A/N: I'm aiming for updates to be faster now. There'll probably be a turnaround time of about a week on chapters, though this is subject to availability. ;-) Thanks to those who reviewed the last chapter. It's always great to know what you're thinking and see how enthusiastic you are about this story. This chapter is a little longer than the others (and the next one is a little shorter, truth be told). Hope you enjoy it, let me know what you think. =]

Tempora Abducto.

by Flaignhan.

"What are you doing here?" Hermione asked hotly, coming to a halt as soon as she saw Tom, waiting outside the Transfiguration classroom.

"I was going to walk you to lunch, come along," he turned and began to walk down the corridor.

"You were trying to eavesdrop," Hermione corrected as she caught up with him. "I'd suggest that you don't."

"Me? Eavesdrop? I was doing nothing of the sort. How could you think so lowly of me?"

Hermione tutted and he smirked. It seemed to have become a bit of a pattern between them.

"What did the barmy old codger want, anyway?" Tom asked airily as they headed towards the end of the corridor.

"He just wanted to know how I'm settling in. He's my Head of House, he cares about that sort of thing," Hermione lied, her brain working surprisingly fast for such a dishonest task.

"Jolly good, and how are you settling in? Getting used to our old fashioned ways?"

Hermione whipped around, but thankfully the corridor was empty, bar for a group of run down looking first years dragging their feet along the stone floor. Thankfully they were a good few yards back and probably were far too engrossed in their own homework induced misery to notice Hermione and Tom's conversation.

"For Merlin's sake, Tom!" she hissed, "don't talk like that in the middle of the corridor!"

"Those first years probably don't even know that it's possible to travel in time, and they're hardly going to assume that one of the seventh years won't actually be born for another thirty five years. Relax, Hermione, you're far too stressed."

"Oh and you wouldn't be stressed if you were in my shoes?"

Tom glanced down at her feet. "I think I'd be more concerned about my feet getting mangled, they're at least five sizes too small for me."

Hermione laughed; she couldn't help it. She laughed more than was actually necessary, for something that was just a passing joke. She stopped walking, becoming incredibly aware of the blood that was pulsing in her veins and the slight tremble in her fingers that signalled a bout of hysteria.

Tom had stopped too. He frowned at her. "Have you never heard a joke before?" he asked.

Hermione looked up at him but said nothing.

"Why are you crying?" his face was contorted with disgust.

"I'm not crying," Hermione said in a thick voice. She cleared her throat and wiped at her face. It seemed he was right, as usual. It appeared that she was crying, and she hadn't even noticed. They weren't tears of laughter either; it had, after all, been a rather poor joke. Something that Fred or George would come out with on a bad day, one of those groan-inducing jokes that Dads usually supplied.

Tom rolled his eyes and grabbed her by the wrist, pushing open the door of the nearest classroom and pulling her inside. He closed the door behind them and leaned against it. Hermione's eyes flicked around the room, looking for the other available exits. The only one she could see was the window, and she didn't much fancy a forty foot plummet onto the grass below.

"What?" she demanded finally. "What do you want?"

Tom pushed himself away from the door and walked towards her. "Hermione, if you have any hope of keeping this little ordeal of yours a secret, then I suggest you don't burst into tears in the middle of the corridor. Apart from being a dead give away that all is not as it seems, it's wholly unpleasant for whoever is walking with you."

Hermione looked down at the floor and wiped at her eyes again. "And you wouldn't care? You wouldn't care if your entire life was ripped away from you? You wouldn't care if you'd been living through hell, and then you go and get sent back in time and you know you've got to live through it all again and more. Obviously you wouldn't give a damn about leaving your friends and family behind, because you've never given a damn about anybody -"

Tom's eyebrows raised ever so slightly, though he did not interrupt her rant.

"- but I do, and being here without my best friends feels wrong. And the worst thing is, you see, every day, the person who sent you back here, but you can't do a single thing, because you'd be messing with time. So you have to sit, and watch, and be a good girl, and you have to start again from scratch, I mean, for Merlin's sake, Tom, I don't even have a name!"

"Are you quite done?" Tom asked, his tone mildly curious.

Hermione stepped forward, but he caught her just before she tried to push past him.

"I don't mean that rudely, I was just wondering if you'd finished unloading all your troubles, because I would like to say something."

"Well I don't want to hear it. Nothing you say could ever make me feel better."

"You need to hear it, and it may not be what you want to hear, but somebody has to say it," he still had a firm grip on her upper arm, in case she tried to push her way to the door again.

When Hermione didn't respond, he continued. "As much as it pains me to say this about any Gryffindor," his eyes were fixed on the ceiling as he spoke, each word sounding as though he was throwing away a little of his pride as he said it, "you are a very talented witch. You are strong willed, you are determined, and you are the only person I have ever met who would bother to sit down for another hour just to make sure an essay – an essay that has little to no consequence in all reality – is one hundred per cent perfect."

Hermione frowned. Was she supposed to take that as a compliment? It sounded like one, for sure, but this was Tom Riddle, and Tom Riddle did not dish out compliments to muggleborn Gryffindors.

"But for Merlin's sake, girl, you've got to pull yourself together! Those vapid little wretches you hang around with -"

Hermione opened her mouth to argue but Tom spoke before she could even get a word in.

"Don't contradict me, you're making do with people you can tolerate, that's fine. It's not the point, the point is girls like that, would spend all their time crying and whining about how unfair it all is. Life is not fair, and you have to deal with what you're given, and if you don't like what you've been given, you have to do something about it. You have to take something that you want."

"I want the next fifty years to vanish," Hermione said sulkily.

Tom shook his head. "Out of the question, I've looked into it, there's no way in hell you're getting back, not even by using...morally questionable methods."

"You looked into it?"

"Yes, why wouldn't I? Your dilemma is fascinating. And if you're really unhappy here you may as well go back if there's a way, but there's not. I don't think there'll be a way for a long time yet. There might never be a way, it might be utterly impossible, but I can safely say you're going to have to take the slow path."

Hermione frowned. It almost sounded as if he had wanted to help her, but that couldn't be right. She had barely spoken to him, made it quite clear that she did not want to be friends, and after all, Tom Riddle did not help people, he only helped himself.

It dawned on her that she may have rattled him more than she realised. Perhaps he had taken her seriously when she had warned him not to underestimate her. Perhaps he thought it was better for him if she was sent back to the future. She could unravel everything right now if she really wanted to. There'd be disastrous consequences most likely, but he didn't know her well enough to be sure that she wouldn't. Though surely it would have been easier for him to kill her and disguise it as some sort of bizarre accident, wouldn't it?

Hermione swallowed the lump in her throat and tried not to think about such an occurrence.

"If you feel the need to talk about all of this," Tom said, "then I am willing to listen. With any luck having some sort of outlet as well as intelligent conversation will keep you from wailing in lunch breaks."

Hermione glanced down at the hand which was still holding her in place. The ring was sitting comfortably on his little finger, the stone in the centre still intact, concealing his soul. "Why would I want to talk to you when you wear that awful ring so proudly?" she pushed his arm away from her and started to walk towards the door.

The little colour in Tom's face drained, though he quickly recovered. "You don't like the design? Or do you think silver would suit me better than gold?"

Hermione turned around, her expression set, as though it had been carved out of stone. Tom straightened his back, trying to hold his own against her in the body language war.

"One word," she said. "It begins with 'H'."

Tom's eyes flicked shut, a fraction of a second too long for him to pass it off as a blink. "Hexagon?" he suggested, plastering a false smile on his face.

Hermione did not smile. "As long as you wear that ring, I'm not going to talk to you."

She left, slamming the door behind her. A glance at her watch told her she was already twenty minutes late for her lesson. She could go left, and apologise to Professor Vaxicon, or she could go right, and spend the afternoon in Gryffindor tower.

She thought it best to make a decision quickly, before Tom left the classroom and found her standing there like a spare part.

"What happened to you?" Joanne asked when Hermione sat down at the Gryffindor table that evening.

"I didn't feel well," Hermione lied.

"D'you think you should go and see Madame Rotherby?" Lucy asked, frowning in concern.

"No, I'll be fine," Hermione replied, smiling briefly.

"Maybe you'll feel a bit better after you've eaten something," Lucy added, "the chicken's really good tonight, try some of that."

"Yeah, maybe I just need to eat something," Hermione agreed, jabbing her fork into a piece of chicken and placing it on her plate.

"What did Dumbledore want?" Joanne pushed the potatoes towards Hermione.

"Oh he just wanted to see how I was settling in," the lies were coming thick and fast now, and Hermione found it was easier to lie when she was helping herself to food, keeping her hands busy and her eyes focused on what she was doing, rather than who she was talking to.

"Has he been looking out for you then? I suppose he would do, he always looks out for the first years, and you're new here too so I suppose he's just as worried about you as he is about them."

Hermione nodded. "Yeah, he's really nice. He's made it a lot easier. You've all made it a lot easier actually," Hermione glanced up and smiled, genuinely. It wasn't a lie after all. Settling in during seventh year had been a lot more comfortable than settling in during her first year. Perhaps she had become more tolerable as she had grown up, or perhaps Lucy, Joanne and Ava were just a lot friendlier straight off than her old classmates had been.

Lucy huffed, and Hermione glanced towards her, then followed the line of her scowl. Tom was climbing onto the bench at the Slytherin table, in between the two seventh years who always flanked him at meal times.

"Two knuts if you don't mind!" Ava said cheerfully, holding out her hand to Lucy.

"All right," she grumbled, "I'll sort it out later."

"What was the bet?" Hermione asked curiously.

"Lucy thought that Tom had died," Ava said smugly. "I bet her two knuts that he hadn't."

"Patrick said that he wasn't in Defence Against the Dark Arts either. We knew Professor Dumbledore had asked to talk to you so we just guessed that had overrun, but Tom never misses lessons. He'd die before he'd miss a lesson."

"I think you're maybe thinking a little bit too literally," Hermione said with a smile, which dropped the second Lucy shrugged her shoulders and looked away. "And hopefully, as well," she added as an afterthought.

Lucy choked on her pumpkin juice, but quickly recovered, her eyes twinkling in amusement. "So you two weren't having a secret romantic liaison?"

Hermione's jaw dropped.

"Well we didn't rule it out," Joanne said quickly. "He always seems to be looking at you. He never looks at anybody, but he looks at you. We just thought it was odd, and then you were both 'absent' and he was hanging around outside the corridor when Dumbledore was talking to you."

"Yeah I know," Hermione said grumpily. "He was just being nosy."

"Oh," said Lucy, signalling the end of the topic. "Oh Ava! Did you hear? Simon and Emily broke up!"

"Really?" Ava replied, her voice bristling with interest. "Tell me more..."

Hermione ate her dinner quietly, half listening to the gossip about various Hogwarts couples whose relationships were supposedly on the rocks.

"I'm going to see Professor Vaxicon," she said at last. "I'll see you up in the common room later."

"Oh okay," said Ava, "d'you know where her office is?"

"Fourth floor, isn't it?" Hermione asked, fake uncertainty causing her to crease her eyebrows and heighten the pitch of her voice.

"Yeah, she's got that suit of armour with the graffiti on its shield outside her door."

"Oh yeah, I know," Hermione said, getting to her feet. "I'll see you later."

Hermione knocked gently on the door of Professor Vaxicon's office. It opened, almost instantly. Tom was standing there, smirking at the sight of her.

"It's Miss Mercer, Professor. Shall I invite her in?"

"Yes, yes, jolly good, I shan't have to go through all of this twice," the Professor replied distractedly. Hermione could see her shuffling through some notes at her desk, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose.

Tom stood aside, opening the door further. He gestured for her to enter and Hermione caught sight of his hand, particularly his little finger, which was completely devoid of the ring.

"Take a seat dear," Professor Vaxicon said, glancing up at Hermione briefly. She reached behind her chair for a collection of scrolls, her long tatty sleeve swinging far too close to the hovering candles that provided the only light in the room.

Tom twitched, and Hermione knew why. Never mind the dark arts, Professor Vaxicon needed defending from her own lack of common sense. As talented a witch as she was, Hermione couldn't help but find her complete lack of spatial awareness somewhat alarming. She threw a sidelong glance to Tom, who rolled his eyes briefly.

"Ah! Here we are! Today's lesson...you didn't miss much actually, nothing you two won't be able to catch up on at least. Where did you get to anyway?"

"Oh I wasn't feeling well Professor, I thought maybe I should give the afternoon a miss."

"Ah very well, very well. And you, Tom?"

"I went to go and check on my Potions project and lunch and it seems somebody has sabotaged it, so I had to spend the afternoon correcting it before it melted half of the dungeons. I assure you I'll make sure I am up to date with everything by the next lesson, Professor."

"I know you will be, Tom, don't worry. You're probably further ahead than the others anyway," Professor Vaxicon said, sliding her finger down the lesson plan on her desk. "Ah yes, homework! Chapter thirty-six in your text books, I want it read and summarised, no need to go into too much detail, I just want to know that you've read and understood. In for Friday, if you please."

"We don't have you on Friday, Professor," Hermione replied. "Tuesdays and Thursdays, but not Fridays."

"Oh? Really? I told everybody Friday...hmm, I suppose it'll have to be Tuesday then."

Tom glanced at Hermione once more, his patience visibly wearing thin.

"She's such a scatterbrain," he hissed once they were out of earshot of her office. "Why in the name of Merlin Professor Dippet employed her, I'll never know."

"Because she knows the subject well and teaches it in an accessible and understandable manner?" Hermione suggested mildly.

"Oh come off it, Hermione. The woman doesn't know her wand from her watch, she's a nightmare."

"I suppose you'd teach it better, would you?" Hermione asked boredly, remembering Dumbledore's suggestion that she indulge Tom's attempts at conversation just a little.

"You know I would," he said, as though it were obvious.

"Who sabotaged your Potion?" Hermione asked, already knowing the answer.

Tom raised an eyebrow, "I'll tell you if you tell me which curious disease you were struck down with for a grand total of five hours."

"Fair enough," Hermione agreed.

"Anyway, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm no longer wearing the ring. So now you can talk to me," Tom said, changing the subject.

"I had noticed," Hermione said stiffly. "But I bet you haven't destroyed it, have you?"

"Don't be ridiculous, that's suicide," he snapped.

Hermione rolled her eyes. "Good night Tom."

She turned away from him, and began climbing the stairs that led to Gryffindor tower, while he descended to the dungeons.