Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing
Who Knew A Lioness Could Fit In A Snakeskin?
-Author's Note-
Hazah She finally updates. Sorry its taken so long. I suck, this isn't beta'd. I'm pretty sure it makes sense, haha. But I hope you all like it. I'm not abandoning anything, its just taking me awhile because I'm going through a lot. But don't give up on me.
Kaley
Hermione awoke slightly panicked the next morning. She had never woken up to green curtains around her bed. They were either crimson, like in the Gryffindor dormitories, or black like at Grimmauld Place. However, she regained composure quickly and remembered where she was and what she was doing there. She sat up and noticed that she must have woken up late because the dorm was void of anyone else but Pansy.
"Good morning." Pansy was sitting on her bed, brushing her hair in front of an enchanted mirror. "Forget when you were?"
Hermione nodded. "Yes, I did and good morning."
"I did the same thing when I woke up this morning." She replied. "Hurry and get dressed or we'll miss breakfast all together. Everyone else just went down about twenty minutes ago."
The brunette nodded and quickly got ready for the day. She grabbed her satchel with her books and her wand from the bedside table and motioned to Pansy that she was ready. The pair made the trek to the Great Hall where everyone else was nearly done eating.
Hermione took a seat at the end of the table and put some eggs and bacon on her plate. Today was the first day that she and Pansy's mission really started. She would need to start keeping a better eye on the things around her and keep her mind sharp. They were both somewhat nervous but knew they need to keep their cool in order to complete their goal.
You know, Voldemort really made it look so easy to kill a person.
After breakfast, Hermione and Pansy made their way down to Potions class. However, Tom kept staring at Hermione, or in his eyes Ophelia, the entire class. She would look back and he would just be there looking at her. She kept reciting muggle poetry in her head just in case he was trying to peek into her mind.
After class had ended Tom stopped the girls in the hallway.
"Ophelia, Amira, how is the first day of classes for you?" He asked as if he hadn't been trying to pierce Hermione's soul with his gaze a few minutes ago.
"Wonderful, Tom." Pansy answered for them, "Well we have only had one, but so far its great."
They all smiled and looked pleasant, to a person who did not know any of them, three friends were standing in the Hallway. To another Slytherin its Tom being a ladies man. To a present day Gryffindor its one part of the Golden Trio and an ally attempting to take down a murderous tyrant. Perspective. The world is about perspective.
I want to know why he's like this.
The three of them chatted for a few more minutes before making their way to Ancient Runes. The rest of the day went mostly without incident, except when a boy with the last name Goyle blew up a ferret in Transfiguration.
Hermione couldn't quit laughing because it reminded her of her fourth year when the impostor of Mad-Eye Moody turned Draco Malfoy into a bouncy ferret.
The nostalgia faded because when she would go back, that probably would have never happened.
I don't care if no one else really remembers. I will always know Draco Malfoy as the amazing bouncing ferret.
The next couple of days went without incident for the pair. They went to class, and Hermione was slowly gaining more and more information about the Slytherins. Turns out it was a good idea to make friends with Pansy's gran, Rose, that girl knows absolutely everything there is to know about everyone.
Did you know that Abraxas Malfoy charms his hair a brighter blonde than it really is? Or that two of the girls in seventh year of Ravenclaw offer special kinds of 'tutoring' in the magic of love? Or that Olive Hornby really has the hugest crush on that Hufflepuff girl who cries all the time, Myrtle I think her name is? Hermione had no idea about any of this until Rose told her.
Night had officially fallen over the grounds of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Even the lamps were dimmer than usual and the air carried more fog than usual for a night like this. This night would make you think your house was haunted, or there was a boggart in your wardrobe. The moon was full and bright, leaving a beautiful glow all around the castle.
However, Hermione was still outside in a bush with Harry Potter's invisibility cloak and marauder's map hunting evil like a vigilante. She wondered why no one had ever thought of this, to go back and just stop him. Perhaps some were too tempted to change stuff for personal gain, re-buy your lottery tickets with the right numbers, put money somewhere so you are rich when you're older, bringing back a person from that time with you who is deceased now. You had to absolutely not want anything for yourself to do this mission right.
Hermione hoped she was strong enough as she waited for the footprints on the map to reach the edge of the forbidden forest before she left the cover of the bush. After she saw the name cross the line into the forest she made her way that way.
A few minutes later Hermione reached the forest as well. After looking at the map one last time and putting it away she snuck to where the map said Tom was. What she saw really surprised her when she approached the scene.
"Hi mum." She heard Tom's voice in a way she never heard it. "Its your son, Tom. I really wish you were alive to be proud of me. I'm doing great in class and I'm learning so much more because I'm studying so much. If it weren't for that muggle bastard hurting you, you would be here with me and I wouldn't have had to grow up in that place."
Hermione thought she saw him shudder, but it was so dark.
"I know I don't come here often to talk to you, but I just really wanted you to know that someday I'm going to make it so that muggles can't hurt wizards anymore. I'm going to make it so no wizard grows up without their family like I had to. No one."
Hermione's mouth was open. You would have swore someone used 'stupefy' by the way Hermione was stunned. Of course Tom Riddle has issues, everyone knew that, but from his perspective and to now finally know the thought that had cost thousands of people their lives over the next sixty years, what had started it.
She wanted to rethink her plan. A well placed 'obliviate' spell would do the job, make him forget about it all, tell him he's a muggle born and let him live a normal life. A psychiatrist would help but Hermione highly doubted that using muggle medicine of any kind was as easily acceptable as in her time. He needed someone to help him sort through those thoughts and let him know that there were just as many bad wizards as bad muggles.
Hermione listened to Tom's conversation with his mother, whom had passed while giving birth to him sadly, and wanted to cry the entire time. He was an evil man, in the future though, and not yet. Right now, he was a mislead boy going in the wrong direction. He was never raised, he never had family, he never had people who cared enough to tell him what was right and what was wrong. The only thing he's ever been told is that he's bad because he can do magic, by muggles.
She finally understood. Perspective, it is all about perspective. A pureblood wizard who had never sat down and had a conversation with an open-minded muggle, who never had their mum ask to repair the good china with their wand, who never had their muggle father mention how cool their animated paintings are, would not understand that muggles aren't bad people.
That wizard, who didn't have parents, who didn't have love, who was beaten because something broke in the room when no on touched. He would only see muggles as bad. What if you were starved because they thought you kept bringing snakes in, when the snakes just came to talk to you? Wouldn't you hate muggles too?
After a while, Tom quit talking and just sat there staring at the moon. Hermione really wanted to go and hold him and tell him that its okay and she was going to help him get though it. She wanted so badly to just cast a spell and make his pain go away. She saw him as a person right now, objectively, and knew he needed love.
Hermione didn't though. She quietly made her way back to the castle under the cloak. She couldn't bring herself to try and love the Dark Lord. What if it didn't work? What if that is what originally made him go all crazy because some muggle-born broke his heart and that was just left out of history? Farfetched, yes, but it is good to go through all possibilities in your head of a situation before following through.
This situation is one that will make you have to decide between a proven method or a variable. Avada Kedavra will work even if you don't truly mean it. Love, you have to truly mean it for it to have any power.
After she made it back to the castle it was way after curfew so she snuck back to the dungeons and her dormitory, she did not sleep though. The girl had far to much on her mind.
Hermione tried her very best to avoid Tom for the next few days. She was far too open to him actually being a person, that it would have impacted her decision to go on with the mission the way it was originally planned. When you watch a future madman do something you, as a sane and healthy person, would do or do participate it regularly, tends to mess with your mind a little.
So now, I have to kill a person with a whole soul and they have emotions to boot.
She hoped, very strongly, that doing this would not make her a bad person.
"Now students, can anyone please tell me when you are supposed to plant venomous tentacula seeds?" Professor Sprout asked the class, only one hand shot up. "Miss Lornson."
"You can plant them anytime, but the venom is more potent if you plant while Mars is in retrograde." Hermione smiled. One piece of normalcy, she was still the know-it-all.
"Very good, ten points to Slytherin." The professor continued with the class. Hermione had to concentrate very hard because her mind kept wandering to last night. She'd already decided to move on with the original plan, regardless of what kind of person Voldemort was now.
Hermione took the most meticulous notes in order to keep her mind off of Riddle for the day.
The rest of the day went by swimmingly. That is until Pansy was on her way to her dormitory to grab something out of her trunk before lunch, and she heard hushed voices.
"Riddle, I can't make it at five, I have quidditch practice." This voice sounded agitated and was very low. Pansy though it reminded her of Goyle.
"Well then how about eight o'clock in the room of requirement? We can't risk anymore meetings where Dumbledore is going to find them." Riddles voice replied quietly to the boy.
"That's fine." Three voices, other than Tom's answered.
Pansy's eyes grew wide and she turned on her heel and managed to get away without her shoes clicking off the stone floor. She made it to the Great Hall to meet Hermione and plopped down next to her.
"I thought you were going to get your charms book?" Hermione questioned, giving the girl a strange look.
"We need to go talk somewhere else. Room of hidden things in twenty minutes. Eat quick and meet me there." Pansy was off again after she grabbed an apple.
Hermione was baffled. What had happened for Pansy to be acting so strange? She has to be talking about the mission that's the only thing we would need privacy for. Maybe she saw or heard something.
Hermione ate a few more pieces of her chicken and got up to go meet Pansy on the seventh floor. She wondered how different the room would look with sixty years less of stuff in there.
As it turns out it wasn't that different, a few less things Hermione noticed. One bookcase was missing and a couple brooms that were hanging from the ceiling in her time weren't there. The room was far too messy to really notice anything out of place. There weren't any sherry bottles anywhere either, Professor Trelawney had yet to start her position at Hogwarts.
"I heard Riddle talking about some meeting with three other boys about meeting in this room tonight at eight." Pansy said in one breath as soon as the door closed behind her and she saw Hermione standing next to a rather plain bust of Rowena Ravenclaw. "They're planning something now, they said they needed a meeting place where Dumbledore couldn't find them."
The room of requirement is oh so useful for hiding from the Professor's who aim to get us in trouble.
"Well, then we need to start getting invited, don't we?" Hermione answered with a smirk that rivalled any Slytherin in History.
Who knew a lioness could fit in a snakeskin?
Albus Dumbledore sat at his desk, he kept getting new memories every so often, and was waiting for the day when everything would just change. He wondered if everyone else had noticed the memory changes, or he was the only one. He worried for the two girls who were on this mission.
This was, perhaps, the most reckless thing he'd ever let students do. He understood it was reckless, but they were both above age and willing to fight. He currently had about four minutes to figure out how to explain this to Harry Potter and Ron Weasley who apparently had found out about their friend and now were on their way up to his office.
The old professor sighed and a few moments later there was a knock at his door.
"Come in Harry, Ron." Professor Dumbledore spoke from his desk. The door opened and the boys walked in. "Good evening."
"Evening, Professor." Harry greeted curtly. "So is it true, what Professor McGonagall told us?"
The headmaster merely nodded in affirmation.
"Why would you let her go? Why wouldn't you just send me? I could have done it." Harry was trying to reason with him but it was far too late. "You shouldn't have put her in danger like that I could have handled this, you could have sent me if you wanted. You should have talked to me about this plan."
Albus sighed. "Harry, it was not my idea, it was Miss Grangers'."
Sorry that its taken me so long to get this chapter out. I haven't abandoned any of my stories its just I'm going through a lot of personal stuff at home, work, etc. and its just pretty freakin lame. But anyways, here is the second chapter.