottle of painkillers and dry-swallowed one, before sticking her hand out for the cane. Tom didn't hand it over. Her eyes narrowed.
"You need to sit. Let me get it."
"You said that dissection was time sensitive."
"It was," he said. "Half an hour ago, before you started being mad."
"Give me my cane."
Tom went over to one of the tables and brought back a stack of her papers, instead. He dropped them in front of her. It was clear how much she wanted him to have grabbed the wrong ones: equally clear he hadn't. He leaned against the desk and crossed his arms, cane still in one hand.
"When you drink coffee," Tom said. "It's generally mine, and it's terrible, because you've never liked it enough to learn to brew it properly. You just want the caffeine in it, and you load it up with every adulterating nonsense possible to make it drinkable."
"What are you getting at. Give me my cane, you–"
Tom handed it over, and jerked his leg out of the way as she immediately tried to smack him in the shin with it. She scowled at the empty space where he ought to have been.
"This little dance we do," Tom said. "It's better than a year of smacking each other with bo staffs. If you're compatible with anyone, it's with me."
"You hate me," Hermione said blankly.
"Don't be an idiot."
"Pilots do not talk to each other that way!"
"Your Potter and Weasley mostly grunt at each other, I know, but they are not every pilot in the world."
Hermione pointed her cane at him. "You can't badmouth my best friends and expect to get inside my head."
Tom rolled his eyes. "You can't be that scared of having me in there, Hermione."
As manipulation it was as subtle as Acromantula kicking the Sydney Opera House into splinters, and equally inescapable. There was some kind of terrible brain disease afflicting every surviving refugee from the Gryffindor Shatterdome that made them incapable of virtues like "reasonable caution", much less anything that smelled of cowardice.
"Fine," Hermione snarled. Tom smiled. "Get a chair and stop looming. We need to plan."
