November, 2012

"Have you read this?"

Ron looked up at his mother. Molly had tossed The Daily Prophet down in a rage that seemed out of proportion to anything that could have been printed in the paper. He pulled the folded pages across the table and tried to focus on the article as Daphne filled his coffee.

"Thank you, love," he said. He ran a hand over the arse that hadn't spread in all their years of marriage and patted it before he skimmed the paper. He could see why his mother was upset. His own jaw tightened as he read the first few paragraphs, and by the end he was grinding his teeth.

Albus Dumbledore is remembered for his long-ago defeat of the Dark wizard Gellhert Grindelwald, and rightly so, but has he lived up to that promise in his later years? As O.W.L. scores drop, some worry that the renowned scholar considers Hogwarts little more than a laboratory for his personal research projects. "Dumbledore isn't ever around," one first year student told The Prophet, on the promise of confidentiality. "I thought the school Headmaster had to do things with the school, but he's always off doing more important stuff."

Dumbledore could not be reached for comment.

The article went on at some length, cataloguing Dumbledore's many contributions to scientific research, all while implying that that research had been done at the expense of the students he was supposed to be shepherding toward adulthood.

Can Magical Britain afford to have our students shortchanged in this way? Other wizarding schools have broader curriculums that better prepare their youth for a changing world. With the fall off in student performance, perhaps it's time we rethink the way we educate.

"Disgusting," Ron said. "Dumbledore is a great man."

Molly nodded, pleased to have her own opinions echoed back at her. "Broader curriculums," she said with a derisive sniff. "Teaching the Dark Arts is what that means." She slammed her cup down for emphasis. "I'd tell Fred and George to pull their children from that school and teach them at home if they opened the door to filth like that."

Ron agreed and he and his mother, and eventually Ginny, spent the morning enjoying how much they all agreed with one another as Daphne began to clean up the breakfast dishes then left for one of her silent walks.

. . . . . . . . . .

"Constant vigilance."

Alastor Moody looked at the class of first years. He knew it was a cliche, but every year they really did seem smaller and more innocent and less likely to ever see Dark Arts. He'd insisted the junior years classes be combined and Dumbledore had agreed; he just didn't have the stamina any longer to teach four separate sessions for every year, or even two. It meant the classes were large, but they paid attention as much as ever had, which wasn't much.

The Nott twins were finally here. They'd begged off the year before, their mother claiming they'd been born small and were behind their peers and that they needed another year to grow up before they'd be able to handle the magical rigors of Hogwarts. They were certainly small, if the first one was anything to go by. The stool she perched on almost swallowed the tiny girl. He glanced back at his class list. Laurel. Long dark hair framed eyes too big for her face and she held her wand like she still wasn't used to its feel in his hands. Maybe they should have kept her back another year. Her twin had gravitated to her side. Thadeus had thick hands who looked like he'd never turned down a treacle tart. He even had a smear of something on the yellow of his school robes.

Scorpius and Cassandra Malfoy, the other set of twins in this year, had likewise returned to one another's sides. Alastor supposed it was odd to be separated from a person who was your other half, but he spared them no sympathy. The world was a hard place and the children of the Minister for Magic surely knew that by now. The girl's hair flickered between a blonde that mirrored her brother's and a Weasley ginger and Alastor turned his magical eye on it for a moment before he snorted. Someone had charmed her hair to hide the red. Trust the Malfoys to be embarrassed by anyone who dared to sport anything other than their usual platinum. He made a note to remember that. What else were they hiding?

A slip of a girl with pale skin and dark grey eyes walked in, barely not late. "Miss Longbottom," Moody said.

She smiled at him. "Professor," she said. "It's Black."

The brown skinned boy with curly hair following her like a puppy laughed. Moody looked down at his class list again. That one must be Helios with the unfortunate hyphenated last name. He found that practice ridiculous, though the girl who had her mother's last name instead of her father's was worse. In his day that was something to be ashamed of, proof of bastardy, but this minx announced her name as though she were proud of it.

"Sit down," Moody said. How had his life come to this? He'd retired from the Ministry and thought he'd prepare the next generations to fight against the Dark Arts but none of these babies had ever seen a curse darker than a jelly-legs jinx, and they never would. Their parents, who had no respect for tradition and twisted their last names into absurd mouthfuls, were politicians and researchers. The world was filled with politicians and shopkeepers and housewives and there wasn't a place for soldiers any longer. He decided he'd retire for good after this year. He was done.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Tom knocked on the door and when the woman opened it he smiled his toothiest grin at her. Hermione had to keep from sighing in exasperation as he asked Dorcas Meadowes whether she planned to invite them in or not. She seemed taken aback at the question and studied him and his tousled black curls and cruel eyes. He studied her in turn. She had a clever face and good hair that, despite the casual ponytail she'd tied it into, she was surely vain about. Lean arms and a stance that could erupt into orchestrated violence suggested she wasn't only good at reading. This would be even more fun than he had expected.

"Why would I invite someone like you into my home?" she asked, stalling as if that would help.

Tom just brushed past her and entered the small bungalow. He took in the neat curtains and the small bookcase filled with popular novels and well as the larger one filled with far less common work before sitting down in the plebeian arm chair. "Fortunately, I'm not a vampire and don't require an invitation," he said. "You are rude, however."

"You always have had a thing for manners," Hermione said. She'd come in behind him and had begun to peruse the shelves of darker tomes. "Magick Most Fowle," she said. She glanced over at Tom and said, "Vampire chickens." He suppressed a snort of laughter at that.

"What?" Dorcas asked. She closed the door and stood facing the two intruders with her arms crossed. "That book is not about vampires or chickens, much less the two combined."

"Sorry," Hermione said with utter insincerity. "Private joke."

"We should go back to Montenegro," Tom said. "I enjoyed that little hotel we stayed at."

"We could say hello to Radovan," Hermione agreed.

"You need to leave," Dorcas said. She went to open the door as if that would make her point but the knob wouldn't budge. She tugged on it again.

"You are a terrible hostess," Tom said. "Trying to get us to leave. Love, she hasn't even offered us tea."

Hermione tsked but she was more interested in a book she'd pulled out than Dorcas Meadowes deficiencies. "I don't have this one," she said.

Dorcas yanked on the door again and Tom made a show of sighing. "My dearest Dorcas," he said. "I'm not leaving. Stop being tiresome. That won't open until I decide it does."

She reached for her wand but the moment she pulled it from a holster tucked inside her deceptively meek housedress Hermione had yanked it from her and she twirled it between her own fingers. "Look what I have," she said.

Dorcas hissed out a slicing curse and Hermione inhaled with shock as it cut into her arm, severing the fabric of her own, less meek, frock. Blood welled up for a moment before the skin knit back together and, other than the smear of red, it was as if the injury had never been there. To her credit, Dorcas didn't even blink. She pulled out a second wand and twirled, launching one curse at Tom before sending the same cutting hex toward Hermione again. This time the pair were prepared for her. Hermione batted aside the hex as if it were a child's toy and took a step toward Dorcas. "If you'd damaged this book I would have been very annoyed with you," she said. "Be more careful with your things."

Hermione took another step but Tom held up a hand. "Hermione," he said in a warning tone. "This is my playground."

Dorcas kept sending curses, one after the other, as the couple in her living room fought them off almost absent-mindedly, too busy eyeing one another to truly focus on the woman they'd come for.

"She cut me," Hermione said as Tom tried to impose his will on her.

"Exactly," he said.

Hermione turned and whipped her wand through the air and Dorcas narrowed her eyes but didn't react as her own arm sported a cut that matched the one she had inflicted on Hermione. Hers didn't magically disappear. "No horcrux?" Hermione asked with a clear taunt but before she could go on Tom snapped her name again.

"She's mine," he said.

They locked eyes and at last Hermione threw her hands up and said, "Fine."

"Good puppy," Dorcas said. "She does what she's told, doesn't she?"

Tom laughed as Hermione flung herself down into one of the ugly chairs. "She's my better half," he said, "as the saying goes." He held a hand out and blood began to drip from one of Dorcas' eyes. "Maybe you have something in your eye that keeps you from seeing how much I value her."

"Dark magic whore," Dorcas said.

"Half right," Tom said. Tiny cuts appeared along her skin and, shredded by the series of slices, her shirt fell off first one shoulder than the second. He covered her bared torso in more of the shallow cuts, blood welling from each in slow motion, the red appearing as if surprised it could escape. Her brasserie began to soak up the blood, a wick drawing the moisture to it, and the dull beige cotton became pinker and pinker. Through it all Dorcas kept firing spells of increasing strength and fury at Tom, but he blocked them all without seeming to try. The curtains dissolved into a sea of spiders that ran at her, and she transfigured them back to dust without a word and he laughed in delight.

"You are a treat," he said. "Where have you been hiding?"

"I am not a schoolgirl," she acknowledged, panting.

Tom's trousers caught on fire. He extinguished them. Her hair sparked out from her head and the books on her shelf all turned to dragons and flung themselves at Tom. He murmured just one word and they all turned to attack their maker. She undid the spell and pages fluttered to the floor. The ink ran out and began to creep toward Tom. He stopped and stared at the black river. "I've never seen that," he said. He nodded to Dorcas, a small gesture of genuine respect. The ink ran up his shoes and tried to sink into his skin and he banished it with a wave of his wand. "Not exactly light magic, is it? Look who's willing to bend her ideals."

"I don't have ideals," Dorcas said. "I have a mission."

"A zealot," Tom said. He nodded as though a piece of the puzzle had slotted into place and now he could see the whole picture. "Anything can be turned to what, the greater good?"

"Exactly." Dorcas threw another curse at him and he blocked it again.

"It would have been nice to have you on our side," Tom said. "You're quite talented."

"Death first," she said as blood dripped down her skin and collected in small puddles on the floor. Her eyes narrowed as she redoubled her efforts to kill him.

Tom merely shrugged at that dramatic statement and made a show of blowing glitter that appeared on his hand in her face. Everywhere it touched, flames bloomed. Faces screamed and writhed in the Fiendfyre as it consumed her. "If you insist," he said softly.

She kept her eyes on him as she burned, keeping her composure through the agony with an almost inhuman force of will. "Albus will defeat you," she said. "Light snuffs out darkness every time."

"Light is an aberration in the universe," Tom said as she died. "Darkness was there first, and darkness will be there when light burns away."

"Poetic," Hermione said as the fire sank into oblivion.

"I'm a sensitive soul, " Tom said.

He looked at Hermione where she'd sprawled in one of Dorcas' chairs, the book she'd wanted dangling from one hand. Her eyes glittered the way they did when he'd excited her, and her tongue darted out to lick at her lips. "You enjoyed that?" he asked.

She pushed one shoe off with her foot. The second didn't want to come off and she had to bend over to unbuckle the strap and when she straightened he'd crossed over to her. "You have plans?" he asked.

Her face was on level with the crotch of his suddenly tented trousers and she looked up at him through her lashes. "Maybe," she said.

He ran his hands slowly along the line of her shoulders and along her neck before fisting them in her hair so firmly she gasped. "What makes you think I'm interested?" he asked.

"I could convince you," she suggested.

She raised a hand toward the buckle of his pants but he tightened his grip. "Don't use your hands," he said. "I'm not interested in a witch who does manual labor."

She raised an eyebrow and he smiled as the buckle of his belt worked itself free without so much as a murmured spell on her part. Was there anything more of a turn on than power and control? By the time she had the trousers unbuttoned and his pants down, it was all he could do to keep from thrusting into her mouth with a violent frenzy. He held himself still, however, and let her do the work, her tongue on him and then her whole mouth. "Control," he whispered, more to himself than to her as she demonstrated her skills weren't limited to magic.

Later, as they lay sprawled on the floor, control having long been abandoned, Tom sighed out in bliss. "You," he said, "are the perfect woman."

"Of course I am," Hermione said. She nudged at him with her knee. "You did shape me to your specifications."

He laughed at that. He had.

She reached a hand up to get her hair out from under the edge of a chair they'd knocked over during the uncontrolled portion of their afternoon, and made a face. "Ugh."

"What is it?" he asked.

"I got her blood in my hair," Hermione said. They glanced over at the burnt spot on the floor, all that remained of Dorcas other than blood, some of which had crawled across the floor and reached Hermione's curls. "I want a shower."

. . . . . . . . . .

A/N - Thank you to cocoartistwrites, who beta read this chapter.