GREETINGS ALL HUMANS. Let us forge forth once more.
Thanks to reviewers: Friendly review, Inkfalls, Guest, momothelemur, DevineInk, Sekowari, Poppyxxxx, Will of the Fire, TheLightningScar, panda1222, Nytefyre, wintersalad, elle, ljoan, mh21, love-warmth-life, another Guest, uleanblue, MissMally, another Guest, The oddest thing, marana1, murtagh799, GinnyRules, Cellar, Anom, Ember Nickel, freebird4, Tanzanite Queen, aaand Lost O'Fallon Girl. Were I the Muggle dictator of a dystopian future, I would totally not throw you guys in cells and use you as energy sources. All my love.
Reading back over uploads of recent chapters, I keep noticing bits where FFnet keeps jamming italicized words into regular words, even though it didn't show up like that in the doc manager. The fuck, FFnet. The fuck. (I promise my space bar isn't broken.)
xoxo,
Speech
"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
- Edgar Allen Poe
They reappeared in the side room that housed the fireplace. Tom gasped in a breath, straightened up, and pushed his hair back from his forehead. Merlin, he wished that experience would get less unpleasant.
"When's this?" Granger asked, similarly out-of-breath.
"The future," Bansherwold said, helpfully. He nodded at the door to the Lords Chamber. "Make yourselves presentable, we've got to go back in there in a moment."
"Why?" Tom said.
Bansherwold turned a cold gaze on him. Tom hardened his own gaze to match. He wasn't sure why, but Bansherwold seemed to have a new animosity toward him that hadn't been present before Tom's time in the Crown. Before, he'd felt like a pawn. Now he felt like an enemy.
He preferred it this way. Animosity, at least, meant respect.
"You'll see," Bansherwold said stiffly.
Granger let out a small noise of protest. Bansherwold glanced toward the girl, his apparent hostility softening. "Sorry," he said. "But the more you two ask unnecessary questions, the more I have to give you that answer."
Tom's eyes narrowed. Why was Granger getting a proper response? Why was Bansherwold treating them differently?
But … suddenly, he remembered their appearance in the Crown. A joint appearance.
Granger hadn't gone over to his side, had she? Tom didn't think she had the guile for that, much less the motive. She still needed to get back to her proper time.
Although she could be trying to satisfy Bansherwold's wishes as fast as possible in order to convince him to return her. It would explain why she had the Timeglass. Why Bansherwold sometimes gave her that look, an brief, intense study, his eyes glittering in a way that seemed more than appreciation …
Hang on. Tom's jaw clenched. Potentially, when Granger vanished, she could have been gone a long while, possibly ten months or longer. If she'd been with Bansherwold the whole time, what if she'd more than formed an alliance with him? What if she'd done something ridiculous like develop feelings for him?
Tom had worked himself into a murderous rage. The last thing he needed was his only ally to be a new enemy.
Bansherwold took out his wand and flicked it at the shimmering screen on the wall of the room. A picture appeared, a crystal-clear image of what was happening in the Lords Chamber.
The chamber had had a redecoration. More chairs filled up the room's central, sunken area, hiding the faded carpet entirely. A platform stood at the head of the room, now – a platform that wore a glossy banner that read, "10 YEARS' PEACE." The whole room, seats along the wall and all, was packed with bodies, silent spectators listening to the speech being made by the man at the podium.
"… seven years now, working together, the WNMC has aimed to crack down on not only Dark Magic, but anti-magic hate crimes, so that both non-magical and magical communities can live without fear. Strides have been made for betterment of both sides of the spectrum: The education of non-magic schoolchildren has been expanded to include the basics of what magic can do, the history of Wizarding society, and its impact. The education of Wizarding schoolchildren, in turn, has been expanded to include technological education, including usages of the internet, phone, television, livestreaming, and postcapping. They are also taught about the danger of anti-magic technology, which, unfortunately, pervades the black market today, despite its governmental relegation to Special Forces units exclusively.
"In other words, we're moving to combat ignorance. The discrepancy between our two cultures is, admittedly, a tremendous gulf to bridge, but we of the WNMC are working our hardest to bring our continents closer together."
The man at the podium smiled. "Today, Minister of Magic Lucy Weasley and I welcome you to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Great Détente. In this very room, my predecessor Allan Banks was revealed to be a wizard himself, therefore forcing our country – and the world – to address the true source of all the problems we'd made. It was later discovered that Banks had been using a dangerous type of Dark Magic to control the minds of members of Parliament. But when Banks tried to turn on the President of the F.E.A.T., an unknown wizard stepped up to save the President's life. This wizard, although he vanished shortly thereafter, took those first courageous steps toward showing the world what a great good magic could be, if it's in the right hands."
The man lifted his hand, and a picture of Tom Riddle's face appeared on the silvery banner, caught mid-duel, fiercely lit by the white glow of a spell. Something caught in Riddle's throat. Courageous. A great good. He almost was like he was back at school again, where everyone believed him a saint. It was thoroughly surreal.
"Another wizard, who also disappeared, used deadly force to stop Banks. It was then that two witches arrived on the scene. You may know them: Lily Potter and Rose Weasley." The man's smile faded. He raised a hand, and Lily and Rose's faces appeared on the fluttering banner. "Tragically, just four months after the famous London Peace Talks that ensued, Ms. Potter and Ms. Weasley were assassinated. These joint heads of Merlin's Order's European Branch were shot to death when they traveled to Cairo to attend an international peace conference. We still remember their dedication and sacrifice, and strive to fulfill the wish they had of a world with cooperation between our societies. Their deaths brought together Wizarding and non-magic communities in a collective grief that we still feel today."
Riddle noticed movement beside him. He glanced down at Hermione. She was silently crying, her shoulders shaking violently. What on earth? How could she cry over people she'd only known for a day? That seemed absurd, even by the standards of pathetically emotional Gryffindors.
Then Bansherwold placed an arm over her shoulders. Riddle's disbelief curdled into a mixture of disgust and outrage. He glared at Bansherwold over Hermione's head. Logically, he had no right to comfort her. If it weren't for him, the girl wouldn't even know any of this.
"We'd like to give a special thanks today to the self-named Mudblood Collective," the man at the podium said, "an organization that has stepped up with unending patience and immeasurable courage over the last several years to help negotiate the tenuous link between Non-Magic and Wizarding peoples. The heads of the M.C. – the non-magic Thea Anderson, the Muggleborn Elena Dursley, and the wizard Teddy Lupin – received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2071, making Ms. Dursley and Mr. Lupin the first Wizarding recipients of the prize."
"Come on," Bansherwold said, moving toward the door to the Chamber.
"What?" Granger said. "But – but he hasn't finished."
"Now."
Riddle gritted his teeth, but strode toward the door. He expected Bansherwold to open it slightly and for them to slip into the Lords Chamber unobtrusively, but instead, Bansherwold flung it wide before them, framing their entrance with unignorable drama.
Heads turned. A few at first, and then a stream of muttering spread, and then a thousand faces turned Riddle's way in what felt like his millionth Bansherwold-induced public appearance. Before the Timeglass, he'd made it a point to keep under the radar. That was the way to lay groundwork for future plans, after all; he had no experience with actual fame, except the word-of-mouth fame that Hogwarts had afforded him.
Now the Prime Minister faltered in his speech. His eyes widened.
Then everything was silent.
A swarm of machines wearing blinking red lights swiveled their way.
Tom Riddle had a knighthood.
The three of them were now Sir Tom Riddle, Dame Hermione Granger, and Sir Alengurd Bansherwold. They'd been interrogated – well, "interviewed," but frankly Riddle found the inane babbling as agonizing as the Cruciatus – by so many damn Muggles that they were all starting to look the same.
Of course, the knighthoods weren't actually under their names. They'd been written down as Sir Fred Perkins, Dame Penelope Clearwater, and Sir Aldous Benfry.
Still. It was a strange feeling, to have a national honor bestowed on him. Riddle, having grown up around Muggles, knew the legends of knights. He'd even self-indulgently nicknamed his band of followers the Knights of Walpurgis, in an ironic spin on Walpurgis Night, a pagan Muggle festival of witch congregation. But he'd never imagined doing anything good for the country that might yield knighthood. Who knew that wanting revenge on the batty old Gurdy Bansherwold would make him internationally renowned? Maybe he should engage in public dueling more often.
The three of them were staying in a flat near Diagon Alley. Most of the alley had stayed relatively intact over the decades, although here and there, signs of technological influence poked through. A glass screen with a Wizarding broadcast from Portus Network here, a dangling metal web that emitted blaring Wizard Rap there...
Riddle didn't quite know how to feel about technology. It stemmed from Muggles, so naturally, he'd assumed it was useless at first … but the sorts of technology he was seeing here seemed to elevate Muggles practically to the abilities of magic. The weapons he'd seen used were – dare he even think it – impressive. About the only thing Muggles had seemed to keep rudimentary were their instruments of torture. It pleased Riddle to see that Dark Magic was still vastly superior in that aspect.
What most unsettled him, indubitably, was the fact that Muggles could control a wizard with their science, using only a piece of hair or skin. It was like they were making potions without any magical ingredients. It didn't even seem like it should have been possible.
What with their flying vehicles – much safer-feeling than brooms, frankly – and their communications systems, this "internet" and their "uplinking" and their "livecasts," Riddle felt uneasy. With their bombs and guns and charmshock suits, their weaponized robots, Riddle felt unnerved.
Muggles had turned from sheep into dragons.
On top of that, Riddle could still feel a lingering, shaky, agitated afterthought of his descent into insanity. It rubbed at the back of his brain, pushing against the grain of his mind, forcing him to hold onto his sense of self tight like a man clutching to the edge of a cliff. Once, his control had slipped, and the world fractured, turning into a blare of pictures and sensations. He masked it well, of course, but the moment had horrified him, a low point in a series of stresses: he constantly felt irritable, he couldn't focus properly, and every time he was about to go to sleep, he experienced a terrible sensation of plummeting. Then he could do nothing but lie there, rigid as a carving, staring at the ceiling and reminding himself he was sane.
The reminder seemed fruitless, sometimes. Other times, it seemed patently false.
They settled in. They were visited by important people in both the Wizarding and Muggle communities. Riddle stayed mostly silent. They faked normalcy.
Four days after they arrived, Riddle sat in the flat's kitchen, eating breakfast cautiously. Caution was necessary: his body was still unused to regular food, and every so often, in the middle of meals, his stomach lurched, and he felt as if he might regurgitate it all. Bansherwold seemed to find this very funny. Granger, less so.
In fact, the girl seemed to be going about helping his recovery somewhat, in ways that were astoundingly unobtrusive. He hadn't thought she had it in her to be anything but obtrusive, frankly. Beside his bed, though, he'd found clothes that had been taken in to fit his stick-skinny frame and a convenient cup of Dreamless Draught, and … well, it had to be her.
He hadn't made any sort of gesture of gratitude. She didn't seem to expect one.
He almost enjoyed it. After all, he missed being waited on hand and foot by the small band of Slytherins who were so terrified of him at school. Granger's actions were a meager replacement, but they sufficed.
It felt strange, though. She wasn't doing it out of fear. She wasn't doing it to flatter him, to impress him, or to try and get in his good graces. The fact that her helping him seemed to be entirely independent of anything actually involving him took Riddle aback a bit every time he thought about it. It was like she was doing it for herself. Either that, or she had some sort of vested interest in his physical restoration, although he'd tried thinking of a motive and had come up empty-handed.
Maybe she was just doing it to feel good about herself. That seemed to be how altruism worked.
Riddle took another bite of the bland porridge – a safe food for the most part – and turned the page in the Daily Prophet. He found himself in the midst of wedding announcements, and was about to flip through when something caught his eye: one Ariadne Goyle was marrying a man named Petey Stebbins. A Mudblood.
Riddle was still staring at the page, riveted in horror, when Bansherwold walked into the room.
"Something wrong?" he said airily, eyeing Riddle's expression of total revulsion.
Riddle folded the Prophet shut, then folded it about five more times and crumpled it for good measure. "Yes," he said. "Another pureblood line polluted."
"Oh?" Bansherwold said mildly, filling the kettle. "Must be the Goyles."
"Must be?"
"Well, they're the only ones left."
Riddle turned around in his chair to stare at Bansherwold. "What?"
"Well, yes. If you'd like me to count them off for you, I can, but it was practically inevitable, you realize. After the Malfoy boy married the Potter girl – her grandmother was a Muggleborn; a Malfoy marrying her was somewhat of a landmark – it set an example for the other pureblood lines." Bansherwold set the kettle on the stove and turned around.
"And none are left that are clean? None?" Riddle said.
"Wizarding Britain is a small place," Bansherwold said, coldness starting to creep into his voice. "This moment has been on its way for a century, Riddle, since the withering and decomposition of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black."
"What about the rest of the world?"
"Strolling down the path to the same result. Aided and abetted by Muggles' knowledge of wizards."
Riddle's skin itched with disgust. "Repulsive," he spat, throwing the Prophet down on the table.
Bansherwold's answering gaze was pure derision. "Your thickheadedness is remarkable."
For a second, Riddle almost wondered if he'd heard him correctly. Then his wand was in his hand. "Would you like to repeat that?"
"Your thickheadedness. Is. Remarkable."
Cold fury bolted through Riddle. He gripped the anger hard in his fists. In one fluid movement, he stood, whirled around, and lashed out with his wand.
The blue stream of light dissipated in front of Bansherwold, who hadn't even bothered to draw his own wand.
"Seems you've forgotten I'm immune to your little wand-waving thing," Bansherwold said, deadpan.
Riddle felt himself heating up like a poker in a fire. He lifted his wand again, preparing to bring the flat crashing around Bansherwold's bloody ears – but then Bansherwold drew his wand, and Riddle found himself blocking attacks left and right.
It was a quick fight, and not much of a fight at that. Offense had always been Riddle's best defense, and with that rendered null, Bansherwold had Riddle disarmed within five minutes.
"What in Merlin's name is going on here?" said an angry voice from the doorway.
Riddle and Bansherwold turned as one to look at Hermione. Her hands were on her hips, her short hair scrambled, her eyes blazing with rage. "I was asleep," she said. "What on earth are you fighting about at this hour?"
"Blood status," said Bansherwold stiffly.
A brief pause. Granger seemed to wake up a little. "What about it?" she said.
"The fact that pureblood lines have been sullied by the spawn of Muggles," Riddle said curtly.
He'd seen her angry before, and honestly, it had been far more impressive when her hair had been intact. These downy chestnut curls atop her head made her look somewhat boyish as her rage drew her back up ramrod-straight.
"You are disgusting," she said, her voice tightly coiled, a spring waiting to pop up. Part of him almost admired her restraint. Better than some obnoxious Gryffindor-ish screaming session, in any case.
"Don't tell me you're a sympathizer," he said, though of course, if she was in the house of blood traitors and Muggle-lovers, he supposed he should hardly expect differently. "Or worse," he said coldly. "Perhaps you've a touch of dirty blood yourself, muddying up your –"
A blast of agony slammed into him, and he jerked backward. The small of his back met the kitchen table, and he found himself folding backward onto it, twitching and shuddering as if electrocuted. The pain originated deep in his mind, a relentless wave that dragged his thoughts every which way until they dissipated entirely.
The thoughtlessness was almost a relief. In the blind pain, resistance was useless. He didn't have to hold back the insanity. He expended only the effort to keep his vocal cords silent.
A voice pressed against the current of the pain, a cold demand. "What are you, then?" Bansherwold's voice said.
Riddle said nothing. As the effects of the curse faded and his muscles went slack, he found himself sliding from the table, slumping to the floor.
Riddle ended up on his knees somehow, his fists balled, his head tilted up defiantly. A hideous snarl tangled his features, his hair dislodged from its customary wave.
"What are you?" Bansherwold demanded, slamming Riddle's wand down onto the counter behind him. He approached and placed the tip of his own wand – dark, slender as a finger bone, probably oak – to Riddle's temple.
"Crucio," Bansherwold said, and Riddle heard, as if from a mile away, the distant intake of Granger's breath. Then he knew nothing at all. The sideways motion of his body, the crash of his flesh to cold floor, made not the tiniest indentation on the flood of fire that rushed his threshold of sensation. If his nerve endings were needles on a pine tree, he'd been set alight, made a live inferno. Every cubic centimeter of his flesh was given the most meticulous shredding treatment by a finely honed knife.
"What are you?" Bansherwold said, his voice hard and loud and inches from Riddle's ear.
Riddle gave no answer.
"Crucio."
Riddle's infallible pride warred with his rock-hard sense of self-preservation. The war continued for 458 interminable seconds of torture before self-preservation won out, although by that point it was hardly a conscious choice.
"HALF-BLOOD!" he screamed. The curse broke.
A second's respite, an eternity of bliss.
"What are you?" Bansherwold said, more quietly, his wandtip lightly resting against Riddle's slick forehead.
"Half-blood," Riddle slurred.
"And how am I defeating you?"
Riddle's muscles were slack in the wake of the curse's effects. He was soaked right through with sweat. His tongue feebly dipped to graze his lip, where he'd bitten hard enough to split skin. He could not find anything appropriately scathing to say in response. Even the notion of finding an intelligent response taxed him.
That was apparently acceptable. Bansherwold gave his own answer, getting back to his feet: "Because I acknowledge Muggle ingenuity. Do you know how hard they work, Riddle? Do you know anything of their long centuries of freezing and starving and dying, battling against an unforgiving world, fighting tooth and nail for life? Do you know what they had to do in order to reach where they are now? Imagine if magic had never found you. Imagine if you were never this lucky."
And at that, Riddle could not help but emit a pained gasp of laughter. "Lucky?"
"LOOK AT YOU!" Bansherwold bellowed, whirling on his heel. His tanned skin was flushed beet-red, his teeth bared. His omnipresent composure was nowhere to be found. He hardly even looked like the same person. "Intelligence, talent, looks, charisma; why do you think you rose to fame? You are not better than Muggles, Riddle: you are luckier. And I? I am not luckier than you. I'm certainly not more naturally gifted. I am smarter, by the sheer fact that I'm not blind to the truth. And if you want to survive, you'll open your bloody eyes. You'll stop being an idiot and start appreciating the very real circumstances you're facing, wherein your luck is finally – finally! – not enough for you to get a leg up on the people you hate so broadly and irrationally."
Bansherwold strode toward the door, but stopped right as he reached Hermione. He shook his head, seemingly disgusted, and turned back to look down at Riddle. "Since you forgot, let me remind you: you are a Muggle to me. Your magic is nothing to me, thanks to my use of Muggle science alongside wizardry. Looks as if Muggles don't taint magic after all – they can make it stronger. Strong enough to defeat you."
Riddle shook, partly from the physical aftermath of the Cruciatus, partly because the words seemed to have a physical force behind them, a jab to the throat. He found it hard to breathe for a second.
"Just so we're clear on the gravity of what I'm suggesting …" Bansherwold reached into his robes and drew out a vial of some clear liquid. "Here. Something that could make you a Muggle for good."
Icy coldness spread through Riddle's body.
A cure for magic. What the elder Bansherwold had threatened, wheezing, under the Eiffel Tower, decades back …
Then something took him quite by surprise.
Granger lunged forward and struck Bansherwold's hand with her own. The vial flew from his grip and hit the floor, breaking instantly. The clear liquid fizzled, shimmered a clear blue, and congealed.
Bansherwold looked at Granger with the most baffled sort of betrayal in his eyes. She pursed her lips, pure determination on her face. "No one should ever have that kind of power," she said. "And Riddle needs his magic for when he returns to his time. I won't let you change that. I can't."
Bansherwold shook his head, his face slowly settling back into its usual composure. "Sorry," he said, "but that's exactly the power of law enforcement these days, now that wizards have learned to respect science. Why would we need Azkaban when we can simply cure a wizard of the power he doesn't deserve?" He shot Riddle a hard look.
"It shouldn't be up to us to decide who deserves their natural ability," Hermione said, folding her arms. "Not you, me, or a jury. That's barbarism. It's like cutting someone's tongue out because the words they're saying don't fit your ideal."
"If the words they're saying are killing people," Bansherwold said snidely, "perhaps the world could use a little tongue-cutting."
Granger bit her lip.
"Granger's right," Riddle said, the words tasting somewhat sour. His voice was curt and formal, a class presentation, a public statement. "The removal of magic is entirely barbaric. It's like cutting out a wizard's soul." A soul that should be theirs to change and tear and entomb as they will. "And I'll mention that you seem awfully comfortable playing God, Bansherwold – as you have since the beginning of this mess. For someone who preaches anonymity, your self-importance is stunning."
Bansherwold considered him for a second, cocking his head. "It's not about that. Perhaps you will never understand," he said. The words were distant. "And you know nothing about me."
Riddle forced himself not to stride forward and slap the man across the face.
"Did you know," Bansherwold said, "that Muggles can transmit images of themselves across the globe? It's practically as good as Apparition, and they've been closing in on outright teleportation for years. They've been to the moon, to Mars, out into space, without wizardry. Imagine them with it." He turned on his heel, considered Hermione for a moment, and said, "Now, if you pair will excuse me, I have somewhere to be."
He strode out and shut the door behind him.
Silence rang through the kitchen.
Hermione half-turned away, as if in some childish attempt to preserve his dignity. Riddle maneuvered himself in a generally upward direction, brushed himself off. His thighs felt made from gelatin, his calves from sand. He had to lean against the table to keep from ending up where he'd started.
Both his and Hermione's eyes fixed on the blue congealed fluid lying on the floor. The implications of what that potion could have achieved seemed to fill up the room, those implications blurry and abrasive as white noise. Repulsion coursed through Riddle's veins.
Hermione cleared her throat awkwardly. Looking at the girl's torn expression, Riddle could tell she had as many problems with what had just occurred as he did, though he guessed they were an entirely different set.
"Are you all right?" she said, carefully not meeting his eyes.
"Fine," he said curtly.
"Because that was completely …"
"Unprovoked?"
"I wouldn't say that. I was thinking disproportionate."
Riddle sat on the table, steepling his fingers back against the wood. He tilted his head up to the ceiling, drew a deep breath through his nostrils, and closed his eyes.
He didn't want to admit Bansherwold was right about anything. Even the notion of Muggles not being an inferior species was still too alien for Riddle to fathom. He'd grown up with it as a fundamental constant, looking around at the weaklings that populated the orphanage, the vicious animals that led the place and that directed his hellhole of a primary school.
Yet he supposed his central philosophy could remain unchanged, even if Muggles did shift slightly in orbit around its sun: there is only power, and those too weak to seek it. So Muggles had power, now; had the strength to seek it. So they had evolved into something more, something civilized.
Perhaps these weren't Muggles at all, but a new race.
Still, though, they lacked magic. They lacked the one true life blood, the soul. How could he reconcile that with power, with worth? And if he stirred Mudbloods into the mix, how fine did the line become between this futuristic semi-Muggle and those worth acknowledging?
That said, he'd known from the beginning that not all power was the right type of power. Dumbledore's light magic, for instance, had been phenomenally powerful in its own right. Yet Riddle had nothing but derision for the man, because Dumbledore could have reached greater heights had he gone the path of Dark magic. And yet he'd shunned it.
But Muggle power …
Muggle power wasn't light. Muggle power was hard, cold, steel. Muggle power was cruel and electric and unforgiving – good God, did he know that all too well. Muggle power sought self-actualization at any cost, tearing unwisely and eagerly through barriers to reach new heights. Tearing through atmospheres. Tearing through the natural world.
Muggle power, he realized with something close to horror, was something very Slytherin indeed.
"What are you thinking?" said Granger's voice. When he opened his eyes, she was standing in front of him, holding his wand out to him.
After a moment, he took it from her and tucked it into his pocket. "Things have changed," he said hoarsely.
"I agree."
"Here, and outside."
"Yes." Granger cast a glance out the window. "I never expected it would last," she said quietly. "Part of me knew the magical world couldn't live in its own private idyll forever. There's simply too much. And this planet is too small, you know. Too small by half."
Riddle appraised her. Her stubborn mouth, lips pursed, eyes thick with thoughts as if clouded with cotton.
"You still want to return home, don't you?" he asked.
Her eyes snapped back onto him with clear suspicion. "What? Yes, of course," she said, a little too quickly.
"There's nothing waiting for me back there," he said, before he realized words were coming from his lips. The instant the sentence spilled out, he wished he could rope it back in, but she was already visibly digesting it.
Eventually, her response: "What?"
"There is only death back there. I die. That was not …" He gritted his teeth. "Not part of the plan."
She shook her head, looking horrified. "Riddle, you have to go back. You have to! You not returning, it – it would change everything. It –"
"I know that!" he snapped. "Don't you think I know that? Idiot girl."
She looked hurt. He ran a hand through his hair, let out a measured breath, and fixed his gaze on the ceiling. The problem was that he knew he had to return. It had already happened. He knew it would occur eventually … it simply had to.
But 1945 was dissociated from him, now, a written tablet of histories that he had transcended. It was not his time. He did not know if he had a time. He did not know where he would rather go, what he would rather do, when he would rather end up.
If his return was inevitable, though, he could at least go on his own terms. He would not come quietly, return silently into the embrace of a life that would end in ruination.
"I know I have to go back," he said, his words dark with bitter resignation. By the time he dropped his gaze back down to her, wary concern had spiderwebbed across her expression, a delicate clinging layer. And he wondered – for what seemed like the hundredth time – why the slightest bit of concern might manifest in her on his behalf.
Suddenly, violently, he wondered what it would be like to thread his fingers through her downy curls and pull. Move her head back slowly. Control her every moment. Make marks on her skin with his nails and teeth. Hear her frank logical superior voice strangled down to a wordless moan, a frustrated sound that she could not stop herself from making.
He looked away from her, his jaw tightening. "Do you still have the Timeglass?"
"Yes," she said.
"Then I think it's time we started making plans of our own," he said quietly.
She nodded.
"I know what you're planning," said a voice in the doorway.
Hermione looked up from her book. She was reading about her past exploits, those before May 1998. She found it quite interesting which pieces had been sensationalized and highlighted, as opposed to which had simply faded. This History of Three: the Lives of Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger certainly didn't describe with any adequacy the agonizing length of the time they'd roamed through the forest, terrified and with hardly even a plan.
"Er," she said. Alen was leaning in the doorway, looking tired. His hair was rumpled, his sleeves pushed to his elbows. "Sorry?"
"I know you're planning microapplication of a segmented portion of the Timeglass's power on a reconstructed example of the megaverse, in an attempt to try gaining control over the Timeglass' power, so you won't need me to return you to your proper times."
Her mouth slowly dipped open.
She and Riddle had planned painstakingly for three hours to come up with that, to make sure they could keep it secret from Alen, to ensure they could conceal any trace of their experiments …
The words of Hermione's elder self echoed in her memory. A man who will always – always – be one step ahead of you.
If that was true – if he knew everything that would happen – if he really was playing God –
"What are you bloody doing here?" Hermione burst out, indignance catapulting her out of her comfortable reading chair. "Why are you faffing about with us like this? Merlin, if you already know everything that's happened, everything that's going to happen –"
"But I don't," he said quietly. "Only general things. Only up to a time."
She stopped to chew on that for a second. So there were limits. That was something; that was a start. "Up to 'a time'? What time?"
"Ahead. Far ahead."
Hermione nearly tore her hair in frustration. "What's so important about that specific time?"
"I'm hoping you'll find out," he said, his voice softening in counterpoint to her rising anger.
"Then why don't we just go there?" she said, slamming her book shut and tossing it onto the chair. She strode up to Alen, folded her sleeve over her hand, and yanked the Timeglass out of her pocket. "Why don't we go there right now and we'll just bloody see if I find out?"
"Because I'm afraid," Alen replied, "and sometimes it is easier to delay than to face a terrifying possibility."
Hermione's mind tore the words apart, searching for their meaning. Afraid for her? For himself? Of her? Of himself? Of what she might learn, what she might "find out"?
"Do you want to go back to 1998?" he said.
"What sort of question is that?" Hermione said, but for the second time that day, she found herself at a disconnect from the proper sentiment of longing. She felt defensive, felt like she needed to reiterate to herself a list of reasons to return. "Yes, of course."
"Why?"
"My friends," she said, lowering the Timeglass. "My parents."
But beyond that, she found she had not much of an answer.
Hermione was good at nothing if not research. She'd learned that here in 2075, House Elf rights were practically assumed, werewolves were socially assimilated – with governmental facilities put in place especially for their condition – and even vampires, centaurs, and other such aloof magical species had special consults for every governmental stipulation that involved them. Justice was served. Even the bigotry of the Ancient and Noble Houses had all but dissipated; ancestry remained a point of pride but was no longer a herald for a pureblood supremacy complex. How could she go back to before, knowing that less than a century afterward, the issues she sought to rectify would evaporate, leaving little more than a shadow in their wake?
Part of her ached to live in this world, where the moniker "Mudblood" was truly a badge of pride just as she'd always tried to wear it. This progressive world, where she could seek knowledge in a society that endorsed budding cooperation between science and magic. This world, where she could help fight centuries of misconceptions between wizardkind and Mugglekind, a far bigger fight than she'd ever dreamed of championing back home.
And another part of her longed to see what lay ahead. All that she loved about the magical world – all the newness that came from learning, from knowing – it could develop a hundredfold. Who knew the possibilities?
Yes: her curiosity for the far future finally stirred, a great oceanic lurch in her chest, and the sensation burned, raw, saline, massive. Worse, she knew what she wanted was well and truly irrelevant. She knew her duty; she knew she had to return.
Unless there was a way …
No. She could not even think it. Of all magics, time travel could go the most disastrously wrong. She would return home and she would like it.
Except she didn't like the idea. Not fully. Not anymore.
"I'm sorry," Alen said suddenly. The thoughts raging in her head settled down to a busy stir.
She tilted her head, frowning at him. "For what?"
"For having tortured Riddle."
"Oh. I …" Hermione swallowed. Bearing witness to the torture had bothered her on more levels than she had expected, specifically the level of her mind that somehow had grown to trust Alen. For all that he yanked them around, constantly told them what to do, and concealed the truth, he'd never hurt them. Not really.
Well, he'd never hurt her. Leaving Riddle in the Crown … and now this?
She'd known he was a Dark wizard in theory, but he didn't seem Dark in actuality. He seemed murky. Unclear waters. This seemed to dye them a shade blacker.
On another level entirely, she'd been rooted, watching Riddle jerk there on the floor like the spider had jerked in Mad-Eye Moody's fourth year demonstration. She knew the pain he'd gone through, and yet he hadn't let out a single sound. She'd been horrified, riveted, fascinated by his self-control.
She'd wanted it to stop. She hadn't wanted him to be in pain, and that in itself surprised Hermione. Vengeance was a dish she enjoyed, on special occasions; justice, certainly … but this? She had looked at Lord Voldemort's agony and felt nauseated, and had wanted nothing more than for it to end.
She felt like she might be developing some sort of attachment to the boy Dark Lord, in his current state. Adrift, like she was. Frightened and angry, like she was. Helpless.
"It was awful," she said, finally. "You shouldn't have done it."
"I don't tolerate insults to my heritage."
"But there's a reason those curses are Unforgivables."
"Unforgivable by whom? His forgiveness and your forgiveness are two very different things."
"How so?"
One corner of his mouth drew up. "I care about yours."
She let out an inadvertent chuckle. The atmosphere lightened for a second, but then Alen said, "And I am also sorry, Hermione, for my own cowardice. For putting you through … just, in hopes that it all might …" He shook his head and swallowed. For the first time, it seemed, he could not meet her eyes.
For a brief moment, Hermione saw him as if he were a boy her age, the Ravenclaw he must have been in his time at Hogwarts, a line drawn between his brows as if he were worried sick about some impending examination. She looked at him and saw shades of Harry Potter in his obvious tense frustration, shades of Ron Weasley in his earnest eyes, shades of Ginny Weasley in his snide directness, shades of Luna Lovegood in his inscrutability. She looked at him and saw herself. Scared. Brilliant. Thinking too hard. Overanalyzing and deducing and strangely unconfident. Only comfortable when everything was planned down to the tiniest moment.
This moment was not planned; she could tell that much.
She slipped the Timeglass back into her pocket and took a step toward him. "Is it me?" she said, feeling strangely brave.
"What?" He looked back down at her and seemed to realize how close she was. She saw him swallow.
"I said, is it me?" The strange bravery overtook her entirely, and she felt painted gold, filled to the skull with hot Gryffindor-red blood. She felt she might transform at any second into a lioness roaring and rampant.
He still looked uncomprehending. "Is –?"
Hermione took hold of the front of his robes and pulled him down. Her lips met his.
He went rigid for one second. Then his arms locked around her, his fingers twisting up in the back of her robes. He tilted his head, pressing, deepening the contact, his lips warm and insistent. Hermione tasted him. Salt. Melted bronze. Warm, bright light. Human and strange.
After what couldn't have been more than a few seconds, he froze again. His arms slipped away, and then he was breaking backward, staring at Hermione. "Fuck," he whispered. "No, it's not supposed to be y –"
She stared back, breathing somewhat harder than she felt she should have been, her heart knocking deliberately at the inside of her chest.
"Don't," he said, turned, and swept out of sight. The door creaked shut behind him.
It's not supposed to be you. Was that what he'd been about to say? Had she disrupted a plan? Had she done something truly unexpected?
Hermione stared at the spot where he'd been. She'd been privately wondering about the legend since he'd made his first insinuation of affection … wondering if, somehow, she was the one he'd loved enough to chase through time.
But that … it's not supposed to be you.
Square one.
The next day, Hermione Granger met her granddaughter.
Winifred Scamander – Fred for short – was the head of the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes, the 38-year-old daughter of Rose Weasley and Lorcan Scamander. The latter, Luna Lovegood's son, had died years ago in a wizard purge. Hermione would have been able to tell Fred was a Lovegood descendant even if Alen hadn't told her ahead of time. Fred could have been a carbon copy of Luna, but with the strange substitution of Hermione's brown eyes and an unsettling addition of Ron's heavy layer of freckles.
"Hullo," Fred said, shaking Hermione's hand. "It's quite lovely, isn't it? The two governments mingling like this?"
"Yes, it's wonderful," Hermione said, looking about. They stood in a corner of the marbled hall, watching a knot of suited Muggle politicians mix about with robed Ministry officials. She'd come with Alen – the three of them had received official-looking invitations from the Prime Minister – but Riddle had insisted on staying at home. "I'm glad to be out of the thick of things, though. It's all a bit stressful for me in there."
"Yes, I can tell." Fred smiled. "You prefer smaller rooms in general, with fewer eyes."
"Er. Yes, I …"
"And you prefer ears to eyes, of course, especially when they're listening ears. But you haven't had a pair of those in a while, have you?"
Hermione felt like she'd been slapped. "Excuse –?"
"It's all right." Fred patted Hermione on the shoulder, a series of gentle swats that did not alleviate the sensation of being shell-shocked. "I'll listen," Fred said, "whatever you'd like to talk about. Unless, of course, you can't. No, you don't look like you can really talk about it, on second thought." She took a sip of wine. "So, lovely weather we've been having."
Hermione forced herself not to gape.
"Oh, I'm sorry," Fred sighed. "Mother used to tell me to turn it off, I'd upset people. Have I upset you? You seem upset, though that's more because of what you can't tell me, I'd hazard a guess." She tilted her head, her brown eyes incisive. Hermione felt laid bare by them. "Oh, dear. You're lost," said Fred quietly. "Aren't you? Quite lost."
Lost …
It was far too apt a description.
Hermione let out an honest-to-god sob. She smashed the back of her hand to her mouth instantly, but the damage was done.
Fred looked upset, guilty. "Oh, no, pet! Here." She fussed around in her pockets and fished an odd-looking fuzzy handkerchief out of one of them. "Well, go on, take it," she said bossily, brandishing the fuzzy square. But as Hermione grabbed the kerchief to wipe the now-steady stream of tears from her eyes, it squeaked and wriggled in her fingers. Hermione let out a small shriek in response and flung the kerchief back Fred's way.
"Oh, dear. I forgot how my Zim-Zim startles people at first," Fred laughed lightly. "He does love drinking tears, and he is so delightfully cuddly." She stroked the fuzzy square Zim-Zim. It emitted a purring sound. "Did you know that Zim-Zims actually played a crucial role in the Goblin Rebellion of the late 1800s?"
"I've … I've got to go," Hermione blurted.
"I hope you find your way," Fred said, with an odd little wave.
Hermione slipped out the door and Apparated back to the cramped living room of the flat. The second her feet made contact with the ground, she burst into proper tears.
Her knees buckled. She crouched right there on the hardwood floor and hugged her knees to her chest, the sound of her sobs assaulting her ears. She didn't know where she needed to be. She knew far too much to live in 1998, and yet she didn't know enough to return. She didn't know what Alen's plans were, didn't know how much longer she had to endure this insanity, didn't know how she even fit into his life. It's not supposed to be you. On top of that, she woke up every day with the enormity of space and time crushing in on her like a hurricane against a fleck of dust. Every day, infinity felt larger. She didn't know who she was or what she was doing.
"What are you doing?" said a stiff bewildered voice. It was only then that Hermione realized she had company.
She turned, hot embarrassment and cold dread clawing at each other inside her head. Riddle sat on the sofa behind her, a Daily Prophet lying abandoned in his lap, looking pristine as always but for the expression of comical alarm splayed across his face.
"What am I –? I'm c-crying," she sniffed, wiping her nose.
"Evidently," he said, but he still sounded somewhat bewildered.
She let out another sob, and it turned into a fresh bout, an instinctive tumbling stream of hiccups and gasps and ungraceful huh-huh-huh sounds.
"Stop it," Riddle said.
As if she could turn it on and off like a faucet. Hermione just cried harder, burying her eyes in her forearm, feeling the soft tissues of her eyes squish around, emitting fat tears like particularly incontinent sponges.
"Stop it," Riddle repeated, but this time his voice was cold and hard, and when she looked up, the tip of his wand was inches from her nose. The scare of it made her hiccups die right there in her diaphragm, and she stopped gasping, and her eyes stopped producing tears, probably out of sheer bloody self-preservation. What on earth? What was he going to do, hex her for crying?
"There. That's better, isn't it?" Riddle looked satisfied.
Hermione just looked at him. The sobs weren't returning. He'd shocked them out of her system.
Merlin. What a way to handle things. She found a bit of a grin touching her lips.
Hermione sniffled a bit, wiped the wetness from her face with her palms, and said, "Thanks."
"Don't mention it."
"Okay."
"Ever." He tucked his wand away and waited for her to get to her feet. "Have you thought of any alternative to the plan we'd made?"
"Actually, yes."
"An alternative he won't already be aware of?"
"I've no idea what he knows and what he doesn't," Hermione said.
Riddle grimaced. "More's the pity that he's an Occlumens."
"Your magic wouldn't work on him anyway."
"Thank you for that helpful reminder, Granger. I should have remembered, you're not a Legilimens."
"No! That's borderline Dark magic."
He gave her a look so patronizing she felt five years old. "Oh, well, if it's Dark, then. Of course not."
"And just call me Hermione, would you, God knows we've been forced to spend enough bloody time around each other."
"If you insist. Hermione." Something glittered in Riddle's eyes, some sort of intention or emotion she didn't recognize. "What's the idea?"
"He mentioned something yesterday about a point in time we had to reach," Hermione said, withdrawing the Timeglass from her pocket. "Somewhere in the future, far ahead."
Riddle eyed the Timeglass warily. "Go on."
"So I was thinking, if we blast ourselves forward as far as we can, maybe we can see what he's talking about. Maybe it's something of global importance, something we'll be able to recognize if we just go far enough."
"And you can handle the pain of this?"
Her lips pressed together. She gave him her most withering glare.
"It was an earnest question." He let out a slow breath. "How can we be guaranteed that Bansherwold will find his way to us?"
"Well, he's done it consistently this far."
"I'd rather not be trapped in 4532, if it's all the same to you."
"If he doesn't show up, we'll have the months we need to learn how to use this thing properly," she said. "In any case, that's the idea."
Riddle nodded. "Sounds reasonable enough. Shall we be off, then?"
"Wh – now?"
"Yes, of course, now. The less time he has to figure it out, the better. What, do you have something particularly urgent here in 2075?"
For a split second, Hermione thought of an aged Harry, an ancient Ron, both still overseas. She thought of her granddaughter whom she could not handle, her son of whom she had only heard, and her murdered daughter. She thought of lips pressed hard and dizzying to hers.
"No," she said, and held out the Timeglass.
Riddle took her other hand and gripped. He met her gaze squarely. His eyes were dark, serious, full of conviction. She found comfort in them and wondered if she was going bloody mad.
Then her hand slipped out from beneath her sleeve to touch the Timeglass, and at the same moment, his palm hit the object on its cold surface.
Unfortunately for the new plan of Tom Riddle and Hermione Granger, they'd been well and truly marooned out here in 2075 for a while, and as such, something had changed. For the first time, they truly doubted where and when they belonged. The anchors that had firmly attached them to their proper respective times had loosened, retracted, and now swayed deep in the bowels of the ocean, creating strong and undetectable currents. The two were no longer sure of anything, really: Tom Riddle was no longer sure of his most concrete doctrine; Hermione Granger was unsure of which fight was her biggest fight, which world needed her most. She was also unsure of how she felt about anything, or indeed, anyone. He was unsure if he felt at all, or if there were finally something there besides fear and hatred. If there were possibly a spark of fascination, or of desire.
They were two foggy signatures left by a tiny biplane in a sky full of mist. They had, at last, become anonymous, and so they were, at last, strangely free.
Unfortunately for Hermione Granger, she realized all of this at the very moment the Timeglass touched her skin.
Tom Riddle did not realize all of this; in fact, he realized none of it, but unluckily for him, he was one of the most powerful wizards ever born.
A combination of knowledge and talent is a dreadful thing.
The whine in the air was deep and threatening, and when they blasted out of the cramped living room of the flat, they barreled far away from home, farther than they had ever even considered possible. They tore their way through universes like a jackhammer through sawdust. They ripped into eternity with greedy, potent fingers. The pain was a firestorm. The pain was an animal. The noise was an unending and infinite roar.
"There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me."
- Gustave Flaubert
Welp.
As a forewarning, the next couple of chapters might be pretty damn short. Still dicking around with some things to see what works, but I just don't want you to get your hopes up if you get an update on like Friday and it turns out to be actually not much at all.
lol hermione and bansherwold's ship name though. banshermione. hermione and a banshee
Reviews are the light of my life, the fire of my loins. What. Who said that. Someone weird. I don't know. Bye.
-speech