A/N: New chapter! And the big news is that this fic has passed the 300 review mark! I'm SO thrilled and it's all down to you guys so thank you. I hope you enjoy this chapter, let me know what you think! =]
Tempora Abducto.
by Flaignhan.
It took a while for Hermione to get used to having Tom back. She would often jump when he broke the silence, not used to any noise in the house, other than that which she was making. She would often have to take another cup out of the cupboard after she had already poured her own tea, then turned round to see him sitting at the kitchen table expectantly, eyeing her cup with a raised eyebrow.
She had to get used to sharing the duvet again. That was a tough one.
Soon enough, she slipped back into the routine she had missed so dearly, and became used to the sound of his voice being more than a distant memory. She became used to waking up with his arm around her, and to him wrestling a book out of her hands when it reached the early hours of the morning and was most definitely time for bed.
Instead of skipping breakfast each morning and heading straight to work, she sat down and had a proper breakfast with Tom, because now she didn't have to stare at the kitchen wall, and now she had somebody to discuss the news with.
She pulled a face and put the newspaper down on the kitchen table, before pushing her remaining slice of toast away from her with a grimace.
"Did it really need to be that graphic?" she asked.
Tom picked up the paper, quickly taking in the headline – ARCTURUS BLACK DIES IN MANTICORE ATTACK – and scanned article. "It seems so."
"The funeral's on Wednesday, are you going?"
Tom shook his head. "No he wouldn't have wanted me to...although what would irritate him more than a halfblood showing up at his funeral?"
"Maybe you could take some muggles with you, really hammer the point home."
"Hermione, a man's died, there's a line of good taste," Tom smirked nonetheless. "What in the name of Merlin was a manticore doing in North London, though?" he didn't wait for an answer, just drained the rest of his tea and turned the page. "Oh dear, someone's gone and splinched themselves."
"Is that really newsworthy?" Hermione asked, picking at the edges of her toast, her appetite almost returning.
"You don't want to know what he left behind," Tom replied, his lips pressed together to hide his smirk.
Hermione tutted and threw her toast in the bin, giving breakfast up as a lost cause.
She frowned, and read through the list again.
It wasn't that she needed the books, but she'd like to have the set, just because they felt like home. They'd guided her through six years of education in her own time, and now, two months before they were due to be released, they were nowhere to be seen on the future publications list that the manager of Flourish and Blott's had let her look over.
The list carried right over to the new year, and yet there was no mention of them at all. She asked Mr Blott, and he had heard nothing of them either.
Hermione bit her lip, paid for her books, and apparated home.
"We've got a project," she said breathlessly, dumping her new books on the table and sitting down opposite Tom.
"What about the ageing potion?" he asked, looking up at her.
"Leave that for now, we need to get writing."
"Writing? Writing what?"
"I've found you a job. Sort of. And actually, it's going to need both of us to get it done on time. We're going to have to work fast. Very fast."
"What are we writing?" Tom repeated, slowly and firmly.
"The Standard Book of Spells, grades one to seven. Textbooks. School textbooks. I used them when I was at Hogwarts, and they're supposed to be released in a couple of months but they're not on Flourish and Blott's list!"
Tom eyed her suspiciously. "How do you know they're not already written, and the publishers are just keeping it a secret?"
"Excuse me," Hermione said, "but what kind of publishers would want to keep secret the fact that they're releasing a set of spell books? Surely they'd be shouting about it at the tops of their voices? Surely there'd be adverts in the Prophet, and surely Mr Blott would know something, but there's nothing! No trace whatsoever!"
"You're sure?"
"Yes!" Hermione said, leaning forward to emphasise her point. "I know that this is what we do. Fifty years is a long time, this is our work. We don't waste ourselves, we teach from a distance! We'll be all set! I was still using them in my time, we'll just have to update them every so often!"
"That does sound pretty good," Tom said, thoughtfully. "And between the two of us we can probably get them done on time...how well do you know the text?"
"By heart," Hermione said. "But I imagine what you write is what I remember, and what I write is what I remember. I could probably write a list of the chapters, and what's in them to get us started, and once we've done that we're good to go."
"Thank Merlin," Tom said, smiling, "I'm sick of bloody ageing potions."
She sat hunched over her parchment, scribbling out sentences, the silence broken only by the gentle crackling of the fire and the scratching of her quill. She didn't look up until she reached the end of her roll of parchment, and only then it was a quick glance at the clock before she flattened her new piece of parchment out in front of her, numbering it at the top and then continuing her sentence.
"It's late."
She looked up momentarily to see him standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame, then returned her attention back to her work. She hated how cool he was about this. He was the picture of perfection, smooth and calm as usual, while she was nursing dark circles under her eyes - a result of several extremely late nights and early mornings. She was getting jumpy, was overworked from trying to hold down her job at the Ministry and do her fair share of the writing for seven different textbooks.
"You can leave that until tomorrow."
"The deadline is five weeks away! We're nowhere near finished! It's still got to be sent to the publishers, they need to approve it, they need to print it! There's just not enough time!"
She scowled. His lack of response obviously meant he was smirking at her. She wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of her seeing it. She was going to continue working and –
"Come on," he pulled her up from her chair by the arm, vanished her quill, ink and parchment with a wave of his wand, and, ignoring her protests, chivvied her up the stairs and into bed, where she promptly fell asleep.
When she awoke it was late. Far too late. She looked at the clock on her bedside table and saw that it was one o'clock in the afternoon. She gasped and jumped out of bed, running down the stairs. She found Tom in the lounge, sitting at the desk, writing in that neat scripted style that always made her heart flare a little with jealousy.
"Why didn't you wake me up? I'm late for work!"
He didn't bother turning around, just continued writing. "I sent a message to your office, I told them you were ill. And don't you feel much better now you've had a good sleep?"
"But the book!"
"Will be finished on time," Tom said calmly. "If it was released in five weeks time, then it will be released in five weeks time. We're getting there, just stop stressing over it," he finished his sentence with a flourish and set his quill down, inspecting his parchment.
"There," he said, rolling it up once he was satisfied. "That's Grade Five finished, now onto Grade Six. Go and have a bath or something, it'll do you the world of good."
Hermione frowned. "Are you saying I smell?"
"No, I'm saying you're a girl. Girls like baths. Go."
Hermione huffed, but followed orders. The idea of a bath was an appealing one, and it was with a happy sigh that she slid into the hot, but not scorching, water.
She wondered if quitting was the right thing to do. Would it raise suspicions, if she was never seen, nor heard from again? Would Dumbledore look for her? Would he think that Lord Voldemort had captured her and extracted information about the future from her? Would he even care?
Of course he would, he was Dumbledore.
She had said she was moving to a different country. They could very well move to a different country, but as bare and lifeless as the cottage had been when they first moved in, Hermione had grown to love it. Over the years it had been filled with books and trinkets and all sorts of things until finally, it was the only place she could actually call home. She didn't want to leave, and there was no reason to, not really.
Her boss wouldn't really check to make sure she'd left the country, would he?
No. No he wouldn't. He wasn't suspicious of her. He had wished her luck, said goodbye, and got on with his life. She was no longer a concern of his.
She sighed, wishing she was less paranoid.
Unfortunately, living your life in hiding with a supposed (future) mass murderer went hand in hand with paranoia, and she had no choice but to force it from her mind and hope for the best.
"You know we could probably buy a house with this," Tom said when she arrived home. He was counting fat gold galleons, placing them in neat stacks of ten. The kitchen table was piled high with gold, and Hermione's eyes bulged in their sockets at the sight of it.
"How much is there?" Hermione breathed, sitting down opposite him.
"Eight hundred and something," Tom said.
Hermione's jaw dropped.
"It's got to last us all year though," he said warningly. "We get the September windfall when everyone's buying their school things, but probably nothing again until next year."
Hermione nodded. She had never seen so much money in her entire life, and was finding it difficult to tear her eyes away from it.
"Why have you got it all in here?" she asked. "Why not Gringotts?"
"I wanted to count it before I put it in Gringotts," he told her. "I'm not just going to take Frobisher's word that there are eight hundred and seventy-two galleons here. He might be trying to rip us off. I'll count it and take it there in the morning."
"Where are you putting it overnight?" she asked.
"I'll put it all into a bag and shrink it," he told her. "And no, I won't lose it, don't worry."
"Right. Well, I'll get started on dinner shall I?"
One night, she awoke to find him gone.
The duvet on his side had been thrown back, presumably in a hurry, and his dressing gown wasn't hanging on the back of the door.
It was with cautious concern that Hermione pulled on her own dressing gown, slid her feet into her slippers, and padded downstairs, where she found him in the lounge, bent over a bubbling cauldron, frowning as he looked between a scribbled page of notes, while stirring the potion he was busy brewing.
"What is it?"
He shushed her, and she scowled.
Finally, he pulled the ladle out, put the lid on the cauldron and allowed her to take up some of his attention.
"What is it?" she repeated, sitting down next to him, lifting the lid of the cauldron curiously to peer in and study its contents.
"I think I've cracked it," he said, his eyes wide with sleep deprivation and concentration. "The ageing potion. I pulled apart the theory behind the Impediment Jinx, re-routed it a bit, applied the effects to the potion and...well...I think this is it. I've gone over the theory six times and it's completely sound."
"The Impediment Jinx?" Hermione said in surprise. "Really?"
"Well look at it logically," Tom explained quickly, lifting the lid to give the potion another stir. "The Impediment Jinx stops things temporarily. That's exactly what we want! It's been so obvious all along that I feel like kicking myself. I can't believe I didn't see it before. And if this works, you could probably come up with a general theory for mixing spells and potions for almost any outcome!"
Hermione picked up the messy page of notes that Tom had been studying when she found him and ran her eyes over it, her brain suddenly alert as she processed this information. She could find no fault with the theory, but she wasn't so keen on testing it out in a more practical manner.
Tom looked over and saw the concerned expression on her face.
"I figured we could try it on a small animal, maybe a kitten, something that grows fast so we'll be able to tell if it's not ageing really easily."
Hermione gasped and her hand flew to her mouth.
"What?"
"You can't experiment on a kitten!" Hermione told him.
"Why not?"
Hermione's jaw dropped and she shook her head in disbelief. "Because it's a kitten!"
"I'm already aware that a kitten is, in fact, a kitten," Tom said coolly, "but you are yet to tell me why I can't test a perfectly safe potion on it."
"How do you know it's perfectly safe?"
"There's nothing poisonous or dangerous in it. It's actually relatively simple, but it might need a little altering, just to get it perfect."
"You're not testing on a kitten," Hermione said firmly. "You're not."
"So, I come up with a way to stop you ageing, and this is the thanks I get..." Tom murmured.
"So what have you got against frogs then?"
"Nothing, why?"
"Well, you had no qualms about me testing on a frog, but a kitten? No, definitely not, out of the question and I was a demon for even suggesting it."
"Yes but kittens are so..."
"If your next word is cute, I'm going to swap your potion for Draught of Living Death."
Hermione gave him a look, and he let his eyes fall on his goblet of potion.
"On three?" he asked.
Hermione nodded.
"One, two, three."
They downed their potion simultaneously. Hermione had been prepared for some awful sort of flavour, perhaps even as bad as the Polyjuice Potion had been in her second year, but this wasn't too bad at all, and considering she had to take it daily, that was a very happy bonus. It tasted like a milkshake, only not any flavour she could definitively put her finger on. It tasted almost like she imagined a sweet shop would, from the smell that hit you as soon as you walked in. There was also a hint of something organic and flowery about it, something that reminded her of playing on roundabouts and swings as a child over the park.
It tasted of being young.
"Well," said Tom, wiping his mouth clear of any potion residue with his thumb. He looked down into his empty goblet, then touched it against Hermione's. "To many years of youthfulness."
"Aren't we supposed to make a toast before we drink it?" Hermione asked.
"Not if you're trying a new potion for the first time. I think all energy needs to be focussed on absolutely not dying."
Hermione froze. "Was that a possibility then?"
"Well, maybe not dying, but you know, something that might not have affected frogs could have affected us."
"Right," Hermione said, setting her goblet down. She suddenly felt a little sick, and her hand immediately went to her stomach, as though it needed support.
"It's all in your head," Tom told her, watching her behaviour. "It's fine. I'm fine, you're fine, and we're going to be young forever."
Hermione's mistake was meeting his eyes when he said this, and she found herself accepting whatever he said without question.