Chapter Thirty-Two
It was only a few more weeks before their OWLs were upon them. Hermione attempted to panic about it, so after allowing a quick review of all subjects (which proved only that she nearly had an eidetic memory), Tom stunned her and left her in bed while he and Ginny worked on more important matters. In other words, they examined the defenses he remembered placing upon the ring horcrux and debated methods of countering them.
The most difficult defense was the compulsion to put the ring on. Doing so would activate a necrotic curse that would destroy the body within the hour.
"Harry could resist the Imperius. Are you saying you can't?" Ginny demanded incredulously.
Tom rolled his eyes. "Of course I can. The problem is that I created this compulsion myself specifically to be irresistible. Period. The only reason I was able to resist it after placing it was that I'd brought a Portkey set to activate just after I finished setting the compulsion."
Ginny stared at him. "You created something stronger than the Imperius?" she asked, voice part awed and part horrified.
Tom held his hand up and tilted it from side to side. "Stronger, but less generally useful. It can't be targeted, for one. For two, it can only be placed on an object."
Ginny wrinkled her nose. "Still."
Then OWLs began, and there was no time to worry about anything else. Even though Tom knew the information well enough to have authored the exams, it still took time to complete everything, and by the time he finished a written exam, his hand hurt too much from writing to do anything else for the rest of the day.
After the first week of exams, Tom spent the Sunday meeting of the study group letting Ginny teach. He hadn't said as much to Ginny, but he rather thought she'd make a good DADA teacher once he left. As she ran everyone through practicals for their remaining exams, Tom murdered training dummies one after another. Eviscerating one, decapitating another, flaying a third, and burning a fourth alive. His goal was to kill a good two dozen without repeating a death twice. In battle, such inventiveness was worth the effort, as it demoralized the enemy far more than simply using the Killing Curse repeatedly. No matter how demoralizing people who understood the Unforgivables might find that, the average person would just get desensitized to that flash of green light. He'd even found that some people welcomed it as a painless way of dying. It was ridiculous, of course, because one should never accept death, but Tom supposed that was what you could expect of the mindless sheep that made up much of the world's population.
The second week of OWLs proceeded much the same as the first until Thursday. The History exam.
Tom actually intended to get full credit on this exam, because History was in fact extremely important despite the low priority their society placed on it. It was, then, with great annoyance that he found himself struggling to remain in his body and not in Voldemort's.
He'd nearly finished when he lost the fight. Instead of a test before him, there were rows and rows of shelves. Upon each shelf sat countless orbs, some dark and some glowing like tiny stars in the darkness of the Hall of Prophecy.
"Really?" Tom asked. "You interrupted my OWLs for more of this?"
Screams answered him. Tom hesitated, but curiosity won out over his History OWL, so he sighed and followed the sound. He turned the corner into the row that should contain the prophecy about himself and stopped. Sirius Black writhed on the floor before him under the Cruciatus. Tom watched impassively for a moment before looking around. He couldn't see Voldemort, but he had to be here somewhere. "If you need someone to summon the order here, an owl would have worked perfectly well," he told the air, hoping Voldemort would hear.
Black only screamed louder. Tom wished he could cast a Silencing Charm on him. "Voldemort, I realize there's a pattern of us meeting for some epic battle at the end of the year, but what do you expect me to do? I'm a fifth year student at Hogwarts. How exactly are you expecting me to get to the Ministry?"
The vision wavered, showing the exam room and a crowd of worried faces, then snapped back to Black.
"Grab it… I cannot, but you can..." Voldemort whispered, presumably to Black.
Tom snorted. "Do you even care that this vision makes zero sense? You and I are the only ones who can take that down safely. I know Rookwood already explained this to you."
Abruptly, everything froze and Black collapsed into gray smoke. Voldemort appeared in front of him. "Potter," the man hissed.
Tom glanced at his reflection in one of the extinguished orbs, curious. He supposed that his mental image of himself did look rather similar to Potter by now. Hazards of living in his body. "Voldemort," he returned cordially.
"You don't seem concerned for your godfather. Do you doubt that portion of this vision as well?" The man looked honestly annoyed by this. He shouldn't. Any idiot would question a vision sent to them by their enemy. Surely even Potter wouldn't have fallen for this.
Tom shrugged. "I'm certain I don't know. However, either you don't have him, so I don't need to worry, or you do and there's no point in worrying. As I said, I'm stuck at Hogwarts, and Dumbledore is gone. I guess I could let another professor know, but by the time anything got done, you'd have killed him anyway." He gave the man an amused look. "You aren't known for your patience."
He took a moment to examine his other self. The body truly was hideous. Tom wondered what he'd been thinking when he accepted such a thing. Fear could be instilled in a number of ways, but there were situations where charm would be more effective, and the horror before him really had no chance of charming anyone. Unusual body aside, he seemed to be recovering physically. He appeared less tired than he had last term, at any rate. His red eyes, however, lacked a spark of anything save madness. Tom's chest ached at seeing his other self - his true self - brought so low. He couldn't allow himself sympathy for an enemy though, not even this one, so Tom smothered the feeling.
"It hurts, doesn't it?" he asked softly, forcing the curve of his lips up into a smile. "Knowing those who follow you now do so only out of fear or insanity. Being aware that even you are nothing more than a shadow of who you once were."
Voldemort's eyes narrowed. "I was planning to take my time torturing Black to give you time to come to the rescue like a good Gryffindor. But now I think I will simply kill him and take another. Perhaps your pet mudblood. What is her name? Granger?"
"Hermione," Tom agreed amicably. "I wouldn't though, if I were you."
Voldemort sneered. "Why? Because you'll make me regret it?"
Tom smiled coldly. "Because if anything happens to her, I will make the entire world burn." Tom held Voldemort's gaze a moment longer, then he turned away, mind returning to the task of locating a way out of this vision. "Don't worry, Voldemort. So long as you leave certain people alone, I will make sure your life had meaning. I will vanquish you, and your name will live on in perpetuity as one of the first casualties of my reign."
"I will destroy you and everything you care about!" Voldemort snarled.
Tom's mind caught up the thread of magic leading back to his body. He smiled patronizingly at Voldemort. "I'm sure you'll try."
He disappeared.
In effectively no time at all, Tom awoke in the Great Hall with one of the examiners waving a wand in his face. Tom scowled and pushed it away. "I'm fine," he said, more for Hermione's benefit than Tofty's. "Is there still time left?"
The examiner looked taken aback, but he dutifully checked the time. "Ah, yes, there are a - a couple of minutes left to -"
Tom was already back in his seat, writing furiously, leaving Tofty little he could do but usher the rest of the students back to their seats as well.
The moment they left the Great Hall and left the crowd of students milling about outside of it, Hermione ambushed him. "What happened?" she demanded, looking him over as though she expected to find physical evidence of whatever it was.
Tom shook his head and, after considering things for a moment, headed toward the dungeons. "Voldemort says he's got Black at the Department of Mysteries."
Hermione sucked in a breath and bit her lip. "He had to have been lying, right?" she asked after thinking about it for a moment.
Tom shrugged. "I don't know. Most likely, but it's not impossible that he was telling the truth."
"What are you going to do?" Hermione asked.
They'd reached Severus's quarters. Tom brought Hermione inside, then said, " Kreacher, I need you."
The house elf appeared with a crack and bowed low. "How can Kreacher be helping young Master?"
"Where is Sirius right now?"
The elf cocked its head as though listening to something, then nodded to itself. "Bad Master is at a muggle tavern. He is with the muggle woman Bad Master has been attempting to court." The elf's lip curled at the thought. Tom didn't blame it.
The important thing was that Black clearly wasn't being tortured at the moment, or not by Voldemort at any rate, and Tom had a paper trail, as they say, showing that he'd shown due diligence. "Thank you, Kreacher. You may go."
As the elf popped out of the room, Tom summoned his owl patronus and told it, "Take this message to Amelia Bones. 'Voldemort claims to be in the Department of Mysteries. He made no mention of the duration, but I believe he is after a prophecy regarding him.'"
The patronus hooted at him, then spread its wings and flew off through the wall and into the night. He turned to Hermione only to freeze. She had the strangest smile. "Is everything alright?" he asked cautiously.
Hermione sniffed and wiped at her eyes. "Yeah. Everything's fine. I just thought… you know…. If it'd been Harry, he would have had us jump onto brooms and ride to London or something equally stupid and - and - and male. I'd have gone with him, of course, but if Voldemort was there, we probably both would have died."
"Probably," Tom admitted. "But Potter has the strangest luck, so it's possible it would have worked out."
"Still, I'm glad you're being sensible about things," Hermione decided. "It means we have time for an outing."
Tom blinked. "An… outing?"
Hermione's smile in return was surprisingly feral. "I think it's time for the DADA curse to get to work."
When they opened the door, Ginny and Luna were already there. Ginny was practically vibrating with malicious glee. "Is it time?" she asked.
Hermione nodded and led the group up the stairs to Headmistress Umbridge's office. To the amusement of everyone but the woman herself, the very castle had refused access to the Headmaster's office, forcing her to remain in the Defense teacher's quarters. Hermione rapped on the door twice, then entered without waiting for an answer.
Umbridge was just pulling her head from the fire, presumably ending a Floo call. "What are you -"
"Imperio."
Tom's breath caught at the rush of magic that wrapped around the woman, binding her to Hermione's with practiced ease. "You've been practicing," he commented lightly, pretending to be unaffected.
"Neville lent me Trevor," Hermione replied absently.
Tom's lips twitched up into an amused grin.
With Hermione between Luna and Ginny to hide her wand, they 'followed' Umbridge out of her office with Tom trailing slightly behind them. As he walked, he casually poked his wand out from his sleeve and scoured any traces of Hermione's magic from the area. Practiced she might be, but Hermione had still used far more magic than necessary, and it had spilled out into the surrounding air. Checking for such a thing was uncommon, since it wasn't considered reliable evidence, but given the current state of the Ministry and public opinion, Tom thought it best not to take any chances.
They left the castle, Umbridge striding purposefully across the lawn and toward the Forbidden Forest with a scowl on her face. To Tom's amusement, they received two types of looks: pitying looks from most and a sort of dark knowing from those who bore his mark. From that, he could conclude that quite possibly everyone he'd marked had been made aware of this plan.
At the edge of the forest, the three girls stopped, but Umbridge kept going. Hermione's expression grew tense, and as the minutes passed, beads of sweat started to form on her forehead. Still she held the spell. It wasn't until almost an hour had passed that she released it, nearly collapsing from the strain of it. "That's that," she said once she'd recovered.
Tom cocked his head to the side. "Did you give her to the centaurs?"
Hermione blinked, then frowned, then glared at him. "Were you following me?"
Tom was innocence personified. "Of course not. I happened to see you while studying for Astronomy."
"You don't need to study Astronomy," Hermione replied flatly. "And certainly not during the day. Anyway, I led her to them, but they won't be keeping her." She flushed a little. "Because of the muggle myths, I had… a slightly different idea originally, but Firenze advised me against it. Apparently they're not opposed to taking human women to… well… you know, but they do require that the women be, and I quote, 'quite a bit less odious.'"
Tom snorted. "I can imagine. So? What will they be doing with her then?"
"Well, if she can keep a civil tongue on her, they'll lead her back through the forest and to me here. If that happens, I'll Obliviate her, and that will be it." Her tone made it clear how unlikely she found that scenario.
Ginny jumped in. "And if she can't –"
"This is my plan, Ginny. Get your own plot if you want to explain things so badly," Hermione snapped, though she didn't look too irritated. She smiled at Tom hesitantly. "If she can't, they'll lead her to the acromantula colony. And make sure she doesn't leave."
Tom, who'd long since given up on the idea that Hermione's revenge might be lethal, stared at her. True, this meant he would almost certainly not be discovering the answer to his experiment with the curse, but that only meant he had to find more test subjects. He realized, then, that Hermione's expression was falling, anxiety taking the place of her previously tentative pride. He couldn't have that. Tom took only one more moment to consider what would be the best reward, then stepped forward, cupped her face in his hands, and kissed her.
It didn't last long, but when he pulled away, Hermione was blushing and beaming. "You did well," Tom said quietly. "I'm so proud of you." It wouldn't take too long before her conscience reasserted itself, so he wanted to make sure she couldn't possibly regret this.
Ginny sighed, and Luna took the opportunity to hug Hermione from behind.
Though they were mostly assured of the result, they sat down to wait, just in case. Luna unpacked a picnic blanket from her bag, along with some biscuits and butterbeer, only mildly surprising the others. When, after another forty minutes or so, Tom felt the curse on Umbridge abruptly break, he smiled. It was, he thought, the most perfect end to the year.
AN: I'm trying very hard to think in what direction the people around Tom would be likely to fall and what desires their own insecurities and histories would give them that they wouldn't have acknowledged if Tom hadn't come into play.
Also, hey, fun, I've been writing a fair amount of this via speech-to-text in my car while waiting to pick up my daughter from preschool. That means the first iteration of each chapter has things like "Her money" instead of "Hermione." It also insists that Ginny is Jenny, which is kind of really annoying. I'm probably pronouncing it wrong. Oh well.
Only one more actual chapter after this for this school year, but an interlude before that because, well, I feel bad for the poor death eaters hanging out at the Ministry waiting for a group that's not coming.
