Yikes. Sorry again about a monstrous wait, it's really not fair to you guys. I'm hopefully going to be able to finish this story over this summer; it's really just bits of the outline that are stalling me, to be honest. I miss back when I was a reliable updater. (read: during tied for last)
Thanks so much for your patience if you're still with me; if you're not, hell if I can blame you. (If you're curious as to *why* this particular wait was so horrendous, check my profile.) Thanks especially to all of you who reviewed; I love reading notes from you more than I love chocolate.
Enjoy.
-speech
"Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why."
-Kurt Vonnegut
Hermione staggered away from Bansherwold and clutched her hands over her rolling stomach. "What have you – why did you –!"
Bansherwold settled to the ground, laying Riddle's unconscious body to the stone floor to tend to his gunshot wound.
Stone floor … Hermione cast her eyes about wildly, trying to make sense of it. They weren't in Riddle's hospital room anymore; instead, they sat in the middle of a bare concrete cell. One dingy window was set in the wall, beyond which the nighttime mists stirred, wraithlike. A small fireplace was shoved almost haphazardly into the wall beside the window. "Where are we? Why aren't we in the same place?"
"Hermione," Bansherwold said with exaggerated patience, "you haven't stayed in the same place during any of these leaps. Think about it logically. Astronomically. If you really were to remain in the same place, the earth would be in an entirely different stage of orbit, and you would be crushed in the vacuum of space. In fact, arguably, there is no such concept as "same place;" nor – slightly more controversially – such a thing as "same time." Everything is always moving. Expanding. Changing. You know this."
He went back to Riddle's wound with an expression of complete unconcern, as if he had just given her the time of day.
Hermione staggered to the window. "When are we, then? Relatively speaking?"
"2065," he said absentmindedly. "Shame we missed 2057, I rather liked that year. This place was a lot nicer then."
"We've lost almost thirty years," Hermione said, more to herself than to him. Thirty years … a third of a lifetime, hacked away in a minute's time.
She suddenly had the sense of plunging forward into infinite depths, plowing into an eternal pit. Merlin, with the Timeglass, she could go on and on and on. Know everything there was to know. Know everything that would ever be known.
"You're wondering," said Alengurd Bansherwold.
"What?"
"I can hear it. Your silences are rather loud," he said.
She settled into a spindly plastic chair nearby, hugging her arms to her stomach. "Bansherwold, why are you doing this? I have to know. Why? And why me?"
"Call me Alen, please. And no one is more deserving."
Hermione scoffed. As if they were on first-name terms. "Deserving of what, of this existential torture?"
He half-smiled. His eyes looked calm. "For many, this would not be existential torture. Most others, Hermione, would find less anxiety in this situation than you. They would be fascinated, exhilarated. They would be frantically learning all they could and hunting through every potentiality. Every shred of the future they could absorb, they would."
"But I don't want to."
"Yes," he murmured, flicking strands of fair hair from his eyes. "And isn't that extraordinary."
Hermione stared down at her fingers with eyes narrowed. She didn't want his praise; in fact, she wished mulishly that he would disappear. She wanted form, structure, rigidity; she wanted anything to make sense. Hell, she wanted to go back to her first year at Hogwarts, where she could cherish every tiny concrete goal.
This object, this crystal – it opened infinite possibilities. And in doing so, it made everything meaningless.
It kicked to the forefront what had kept Hermione up at nights as a young child: the knowledge that she was a speck on the face of an earth that was always cleansing itself. The knowledge that any mark she could place upon the world was nowhere near indelible. This reality of the eternity of time threatened to engulf her, to ruin her.
Something nagged at her sensibilities. What Bansherwold had said about appearing in the same astronomical location … how had she been doing it, then? How had she and Riddle been doing it, keeping themselves pinned to the face of the Earth? The leaps had been remarkably accurate, with that sort of lens in mind. They hadn't appeared even a foot out of place.
Had it just been because they'd expected no different?
Now that Bansherwold had made her wonder, was there a danger that the next time she touched the damn thing, she'd end up millions of miles away, sucked into a sun or drifting out of orbit, eyes boiling out of her head?
Damn him.
"Ennervate," said Bansherwold's voice.
Hermione found herself absurdly relieved when Tom Riddle sat up. Relieved at the sheer familiarity of him. Relieved at the instinctual and almost logical cruelty which governed his life, because Merlin, at least he seemed to have a logical center. How was she supposed to ascertain Bansherwold's motives when he seemed so unhinged half the time? Sure, her older self had told her that the man was sane, but Hermione wasn't quite sure.
"When?" said Riddle hoarsely, grasping at his healed wound.
"2065," Hermione said. Riddle cursed. She shared his sentiments.
"You were right, by the way," Bansherwold said to Riddle.
"About?"
"He had both your wands. My elder self."
"Is he here now?" Riddle said. "In this time?"
Bansherwold nodded.
"And what are you doing here?" Riddle demanded. "Why did you heal me? Why are you doing any of this?"
"Because time needs a governor who is not afraid," Bansherwold said. "Are you afraid of time, Tom Riddle?"
"I am afraid of nothing," he hissed. Even Hermione could tell it was a blatant lie, but she couldn't help wondering what else he did fear besides time's passage, besides death and decay.
"I am," Hermione said. The others' eyes fell on her, one pair dark and disbelieving, one pair calm and appreciative. "I'm afraid. God knows it's natural, being afraid of something that's obliterated so much of the world already."
Bansherwold smiled. "Pity."
"What's a pity?" Hermione said.
"That the sensible ones never try for supreme leadership." He stood, drew a wine-red pouch from his pocket, and handed it to Hermione. She peeked inside and saw the Timeglass's point of flame glimmering within. "I'm giving you this for safekeeping," Bansherwold said. "Think of it as a gesture of good faith. It's warded shut, by the way."
As Hermione tucked the pouch into her bag, Bansherwold caught Riddle's eye and chuckled with no mirth whatsoever. "Don't even bother trying a Villinger's Bond – I've already handled that. Anyway, I have to go handle some things. It's …" He checked a glass contraption on his wrist that – while shaped like a watch – had a face nothing like a clock. It was notched, like a graduated cylinder, partially filled. Hermione tried to peer closer, but he let his hand drop, and his sleeve obscured it instantly. "Yes, it's about time."
"Time for what?" Riddle said sharply.
In response, Bansherwold handed Riddle a wand, his own yew wand. "Try not to lose it again."
Riddle took the wand in seeming disbelief. Hermione wished to the marrow of her bone that Bansherwold would deign to bestow her own upon her in similar random fashion, but no such luck.
She repeated Riddle's question: "Hang on, time for what?"
Bansherwold turned on his heel and vanished.
Riddle, the wand loosely held in his grip, conjured a few floating, fiery bubbles. They dissipated into the air like burning threads of gossamer. He narrowed his eyes at the wand. It felt too whippy, a touch too responsive. What had Bansherwold done to it?
Hermione let out a slow breath. It seemed like it had been a million years since she'd had the time to think properly. "Shall we try using this?" she suggested, holding up the Timeglass.
Riddle cast her a glance that looked disconcertingly apathetic. "If you'd like."
After a second, she said, "No, stop that."
"Stop what?"
"That voice. The way you're sitting." She stood. "You're not going to sit here and plot, much less pout. We have to keep moving. We have to figure out where this place is and what our circumstances are."
He made no move to reply.
"We need information. Come on."
"As if you could order me around," he said, contempt dripping from every syllable.
"I can and will. Up," she said as if he were a particularly obstinate broomstick.
"We're in a safe location and we have the Timeglass," he pointed out. "I even have my wand back. We have all we need to return to our respective times, you foolish girl, judging by the way the man's been popping in and out of time –"
"Time. Time … he said it was time for something," Hermione said, more to herself than to Riddle. "Time for wh –?"
The door in the wall burst open. They whipped around to face it, Riddle's wand instantly at the ready.
"Down on your knees!" yelled the woman framed in the door, brandishing a bone-white machine gun that looked deceptively fragile. She wore loose-fitting leather armor, tan, with something bizarrely like chainmail clanking around the knees and joints. Three, then six, then nine others poured through the door after her.
"Take my arm," Riddle said. Wandless, Hermione obliged instantly.
He spun. Nothing happened.
"Wards," said the woman with the machine gun triumphantly. "Sorry, Apparition's broken today."
It would never get less bizarre, Hermione thought, hearing Muggles referencing magic so cavalierly.
Riddle lashed his wand out at the woman, an ugly snarl on his face. A bright yellow curse rocketed her way.
She jabbed a button on the back of her hand. Her tan suit crackled with generated energy. The yellow curse swam into the fizzling electric field, jerked like a dying snake, and dissipated. "Confuses certain magical energy signatures," the woman said, a smug expression settling over her face. Riddle imagined dismantling that face several different ways.
"Get them," she said, her expression turning hard. Her nine companions strode forward.
A malicious leer leaking like oil across his lips, Riddle slashed out with his wand again. If he couldn't hit them, he'd damn well make the world around them crumble.
The ground under their feet cracked, erupted in whizzing fragments of stone with a noise like gunfire. Riddle fixed his wand on the floor and gritted his teeth, muttering a long string of incantations. A great roar swallowed the air, and the ground fell away, sucked downward as if by some infernal vacuum.
The Muggle soldiers screamed as they toppled into the pit. The lead woman was the last to go. The screams were a symphony to Riddle's ears.
In the wake of the pit's formation, the nearby wall of the stone room crumbled, cracked, and then fell altogether, sucked down after the screams of the soldiers. Riddle flicked his wand upward, transforming the huge chunks of stone ceiling that toppled toward them into crows. The pit stopped growing and swallowing everything at a twenty-foot diameter.
Silence fell, blistered only by the hoarse cries of the crows, which were flapping off into the starlight.
"Oh my goodness," Hermione whispered as the dust cleared. Through the gap where the wall had been, she saw that their cottage sat in the middle of a vast field.
And that field was filled with soldiers.
There had to be a thousand tan-clad men and women, all standing in lines that stretched back into the distance, their faces made invisible in the night by some sort of dark mesh cloth. Black bubble-like machines hovered in the air, vast guns dangling from their bellies, their glassy curves reflecting the moon like watery planets. Robotic creatures, vaguely humanoid, stood strong amidst the ranks of soldiers, twenty feet tall at least. The field wore the hum of war in a thick buzzing mantle.
One of the hovering machines' belly-guns roared into life, jettisoning a white line of energy toward them, a sustained stream. Riddle's hand darted up, creating a massive blue shield. The blast hit the shield with a terrible scream, and Riddle clenched his jaw, pushing.
"Do something," he hissed to Hermione, a vein standing out on his forehead the longer he held the shield.
"I don't have a wand, if you remem –"
"Then do something else!"
Hermione considered the Timeglass – warded shut. She considered everything in her bag – useless for a getaway. She considered the bag itself – she could bundle herself and Riddle inside the damn thing, maybe, but God knew this army would find it somehow, and they'd be no better off upon getting back out.
She considered the general hopelessness of the situation. Her mind, pulsing and driven by the adrenalin she had never quite learned to control, could only muster one word: nothing.
There was nothing to do.
She stepped forward and raised her hands. "We surrender!" she yelled.
"I didn't mean do that!" Riddle said as the machine's blast cut off. He lowered his wand, breathing hard, staring at Hermione as if he'd never seen her before.
"Names," said one of the soldiers on the front line, voice amplified as if by a Sonorus.
"I'm Penelope Clearwater," called Hermione. "This is Alfred Perkins."
Riddle shot her a disgusted glance. He couldn't believe she'd somehow come up with something more common-sounding than his own goddamned name.
The soldier muttered something to the man next to her, then turned back to the pair. "Our scanner is reading an array of magical objects on your person. Please throw your wands and all items of magic forward."
"I don't have a wand," Hermione called, but withdrew her bag from her jacket pocket and lobbed it over the pit rather unceremoniously. For a single, futile second, she hoped the Timeglass would do something mysterious as it landed, but nothing happened. She hoped to hell that Bansherwold had some sort of plan for reclaiming it, now that it was in these people's hands.
"Wand, Perkins. Now," said the soldier, her voice booming more loudly without her appearing to raise her voice in the least.
For a moment, with Hermione looking expectantly at him, Tom debated trying to take on the fight alone. A thousand heavily armed Muggles and their machine contraptions. Could he?
No. He couldn't. He was hopelessly outnumbered and had no idea what these Muggles had stolen from the magical world that they might use against him.
His pride turned white-hot with anger, a precious metal that would not melt.
Seething, he lobbed his wand forward. It arced over the pit, flipping tip-over-tail like a hatchet, and landed in the grass point-first right beside Hermione's bag.
One of the robot machines clicked loudly. It raised its thick barrel of a gun and aimed at the objects sitting there in the field.
Two pairs of eyes widened in horror.
The machine fired. A sleek canister with a blunt, bullet-like nose burst from the robot's arm, plunged into the earth beside the wand and the bag, and promptly blew up. A jet of white fire erupted into the sky from the point of impact, accompanied by a monster's roar. Neither Hermione nor Riddle could even blink, let alone lift their hands to their ears to muffle the sound, frozen in horror as they were.
The column of fire died abruptly, like a beam of light throttled by a thunderhead. A bar of black replaced it, cleaving Hermione's vision in two. She blinked rapidly, and the bar reasserted itself in mottled colors, like her vision was bruised by what she'd seen.
The only remainder: a black circle two feet wide where the items had lain.
It was silent again, save for the tinny whine in Hermione's ears in the aftermath of the roar.
She and Riddle burst into a run at the same time.
"Stop," ordered the Muggle, but made no actual move to subdue them. Made sense, thought Hermione with an electric kind of panic, because it wasn't as if she or Riddle could actually go anywhere or do anything. They were well and truly crippled.
Hermione vaulted over the crumbled wall's remains, darted around the pit, and fell to her knees in front of the circle of ash. "Oh, Merlin," she breathed, scrubbing her hands through the charcoal.
"No," Riddle snarled at it, dropping to the ground across from her. "No, no, no –" He tore at the charred circle, but nothing remained.
"The Timeglass," she said, looking up and meeting his eyes across the circle.
"My wand!" he spat at her, before swearing at length, frankly feeling too sick to his stomach even to be creative about the curse words that spilled from his lips. He could not tear his murderous gaze from her, either. It was her fault that his wand was gone. His wand, which he'd never allowed to leave his presence since he'd gotten the damn thing in the first place. His wand, the one thing that had ever told him he belonged anywhere, the first thing that had told him the magical world was his for the taking … incinerated like a worthless stick.
And with the channel for his power stopped up? He would burst without it. He would die without it. He was sure.
"The Timeglass," he said, finally letting himself care slightly about that little tiny fucking hiccup. He glanced to his right. The Muggles were advancing on them, a wave of uniforms. "No, the Villinger's Bond – Bansherwold must have it. It must have gone back to him."
Hermione let out a slow breath. Yes, of course, he was right. The second it left her entrusted care, in fact, it should have returned to Bansherwold. But Harry's Cloak … had Muggles legitimately blown up one of the Deathly Hallows? How could that even be possible?
She reeled.
"On your feet," said the Muggle, now quite close, her voice no longer raised. She sounded tired. "We've been on a right merry chase for you two."
"Really?" Hermione said numbly, standing. "We've only just gotten here."
Riddle gave her another look of utter hatred, presumably for divulging anything about their states of being, but frankly she couldn't find it in herself to care. Without any shred of magic on her, she felt stranded, naked, young. It was as if she'd been cut somewhere deep inside, confidence bleeding out of the wound in a sick, personal sort of hemorrhage.
"Hands," the soldier said. Hermione extended her wrists, and after a moment, Riddle did the same.
"What are you going to do to us?" Hermione asked slowly.
The soldier slid a flexible metal cord around Hermione's wrists and pressed a button at its end. It automatically constricted, binding her wrists so tightly that her forearms clapped together. Only then did the soldier meet her eyes. "Don't play dumb," she said, her voice flat and unsympathetic and sneering, and Hermione, staring into the woman's night-dulled irises, could only think that they were more terrifying than any darkness she had seen before.
The soldiers took them away in a black vehicle that zipped along ten feet or so off the ground, a vehicle sleeker and more elongated than the ones they'd seen in Rome. Riddle and Hermione were bundled into its back seat behind metal bars. They'd been restrained in several different manners, some of which seemed to Hermione to be complete overkill. Honestly: chains, wasn't that a bit archaic?
"Erm, where are we, exactly?" Hermione managed timidly after about fifteen minutes of travel. The driver – or, well, the man tapping buttons on the glass screen to make the thing go – glanced back at her between the bars and folded his arms in reply, hard bitterness curdled in his features like sour milk.
Hermione sighed and looked away. They were rushing along a dimly lit path in some sort of woods, flying faster than any broomstick she'd ever seen. Obviously, from the soldiers' accents, they were in England somewhere, but the accents had varied from person to person. They could be anywhere in the country.
She didn't have to wait long for an answer. Soon they jumped up thirty feet or so with a most disconcerting lurch, and as they started across the woods in earnest, the London skyline sprouted up in the distance, an achingly familiar silhouette.
A lump of loneliness swelled into Hermione's throat. It felt like half her innards had been torn out and replaced by a jumble of ice cubes. She wanted Harry and Ron here so badly. She would have settled for literally any other human being from before.
She cast Tom Riddle a look. He stared at his knees, expression impassive, eyes unreadable.
She amended her wish: any other human being except that. She still wasn't certain if that was entirely human, anyway. For God's sake, they'd survived how many time-jumps and near-death experiences together now? And still he wouldn't even look at her.
Hermione glanced back out of the vehicle's curved glass bubble-top and her breath caught in her throat. At first, she thought she must be seeing things, but the closer they got to London, the more she felt the urge to rub her eyes in disbelief. Something was clogging the air above the city. Something solid, something blocking the stars as a tree's leaves block sunlight. Like a distant cavalry of zeppelins.
They rushed closer, and Hermione realized: Not airships. Buildings.
A cloud of cubes floated a neat few kilometers above the city, hanging there bizarrely like Christmas ornaments on the clouds. She thought she could almost see lines trailing down from those cubes to London proper, hair-thin filaments from this distance.
"What the bloody hell?" murmured Riddle, apparently having noticed the development as well.
"Yep. You're heading to the Crown, you filthy Pomsites," said the driver with somewhat of a nasty chuckle, his voice strongly accented.
"'Pomsite'?" Hermione said, unsure what exactly that meant or if she'd heard him correctly. Then she remembered the doctor's words to her. Pom – person of magic. Apparently adapted to a slur now. Lovely.
The driver tapped a button on his screen, and the vehicle tilted, cruising upward into the sky. Hermione felt her weight shift backward, and she bit her lip hard, closing her eyes. Flight had never been her favorite method of transportation at the best of times. It certainly didn't help being a prisoner in a world that wasn't hers.
"The Crown," Riddle said. "Would you mind explaining what exactly that entails, please?"
Hermione was surprised for a second that he'd phrased the question so courteously, but of course, Riddle had once been subtle and charming, hadn't he? He knew as well as she that an insulting interrogation wouldn't work on this Muggle.
The driver laughed, and just when his laughs seemed to be petering out, he started laughing afresh. This, Hermione mused, did not exactly bode well.
"Oh, feckin' Jesus Christ," he wheezed. "You're in for a right time."
He tapped a button on the glass board. Their angle lessened, and they shot forward toward the buildings over London.
"C'mon, out," said a tan-clad soldier with seemingly no regard at all for the thousands of meters separating them from a bloody splatting end. In the night, the distance looked eternal, a bottomless pit.
Rolling his eyes, the soldier yanked first Riddle, then Hermione across the terrifyingly narrow walkway to the metal platform.
Riddle looked up at the building across the platform. Bleak, blocky letters across the door read THE CROWN, but its appearance still gave him no hint whatsoever as to what the place was or what it meant.
"See you never," called the driver from behind them, a childishly inadequate parting shot if you asked Riddle. Then again, it also wasn't Riddle zooming off free as a bird into the night, so there was that.
Their guards shoved them forward. Granger squeaked as the nose of her soldier's gun prodded the side of her neck. Riddle found himself angry on her behalf, since she seemed to have relinquished all anger in favor of this obnoxiously docile, whimpering, quivering act. She could have decimated them, had she had a wand. Muggles.
One of them nudged Riddle with his gun, and Riddle jerked his shoulder, knocking it away instinctively.
"Watch it, Pomsite," spat one of the guards. Riddle almost laughed, but stopped out of self-preservation. Still, though. From the disgust and vehemence which dripped from the word "Pomsite," he had already inferred its apparent cultural connotation, but as the term had no attached significance to him personally, it sort of sounded hilarious.
"My mistake," Riddle said smoothly, lowering his bound wrists, the words tasting poisonous on his tongue. He didn't fancy being attacked. No; he'd stick this out and find a way to get out. There had to be a way. There was always a way: Riddle was built to survive.
It was freezing up here, unsurprisingly. The winds ripped high and the drizzle didn't so much fall as drift every which way, frosting the Granger girl's massive hair like tiny crystals, greasing the metal so as to make every step perilous and slick.
Riddle made a note to learn how to fly without a broomstick.
"Don't try to make a run for it," cautioned a guard, which made no sense whatsoever to Riddle, as the only options for running were into that building, their clear destination already, or off the edge.
Hermione, however, in her terrified state, understood perfectly what that meant: whatever waited inside was worse than death.
She let out a tiny noise and found herself biting her lip so hard her mouth filled with the taste of blood.
At least it was warm inside. The massive glass doors slid shut behind them, leaving them in a tiny antechamber facing a blank gray wall.
A soldier said, "Open." The wall's single door slid wide, and Riddle and Hermione were shoved in unceremoniously.
Hermione looked around as the soldiers followed them in. They stood in a room with no furnishings, no windows, nothing except a row of metal instruments hanging on the wall. Each instrument was identical, a long gunmetal rod.
Two of the soldiers retrieved instruments, and Hermione found her heart beating in her curled-up fingers. Torture. They were going to be tortured and beaten. Why? What could possibly be the purpose?
But the soldiers approached them and tapped the metal wrappings on their hands instead. They went limp as spaghetti, and the cord fell from Hermione's wrists. She flexed her hands, swallowing. Maybe this was to be civil. Maybe they wanted some sort of answer from her, or from Riddle, though why that would require the damn Royal Brigade to retrieve them, she had no idea. She didn't even know what information they could possibly provide. If the Muggles had been searching for answers for three decades, surely they had to know most things by now.
The soldier before Hermione tapped the gunmetal rod three times on its end, and a pair of sharp blades popped from it. Her fear jumped back into life, but only for a second, because he started cutting away her clothes. Hermione could do nothing then but close her eyes and try and remind herself that she was a human being.
Ten minutes later, they'd examined every inch of her naked body thoroughly for enchantments and charms. So thoroughly, in fact, that she was starting to wonder if they'd somehow discover she'd had her teeth shrunk years ago.
She felt humiliated, used, and her clothes sat on the floor in a shredded heap. Relief blew over her like a gentle breeze the second they slipped a papery robe over her shoulders.
Then they started on her hair.
The soldiers led two bald teenagers through the room's other door. They were between buildings, heading to a taller one that loomed overhead, blunt and monolithic like a dam's wall. The drizzle had turned into a storm. Thunder trundled by, seemed to steamroll through Hermione's bones. They'd taken blood from her; she wasn't sure how much, but she felt queasy, and she tottered with each step.
The rain hit her naked scalp hard. Her head felt too light on her neck and she felt colder and colder with each breath in. The papery robe was water-resistant, but she couldn't feel anything below mid-calf.
She stumbled a bit, and somewhat to her surprise, Riddle's hand clasped her shoulder and kept her upright. She nodded in his direction without looking at him. He didn't look at her either. In fact, neither of them had even faced the other since the soldiers had stripped them.
Hermione wasn't sure why she wasn't crying. Perhaps because the sky was doing it for her.
They entered the next building and found themselves looking up at a vast wall split into a grid. It must have been a hundred cells across and up. Each of the grid's three-foot squares had a circular opening, and what looked like a tube beyond that opening.
"They're in eighty-one," said one of the soldiers. Another shoved Hermione and Riddle toward the right end of the grid, and when they'd walked long enough that Hermione's feet screamed for relief from the rough stone, the soldiers pulled her to a stop.
One of their guards walked to the non-grid wall and entered something on a glass screen. The ground under Hermione and Riddle suddenly slid upward, pushing them toward the dark ceiling, grinding to a halt in front of one of the grid squares.
"Fold your arms over your chest, get in feet-first, and slide," commanded a soldier.
Riddle finally looked down at Hermione. She looked back at him. He looked strange without hair. It did not make him look more like the Voldemort she knew. It made him look a child, his dark eyes overlarge, his ears jutting out from the contours of his pale skull like handles to some strange trophy.
Then he crossed his arms, stepped into the circular opening, and pushed forward. He slid down the tube and out of sight.
Hermione peered after him. It looked steep. She dreaded where she would end up if she followed.
"Bloody go. We don't have all night," snapped a soldier from the ground.
She closed her eyes, folded her arms, and slipped in.
The rush was so steep she felt as if she might as well be falling. The frictionless material, at least, didn't tear at her skin as she'd anticipated it would. It felt as if she were sliding down ice, numb and cold, but it seemed to stretch slightly, definitely some flexible substance rather than the glass she'd thought it was.
The tube twined around like some awful roller-coaster ride. She tried to keep her eyes open, but it was only lashing rain and snatches of night sky and gray mist and the occasional glimpse of London's bones far beneath. It whirled and she clenched her eyes shut and fuck, she was so lightheaded, Merlin, how much blood had they taken?
The tube deposited her onto a plush surface. She curled up in a ball and realized she was crying now in earnest, hot useless tears melting out of her eyes and into her cupped hands. She didn't want to open her eyes. She didn't want to see what fresh horror awaited her. She was helpless and alone and this world didn't just disregard her, it actively hated her. It wanted her to get out, and she wanted to get out twice as much.
Of course, eventually, she had to open her eyes. She found herself in a glass cell, six by six feet, whose floor was some sort of stretchy, silvery, woven material. Riddle sat in a cell adjacent to hers, his knobby knees pulled up to his chest. In fact, the whole room was nothing but tiny divided glass sections, like they were rats in a case at the Apothecary waiting for adoption from some force above.
Hermione looked up. The ceiling was closing above her, the last sight of the tube vanishing behind it.
"What is this?" she whispered, curling up in a fashion similar to Riddle. Tiny holes, she was glad to see, had been bored in the glass wall, making conversation possible.
He simply shook his head.
"It's the Crown, of course," said a voice to Hermione's other side. She turned around. A woman sat on the other side of the glass wall, her incredibly long hair crow-black, her eyes cornflower-blue. What looked to have once been a robe sat in tatters at the edge of her cell. She sat unapologetic in her nakedness, her small breasts and concave stomach emphasizing the jutting lines of her ribs. Her hipbones were sharp as broken china.
"Where were you transferred from, then?" the woman said. "Uncooperative colony members, were you?"
"I … excuse me?"
"No? Vigilantes, maybe? Violent crime?" The woman's nose wrinkled.
"What's she asking?" Riddle's voice said from past Hermione.
"Got it. Pro-wizard propaganda," the woman said, snapping her fingers.
"I …" Hermione shook her head. "What did you do?"
"Unlicensed breeding," sighed the woman.
"Erm."
"Look, will you tell me why you're here or not?"
"I don't know," Hermione said helplessly.
The woman frowned. "What?"
"We … have amnesia," Hermione invented. "He and I. We woke up surrounded by soldiers with no idea what we'd done."
She blinked a few times. "Pensieve anywhere near by?"
"Nope."
"Well, then. Odd. And that's pretty unfortunate, to be frank, because you're never going to find out why you're here." The woman stretched out, yawning.
"Why didn't they shave your head?" Hermione asked.
"Oh, they did. When I got dropped in here four years ago."
Hermione stared. "What?" she said, although she'd heard perfectly clearly and she knew what this meant. She was honestly just hoping the woman would say, "Just kidding!"
No such good fortune. "Four years. Had my child four years ago. Serena." Her eyes softened, but hardened again almost instantly. "So you've forgotten what the Crown does," said the woman. "Sorry you had to end up in here with that sort of shit luck."
"What does it do, exactly?" said Riddle.
The woman pointed downward. "You're sitting on what it does."
Hermione examined the silvery mesh fibers, which – now that she looked more closely – seemed to glimmer with colors that darted away as soon as she could identify them. "What is it?"
"Nonstop collection. They take your blood, wire this up to your signature, and voila."
Hermione shook her head. "Sorry, I've no idea what that means."
The woman unleashed an impatient sigh. "They withdrew your blood, yes?"
"Yes."
"Then they'll extract from your DNA all the information about your magical signature they need to turn you into an energy source. They take it through the floor. They've probably already started collecting it, in fact." The woman waved one hand nonchalantly. "Muggles needed to solve their energy crisis, and they figured out we're little capsules of insane amounts of energy. I power around half of Frankfurt, myself. See, they take our wands, and the energy's got no place to go. They twist it all down this material, whatever it is, and pipe it across the world. Works as fast as nerves, the transmission."
Hermione's tongue had turned to ash, or stone.
"The various wizard colonies have something similar, but it only works at nighttime, when they're sleeping. It's a more passive sort of thing. In exchange for their cooperation, see, they're allowed to live in controlled environments, the colonies. It's not this sort of prison. Not as if it's a normal, happy life, though – they're watched every minute of every day." The woman arched a thin eyebrow. "Just like us, though there's not much to watch in the Crown. Welcome to living hell. We get one meal a day, thanks to global rationing, crop poisonings, species die-offs. And we've got three one-hour periods of natural light, one at dawn, one at midday, and one at sunset. It's you and your mind in here. No breaks. No getting out, ever. Get ready to waste away to nothingness for the good of mankind."
Hermione looked up, wondering if somehow she could climb out.
"The walls are slick as water, and it's a mile and a half drop if by some miracle you did pop over the top. Don't bother," said the woman. Her eyes finally softened. "I really am sorry. The world's not a nice place to wake up to, not these days. Not anymore." She lifted one hand. "By the way, I'm Glen."
"Hermione."
"Nice to meet you, Hermione."
Hermione swallowed and nodded. "I … thank you, for telling me." She glanced around at the other dozen or so cells in the room. Besides Glen and Riddle, there were four others. One – and her heart dropped to see it – had flame-red Weasley hair.
She turned back to Riddle, curling up into a tighter ball than ever, feeling like she needed to physically hold her body together or she might just burst with unfairness, with terror, or with despair. "Do you have a plan?" she whispered, hoping beyond all hope.
He gave one bitter laugh and met her eyes. The second of eye contact told her all she needed to know.
She slept only after thirty-six hours of futile, desperate thinking. Riddle held out longer. He went two and a half days, stubble dutifully sprouting into place to remind him that he was only human. Then he collapsed.
When he woke up, he wanted to kill something. More specifically, he wanted to kill everything. He was shocked that his sheer anger hadn't shattered all the glass.
When he had said as much, the boy in the cell next to him, Geoff, had helpfully supplied a reason: "They disable your magical signature, actually." The boy's brown hair was so long he had knotted it, and he had a full-fledged beard. He couldn't have been more than sixteen. "You can't even release uncontrolled bursts like you do when you're a kid. I mean, I guess you can, but it goes into the floortwine, like everything else."
Floortwine. Riddle had tried to untwine it, picking at the fibers with his fingernails, but to no avail. He'd also, upon realizing exactly what proportion of the day Geoff spent babbling, considered bashing his head against the wall until he simply died. The boy made Granger look like the conversational partner of the century. Overeager Hufflepuff to the core; Riddle could practically smell it.
Though he doubted Hogwarts was still open. According to his and Granger's assorted cellmates, everything had changed. Riddle had never concerned himself with Muggle politics, but he now knew that England's Prime Minister was a wizard-hating extremist, as were the President of the Far Ex-American Territories, the High Elector of China, the Minister of the Seaboard States, the Grand Officer of the Korean Confederation, and the Something-That-Sounded-Like-a-Thinly-Veiled-Euphem ism-for-Dictator of Russia. His personal opinion was that all these Muggle rulers should just be neatly assassinated, but Geoff had laughed at the suggestion, as if it wouldn't be perfectly simple.
"It wouldn't be simple. They're in the process of setting up satellite-broadcasted Anti-Apparition Wards," the girl in the corner, Em, had told him glumly. Judging by her short, shaggy hair, she'd been the most recent arrival before Riddle and Hermione.
"And what exactly does that mean?" Riddle said.
"No Apparating anywhere on the planet," Hermione murmured.
Riddle was almost certain he was going to go insane. This was insane, after all, completely so. The very notion that he'd fallen prey to Muggle contraptions stunned him, offended him so deeply that he was almost glad he had this much damn free time to adjust to it.
Here, he didn't quite feel like a person at all, let alone himself. He felt animalized. He shat in the corner while the others looked away, and the ground, whatever the hell it was, disposed of it somehow. He smelled godawful, as could be expected, given the total lack of hygienic materials. He mechanically ate the morsels that dropped into his cell. He was almost constantly hungry, as these idiot Muggles didn't quite seem to understand how much food an adult (well, practically-adult) male needed to eat in order to not wither away to nothingness.
Granger kept complaining of stomach pains. This brought to light an uncomfortable question: if illness happened to take one of them, would they just waste away and die right there, their remains disposed of by the floortwine like so much refuse? It was surely too much to ask for medical care.
A week passed. Peach fuzz grew onto his and Hermione's heads.
Riddle wondered incessantly what Bansherwold was planning. After a week and a half, he deigned to broach the subject with Granger.
"Yes, I've been thinking about it too," she said, her eyes serious. He much preferred her like this, quiet and subdued and intellectual, no flighty Gryffindor stupidity.
"All right. Thoughts?" he said.
"We don't know much for certain, of course," she said. "We know he brought about the discovery of the Wizarding World almost singlehandedly, but we don't know why."
"A peculiar kind of domination," Riddle said.
"Maybe not domination. Remember, Bansherwold went forward in time to –"
"Save his love, yes, that rubbish, I know." Riddle grimaced. "Look, since when have you known legends to be accurate?"
Hermione opened her mouth and most definitely did not mention the Deathly Hallows. She closed it again after four seconds of awkward silence.
"He said he wanted to be Time's governor," Riddle muttered, apparently not noticing – or perhaps not particularly caring about – the lapse in conversation. "Or that he already was, rather. He's said his method is achieved through anonymity, but dammit, how do you rule the world through anonymity?"
"It's always somewhat anonymous forces that have the greatest impact," Hermione said. "Love is one of them, in a way. If – ow." She gripped her stomach.
His eyes fell dispassionately to the area between her ribs. "How long has that been happening now?"
"Since we bloody got here," she said, grimacing, massaging her abdomen. "I thought it was just hunger pangs, and then I thought it was … well, you know, cramps, but it's not. You know, maybe it's actually something about this place."
"What are you expecting?"
"I don't know."
"Maybe the floor will magically open due to your gastronomical inabilities," Riddle said tonelessly.
"You're hysterical," Hermione shot back, the deepest of scowls on her face. "Anyway, if Bansherwold is thinking global control, which world does he want to take over? He could have his pick of them, couldn't he? He could want to rule the Earth in year 3400, for goodness' sake, and do it, I'm sure." She sighed, closing her eyes. "But honestly, given his proclivity to jump timelines like he's using the bloody Floo Network, I can't really imagine we're here for anything more than detainment while Bansherwold continues whatever the hell it is that he's doing."
"Which is …?"
"Well, that's the question, isn't it?" Hermione said softly. "As well as, if he's going to get us out of here at all, which I assume he is, why do it later rather than now? Why's he leaving us to rot?"
Riddle gritted his teeth and cracked his knuckles and made any number of other motions to indicate his displeasure that did not actually help the situation in the least.
Hermione closed her eyes, kneading her forehead. The picture of the young Bansherwold's face sprang into her mind, and his voice reminded, Patience, Hermione Granger, is a virtue.
Two and a half weeks. He was getting madder. She was getting quieter. He was starting to rage inwardly without cessation. She sat and stared at nothing a lot of the time.
Glen sang, sometimes. She had a nice voice.
Geoff sang, sometimes, too. His singing voice sounded something like a House Elf having a seizure.
All Tom and Hermione ever did was think.
He'd blown up at her several times for having lost him his wand. She'd refuted his argument heatedly and soundly – so soundly, in fact, that he found himself shifting the blame almost entirely to the Muggle soldiers they'd encountered that day. Still, he nursed the loss of the wand as someone else might nurse the loss of a friend. Lucky, then, that he did not have those.
Hermione, on the other hand, sometimes stared into the glass at night and saw a hint of her own reflection and imagined Ron and Harry there with her. Sometimes she thought the stomach pains were loneliness, pure and simple.
She thought about anonymity quite a bit. "First," Bansherwold had said, "you have to be comfortable with anonymity." Was this all some sort of cruel, protracted lesson? Nothing better for an inflated ego than the world locking you away and thoroughly ignoring you.
Hermione had always been comfortable with anonymity. At school as a young girl, she'd literally hid behind stacks of books on many an occasion, and not with any secret desire that someone might seek her out, either. These hiding-places were bliss, partially because young children were often crueler than they had any right to be, but also because she'd found even then that what she put into her mind was more important than what was waiting for her in the social world, whether that was a blank stare, an active dislike, or a nickname of Bucktooth or Bush-head.
"Then," he'd said, "you have to fall in love with it."
To a certain extent, Hermione thought she'd fulfilled that particular criterion at Hogwarts. She'd certainly brought her desire for aloneness to Hogwarts. Of course, perhaps by that point she'd learned to want what she had; perhaps the world had trained her to want to be alone, given that no other option had ever presented itself. But she privately thought it was more than that. Her refuge through the years was always solitude, no matter how much she'd grown to love being around Harry, Ron, Neville, Ginny, and the rest. She was still her best version of herself around a book rather than around a person. A book could not pick you apart fault from fault. A book could not stare at you expectantly while you fumbled for the right words and found only the wrong ones. A book was unconditionally loving.
Also, by the end of fourth year, Hermione didn't think she could have been sicker of fame. It had nearly lost her Molly Weasley's respect. She would have been perfectly happy to have been anonymous as Victor's date to the Yule Ball; it certainly would've helped prevent yet another fight with Ron, and she hadn't needed the stupid event to make a connection with the intelligent, somewhat bashful Quidditch star. After that year, the scraps of quiet time to herself that she'd found had become even more valuable.
But the last … "Then you have to become it."
How could anyone become anonymous down to that truest, deepest part of themselves where magic lived?
Hermione's feet were cold and bare and buried to the ankles in dirt.
She stood outside amid the dusk. Her whole body shook. She was naked. She was always naked in dreams, these days. The wind drew its spidery fingers down her back.
She was supposed to knock on the door. She wanted to knock on the door. She reached out for the door …
One knock and she doubled over.
A second knock and she gasped.
A third knock and she clawed back into consciousness, her stomach tearing open with pain, her mouth gaping wide and emitting the most horrible sound that had ever come from her, somewhere between a retch and a scream and a desperate "HELP" –
"Granger!" said Riddle, his hands flat against the glass. "What's –"
Her hands pressed against her stomach, she was so thin, too thin, her stomach was bursting and twisting and then her hand found something hard right through the skin, a lump buried in her abdomen, faint but noticeable, and she looked up at Riddle with agony and with horror.
"It's there," she whispered, and she nearly blacked out as it throbbed there in her stomach.
Bansherwold hadn't created the Villinger's Bond to himself. He'd reforged it to her.
They'd taken her clothes and the Timeglass had reappeared on her person the most permanent way it could.
She clutched at it and a whining noise carded through the air, shredding it like knives, but something was different this time, because the pain was receding, for once, not growing stronger, and Hermione huddled up in a ball and wanted to disappear and somehow her mind was fixated on a shack in the middle of a field and Alengurd Bansherwold saying, "Shame we missed 2057," and then warmth exploded through her body and she was catapulting backward and upward and landing flat on her back on a sofa in a place she had last seen completely destroyed.
Tom Marvolo Riddle, on the other hand, was sitting in his glass cell, staring, horrified, at the spot where she'd been.
And he was alone. Completely alone. There was no one who cared who he was, no one who cared what he had been, and no one who cared what he would be.
"Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone."
- Alan Lightman