Tom wakes her up at a time that is neither night nor day but some strange, bleeding middle ground. He throws her one of the thick sweaters from his duffel bag and pushes a warm cup of tea into her hands, before shoving her across Hogwarts and down the rabbit hole, straight into the serpent's den. He talks to her the whole way (don't trip on the bones, watch out for steps,-) and Hermione answers in nods and hums.
She has no trouble following orders; it's something she internalized in the war.
Surprisingly, the chamber looks exactly the same as when she entered it with Ron to destroy Hufflepuff's cup. In the dim light, the cave is an eerie colour between emerald and grey. There are bats nesting in the ribs of the basilisk's skeleton and the tiles crack ominously under her feet. Torn-up flooring, brick pallets, mounds of dirt. Silt drifts lazily in the muted glow of Salazar Slytherin's statue. It looks more like a half-finished cathedral than a secret underground chamber.
Nothing moves. Everything is dead silent.
Like Harry.
The painful reminder almost makes her vomit. But she swallows the bile that rises and takes deep breaths.
"Is there some nostalgic reason why we're here?" she asks, stepping over a large bone, grey-fleshed and half-rotten.
"I'm looking for something," Tom says absently. He pushes at one of the moss-covered tiles right in front of Salazar's statue. It jolts, then moves. He takes it out of its socket and a couple of agile snakes wriggle out of the hole left behind. "It should be back here."
Without fear, he reaches into the chasm and pushes some of the remaining snakes gently aside. His hand emerges clutching a tattered piece of paper.
"What's that? Paper?" Hermione asks sceptically. The shape is paperback-small, and while the contours are battered and buckled, the paper itself is a pristine white. Almost like the pages in the diary. The damn diary that Tom carries with him all the time. "Wait, is that-"
"Yes." Tom hesitates, the page hovering over the now open diary. He looks calm and composed but there's a slight tremor in his grip and the smallest twitch in his facial muscles. Even in these small gestures, he's the most dangerous thing she has ever seen. The thought makes her heart pound.
"What are you doing?" She takes a step closer to him, climbing over cluttered debris. She slips on a piece of dry snakeskin but catches herself on one of the stalactites that hang low enough to almost touch the ground. Tom does not react. His eyes are still spellbound on the page hovering over the diary.
"When creating a Horcrux you're not only splitting your soul into the object. It's difficult to explain but you also need to put something of yourself into it. Something valuable."
"I don't follow."
"Think of it as a Pensieve. Most people put either their most painful or their most cherished memories in it to preserve them. A Horcrux is similar. The only difference is that you cannot choose which memories are preserved. A Horcrux lives, so it needs your most emotional and defining memories. It doesn't care if they are good or bad. It feeds off them because that's what makes us human. Our choices, emotions, and memories." His voice sounds flat. Rehearsed. As if he had spent lots of time making his explanation easy to understand.
"Alright, but that still doesn't explain why you look close to freaking out," Hermione says, watching him. "The Diary was destroyed years ago and-"
"It wasn't," Tom interrupts immediately.
Hermione laughs without humour.
"Sure, not a lot can kill a Horcrux, but I know Basilisk venom does the trick."
"Well, you're technically right." For the first time in minutes, he looks up at her. "Unfortunately, the Horcrux wasn't complete when you destroyed it."
"I didn't," she bristles. Then breathes. "Destroy it, I mean. Harry did."
Tom holds her gaze steadily. He doesn't offer his condolences and his face doesn't scrunch up like an old apology, and for that Hermione is thankful. "Anyway. So what you're saying is, the Horcrux hasn't been destroyed - at least not completely - because there was a page missing from it."
"Several," Tom hisses, shifting his gaze back to the diary. "There are several pages missing."
"How is that even possible?"
"Voldemort must have ripped them out and hidden them."
"You're kidding."
"I wish I was," Tom mutters.
"If you think about it, it makes sense. An incomplete Horcrux can never be destroyed." Hermione says. She expects him to look at her, but he doesn't. "Sounds exactly like something a megalomaniac like you would come up with."
A smile touches the corners of his mouth.
"I'm touched you think so highly of me."
Hermione glances over, idly tucking a loose strand of caramel-brown hair behind her ear. This place reeks of stale water so hard it makes her cheeks hurt. Tom's skin looks sick under the emerald glow of the chamber. He's staring hard at the page, fingers clenched enough to restrict blood flow, painting his fingertips a blotchy white. He looks disturbingly cruel, stripped of any other emotion than blank focus. She finds herself imagining what it would feel like to be pinned by that gaze. Utterly seen, she thinks. Intimate, in a way. She banishes that thought quickly, wishing it never occurred to her.
"What's the problem?" Hermione asks when Tom remains unmoved. "Just take one of the fangs and spear it."
"Destroying the page would do nothing. It would just reappear, no matter what you do with it. The memory bound to this page is linked directly to the diary as a whole. As long as the diary is incomplete, none of the pages can be destroyed."
"And what exactly should we do with it?"
"Find the missing pages, put the diary back together, and then destroy it. Easy."
"Easy. Right." A choking sound emerges from the back of her throat. She can't decide if she wants to cry, scream, or both. "And let me guess, you know where your alter ego has hidden the other pages?"
"I can sense them. They are a part of my soul after all."
He finally meets her gaze, and they stare at each other over the half-dark in the chamber. His hair is dusty, she notices absently.
"Great," Hermione mutters tiredly. She watches him turn the page a couple of times, lining it up with the still-bound pages. "I thought you said destroying the page wouldn't do any good."
"I'm not going to destroy it. I'm going to mend it." A grin slices across his mouth, a flash of sharp, white teeth. It's savage, almost interesting, and then it's gone. "There's no point in explaining it. I'll show you."
He presses the loose page down into the diary. Immediately, threads start to weave themselves through the paper, pulling it back into its leather binding. A hint of neon yellow magic sways in the air, flickering like dust motes. Hermione feels the pulse of it reaching throughout the chamber, touching everything in the process.
At first, nothing happens.
Then, suddenly the world around her starts to shift. The chamber bleeds away in a swirl of washed-out emerald and grey. One minute, she's standing next to the relic that is the rotting basilisk skeleton. The next, she's in the miraculously undestroyed girl's second-floor bathroom, with its large, eggshell-white, porcelain fountain and silver-ornamented mirrors. The colours are vivid, brilliantly so. And the bright light of the sun that shines through the large, leaded glass windows, blankets the room in a magical atmosphere.
"What the hell," she stumbles for her words. Carefully, she touches the marble. Then the porcelain. Then the cold metal of the tap. All of them are solid and warmed slightly by the sun. When she tries the tap in front of her, water springs from its mouth. Everything is firm, corporeal, and nothing like the half-blurred memory from a Pensieve.
Tom, standing next to her, looks ashen. Lips pressed into a hard line, arms crossed over his chest, fingers curled inside. He's silent as a rock and twice as stiff. When the door to her right opens, she almost loses it again.
A young boy enters the bathroom, Hermione guessing that he's barely older than a first year. Even covered by his wide uniform, she can see that his body is sickly thin. There is no baby fat on his cheeks, no rosy tint on his ears. His eyes are rounder, softer, but otherwise, the boy is the spitting image of the Tom next to her.
Yet while she notices him, he doesn't seem to notice her at all.
"That- that's you. Where - are we in the past?" She whispers, as if daring to speak louder would disturb the boy in front of her.
Tom hums in agreement.
"Almost. We're in the memory."
Slowly, young Tom approaches the sink. He's pushing water into his hair as he washes his face, rubbing with more force than necessary. The dark circles under his eyes are wine-dark and bruised. His fingers grab desperately at the porcelain to keep himself from shaking, knuckles white and veiny. He's muttering under his breath (stop talking, be quiet, I don't want to hear this anymore, stop-)
"How old were you?" She says, eyes still on the boy. His grip is tight enough to cut off circulation, his fingers slowly starting to match the white of the porcelain as they lose blood.
Tom, shrugging a shoulder, says,
"Twelve."
A swampy knot of unease is tying itself tighter and tighter in the pit of her stomach.
Harry often spoke about Tom Riddle. About the boy who was already a monster by the age of eleven. The murderer. The psychopath. But he never mentioned the fright that bleeds out of his every pore. Here, the boy looks exactly as scared as she has felt multiple times in her life. He looks incredibly, awfully young. The surrealism of the situation is almost too much to grasp.
The Tom at her side is silent. She knows words will bring him no comfort. Words are spiked teeth tearing into crimson flesh, snapping to be unleashed. She wants to say something - anything - but there is simply nothing to say.
They watch his younger self breathing through something similar to an anxiety attack, muttered words turning into sharp hisses until the young Tom opens the entrance to the chamber. Hermione witnesses Tom's first descent into the dark. Older Tom makes no motion to follow, nor does he continue to watch his past play out. Instead, he waits, stoically facing the leaded windows. Hermione stays, too. The minutes that pass in between them feels like hours. She's still watching dust motes in the orange glow, absorbed in the radiance of the colours, when the memory slowly dissolves. All the colours wash out in front of her eyes. Marble tiles and brightly lit windows become moss-covered debris and a decaying skeleton. Even the air chokes and becomes stale again.
There is no trace of the memory left.
Tom stares down at the diary in his hand. The loose page is gone, perfectly threaded back into the book. He closes it at once and puts it away, faster than Hermione can follow. He looks deep in thought.
She searches for the right words, starts with,
"Are you-"
"Don't," he interrupts her, then turns around and stalks away.
She watches him retreat until his back vanishes completely. Somewhere in the back of the grotto she can hear water trickling onto the floor.
She rolls the words twelve and boy and child and afraid around in her mouth. Just to see how they taste.
They taste like rot.
The taste doesn't leave her for the rest of the day.