Hello, dears! Back. Sorry for the blip.
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Tom's life is spread across his desk. He's kept every scrap of paper from his eighteen years on this earth, from his admission slip to Hogwarts Boarding School to his graduation papers. Every telegram, every letter, is painstakingly categorized. He has the first letter he ever received from Salazar Slytherin, informing him of why, exactly, Tom wound up at Hogwarts Boarding School, when he certainly didn't apply. Most treasured is the letter from Slytherin informing him that Riddle is his most direct descendant, and—as such—his heir.
Tom has years' worth of communication between himself and Slytherin—letters that continued until fifth year, and, in the wake of that year's events, broke off. They didn't pick up communication again until less than a year ago, when Slytherin's secretary informed him that Mr. Slytherin had taken sick. Too sick to write—he can only wheeze through a telephone these days.
With other people, Riddle is brutally unsentimental. However, when it comes to himself—his own past, his own history—he finds himself making a careful collection of everything that matters. He is the curator of the museum of his life; it will, after all, be a legendary one.
Usually, he keeps it all tucked into a black briefcase. That call, though, yesterday—if Slytherin has finally settled on the terms of his will, it must mean there's been a turn for the worse in his health. Soon enough, Tom will inherit the Slytherin empire, and that means he must be prepared for a tsunami of public scrutiny like nothing he's ever encountered.
As much as he has become attached to these fragments of paper, they have to go.
He shuffles the stack into a neat rectangle, picturing what these papers will look like scattered over the edge of the ship. Like seagulls losing their flight, maybe, white darts flapping down into the dark water.
Three sharp knocks on his door pull his attention from the stack. He freezes an instant before replacing it in his briefcase, snapping it shut, and sliding it beneath his desk. He crouches, leans forward, and wedges it behind the desk itself, leaving it all but invisible.
When he answers the door, he's surprised to find Hermione Granger standing before him, looking slightly out of breath.
"I've changed my mind," she says.
His stomach swoops. He's already adjusted his plan for this dinner to include her, and the prognosis looks far more favorable than it did before.
"Changed your mind about?" he says smoothly, accumulating arguments in his head. He will persuade her through any means necessary to come tonight.
"I want to see the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," she says.
Relief rushes through him. He does not let it show. "Well," he says, "I think that can be arranged."
#
The stairs are starting to wear on him, as is the increasing presence of crewmembers, third-class passengers, and other such unsavories. This ship plumbs so deep into the ocean, burying millions of pounds' worth of valuables in millions of gallons of seawater, separated only by that thick hull.
Finally, they reach the lowest floor, where crewmembers give them confused glances before Tom casts them off with a look. They pass doors that emit refrigerated blasts, doors through which he spies huge volumes of food, doors of the crews' private cabins.
"We don't need to ask anybody if we can look at it?" Hermione asks.
Tom holds up a key in answer. The Rubaiyat has been placed under watch in the same safe as a particular ring, carrying a stone that has been in his family for a long while. Thin grates separate his item from the others, but that's a simple fix.
They enter a room whose entire back wall is taken up by the switchboard, the power center of the ship. The operator's quarters were a way back on their route; here, a long row of identical white handles stretch down the board. Above the handles, dark fuseboxes and ammeters adorn the board, one for each circuit. Hermione lets out an embarrassing squeak and dashes over to examine the switchboard, peering at it from every angle, having apparently forgotten about the Rubaiyat entirely.
"Ooh, I wonder how much it would take to disrupt this," she says, pulling open one of the black panels beneath a circuit. A pair of cables snake behind it, off into a tunnel, delivering electricity to be subdivided further on.
As for Riddle, he wonders what it must be like to have so many questions about such menial things cluttering up one's head. Perhaps it's what makes her brilliant. He likes to think he was born with his desire for information never superseding his composure, however, and Granger certainly doesn't give a care for composure. Her face is illuminated by the switchboard lights, eager, thirsty. Her bushy hair spills down her back. She keeps moving, always moving, always pushing and investigating.
Kissing her was like kissing a live wire. He wonders if she regrets it.
It's strange. A few days, and already he feels as if he has known her for years.
He pushes the door to the cargo hold open. She looks back at him, an uncertain smile touches her mouth, and she follows.
#
"Hmm," she says, holding the delicate glass case. "It's pretty."
"It's more than pretty. Think of what it's worth."
They sit on the ground in front of the safe. The Rubaiyat sits in Hermione's lap. Jewels set deep into its leather cover glisten up at them, dim and dull in the shadowy air of the cargo hold. "I expected it to be … bigger?" Hermione says, handing the book back to him.
"Still unsatisfied," he says, sliding the book into the safe again. "What a shame."
Hermione stands, looking around the cargo room. She shivers visibly in the refrigerated air. He feels the strange, sudden instinct to warm her. To cage her with his arms until the cold is the last thing on her mind.
Crates and boxes rise and fall against the walls and in tight-strung bundles, forming small wooden cities across the dark metal plain. Hermione approaches one, a blocky cluster, and climbs atop the crates, moving nimbly despite her cumbersome skirts. Hooking his hands into his pockets, Tom follows her to the crates, but doesn't climb.
"I can't believe how much there is in here," she says. "It's strange, isn't it? Everyone's lives all packed in like this."
Riddle doesn't know or care what she's talking about, but he's curious why she's asking. There's always a means to an end, he's found, when people have talks like this. With his acquaintances, it's often easy to discern that end. With Hermione, he's less sure.
Of course, she might just be talking to fill the space. That would be uninteresting of her.
"Is your life down here?" he asks, stopping in front of the tower of crates she's perched on.
She sits, folds her legs, and peers down at him. "Of course not. My life fits in the suitcase under my bed. But look at this." Her sharp eyes dart from place to place. "Cars and pianos and – what is that? Telegraph machines?"
He glances over his shoulder. Yes—near the door, an honest-to-God telegraph machine sits on a rolling wooden square. "Did you expect the rich and famous to abandon their lives at the doorstep?" he asks.
"Of course not. I simply didn't expect myself to see it all like this."
Riddle sighs, climbing up onto the cluster of crates. The dry, cold wood creaks beneath his shoes. And as he climbs, block by block, he almost understands what she means. Looking out over the bundled crates like this, he can see each particular space designated to somebody's life's work. That corner, over there: where the Malfoy fortune sits snugly against the wall. Over there: Cygnus' inheritance. Everything looks paltry here, even containers worth millions.
"It does look rather … diminished like this. No presentation." After one last summary scan, he climbs back down, settling in a blank space in a ring of crates. The metal floor eats away his body heat through his trousers.
Fabric swishes as Hermione follows him down, sitting against the crate beside him. "What is it like?" she asks abruptly. Curiosity burns in her eyes. "Being … how you are?"
"Rich?"
"Yes."
He looks down at his hands, splayed on his expensive trousers. This is an inconvenient topic. She thinks he grew up this way, obviously—it won't do to discourage that notion.
Will it?
Maybe … after all, there's a certain flair to abandonment as he wielded it during his school years. Most people clearly felt a tug of empathy, learning about it—knowing him as an orphan, somebody brilliant but discarded. The worthiest possible creature to rise back to the top. It was a convenient angle in his younger days.
But looking back into this girl's eyes, her burning eyes, he realizes he doesn't want to lose the way she looks at him. Right now, it is the perfect mixture of frustrated incomprehension, curiosity, and desire. He doesn't want to illuminate the dark spots in her mental image of him. She already knows so much—he rather enjoys it, he realizes, that she knows so little about him. He enjoys being her only enigma.
A smile curls his lips. "You'll find out in my inevitable bestselling memoir, won't you."
She grins back, showing a sliver of crooked teeth between those usually-busy lips. "I suppose." She looks down at her nails, picking at the nailbeds. "You know, I've no idea if anything will come of all this, but I'm glad we met. It's so … educational."
Tom lets out a sharp laugh. That was how he used to see his time at Hogwarts before he knew the truth about himself. Every second, he'd used to study the wealthy children, examining the way they spoke and held themselves. I may never be like them, he thought at age twelve, but I can build a persona that comes close. He didn't know he was destined to rise above them all.
How dismal it must be, not to have long-buried family secrets like his own. Looking over at Hermione, he experiences something rare: the feeling of pity. He pities this girl, bursting with knowledge and skill, trapped by her disgusting circumstances. It's a miracle she's managed to convince herself her life means anything, and yet it's clear in the way she barrels through the world, demanding, headstrong. The stubborn belief that she matters.
She might matter, this one. Just for believing it so fervently. Everyone is so disposable, so thoroughly dispensable, but this one … maybe she matters.
"What?" she says. "You're looking at me like."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. A crazy person?"
Tom shakes his head. "Strange, sitting here. On the floor."
She raps her knuckles on the metal between their legs. It doesn't echo.
He takes her hand.
He feels her go still, and it delights him, the easy, immediate attention. Her hand is small and work-worn, her nails ragged from biting; her wrist and forearm are smattered with freckles.
Tom lifts her hand to his lips and kisses her knuckles. He turns it over and examines her callused palm. He kisses its center. Kisses her wrist. He glances over at her, and she's staring as if she's never seen him before in her life.
Lowering her hand, he leans forward slowly. His eyes are fixed to hers. He can see her mind racing and it wrings pleasure out deep in his abdomen. Her frantic, buzzing thoughts. The closer he leans in, the tighter her hand closes on his—as if she is begging him to be her lifeline against his own stormy waters.
He stops his kiss a centimeter away. She parts her lips slightly. A fragile breath wisps across his mouth from hers.
"What are we, er, doing?" she whispers.
Riddle chooses a kiss in place of an answer. He does not like explanations. For all that she accused him last night of naming himself a riddle and embodying it just the same, he likes to think he is simple at heart. The world is a kinder place with a black-and-white view: money is might. Anything that moves toward that goal is acceptable. Anything that distracts from the goal is useless.
She is not a distraction, he tells himself, until he believes it.
Her lips press insistently. He tilts his head, letting her tongue slip through his lips to touch his. She kisses in bursts, capricious and unconfident, and he finally lifts his hand to her face, his thumb pressing against her jawline, his fingers gripping the back of her head. Holding her there. He bites her lip, and the tiny noise she emits makes something grow hot beneath his stomach.
Riddle slides his arm behind her back, turning her to face him. He clasps the woolen waist of her skirt and half-lifts, half-maneuvers her onto his lap. She takes his face in her hands, palm-to-cheek, and for a split instant between kisses, they meet eyes. He has to close his. This is far too close.
It's not his first go around with any of this. He had his share of fumbling around with Hogwarts girls in corners of the towers, after hours. The boarding school had four separate houses, two boys' and two girls', supposed to keep their populations apart. As if that would have worked in any conceivable universe. During one particularly memorable night, a girl had snuck into his house common room long past midnight, when he was the only one still awake studying. The studying had not lasted long after that.
He had never even stooped to consider what was happening in those girls' heads. They hadn't cared about his personality either, so he extended the exact same lack of courtesy. Now, he realizes, it is different to know who exactly you are kissing. It is too much to know Hermione's brilliance and be kissing her. It is too much, and it is objectively imprudent, and something is lighting up in his body besides arousal, and even with all this, he cannot stop. Her mouth is sweet and warm and soft. Her knees are on either side of his thighs and pressing inward. Her hand is deep in his hair, moving back and forth, sending prickling ice from his scalp directly southward.
The kiss breaks with a gentle inhalation, and her eyes open as she draws back. "It's funny," she says, sounding hoarse. "Druella told me to stay away from you."
He's amused. Druella's never been fond of him—they tolerate each other, nothing more—but to tell Hermione to stay away? "Did you tell her about what happened last night?"
Her cheeks go brilliant red. "No, of course not. Though she … is very perceptive, so she may have guessed."
"Hmm." Riddle taps the corner of his mouth with his index finger, pretending to think. Hermione's eyes dart to his mouth, and he could swear he sees her pupils dilate. It's all he can do focus on the question, rather than pushing her back on the floor to resume business. "Well," he says, "perhaps you should tell Druella to go back to her horrible fiancé and leave the private affairs of others to privacy's capable hands."
Hermione laughs. "Cygnus isn't horrible."
"You're right. I can't even muster the energy to hate him. He is like a growth on the surface of the world. One can hardly blame him for metastasizing."
She laughs again. Her amusement satisfies him. He wants more of that laughter. He wants to tear it out of her. Instinctive, knee-jerk laughter, and other instinctive noises.
"Enough about Cygnus and Druella," Tom says. He lets his hands rest on her knees. She shifts, releasing the fabric, and his hands slip beneath her skirts. Her thighs are soft, so soft, and as he presses his fingernails lightly into them, she swallows. His grip tightens just above her knees, and he leans up to kiss her again.
With her weight on his legs, it doesn't take long for his feet to go numb. He pushes forward, hands fastening on her hips, helping move her back. She grips his shoulders as she sits, and soon she's on her back, and gives a delightful little shiver at the coldness of the metal.
He kisses her neck, trying his damnedest not to leave marks. One of his hands splayed on the floor beside her, the other unbuttoning her blouse, he nips at the skin above her collarbone. Her hand is wound in his hair. She pulls. She's demanding. This makes sense.
"You're the strangest person I've ever met," she says, the words a ragged whisper.
"Mm," he murmurs, flicking his tongue across the hollow between her collarbones. "Explain." He finally pulls her blouse open.
"I get the sense you need something," she whispers. "But you won't just bloody ask. Instead, there's all … this."
Her brassiere is thin cotton. The series of hooks down the middle look specifically designed to drive the user insane. Resisting the urge to tear it open, he brushes his thumb over the peak of her breast until her nipple strains at the fabric. She shivers again and lets out a frustrated noise.
"Sorry for the lack of explanation." He kisses her again, and when she kisses back, he tastes her frustration.
They break. "You're simply distracting me," he says. It is a bit too true.
#
Some remaining sense of propriety—and the extreme discomfort of the flat metal—stops them from having lurid sex on the floor of the cargo hold. They collect themselves before exiting. They walk briskly back into the heat.
On the way back to the regular decks, Hermione takes a twisting route through the engine rooms. Tom nearly protests—think of the clothes, after all—but she's determined to see the champing pistons, and he ends up following, because if he doesn't, she'll probably get arrested.
They spend so long in the sweltering engine room that by the time they climb back up the steps, they're both drenched in sweat.
"That was amazing," Hermione blathers, going on about the beauty of large machinery. Her hair has puffed up in the heat. She has a huge, idiotic smile on her face. Riddle, trying to arrange his hair and smooth down his suit, fundamentally does not understand how her mind works. She doesn't just have no shame; she appears to have no self-concept whatsoever. No idea how she comes across to the rest of the world. Or if she does, she has made a damn good show of concealing it.
They wind up back at his room by four o'clock. "Some preparations for tonight," Riddle says, shrugging off his jacket and waistcoat at long last. "You and I will be meeting Dumbledore and a few of his colleagues. It is imperative that we give a good impression; as such, I've told Cygnus and Abraxas to keep their mouths closed as much as possible."
Hermione nods. "I'll do the same."
"No," Tom says. "No, that won't be necessary."
"But …"
Tom strides into his bedroom to change into his bathrobe. "Cygnus and Abraxas," he calls back into the stateroom, "are businessmen. Businessmen hate nothing more than other businessmen; they are an implied threat. You, on the other hand, are no such thing. You are an asset."
He emerges, bathrobe on. She's leaning against his wall, her arms folded, her eyes critical. "Am I there to make you look good?" she asks.
Riddle gives her a thin smile. "Among many other, more important things, yes."
He heads for the door, and she follows. As he shuts the door behind him, Hermione checks quickly down the hall, leans up, and kisses him hard.
Riddle blinks quickly, bemused. "What was that for?"
"A thank you," she says. "Now, I'm off to wash."
"I'll see you at six o'clock," he says, before striding down the hall.
#
Hermione peers back around the corner just as Riddle disappears into another hallway.
She darts back to his unlocked door, slips into his quarters, and lets herself release a victory sigh. Leading him through the engine room like that, she's gotten him filthy enough for him to be washing up for a while. She has time.
Her heart drums rapidly as she looks around. Where to start? Where might there be some clue as to what Druella hinted—some buried past, something out of place …
Hermione slips into his bedroom and turns on the light. She hunts through the drawers and back of the armoire; she checks every space in the chest. Nothing of interest.
She exits back into the stateroom. Where does he keep his journal? Maybe there's something else in there, something she missed.
She hurries to his desk and pulls out each drawer. As she crouches to pull out the bottom drawer, her eyes catch something at the back of the desk: hiding behind a sleek wood panel is a defined shadowy corner.
Hermione pushes the desk chair away and crawls beneath. She reaches behind the wood and pulls out a black leather briefcase.
She opens it.
Eureka.
Hermione sits hard in the desk chair, sets the stack of documents down, and starts to do what she does best: read. She keeps one eye on the clock, but it's hard. It's all here, chronologically ordered as if to make her perusal as easy as possible. It's enough to make her paranoid.
She finds her first surprise in the address on the first letter. To: Tom Riddle ... under the care of an orphanage.
So that's what Druella meant. He wasn't just some outsider to their clique of hyper-wealthy oligarchs. He'd been raised with nothing.
She opens the letter and pulls out the thin sheet. Tom was accepted, thanks to a wealthy patron, to Hogwarts Boarding School at age eleven. Probably where he met Malfoy and Black, she thinks, moving on.
Then her eyes meet the second shock.
Salazar Slytherin. A letter directly from Salazar Slytherin to Tom. What business does he have writing to a twelve-year-old?
Reading the letter, her mouth falls open. Something seizes her throat, stilling her breath.
He's the heir to Slytherin's empire.
He's not some architect genius signed on by his more important friends—he is the most important person on this ship, besides maybe Albus Dumbledore himself.
She moves on, her fingers trembling. Letter after letter after letter—the correspondence from Slytherin continues until 1909. Tom must have been … fifteen, then? The final letter from Slytherin reads:
Dear Tom:
Do not panic. It is unbecoming. They will not find out; there is no evidence to make you suspect in the eyes of the authorities. If you remain calm and self-assured, there is no reason blame should find you.
If you experience feelings of guilt, be reassured: she should never have found out. She could not have been allowed to know; or, at least, to know and live. You acted with prudence.
For the time being, it is best that you not reply to this message. Frequent communication may endanger you. In the interim, I would advise the careful selection of a likely scapegoat, or the planting of some other evidence (an infestation of poisonous spiders; a toxic substance, &c.) in a location secret enough to maintain subtlety, but obvious enough for the cretins of our law enforcement services to uncover. Until this shadow passes, I remain -
Yours,
Salazar Slytherin
Hermione's hands have gone from trembling to a violent shake. She turns the page. The next document is a carefully inked diploma of graduation from Hogwarts Boarding School. After that is a telegram, marked less than a year old, tucked into a small brown envelope. She draws it out.
SAL TAKEN SICK STOP MONTHS NOT YEARS LEFT STOP CALL SOON 62442
That telephone number must be Salazar Slytherin's own line. Hermione slides the telegram back into its envelope.
There is one more item in the briefcase. A clipping from a newspaper: an obituary.
Tom Riddle (42), Jacob Riddle (71), and Elizabeth Riddle (68) died the evening of July 7th, 1911 in the elder Riddles' home. Although not survived by any relatives, the Little Hangleton Church mourns the loss of three faithful community members. Open service to be held Friday. Policemen wish to note investigation ongoing.
Spots burst in Hermione's eyes. She puts the papers together, replaces them back in the briefcase, slams it shut, and gasps for breath. It comes down her throat cold.
She wedges the briefcase back behind the desk and slips out the door. She's sprinting before she turns the corner.
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Two more chapters. (Three at a stretch.) More soon.
I thatch my roof with reviews! Keep me dry! Jk I don't think that would meet urban industrial codes.
Love y'all -
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