Title: Envy or Jealousy
Characters: Hermione, Tom Riddle (Voldemort)
Prompt: 014: Green
Word Count: 604 words
Rating: G
Summary: To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude. Joseph Addicon
Author's Notes: Finally, I get into the Tom Riddle part of Voldemort. I'm less comfortable with him, but it's good for me anyway. Sort of in the same vein as "Do you trust me?"

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Tom Riddle was not accustomed to having to catch a person's attention, particularly if the person was of female persuasion. He knew the power of his appearance, even if the handsome features of others never affected him beyond a passive appreciation of their influence.

She had none of that power - her power was in her persistence and her persistent dismissal of him. When he spoke in class, his voice was mesmerizing. When he sat back in his chair, everyone knew that it was his turn to speak. When he played coy and innocent, there were giggles or shy smiles, fingers flexing, wanting to touch his arm, his face. This power was almost too easy and could become a nuisance if he exercised it too much.

She could not command a classroom. Her voice was grating, bossy, piercing through the peace of his expectancy and ignorant of her complacency. He heard her called swot, bitch, Mudblood filth, bint, the usual epithets. Tom was never called any of these things. People who called him anything that drew attention to his less than savory roots on his father's side forgot that he both had the magic to curse them without exertion and had friends to deal with them while he watched.

She had no friends. She had people she talked to sometimes, and he heard her talk about a few old friends, three names that she seemed uncomfortable remembering. But in her classes, at the Gryffindor table, in her dormitory, she talked to no one but her books and notes, muttering to herself as she went over them. Her common room was the library. He saw her there more often than most students could stand, and all he could see were piles of books and untamed hair as she hunched over the table with her rapidly scratching quill. He had consumed the library when he was younger and knew where most things were so that he did not have to spend so much time there. As useful as he found books, he could not stand the library where the knowledge whispering from all sides hardly told him what he needed to know. His calling was deep in the dungeons, in empty classrooms, in filthy pipes, at the edge of the Forest. Not in the library.

She never crossed the lines he did, but she worked hard and disregarded his attempts at intimidation, as though she saw right through him and he was not even there, as though he was dead. The idea that he was not there filled him with inexplicable dread, as though he had to touch himself to feel that he was solid. When he tried to draw his wand, she drew hers and stared at the twist of yew with complete confidence when others would stare at his feet in fear. When he told his followers to follow her, she found somewhere to duck away from them. One came back with boils on his arse.

She seemed to have a purpose, and that purpose seemed to be him. The deliberate way that she pushed him away only drew him nearer, more than curious. The way that she wasn't in the palm of his hand made him want her as a possession. The way that she faced him and didn't face him made him slightly envious - she was grounded, content, she had a defined purpose while his was only just coalescing with the blood of his father on his hands and the dormancy of the basilisk. He would discover what she wanted with him, and she would discover what he wanted with her.