A/N: Boom.
The Roots of This Tree
Chapter Three
There's an explosion.
When she hits the wall, neck whipping and head smacking against the exposed, roughly cut wood of the shack, she doesn't feel it. She doesn't feel it as her body slumps to the mattress and her vision tunnels and her ears ring a cascading, rippling note. But she does feel a pull.
Her magic thrums in a vacuum.
Her palms are empty.
Across the small room, Tom's limp form is collapsed near the fireplace, the back of his head flush with the upended pewter cauldron.
Hermione picks herself up. Painstakingly, she scoots forward, then swings her feet off the cot. She stands, and her legs buckle under her weight.
She lands on all fours, her knees and palms slapping the achingly solid floor. The lack of control is unnerving, worrying, but she resolves not to think on it.
Instead, from her new vantagepoint, she surveys the room. She searches it still as she struggles to her feet, her pulse rabbit-quick and practically audible.
All she sees is dirt. Dirt and filth and the broken, digested bones of rodents and mice and other small creatures. And Tom. She sees his form, too. Though it looks like it's not completely broken, she thinks.
She hesitates.
Uncertain, she lifts a trembling hand and whispers, low and clear, "Accio Wand!"
She scans the room and waits, wanting and hoping, willing her wand to appear from the wreckage of the room and fly into her expectant hand. The magic that surrounds her, is in her, is her — it could do this for her, this feat of technically above average skill, if she does her part right.
But nothing happens. Not a movement, not a flicker.
Her foolish heart sinks.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Tom stir.
She bolts, immediately stumbling for the door. Skirting her bone-deep revulsion, she knocks aside the corpse of a brown diamond adder obscuring the doorknob, its slick scales sliding against her skin, and wrenches at the metal handle.
It's locked.
She tries the handle again, shaking the door so hard that the snakes swing and rattle like perverse pendulums. The largest, heaviest one severs on its iron nail, falling, finally decapitated, to the floor.
More snakes are knocked aside and the smell of rotting, desiccated meat nearly makes her retch, but it's no use. The door is locked, yet there isn't a visible lock. It has to be magic.
Immediately, her eyes fix on one of the shuttered windows. The one directly above the bed. She scrambles back on unsteady feet, feeling endlessly stupid as she retraces her steps; she's relieved when she finds the thick glass panes are latched from the inside— not with magic but with a simple metal catch. Her fingers trip over the small latch, hands shaking with worried tremors, but she gets it open. The rusty hinge screeches in protest.
After that, though, the wooden shutters open with absurd ease. Fresh, clean summer air greets her.
The sun is truly risen now, and morning light glows, reflecting off dew-laden grass and a mist-covered treeline, bouncing back at her, bright and shimmering. The scene is beautiful, almost ridiculously so, but she doesn't have the time or energy to take it fully in. She has to leave, and fast. Before he gets up.
She glances down, thankful not to find a hedge or overgrown bit of shrubbery below her. Still, it will be a slight drop. There's no other way.
Awkwardly, she leverages her left leg through the window, thigh propped on the windowsill and hands grasping for purchase on the outside of the house. She pulls her other leg up with some effort. Her muscles strain, all conscious thoughts and direction, and they aren't happy with her. They're screaming with just how much they aren't happy with her.
"No! Stop!" she hears Tom shout, and the wooden shutters start to rattle.
Not a chance, she thinks.
Adrenalin kicked, Hermione slides out the window and falls forward to the ground. Not waiting for the red light of a stunner, she scrambles to her feet and starts running.
Directionless but intent, she keeps going.
At least, she does until she's tackled.
A solid body slams into her. Surprise aside, her strained muscles have no real resistance left to give. She goes down hard — and with her, him.
The dark, compact earth is unforgiving, smacking into her from her knees to her breasts to her chin, and then not an instant later, the weight of Tom's body drops on her fully, pushing her further down.
Copper flames in her mouth, her roughly bitten tongue a casualty of the fall. Tears bloom in her eyes, nearly breaking her.
What is going on?
There's incredulity, uncertainty, pain; all of it coalescing as welling water.
She blinks the tears back.
In that second, firm hands roll her over and pin her down.
"Get off of me!" she sputters.
Tom ignores her.
"Tell me who you are," he growls, grasping her bare wrists tightly and thrashing them to the ground at her sides. His mouth is twisted, hair bloody, and his dark, dark eyes burn black. She has never seen a look so intense, so demanding, like he can see right through her.
She doesn't want to tell this enraged, clearly unhinged stranger anything, doesn't feel she ought to. He memory charmed her. He killed someone.
He killed someone.
"Hermione," she says through pink, gritted teeth. A cornered thing, she wants to hiss and spit and claw.
He nearly does.
"What?" he responds. The question is savage.
She swallows, but it doesn't keep a diluted mix of blood and saliva from trickling out of her mouth and down her chin. A harried part of her wonders, worries. How much has she lost after what happened at the Ministry? After what happened at that house?
"My name is Hermione," she says, over-enunciating like she's talking to Viktor. "Her-my-oh-knee."
He narrows his eyes at her ill-timed sass. He doesn't call her on it, though. Instead, he presses, angry and scowling, his own blood pooling at his hairline and trickling down his forehead in a jagged shape. "Hermione what?"
"Granger," she bites back immediately, defiant. She is bruised, bloody, tired, and so very, very confused. But she is not ashamed of her last name.
His dark brows knit. "I've never heard of you," he says.
"Yes, well, I've never heard of you, either."
The grip on her hands tightens. He leans over her, sneering, and opens his mouth. But before he can say anything, a plump red droplet falls from the crown of his still-bleeding head and hits the creased skin between her eyebrows. Her entire body tenses, stunned by the bloody splat.
Another hits, then.
And another.
Tom leans back, but more drops fall, and red runs in rivulets across the bridge of her nose and down the crevice of her left nostril like a gently trickling stream. As the small amount of blood passes her nose and stops just at the upturned curve of her lip, Hermione snaps.
No.
She wrenches her head side to side with enough force that she thinks she could break her own neck. With a bucking jerk, her whole body kicks.
"Get off!" she shouts, twisting, attempting to roll, but efforts to extract her arms are weak against his firm grip, and he is sitting on her knees.
"No," he says, his eyes jumping from her curling, scrambling fingers to her bloody face. "Calm down."
She makes a loud, guttural noise and digs the left side of her face into the dirt, doing her best to smear her skin clean with the small rocks and grit of the ground. She thinks she's gotten it all but digs her cheek down one more time just to be sure.
"Are you quite done?"
She glares — sees his disgust, his disdain. She also sees his swelling jaw; the fine line of it blooms a satisfying, newly plum-red. It makes her ache to hit him again, but the ache doesn't match the one she has to get away.
She contemplates screaming, then. Loud, shrill, and piercing.
But she has no idea where she is, other than Little Hangleton, which may or may not be true. If it is true, she's on the outskirts, back in the woods. Not in the city, certainly. Not near any people.
So she stills. Calms down.
"What do you want?" she asks after several deep, regulatory breaths. "What will it take to make you let me go?"
Clearly suspicious, he presses hard on her wrists once, twice, a warning, before slacking his grip and leaning back to sit more firmly on her legs. He eyes her critically, and again she sees the quickly turning cogs of calculation in him.
After several pooled seconds, he speaks. "How did you know the riddles?" he asks, and just like her own turn to calm, his is night and day. Collected, compartmentalized coolness contrasting so extremely with the fierce burn of moments ago.
Her wrists appreciate the reprieve, but she has no idea what he's talking about.
"The what?"
"The who," he says with impatience. "The Riddles. You were in their house."
"Riddles?" Hermione chokes, eyes widening as she takes in the swarming, swirling logic before her. Her voice drops. "Tom Riddle?"
Tom Riddle. Little Hangleton. The someone dead on the floor; the bones used to bring him back. They are pieces, and they clink together perfectly. Impossibly.
Tom Marvolo Riddle.
I am Lord Voldemort.
He is Lord Voldemort.
She can't believe it. She can't believe it.
What else is there to believe?
The fear squeezing her insides grows claws that hook in deep. Tom's - Voldemort's weight on her legs pales in comparison.
But how?
Tom has leant in eagerly, greedily at her blurted acknowledgment of him, at the twisted, horrified expression that she undoubtedly wears.
He opens his mouth, and —
There's a loud pop.
It goes off somewhere behind her, back by the hovel of a house she ran from. It sounds like a car backfiring, though she knows that's the last thing it could be.
Hermione doesn't need to crane her neck around Tom to know there's nothing but a winding, overgrown path leading to the shack. She won't be able to see it if she looks, which means they can't see her.
Tom swears, jumping to the appropriate conclusions before her, but he's not fast enough. His left hand leaves her wrist, but it doesn't make it to her mouth before she turns her head and screams a piercing, pleading, prolonged note. Seconds later, his hand cuts off her cry, but she smiles around it, the blood on her teeth rubbing off on the lightly calloused skin of his palms. She's won this round.
They hear her. They have to.
"I'm going to find you," Tom says fiercely. "And you're going to tell me everything."
A threat. A promise. From Voldemort.
She laughs. How absolutely barking this dream is. How absurd.
She doesn't respond, but it appears he doesn't expect her to. He gets off of her, rising nimbly to his feet and bounding off into the dark woods, away from the hedgerowed path, and away from the apparating stranger, with long, pumping strides.
She looks up, laughs again. The cloudless blue sky is entrancing above her — so pretty, so bright, and she's still laughing sporadically, disturbingly, between gasps of pain, but she pushes herself up. She spits, wipes her mouth with the back of her sleeve, and stands, limping back toward the ruined cottage, looking for her savior around the bend.
No one is there.
A/N again: Thank you, sweetasylums, for looking over this chapter for me. Any remaining errors are my own.
And thank you to everyone who felt this story merited an extra second of their time. Every time I see someone favoriting, signing up for alerts, or writing a review for this story, it makes my day. (But especially thank you for the reviews. Those are unequivocally the best.)