"Potter." The voice of the Fire Prince rang down the Royal Hall.

"Prince Draco," Harry replied with a stiff bow. He supposed it was too much to hope that Draco Malfoy, royal prat in the most literal sense, might call him Colonel.

In the absence of the Fire Lord, Draco was lounging on the throne behind the its wall of flame. He was dressed in pale embroidered silks, which, combined with his sun-bright hair and his ghostly pallor, gave him the look of something from the Spirit World.

"It's been too long," drawled Malfoy, and although the phrase was laden with sarcasm, Harry had the strange sense that the prince was being sincere.

Harry cleared his throat. "Yeah, well, I've been doing a lot of training. I suppose you've been busy, too, since we finished at the Academy?"

Malfoy scoffed. "Busy dying of boredom. They made me an honorary general six months ago, and I thought that would give me something to do, but … well, here I am talking to a colonel at two in the afternoon, so I suppose you can see how that's gone."

Harry hesitated. Malfoy must have been really desperate for company to speak to him like this—as if they'd been friendly at school. They'd loathed each other the first several years, competing in classes and training. It was true that after Harry had become involved with the Order of the White Phoenix, he'd lost the fervor of their rivalry, but he and Malfoy had never been friends.

Still, even at the end of their training, Malfoy had come up to him about three times a week to make annoying comments about Harry's hair or glasses. Maybe that constituted friendship to a prince.

In a way, Harry almost pitied Malfoy. He obviously didn't know anything about his father's plan with the Avatar to invade the other nations, which meant that nearly everyone in Malfoy's immediate orbit was lying to him. Including Harry. But he tried not to think about that.

"Anyway," Malfoy went on, "to what do I owe the pleasure?"

"Right." Harry drew a sheet of parchment from his robe. "A civilian turned in a piece of equipment to a local guardship the other day. Apparently another civilian attacked her with it, and it's got the military insignia, but I don't recognize the design."

He approached the wall of flame. Draco stood, stretching, from the throne, sauntered through the flames with a flick of his wrist, and sat on the edge of the elevated dais, plucking the piece of parchment from Harry's hand. Hermione had sketched the tripping device to the best of her ability.

Draco's eyes moved over it slowly.

"I wondered if it was a new design," Harry added. "Something still under testing, maybe. That might help us find out where it was taken, and we can tighten security so there's no more civilian theft."

Draco yawned. "I'll ask the Royal Armorer about it." He tucked the parchment away. "Was that all?"

It had been a long time since they'd been in such close proximity. Harry caught himself comparing this Draco to the one he'd known at school. The prince's face had lost the golden tint that long hours' training had once given his skin, but his eyes remained the same, lashes like frost, irises as luminous as moons. His hair fell easily over his forehead.

The Fire Prince had always been good-looking, but here, in a palace that belonged to him, upon soil of the nation that he stood to inherit, Harry found it distinctly more annoying.

"Yes," he said, stepping back from the dais. "That's all."

"Fine." Draco stood and walked back through the wall of flame. Harry couldn't shake the feeling that he'd sounded disappointed.

#

Ron knocked thrice on the door, loudly, so as to be heard over the thuds and clangs of the nearby factory district. Within a minute, the door was opened by a haughty-looking woman, rail-thin, with silver hair tied up in a bun.

She eyed him critically. "Is that a Weasley? In the Fire Nation?"

"Er—yeah," said Ron with a short bow. "I'm Ron; I'm here about Neville. I'm actually a friend of his from school. You must be his grandmother."

Pain flickered in the fine muscles of her face. "Yes. Neville is a good boy. In the last few years at that school, his talent for earthbending … he made his parents proud."

"Yeah," Ron agreed. "It's awful. Him disappearing, I mean."

Neville's grandmother did not reply to this. She merely looked down the bustling street toward the harbor.

"I want to help find him," he told her. "He's been gone a week, right?"

"I've already told the city watch everything I know, young man."

"Sure, but I reckon … well, the firebenders have their own way of doing things, don't they? Maybe it'd help to have an earthbender's eye."

Neville's grandmother sighed. "Neville isn't the only one who's gone missing. Waterbenders and airbenders, too. All from this district, all taken at night."

"Do you know where he was supposed to be that night? Last week?"

"He was going to a gardener's meeting. It's only a few streets away, and he takes the same route every time."

Ron followed her directions exactly. As he walked, he studied the ground. For people who knew where to look, there could be clues in bricks and cobblestones. During Dai Li certification, he hadn't been the most meticulous tracker, but he figured he'd do better than Fire Nation guards, who were used to looking for telltale burn marks, not traces of earthbending.

He was halfway down a narrow alley cluttered with boxes and old carts when he saw it: a distinctive pattern of hairline fracturing through a series of cobblestones. These stones had been used during a fight, jolted out of place and back in. Neville had been taken here.

Ron crouched by the damaged stones, unsure what he was looking for. He could tell that the fight hadn't taken long—for one thing, none of the surrounding buildings showed any damage—but then, he could have guessed that much from Hermione's story. They'd likely ambushed Neville the same way.

Ron formed a fist and thudded it experimentally onto the ground, earthbending the damaged cobbles out of place.

In that instant he saw something half-shadowed beneath a crate: a white rag of paper that had been torn away, caught beneath the cobbles.

Ron plucked the fragment of paper from its place. It was barely an inch around and grimy from days in the dirt, but when he rotated it, he saw the left half of an insignia.

It wasn't the military insignia of the dragon. It was a skull. Coming from its open mouth was a twisting, serpentine tongue of flame.

#

"The first thing that a Water Tribe healer learns," Hermione said, "is the tracing of the qi paths throughout the body. We'll start with our own bodies, where we have the benefit of internal knowledge."

They were sitting in his private courtyard again, beside the pond in its center. Hermione's robes were lifted to the thigh, and Riddle's breeches were rolled above his knee, too.

"You've tried to learn healing before, haven't you?" she asked.

"Yes. When I was seventeen, led by a master from the Southern Tribe."

"All right," said Hermione. "Then you should already know the theoretical basics. … For instance, that healing doesn't rely on a sequential series of forms, but rather on infusing the nature of the element into the human body. The water also acts as a kind of intermediary between the energy of one body and another."

Riddle nodded as she reached out to enclose her hands with pads of water. Then he copied her.

After a day's consideration, Hermione had come to view Riddle's request for healing lessons as a stroke of luck. She'd been worried that her qi-therapy techniques might accidentally help him unlock the Avatar State, which would have been unacceptable. So, anything to waste time until the full moon.

The atmosphere was uncomfortable. Riddle had greeted her this morning with his usual politeness, but it had felt artificial, nearly ridiculous. The day before, they had been striking at each other with the intent to draw blood, to claim absolute victory. She had seen him burn with anger that she had managed to land a blow. They couldn't simply slip their masks back on after that.

But Riddle seemed to be trying. As Hermione spoke through the basics of healing, showing how the hands should best be moved and held, Riddle played the perfect, demure student. He asked questions about technique and theory. His body reacted to even the most minor change in her demonstrations, his hands matching hers as easily as if they had been reflections of each other.

"Now move your hands over the ankle," she said. "Try to feel the energy flowing from calf down to foot."

"Yes, Master Hermione."

Again that sense of absurdity descended upon her. "Would you stop with the Master Hermione?"

"Very well. What would you like me to call you?"

"Just pick something else." Hermione looked up from her ankle to shoot him a sidelong glare, realizing she was properly annoyed with him. It wasn't the usual loathing, but petty annoyance. They'd been honest with each other yesterday. Their spar had been a genuine expression of what they felt: dislike, distrust, and disrespect. Did Riddle think that she was just going to forget that? That she would ever again pretend to look at him as the emblem of perfect manners? It was insulting.

Maybe he could forget their duel so easily, but Hermione couldn't. Since leaving the palace complex yesterday, she'd thought nonstop about the fight with a mixture of residual anger and guilty excitement. The Order of the White Phoenix had trained her to face Riddle, yes—but only in the sense that she'd tested more and more severe levels of bloodbending upon them. They'd never bothered to spar with her, because they knew that if it reached the point of sparring with Riddle, she was already dead. It had to be absolute control, or nothing.

But the duel had awakened something Hermione hadn't felt in a long time: eagerness, like the kind she'd felt as a girl. Their fight had been nothing like the friendly nighttime spars she'd had with Harry and Ron at the IBA. In fighting Riddle, she'd known that she was fighting a bender who had reached the pinnacle of the art. Even having confined himself to a fraction of his ability, he had overcome her in scarcely a few minutes, and that enraged her, but it electrified her, too. Moments of the fight kept replaying in her mind, and she dissected them to the millisecond, thinking about how she could have moved more efficiently, how she might have shaved off a moment's action here, half a moment there.

Lying awake the previous night, she'd caught herself planning changes to her form based on the fight. She'd warred with herself over it. If she altered her bending based on Riddle, that would mean he had affected her. It would take part of him into her forever.

Yet she'd studied for so long to reach the full potential of her bending. Could she turn down something that brought her closer to the ideal in her mind—even if its source was abhorrent?

Riddle had perfected the motion of the water, the slow drag of each pad. "Good," Hermione said shortly, letting the water drip off her own hands as he moved the pad over his own bare foot, ankle, calf, and knee. "Can you feel the qi flow?"

"Yes," he said. When she gave him a probing look, he added mildly, "Bending the other elements requires that much, especially the creation of lightning."

Her annoyance increased. It was that tone. Subdued. Deferent. False.

Resentment began to mix into her feelings. Quite aside from loathing this character he'd put back on, she didn't actually want to teach Tom Riddle anything. She wanted to fight him again, to glean more knowledge from him. She was the one who was owed knowledge, wasn't she?

She forced herself to take a deep breath. "Let's start with a superficial scrape. Nothing that will draw blood. Use your fingernail."

Riddle put his index finger against his calf and dragged it upward. A thin white line appeared upon the pale skin.

"Now, the water," she said.

Riddle bent a stream of water from the pond and let it settle over his right palm. It occurred to Hermione yet again just how much of a waste his talent was. Even this tiniest action was like the prelude to a graceful dance, his mastery of waterbending forms absolute. It seemed impossible, almost mortifying, that he could perform them so beautifully and feel no appreciation.

"Place it to the scrape," Hermione said.

He obeyed. Only now did Hermione see signs of anticipation, of real focus. His gaze fixed on the spot the water touched the scrape, two indentations forming at the corners of his mouth.

"First, again, feel the qi flowing through your leg."

"I do."

"Now let that energy flow into the energy within your hand. Let the water act as a conduit between the two sections of the body."

The edges of the water rippled as Riddle moved his fingers infinitesimally. The indentations bracketing his mouth deepened. It was at this point that the water should have begun to glow.

Nothing happened.

Hermione had to force herself not to smirk. Every nine-year-old Water Tribe girl in the healing huts could manage this much. To see Tom Riddle struggle to manage it, with all his notions of superiority, was beyond gratifying.

He had pushed his hand nearly into contact with his calf. "No," she said, touching his palm to lift it. "Putting the water into greater contact with the skin won't encourage it to do anything more. Force has nothing to do with it."

She didn't miss the way his body tensed at the contact. She pulled her fingers away quickly, somewhat unsettled by the warmth of his hand, the rough calluses that evidenced years' sparring and training. A history she would soon erase.

"Yes, of course," Riddle said, voice girded with the same tension that had drawn his shoulders taut. He collated the water again and redoubled his focus.

However, hours' attention and their attendant exercises did nothing to fix the nick on Riddle's skin.

For the rest of the day, Hermione tried to teach him. She really did, more out of academic curiosity than anything. A tactical diversion it might be, but when else in her life would she have access to an Avatar, to work through a waterbending puzzle like this one?

Momentarily, she worried that she might aid Riddle in his plans by teaching him how to heal—but he would be dead within two weeks, anyway. She reminded herself of her purpose that night before she went to sleep, and the next morning, when she arrived in his courtyard. She was here to end his life, to keep the world safe. This healing puzzle was only for her benefit, to sate her own curiosity.

So, the next days, she spoke Riddle through qi-enhancing meditations devised by the Southern Tribe. She stayed until after sundown, urging him to draw on the power of the crescent moon. Healing was meant to be innate to an Avatar, as she knew from her studies, and yet Riddle could not correct so much as a pinprick. He sat there with a pad of water held over some minor injury, and nothing happened.

They ended each session the same way. Riddle bowed to her and thanked her for her time. He'd say something like "I'm sure we'll see progress tomorrow," and she stamped down her annoyance, returned the pleasantries, and left. He had not shown his true self to her since their duel. She supposed that was the most she would ever see of the person beneath: the hint of naked desire she'd glimpsed when he'd first said, Teach me.

On the fifth day since her arrival in the Fire Nation, she left their lessons preoccupied. As she moved through the open halls of the villa, an idea came to her. She stopped in her tracks. They had tried to harness the power of the moon, but not its complementary spirit. What if they went to the seaside tomorrow evening, where they might evoke the power of the Ocean and Moon Spirits together?

She doubled quickly back through the villa's halls, intending to tell Riddle to meet her outside the palace complex the next morning. But when she reached the archway that led into the courtyard, she froze.

Not thirty seconds before, he had bidden her goodbye with that omnipresent restraint. But now, in her absence, he was unleashing a storm of firebending the likes of which she'd never seen before. His face was livid, his teeth bared, his dark eyes flashing red as he spun, twisted, and wrung an inferno out of the air.

Something beyond satisfaction, closer to exhilaration, beat through Hermione. The entire week, when she'd been itching for some reaction from him, he'd been bottling up this rage. So, this was what had been fomenting inside him all along when he couldn't make something fall into line, when he found a type of power to which he had no access.

Hermione remembered the way she'd stormed back home as a child after Umbridge's decree, longing to lash out, to destroy the very walls of the world around her. She saw that anger contained in Riddle's body now.

It occurred to Hermione that she shouldn't be seeing this. It occurred to her that in this state, he might even be a danger.

But before she could move, he spun into a kick that turned his face toward her own.

The fire died from the air. He landed with perfect balance and froze, eyes locked on hers.

#

Tom had spent the past three days steeped in fury. In the evenings, when he should have been focusing on collaborations with Fire Lord Malfoy, some part of him remained in the courtyard, sitting beside a phantom Hermione Granger, staring down at harm to himself that he remained resolutely unable to fix.

The attempt to learn healing was putting him in a murderous mood, but he'd vowed to himself that he would show nothing of that to Granger. The revelation of his past, even his acknowledgment that he favored the Fire Nation—these were dangerous pieces of information for her to have, but if she turned out to be the key to his healing ability, it would have been worth it. Besides, if she seemed a threat later, he could always organize a tragic accident.

Either way, he'd told himself she would get no more of him. She knew too much already, the waterbender with the secret. Tom was not familiar with the feeling of mutually assured destruction. He preferred having every card in his hand.

But now Granger had seen what he had meant to conceal. She didn't even look frightened.

She said, "Did you try when you were seventeen?"

"What?" Tom said, still breathing hard.

"When the Southern master tried to teach you healing at seventeen. You didn't really try to learn, did you?"

No. Of course he'd had no patience for the doddering old tribesman who'd tried to explain the reverence one must have for all life, were they to heal. Everything about that philosophy had made Tom want to sneer. Reverence for all life? What, he was meant to revere even the people who had shoved him into a corner of society, a vulnerable child, to rot?

"Why does that matter?" Tom said.

"Because if you didn't try before, it means you've never failed at anything until now. Have you?"

He considered Granger for a long moment, anger and frustration still simmering. "No," he bit out.

"It doesn't mean you're ordinary," she said carefully. "It means there's something you haven't tried."

Tom's breathing finally steadied. Again, as before their spar, he felt a strange pulse of understanding, even of likeness, as if he had walked past a surface he hadn't realized was reflective.

In those two sentences he heard Granger's history. He immediately understood that she had felt this before: that her abilities had always come without effort, until at some point, she had run up into a wall—then demolished the wall. He understood that she had an identical yearning to be exceptional and even perfect.

Tom gave his head a hard shake and looked away. "Tell me what, exactly, there is left to try."

"You could try being honest." Granger stepped out of the threshold, into the sunset light. "I've already told you that the ability to heal has to do with free feeling, yet you've wasted days bottling all this up."

Tom let out a hard laugh. She wanted honesty? Fine, he thought, allowing his lip to curl in a condescending sneer. "You think that my manners have anything to do with the ability to heal? You think that it makes any difference whether I show you my frustration?"

"I think you're much too quick to dismiss something you've never tried," said Granger, voice acid.

"People think they want honesty until they see it. You don't know what you're asking for."

"I know that this is infinitely preferable to the ridiculous act you've been throwing at me all week."

Tom narrowed his eyes. He couldn't tell if she was being serious. How could she prefer this open hostility over a docile, malleable pupil?

"I'm perfectly serious," said Granger, as if she'd read his mind. "I'm sure you've read about the effects of meditation on bending. That's all about emotional management, emotional acceptance. You must see how the two are related."

"What I've seen is the benefit of focus and control. If emotion has anything to do with it, it's only because emotion ruins precision." Tom snatched his robe from the cobbles, shrugged it on, and stalked toward her. "I've fought master after master. I've defeated them all. In the instant that I gain the upper hand, they always lose themselves to emotion. Anger makes a bender sloppy. Fear shuts away flexibility. A master tradesman doesn't allow feeling to come between himself and his tools."

Granger made a frustrated sound in the back of her throat. "There is no upper hand to gain in healing, and the element of water isn't just a tool! If you're still thinking about healing in these terms, it's no wonder you've made no progress! This is exactly why you need to be honest. There'll be no overcoming these roadblocks if you keep pretending they don't exist."

Tom stopped before her, ice and heat moving through his veins at once. No one had ever spoken to him this way. Granger's stubborn face, the tight line of her mouth, the impassioned color in her cheeks. The way she looked at him—as if she wanted to peel him apart and see everything that was only his.

In that instant he thought he must loathe her more than he'd ever loathed anyone. That had to be the feeling.

"I'll be back tomorrow," she said, turning on her heel, "and I'll expect you not to waste any more of my time."

#

The next morning, Tom arrived to the courtyard to find Granger wearing different clothes. They weren't the Fire Nation robes that she'd worn for courtesy to their dinner, nor the traditional healer's robes she wore most days. He recognized this light blue robe from the Southern Water Tribe: the slits cut up its sides provided flexibility, while her legs were covered with light, breathable material suitable for a Fire Nation summer.

She greeted him by saying, "Riddle."

"Granger." As Tom walked stiffly to the pond, then stopped before her, he realized how uncomfortable he felt. Stripping away all the niceties, all the courtesy he'd worn for decades, how was he supposed to act? What did honesty look or feel like, after this long?

He supposed he was honest with Malfoy and the others, but he didn't say things like good morning to them. He didn't have conversations with them. He issued orders, which they then followed. It was all blessedly simple.

"What is that?" His voice was jerky, which he didn't understand, either. "Why have you changed your clothes?"

"This robe makes movement easier. From the way that you spoke about waterbending yesterday, I have a theory that your healing block has to do with a lack of appreciation for the element."

"A lack of—" Tom felt a flare of rage and indignation. "I know more about waterbending than nearly anyone alive."

"Yes, I know." She sounded annoyed. "Your forms are perfect, and you have an encyclopedic knowledge, and you reached full mastery at age fourteen."

Tom paused, slightly mollified.

"And none of that indicates appreciation," she went on, bending a stream of water from the pond and passing it to him with a slow sweep of her arm. "Tell me: what's your favorite aspect of waterbending?"

Tom reached forward unthinkingly to mirror the movement, settling into his stance as he passed the water back to her. But he didn't understand the question. His favorite aspect? It was like asking him about his favorite aspect of breathing. Bending water was something that enabled him to be the Avatar. There was no other point.

"Mine," said Granger, "is the weight of it." She cycled the water overhead, then around her waist, closing her eyes, sinking deep into the movement. "The weight and the counterweight. That feeling of balance. It makes me feel as if I'm part of something, as if I'm connected to all the world's water, and to other waterbenders, too. That's what I chose to emphasize when I was fusing bits and pieces of different waterbending styles together. I wanted to push the balance to the breaking point."

She passed the water back to Tom, who moved it out over the surface of the pond. He had to force himself not to make frivolous conversation, to pretend he was oh-so-interested in her thoughts and history. Granger wanted honesty. She believed honesty would help him heal.

So he said, still in that cold, jerky voice, "What does this have to do with my ability to heal?"

Granger didn't look at him with judgment or disapproval. She seemed to have expected no other answer. "Because," she said, "I'll be teaching you some of the moves I developed at the International Bending Academy. They were born from a love of waterbending. You can't heal, but you can move the water around. That's where you'll have to start finding your appreciation."

So, for the morning, Tom suffered through the most irritating type of instruction he'd ever experienced. Granger couldn't just teach him the moves she'd developed. No—she then had to show him the forms that had inspired each move, then deliver long lectures on how the moves might be useful in the context of life in the North Pole.

He could appreciate that her forms were cunningly crafted ones, and he could copy them almost immediately. But Granger forced him to slow down, to decontextualize the motions from fighting. "Close your eyes," she'd say, "and feel the weight of the water. Feel the tension between yourself and the element. Allow yourself to enjoy the rushing sound of the water, the feeling of it in the heat. Water is relief, and waterbending is as flexible and malleable as life."

It was all completely ridiculous. I hate this, Tom thought over and over again. What a waste of my time. In moments he fantasized, again, about kidnapping a healer for the war, not Granger this time, but someone weaker and more manipulable.

But then he would look at Granger's hands, the surety with which they moved, and remember how she'd touched his arm and sealed the cut so simply. Resentment and determination jabbed him like hot needles. He could do anything this woman could do. This power would be his, and then he never had to listen to Hermione Granger's sermons again.

In mid-morning, she started asking him questions. "Do you prefer rivers or the ocean?" she said, beckoning him to sit by the pond.

"Is this relevant?"

"It's all relevant. Rivers or the ocean, Riddle. Choose one."

He made a scathing noise and sat. "The ocean."

"Why?"

"Because—" He pictured the near-black waves and lifted his shoulders. "I don't know. Because it's powerful. Because no one's ever found the end of it, I suppose."

"Good." She gave a curt nod. "I agree. The ocean is mysterious. It's beyond our capacity to control. It's relentless, too; it moves in cycles. All this, too, is contained in waterbending."

She dragged one finger over the surface of the pond, leaving ripples in her wake. Tom looked at her fingertip and saw his own hands in the dark, age ten, the flame that had come from his body into the night—his sanctuary in a life of abject cruelty. Unwilling understanding broke over him like an ocean wave. The reverent tone in Granger's voice told him that waterbending was her sanctuary, as firebending had always been his.

Neither of them, he suspected, had anything else.

#

Hermione had to admit that she was enjoying this new kind of healing lesson. She could say anything she wanted to Riddle. She'd stripped away his carefully constructed façade, and now she was rubbing his face in the absurdity of his own prejudice, and he had to sit there and take it.

She even enjoyed watching Riddle struggle with himself. He clearly had to fight to form every real response, no matter how rude or petulant. His voice even sounded different. The smoothness had turned to agitation, the pleasant richness into dark frustration.

It was no wonder he didn't want to let any of this show. It all conspired to subordinate him to her. Every shadow of frustration or anger was a reminder that Riddle was failing, that she was the one, now, with the power.

At sunhigh they took half an hour's break for lunch. In the shade at the edge of the courtyard, they sipped a cool summer soup brought to them by a young servant.

"I thought I remembered this soup being your favorite, Avatar Riddle," said the servant, her cheeks red in a way that Hermione suspected was unrelated to the hot, humid air. "I'll be straightening the sitting room if you need anything else. You need only call." As an afterthought, she added with a quick bow, "Master Hermione."

"Thank you, Miss Vane," said Riddle with a smile, his mask immediately back in place. "You're right. It is my favorite."

The girl brightened so immediately that he might have just presented her with a royal commendation. Then she hurried back into his villa.

"Do you ever get tired of people treating you like that?" Hermione said, looking after her.

"Should I?" said Riddle.

"Yes. It looks exhausting."

"Just because you have no opportunity for flattery, it doesn't mean that the rest of us shouldn't enjoy it when we can."

Hermione scowled. "That's not flattery, it's complete obeisance. It's practically worship."

"Yes," Riddle agreed. He lifted his ladle to his lips and drank. Hermione realized he didn't mean to add anything more.

She pursed her lips. "So, you think you deserve worship?"

Riddle leaned one shoulder against the red wall of the villa. "I think that if people choose to admire me for the talents the Spirits have given me, and if they feel impressed by the devotion I've shown to my duties all my life, I won't begrudge them for expressing it."

"That's a long-winded way of saying 'yes.'"

Riddle arched one brow at her. "So, if you were finally recognized for your fighting skill, you'd insist that you don't deserve acclaim?" Derision, almost disgust, colored his voice. "That's really what you want—to waste half your life putting on false humility?"

Hermione considered. She had felt excited, upon arriving in the Fire Nation, to see the royal procession laid out for her. She'd certainly accepted enough compliments of her healing ability. She didn't think she was immune to praise, but …

"It's not about flattery," she said finally, lifting her chin to look him directly in the eye. "It's about recognition. I don't care about people's praise. I want them to know what I am."

Riddle's slight sneer had faded. He was looking at her now with unfamiliar focus, the kind he'd directed at the scrape on his leg.

"Those are the words of someone in hiding," he said finally.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that time doesn't stop once the world knows who you are. There is always something to want next." He narrowed his eyes. "Take me, for instance. I already know who you are. I recognize you. Now what do you want?"

Hermione felt a heated squeeze low in her stomach. She was surprised to realize that she knew the answer to his question immediately. In the exposing light of the truth, she wanted to learn more. She wanted to refine herself again and again, so that he would recognize not only current excellence but limitless potential.

This had also been true when Harry and Ron had discovered the truth, and the Order of the White Phoenix, and even Dean when she'd been a child. She supposed she was greedy. She wanted to glut herself upon knowledge and improve herself, empower herself, until it made people nearly afraid.

But she would never even have the meanest condition: the truth. In that moment she wanted freedom so badly that it made her tongue sting, as though she had touched it to cold iron.

"Well?" said Riddle. He leaned forward over the table, and she didn't understand the keenness of his gaze. "What is it that you want?"

"It's irrelevant," she said, standing. "I'll never have it. Let's get back to work."

#

Tom wasn't sure why, but he found himself anticipating Granger's arrival the next day, and the next. Perhaps it was the simple novelty of being able to interact with someone without the suffocating veil of politeness. He hadn't realized he might enjoy honesty, but it was almost relaxing to let himself scoff or act cold when Granger said something ridiculous—and when she argued with him, to argue back.

She was certainly like no other teacher he'd ever had. One afternoon, she challenged him to a series of spars, with restrictions on what kinds of styles he was allowed to use. He didn't understand the point of it until she said sharply, when he went for one of the basins of drinking water in the corner of the courtyard, "No."

He returned, warily, to the center of the yard.

Granger kept him off water for hours. She forced him to spar and spar, and as sweat dripped from his body in the summer heat, as his tongue dried out like salted meat, Tom's attention began to stray to the pond in the center of the courtyard. He imagined how it would feel to fill his mouth with water; he imagined the coolness of ice. Under the blistering sun he began to feel transformed, as if his muscles were old strings and his skin burlap.

When he finally staggered during a spar, Granger told him to sit down. He did, hating her. His head was spinning. "Now," she said, "think of the last time you felt this way."

Tom remembered being eleven, new to the Capital City. To test the limits of his expertise, Fire Lord Malfoy had summoned masters of all stripes to spar him. Weak from so many years of undernourishment, with no formal training, unused to the blistering summer weather, Tom had nearly passed out.

Now every breath was painful in the same way. He could think only of water.

"Now imagine pushing your head beneath the surface of a river," said Granger. "Imagine drinking as much as your body can hold. Imagine how refreshed you'll feel, how much healthier. Your body needs it." She paused. "You must see that you need water, now."

Tom's head spun faster. He felt as if he'd been tricked into something. Hate and pain and longing were beating through him. He watched the tread of Granger's feet and the way she slowly drank from a cup of water and he wanted to drag her down to the ground where he was slumping, nearly unconscious.

"Say you need the water," she said, stopping before him with the cup, "and I'll give it to you."

Tom glared murder into Granger's face. The hard brown of her eyes, like tempered wood. He was used to her plain features by now, and knew where to look for the flickers of motion. Her bitten lower lip, where impatience made her twitch. Her expressive brows, always drawing together in outrage or easing when she wanted to sound dignified or condescending.

He couldn't make himself say the words.

Granger spun, suddenly, and drew a flood of water from the pond. She circulated it around her body, lashed it from one end of the courtyard to another. The sound made Tom's mouth try to produce saliva, made his tongue ache. The cool rush of it.

He wanted to dive headlong into the pond, but he knew this was a test of his control. He would not buckle. He found he had almost bared his teeth at her. Was she doing this to help him heal, or to torture him?

"Say you need it." Granger let the water fall back into the pond and took another long sip from the cup of water.

He watched her throat move. He watched a bead of sweat move down one long muscle of her neck. He wanted to take her by the throat. He wanted to touch her mouth.

Tom squeezed his eyes shut. Her mouth? What did her mouth have to do with anything? He was losing clarity. There was no sense in his thoughts.

"I need it," he rasped out.

"You need water."

"I need water." Tom forced himself to his feet, teeth gritted. "I need it. Give it to me."

Barely had Granger filled the cup from the basin when Tom dove forward and tore it from her grasp. He guzzled it down in two long swallows. He refilled it and drank again, eyes tight shut. He felt like an animal. He had never tasted anything so vital, so delicious. As he drank, her voice echoed: water is relief … as flexible and malleable as life.

When he opened his eyes, she was bending a water whip out from the pond, stepping back from him and moving the shining whip overhead. It caught the sun in a way that Tom had never noticed before.

There was elegance, he realized, in the way she moved, and in the way the water moved at her behest.

But it had nothing to do with waterbending, did it? It had to do with Granger. She was worthy. She spoke the language of power in the same way he did.

That feeling, again. That consuming feeling.

It was not loathing, Tom realized. It was unwilling fascination. It was a kind of desire he'd never felt toward another person: not to move her like a tile across a game board, but to unwrap her. To know every facet of her, and see where each of those facets aligned with his own.

He had asked her what she wanted. In that moment, he realized he wanted her to look at him with fascination, too. That was the truth. That was what was next.

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thank you for reading! reviews always make my day :)

-sw