The dark treasure slips through her hands at thirteen, an initial suspicion not fully tested before Harry takes the diary away from her again, a thoughtful expression on his face. When the truth comes out about Ginny, Hermione is horrified and unfortunately even more fascinated. A thoughtful boy that you could talk to about your problems, and in exchange he would possess your body and use your hands for terrorism – a dangerous, dangerous thing. A boiling pot on a stove she had a mad desire to reach out and touch. But Harry has already vanquished the evil, and so Hermione tries to forget it.
But Tom Riddle is not so easily defeated, Dumbledore teaches Harry when she is seventeen. The more Hermione finds out about Tom, the more a pull towards him grows, from somewhere deep within her. Harry pours the secrets about Tom into her ears, where they roll around her head endlessly.
The institutionalised grim orphanage – she understands where the hatred for the non-magical emerged. How different might he have been in another world? And Hermione can see it, when Harry describes how disdainfully Tom walked into his magical family's home, tidily throwing them to prison as he obliterated his useless muggle father. She almost gasps as Harry frames the cold certainty and indifference (and she definitely gasps later that night, her finger on her clit and Tom, Tom, Tom in her head like a ritualistic chant, like he could know her from where she got him out from under her skin in the Hogwarts showers).
The holy quest is handed to Harry, and then shared with her. And finally, after months of planning, after years of waiting, a piece of Tom's soul is back in her hands, cold and beating through the metal of Slytherin's locket. Can it tell? Does Tom know how hard a heart beats, a breath catches, a cunt clenches on the other side of the horcrux?
"I'll take first watch," she tells Harry and Ron, and tries not to run out of the tent, walking as far as the wards extend and leaning against a tree. Hermione can barely breathe. Her body feels like it might explode with excitement as she loops the metal chain over her head, and the locket falls against her chest –
Oh. The magic is immediate; straight from her heart, her womb, the years of obsession over the handsome young man with power beyond this world flowing out of her, through the conduit of the horcrux. Hermione almost falls but he's already there, one hand on her throat and another on her sternum, against the pine tree reaching up to the grey sky.
"Who are you," Tom asks, voice harsh with the discomfort of not knowing where he had been awoken, but Hermione can hear it – he feels the lurid fascination too. She opens her eyes, and sees his are black with power and lust too.
"I'm Hermione," she gasps, the time finally come to say what she's waited so long for. "Hello, Tom."