Ugh this chapter was such a pain! Took me so much longer than I planned, and I had all these ideas that I felt like weren't coming across well enough. So finally I just gave in, wrote the thing and am now posting it. Don't blame me for any of the spelling mistakes, I can't be bothered fixing it before updating. But if you find any that bothers you, please leave a review and I will fix it.

In other news, I finally have an idea for where this is headed. Enough that I have written a 1 000 word epilogue! But we are only coming up to second year in a couple of chapters, so who knows if that will change!? (so much for my promise to myself to not write anything further into the story than following the timeline)

thanks again to all the wonderful reviews from , LK-HoGwArTs-hEaDgIrL and the amazing AliceEnchanted! Your reviews made me smile! And thanks to everyone who has favorited and or started following this story, you are wonderful!

PS: can you tell I've been procrastinating writing this by reading Poe, Lawrence and Shakespeare?

Home Alone

She felt the breeze of the wards surrounding the house.

Her dad was home at last.

Showtime.

She was giddy with anticipation, and felt her entire body flood with adrenaline.

Her place by the window enabled her to see the entire walk from the front gates, and up to the house. With every step Voldemort took closer, she could hear her heart thumping against her ribcage.

Voldemort was not pleased with how his little trip had gone. He could feel his angry magic bristling around him. All he wanted to do, was get inside and relax with one of his books, maybe curse a follower or two.

He stormed down the pathway to the house, grumbling under his breath, setting fire to a few rose bushes along the way. The gravel beneath his feet seemed angry with the force of his steps, his breath was sharp, steady and fast. His robes were billowing behind him, making him seem like an angry stormy cloud descending on the Riddle house.

He exhaled in relief when he finally hit the steps leading up to the house. He pushed against the door with greater force than he normally would, not noticing that they lagged a bit and dragged more than usually.

He heard something clicking and ticking, something that should have alerted him that everything was amiss. He caught it all a second too late, his eyebrows raising comically as he saw the huge trunk of wood falling towards him out of nowhere.

He was caught in that moment of utter panic, where you have 5 different scenarios playing in your mind and not being able to decide which one to act upon. Hermione had reached the top of the stairs just in time to see him standing like a deer caught in the headlights and raise his eyebrows at the tree trunk swooping in from above.

He let out a loud "OMPFH!" sound as it connected with his chest, Hermione wincing at the odd crunching sound it made after having connected with, and broken his rib cage. She saw his weirdly graceful arched path through the air as the force from the wood was transferred from it to him, sending him flying over the steps and back on the gravel.

He groaned, and Hermione stifled a laugh.

Some muttering and huffing and puffing later, and Voldemort had fixed his broken bones somewhat and walked up into their foyer again. This time she could almost see the anger radiating from him in waves.

"HERMIONE MEROPE RIDDLE YOU ARE IN SO MUCH TROUBLE!"

She eeped and ran down the hallway to get away from him, escaping to her bedroom and locking herself behind it. Just as she twisted the lock, she heard the garbage hitting him, and his scream of rage following it.

As he started up the stairs she held her head close to the door, hoping to hear exactly what his reaction would be when- a loud eeep filled the house, and followed by a rushing sound. He had found out what happened to the stairs, just like the girl dorms in the Ravenclaw house. The loud clatter meant that she had calculated right, and he had ended up in the garbage pile once more.

It took him a while to figure out how to work around the charm, she waited with baited breath as he had come up the stairs and rounded the corner. She could just about see his rigid posture as he walked down the hallway, all the way over to the chute she had installed.

His face when he stepped forward and there was nothing underneath him was priceless. She only wished she had a camera to capture the moment. A laugh escaped her as he screamed bloody murder sliding down the tunnels.

She had made sure they were extremely long and arduous if not impossible to get back up.

The bottom of the chute was where he kept his poisonous snakes, the literal snake pit in the house. Someone had forgotten to feed them while he was gone, completely by accident of course, and they were on the warpath.

Voldemort was the only guy who was sure to survive something like that, so she wasn't worried about his safety, more hers when he found the door and saw the password, or more like the riddle that would unlock the door.

She was surprised and apprehensive about how quickly he solved "What can you rearrange Tom Marvolo Riddle to become?" not only was it not "I am Lord Voldemort", you also needed to be a parselmouth to get out.

How many people knew "Mr Tom, a Dildo Lover" in Parseltongue?

When he got out of that room, he would be met with hallway upon hallway filled with plastic cups. Stepping on them would result in a big splash, lifting them up would make water spill all over. Well most of them were water, some were different kinds of potions she had brewed over the summer. She wasn't sure if any of them were going to react badly to each other.

She really hoped they wouldn't. Pranking her dead was suicidal, yes, but she was the proverbial money maker, and he could reign in his temper for that. But if she seriously maimed him in her poor pranking siege against her dad, she wasn't sure he would.

He was storming down the hallway up to her room now, and she was sure the crowning on the cake was going to kill him, or maybe her.

When he walked into her room, the bucket on top of her door tipped over, spilling its contents all over him.

It was just swamp water, but it really made you itch.

"Hey dad." She chirped happily, pretending to read a book she had managed to steal.

She looked up and swore he was actually steaming with rage, smoke coming out from all orifices, and the man turning an ugly shade of red.

Suddenly his wand was out, and he started setting fire and blasting everything in his sight. Hermione ducked behind her bed to take cover, putting up a shield to take the debris that might come her way.

It took her dad an hour before he stopped setting fire or exploding things in the house, the House Elves running around trying to fix everything straight after he was done destroying it. But the house still looked like a tornado, storm and a fire had taken hold of it, before an earthquake had finished the job.

Hopefully the elves would find a way to fix most of it, because there was a huge chance she wasn't going to be able to live there for a while seeing as barely anything was left of it.

Her dad had left again before he had spoken to her, probably because he would murder her if he tried talking to her before he had calmed down.

Hermione was sure glad she wasn't a Death Eater at that moment.