Nightmare

By: Provocative Envy

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Author's Note: I am a lying liar who lies, apparently, because there is one more chapter after this—I just really wanted to give Tom his own chapter, and his own voice separate from Hermione's perspective, and I also felt like the impact of the ending would be more powerful if it was standalone, so. That will be up hopefully in a few days.

Enjoy!

xoxo

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

April 13, 1945

It has been a little over three months since I last saw her.

France is still dreadful.

Grindelwald's chateau is a labyrinthine monstrosity full of hidden doors and secret passageways, trick walls and dusty dead ends—the staircases move, much like at Hogwarts, and there is a menagerie of rare magical creatures stabled in what must have once been the orangery. The house elves are polite, well-fed and well-preserved, and have latched on to me with alarming alacrity; they make me think of Hermione. Everything makes me think of Hermione.

I cannot—

I have taken an east-facing bedroom; the light is extraordinary in the morning, filtered as it is through sheer, sky-blue curtains, and it gets cool in the afternoon, cool enough to warrant lighting a fire, certainly—the fireplace is enormous, stacked slabs of snow-white Grecian marble veined with black and gray and silver—and I have thought, more than once, of the common room fire in Slytherin, the way it crackled and spit and hissed in the background the first time Hermione ever let me touch her, let me taste her—

I cannot—

The gardens here are mysteriously overrun. The elves refuse to touch them, which is uncharacteristically strange—it implies that Grindelwald was likely growing something dangerous. I have not gone exploring, however, have been utterly unable to take a step past the wild, unkempt field of roses—there are a variety of bushes, big and small and a multitude of different colors, deep reds and butter yellows, a blue-violet that's dark enough to seem black—white, too, gorgeous velvet petals making a mockery of how very much they remind me of her, of what she wanted, but I—

I cannot.

Lestrange finally got around to sending me a copy of our marriage license—forged, of course, because she is not here, she is not here, it is immaterial how many doses of Polyjuice contain strands of her hair because she is not here—and it's served as a proper enough excuse for our disappearance, I suppose. It is…harrowing, though.

Hermione Riddle.

I have been staring at that signature for far longer than I care to admit. I never planned to use my birth name after I left school, never wanted 'Riddle' to amount to anything more than a cursory fucking footnote for the first eighteen years of my life; it is a muggle name, plain and common and ordinary, not magical, not right, and it is an uncomfortable reminder of my father, of what he was and what he did and how he eventually died—remorseless, terrified, eternally unconvinced of his own wrongdoing.

And it is—

It is a bit difficult to acknowledge that I have always wanted to say that I felt nothing for him. To say that I felt nothing when I killed him. I am indifferent to so much else—what is one more object, one more person, one more Unforgivable sin, really?

But that night, on New Year's Eve, in Wales—

The way Hermione's hand kept drifting towards her abdomen—below her navel but above her pelvis—

It gave me pause.

It fucking unsettled me.

After all, my own father would have been unquestionably apathetic had he ; other than an uncanny physical resemblance, we shared nothing. Fucking nothing. Nothing beyond blood and broad shoulders and still I wonder, cannot help but recall—there was a flicker, in the very back of my brain, young and naïve and desperate, that hoped he would say that he was sorry, that he had not known, that he had been taken advantage of by my mother but I was not her, I was not her, I was his and he was mine and he would never have fucking left if he had just—fucking—known

He had known.

He had known, and he fucking died for it.

He deserved worse, actually, and I wish that I—

Draco Malfoy's reaction to Abraxas' death was jarring.

The expression on his face after he realized what had happened—he fucking erupted with rage, with pain, as if there was not enough empty space within his body to contain it all—and prior to Hermione, I would have found the entire display distasteful, incomprehensible, a gross misappropriation of emotions too forced, too foreign, to bother with.

But instead—it made me angry.

That sort of attachment is a weakness, a fucking liability, and much like I never imagined myself assigning any nostalgic sort of permanence to the name Tom Riddle—I was Voldemort, was always supposed to be Voldemort—neither did I ever imagine that I would succumb to this peculiarity, this atrocity, this—this vulnerability.

Because she is my blind spot, my open wound, the most fatal of all my flaws and faults and failures—and I would follow her anywhere, would rearrange my insides and reorder my life and reexamine, reprioritize, revise and review and resist—she killed for me, ripped what she thought she knew of herself to shreds, bite-sized and bitter, and it was beautiful and it was mad and it was fucking frightening, too, chaotic and illuminating, both, because it told me all I needed to know about who she was willing to become should I simply ask it of her.

No—no—no, I did not even have to ask, did I, not when Malfoy was offering himself up as a sacrifice, a moral ransom and an ultimatum and excuse to diverge so exquisitely from the path she had set for herself—

I digress.

Grindelwald's office is astonishingly disorganized. His notes, when legible, are scattered, at best, and I am reserving judgment on whether this is the mark of a man with a brilliant mind, or just a psychopath with poor discipline. Regardless, I have been massively unsuccessful in my attempts to recreate the capabilities of his time turner. Bending time—manipulating magic to the degree that he did—it should not have been possible, should not have worked, and yet—it did. I have seen it.

So far, I have managed to go four hours forward, which is twice the established Ministry record, but any more than that...it is precarious. The edges of my vision go soft and begin to quiver, as if preparing to collapse, and I am always quick to turn the dial back, to return as close to my starting point as I can feasibly calculate.

I thought, for most of February, that because Grindelwald had used the Elder Wand to inscribe the runes, to seal the incantation, I would be unable to duplicate his results. I have the pieces of the Wand, obviously, snatched them away from Dumbledore right before I left Wales—but the Wand is…not what it once was. It is blank and cold and stiff and there is no spark, no frisson of recognition, of surrender. It is disappointing. One day, perhaps, it can be mended, somehow

Yes.

One day.

I will make sure of it.

The time turner, though—

This whole situation has felt so hopeless.

It has felt so endless.

It has felt like a fucking struggle, one that I haven't had the strength to master, subdue, defeat—

Until today.

When I first arrived here, I presumed that Grindelwald had not significantly altered any of the original time turner parts. I was also stupidly, unnecessarily cognizant of the sanctity of the Ministry's power, and was therefore operating under the erroneous assumption that the Department of Mysteries had made their time turners with the most magically potent resources at their disposal.

They had not, as I have discovered.

The sand in the hourglass is rare and valuable, mined in an Unplottable Czechoslovakian quarry and so remarkably expensive that I doubt even the Malfoys could get their hands on a pocketful. Acquiring more is not an option.

Increasing its efficacy, however, is.

The mechanics are irrelevant—all I need to do is replace the outer shell, exchange gold for iron and Anglo-Saxon runes for their exponentially more powerful Phoenician counterparts—and the limitations on how far forward or backward I can go—they won't be gone, of course, as infinity is a worrisome, entirely theoretical concept that has no basis in demonstrable fact—but they will be expanded, lengthened enough that a jump of fifty years either direction should not be…dangerous.

Except—

No.

No, it is dangerous. It was always going to be dangerous—she was always going to be dangerous, I sensed that from the very beginning, and I have to ask myself—if she will be the same. If we will be the same in another place and another time, with another version of the future, a future that she never knew and couldn't have expected—will she know me? Will she remember? Will she still be pregnant, still be mine?

It does not matter.

I have never much cared for Divination, never had any inclination to seek out prophets and prophecies—but magic is real, and she is my destiny, and I was made for her and she was made for me and I fancy that out of all the tea leaves and all the stars there isn't a single one that would tell me otherwise—

There is nothing left for me here.

That sounds fucking maudlin, but it's depressingly true. I allowed Lestrange to take the credit for Grindelwald's death in exchange for his refusal to cooperate with Dumbledore—that daft old man wanted me thrown in Azkaban for Malfoy's death, hilariously enough, which—he can call himself 'neutral' all he likes, but he should be aware that I was not the only fucking villain in that room. Far from it, in fact.

And my Knights—Avery, Nott, all the rest—they are replaceable. Forgettable. They have not done me any favors, not really, and their loyalty has been irreversibly compromised by everything that went on with Abraxas; I would be a fool to trust them again, and with the destruction of the Elder Wand…I have no legitimate interest in enslaving muggle-borns—it makes sense to cut my losses, to start fresh in the future.

As for Hermione—

I cannot

I have a time turner that works, I have my notes and my research and a destination in mind—I can survive anywhere, carve out a life and a following and a purpose, and she will be there.

She has to be there.

She will be there because she would kill for me and I would die for her and I have felt nothing but incomplete since she left—off-balance, almost, like a broken set of scales.

It needs to end.

This interlude—this separation—it is over, it must be over, I will decree it and demand it and I will fucking make it so

I shall leave tonight.

-TMR

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