Chapter 10

"Thank you, Miss Granger," said Riddle kindly. "Most ingenious, and the sort of thing that I daresay I should have come up with at Hogwarts, and would have rewarded my friends handsomely for working out. Of course, it requires you to corrupt one of the lightest spells into something exceedingly dark, unpleasant and unethical, not to mention damaging, but I'm sure the students who were fooled by your trick deserved it, didn't they?"

He forced her to look up into his cold, blue eyes. "Didn't they, Miss Granger?"

"It was dumb of them to not even think to check," she spat back. "Thirty people in a room and no one even wavered. I guess we should have trained that along with countercurses."

"Yes, you really ought to have trained them to be distrustful, suspicious, and ruthless, oughtn't you, Miss Granger? Dear me, it's almost as if them not being Slytherins was a personal affront to you."

"That's not what I meant!"

"But it is what you said," Riddle chuckled. "And you're right, Miss Granger. If they're going to run around trusting authority figures, they would be easy prey to me and my followers. You know as well as I do that my followers have infiltrated the Ministry, and all sorts of other institutions that your little friends would expect to be safe from my influence. You simply proved what was obvious from the beginning. Your little army should have been helpless against my older self. It's only because he has gotten so much stupider that you or anyone in your little expedition is still alive."

"His tactics may be much stupider than yours, but you both still have dumb strategy." It was easier for Hermione to be angry than afraid. "You say you're afraid of the atom bomb - I am too! - but wiping out Muggles is a short-term and short-sighted solution. You could just transfigure all the firing mechanisms so they seemed like they were working and would never ever fire. You're immortal, you have the rest of time to come up with a better idea. Trying to solve a problem quickly and permanently isn't a sign of strength, it's evidence of fear!

"Wizards think the solution to anything is just to reshape it by pure will and power. The Malfoys use money and tradition, and you don't think that gives them any special authority, it just makes them useful for your to manipulate. How are you any different, just because you're using pure power and a bit of creativity?"

"Transfiguration can be undone, Miss Granger," Riddle said. "And muggles would surely notice if the bit of the map they targeted with their weapons were to remain completely unscathed. And if I wait, who knows what else they will come up with? The clumsy weapons they had when I was at Hogwarts must have improved with time, and surely, they have more of them now than they did then. When would you have me wait until, Miss Granger? Until one of them accidentally decides to go spelunking in the 'abandoned ruin' that is Hogwarts and emerges, warning the others? Until a Squib is listened to about the existence of an alternate world right next to theirs? Until one of their Presidents or Prime Ministers decides it would do wonders for his political image to out us and destroy us? Until one of their leaders gets elected on the promise to destroy us?"

Riddle was leaning in very close to her, and his voice was getting steadily more accusatory with every sentence. "You ask how I am different from the Malfoys. The Malfoys rely on false sources of power to back up their claims, Miss Granger. The Malfoys think tradition and money are sustainable as sources of power. They are not. Magic is the only power worth having. Even the wealthiest, most traditionally respected wizard can be dominated with the Imperius curse at the drop of a hat. The most powerful wizard, on the other hand, would be able to survive even a nuclear blast in some form and come back to exact his revenge. The muggles have one great advantage, and only one, and that is the power of numbers. There are too many for us to Imperius all their political leaders, all their scientists, all their engineers, all their journalists. Even if we wanted to, we should not have to spend all our time as a race babysitting cursed animals. Nor could we only kill the dangerous ones. That would be too suspicious, and also impractical. The only option is to either rob them of sentience as a race completely, or eradicate them-"

"You're trying to have it both ways!" Hermione cut in. "It can't be true that magic is the only power worth having and that muggles pose such a serious threat that the only way we wizards can sleep safely in our beds at night is if we lobotomize the majority of the human race. They must have some kind of power that interests you, if it's potent enough to threaten you!"

"I know this diary has made me appear to be just a year older than you, Miss Granger," Riddle said coldly. "But you have not seen the things I had seen even at this age. I know what muggles are capable of. I lived through it. If you know anything of what I saw - the senseless wars, bombings, mass killings with no discernible purpose - you probably only read about it. Yes, the muggles have a power I fear - their scientific knowledge. However, it is a power they are demonstrably incapable of applying responsibly. I do not wish to wipe out their knowledge, but I do not intend to let creatures like them keep it. Would you trust magic to a race made up almost entirely of Crabbes, Goyles and Ron Weasleys, Miss Granger?"

"What's your favorite play by Shakespeare?"

Riddle blinked for a few seconds. "What?"

"Shakespeare. You were raised in the Muggle world. You're smart. You read him. Which play is your favorite?"

Riddle raised his eyebrows and considered Hermione for a few seconds. "Yes, I read him," he said simply. "As to my favorite play...can't you guess, Miss Granger?"

"Richard III?"

Riddle laughed and shook his head. Then, extending a hand toward Hermione, he stroked lightly along her cheek and moved closer.

"Hath not a Jew eyes?" He began softly, his voice suddenly taking on a subtle hard edge. "Hath not a Jew hands? Senses? Affections? Dimensions? Passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?"

He was not staring right into her eyes, their faces and inch apart. "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"

He leaned in, his mouth once again brushing her ear. "And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"

"And you're destroying that. You're still standing with the Crabbes, Goyles, and Malfoys against Shakespeare, Leibniz, and everyone else. You're standing against me and you-"

Riddle slapped her. Hard. "Never associate me with them, Miss Granger. Never. The loss of Shakespeare, Leibniz and every other bloody member of their race who has produced something halfway beautiful is an acceptable cost to avoid more of what they seem to love to make so much. You attack me for supporting Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle, and to be sure, if I had my way, Crabbe and Goyle at least would never be born with that talent, but they are. And because of that, Crabbe and Goyle are superior to even the most brilliant Muggle, Miss Granger."

"What?"

"What do you think it is that sets a wizard and a muggle apart, Miss Granger?" The hard edge was now very noticeable in Riddle's voice.

"Magic, obviously. But it's just one more domain of skills-"

"Wrong," Riddle snarled. "Magic is more than another suite of skills you can take classes in, Miss Granger. Magic is the difference between a free human being and a slave. Muggles are slaves. Permanent, irrevocable slaves. And not just to each other, though that is a frequent fact. They are slaves to reality. Muggles may build monstrous machines that enable them to approximate flight, but they will never know what it is to actually do it. They will never feel the wind in their face, the ground slipping away beneath them, nor anything else, because they are slaves to the laws of gravity. Muggles may be able to extend their lives, but they will never devise something that can save their souls in the event that their bodies are destroyed, even in a truncated form. We wizards may learn of these laws of nature, as they call them, but our magic can break those laws. And because it can break those laws, it renders us masters of nature. The very thing that muggles can never be, Miss Granger. The very thing that makes you and I, and yes, even Crabbe and Goyle Godscompared to Shakespeare, Mozart, or any other muggle."

"That's ridiculous. Crabbe and Goyle, and most pureblood wizards in fact, don't even understand there are laws to be broken! What good is mastery if you don't understand that you're exploiting it? They're like children, and they don't think clearly, because they don't understand the rules well enough to break them cleverly or efficiently."

"Dear, dear, Miss Granger, and you were lecturing me on Shakespeare?" Riddle said, a little sardonic indulgence creeping back into his voice. "Clearly you have forgotten one of the most important lines. 'As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods. They kill us for their sport.' Those wanton boys are still Gods, Miss Granger. Stupid Gods, yes, but Gods. Humans do not lose their dominance over ants because we do not know what it is like to be only a millimeter or so tall. No more do wizards lose their dominance because they are unaware it exists. Besides, Hogwarts could easily include a few units on science. It would certainly be less of a waste of time than flying lessons, wouldn't you agree?"

"Shakespeare wrote sonnets. And he adapted stories. He was brilliant because of the way he operated within and played with constraints. The purebloods don't understand them and that makes them lazy.

"You admire my intellect? You think I'm like you? Isn't it interesting that we were both raised by Muggles, and had to make sense of the wizarding world? Don't you think that put us in a better position to understand how things worked and work around them? Pureblood wizards are blind! They have no reflex to even think of their world as intelligible or to reach for anything but a brute force solution. Lucius Malfoy is counted as clever just because he used both magic and money in a world where most people only reach for one.

"You're signing our death warrant, and robbing the Wizarding world of anyone who will truly appreciate or expand it."

"Now, Miss Granger, that is a silly argument," Riddle said softly. "You can't expect the two of us to count as evidence. Have you seen what most muggle borns are like? You are an obvious outlier, and I, too, where half-blooded wizards are concerned. Purebloods do not look down on the breed simply because of muggle blood, though they do consider every muggle-born child the product of muggles stealing their magical blood through the many brutal rapes against not fully functional witches in the middle ages. No, they also look down on muggle-borns for being sluggish, and at a disadvantage when they arrive in places like this."

His voice turned bitter. "But say you were right. Say muggle-borns had some special advantage because of their upbringing. A child raised by wolves may run faster than one raised by humans, and may be tougher and stronger, but the risk of a child being eaten is too great to hand over all our babes to the wolf pack, or even one, unless there is no other way. You and I may have gained advantages. It is simply too dangerous to our kind to allow more children than necessary to be raised as we were."

Hermione's voice got colder. "But exceptions are all you do care about. You have contempt for Goyle and Ron. You just aren't afraid of them, like you are Muggles, since they can only work in a domain you understand better than they do. They're just chess pieces that won't bite back. You must not really think of them as fully human either. Is anyone in that category? Besides fragment-of-a-soul you?"

Riddle chuckled. "Haven't you been paying attention, Miss Granger? I would think a girl as clever as you would, given the stakes, but no matter. No, I cannot say with certainty that anyone I've met is in that category."

He smiled at her and brought his hand up to her cheek again. "You, however, just might be."