Lo! The fire of my loins is quenched. (Oh, Christ.) Bless you all: ShimmeringWater, Nytefyre, YumiDoesTheMacarena, Poppyxxxx, summerful21, Beserked2, Ella Palladino, FaeBreeze, Ember Nickel, mh21, angrypixels, Quinn Spencer, BlackShirt16, marana1, nina, GinnyRules, AvoidedIsland, these two i s2g (i know right), immortal love rodd, and 3!
Mini-chapter, as promised. Again, there may be a couple of these briefer-length ones. I'll try to be prompt with them since they're mini. (if there's not a prompt update then it means i'm consolidating them into a normal length guy)
"If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way."
- Janet Fitch
After a while, the pain became something like a drug, brightening and sharpening the edges of Tom's vision. Here and there, he caught images in the blinding rush of light. The leafy top of a tree. An unfamiliar face. A planet from a hundred thousand kilometers away.
Even as they shot through the molten seam of universes, Tom realized something had gone awry. This felt different from their previous transports forward; this time they were plummeting and spinning head-over-heels into another dimension entirely. His brain hounded him to draw his wand, but he knew it would be foolishness to let go of Hermione's hand, and he physically couldn't budge his palm from the Timeglass. Something had glued it there, some great intractable force.
He couldn't see her. He could only feel the touch of her fingers. Everything was blinding and whirling faster than ever.
Tom poured every inch of his self-control into prying his hand up from the surface of the Timeglass. "DROP IT!" he roared into the light, and as Hermione's hand tightened on his, he could feel her strain, too.
After what must have been a solid three minutes, his skin finally peeled away from the glass.
It was like being hit by a Swedish Short-Snout head-on. Tom slammed into the face of some planet back-first. The breath vanished from his body in one great go. Beside him, Hermione made impact standing up. Her leg hit with a sickening crack, twisted at some oblique angle, and she crumpled all at once, instantly and soundlessly.
A strange sort of heat formed in his palms as he watched her collapse. He wondered what it was.
Still gasping for breath, he drew his wand, prepared to conjure cover if the environment was hostile. But the air appeared breathable enough, he realized, once he eked a proper bit of it into his lungs. He supposed that aligned with the Second Chaotic Assonance Theory – a magical entity, if thrown into a vacuum of sheer chance, will naturally gravitate toward areas similar to its previous habitats. Probably a biological survival technique from Apparating Trilobites, back in the days of the primordial swamp.
Tom lowered his wand and glanced over at Hermione, who was still huddled over her leg, alarmingly still and silent. He wondered if she'd fainted.
He moved over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She jumped so violently that he flinched back in response, and when she looked up at him, her face was greener than the surface of the planet they stood on.
"Lie back," he said briskly, with a second of silent appreciation that she hadn't descended into histrionics.
She collapsed back onto the barren green plain, her eyes crossing and rolling, tiny noises slipping from her mouth. He wondered if she would throw up. He hoped she would find somewhere else to do it than on him.
Tom found an odd force pulling downward at his lips as he severed half her pant leg to look at her tibia. It was as if his mouth were telling him he was upset at the sight of the broken bone, the shard of bloody red that had gutted its way out from her calf and now dripped resolutely. Why should he be upset? It wasn't as if he weren't accustomed to gore.
Granger's face, though, was unpleasant to look at in its current state. Not aesthetically – well, not any more so than usual – but in the way that he might look at his own hand and find a fingernail turning black. He wouldn't go around injuring himself on her watch; he expected her to do the same. They were supposed to be keeping each other standing, for Merlin's sake.
It took a little over twenty minutes for the healing spell to sink into the bone properly. In that time, both Riddle and Hermione had categorized their surroundings.
"What is this?" Hermione said, looking upward. A vortex of a sky spiraled straight up above them, a silent tornado, tiny fragments of stars and moons glittering in the soundless whirl. The plain on which they'd landed stretched on forever in all directions, windless, some sort of hard material that was not stone. It was uninhabited save for their bodies.
"It's not what we wanted," Riddle said, which was the only thing he could ascertain.
"D'you think this is Earth in another universe? Where something along the line went differently?" Hermione said.
Riddle's first instinct was to say, Who cares? but something kept his mouth buttoned: a strange injection of perspective.
He saw himself sitting beside his only companion in all the unending vaults of space and time. She was Gryffindor to the core, wasted all her time on moral upkeep, and Merlin knew she was probably a Mudblood, too; he'd deduced enough about her past for that to be a reasonably sure guess, but he definitely wasn't going to bloody ask her to verify it. Here – as he stared around at a blank void of a world, empty of life, empty of civilization, empty of everything except the feather-fine touch of air on his skin – he realized he didn't care about any of those things. He could not care about them. Here, she was a human being, and she was the only barrier between himself and more solitary confinement.
Panic took his heart in two iron fists and squeezed until he thought he might burst. How could he go back to his time and tell nobody about this? How? He'd go insane again. Perhaps he was still insane. Maybe the insanity would always be there, hanging over his shoulder like a prized kill after a hunt, waiting to burst back into life …
He rubbed at his forehead. "Maybe," he said. "Or perhaps the chance of it being Earth at all was so small that it was hopeless from the start."
"Should we try going back to Earth, then?"
He pressed his lips together and forced himself to his feet. "Yes. Can't see how we can make things much worse."
Hermione got to her feet as well. "We're going to get back," she said, with a brave try at resolution. "We'll figure this out. This time, focus as hard as you can on Earth. There must be a pattern to it, to mastering it. Trial and error."
"And once we do get back, you'll return to 1998," Riddle said, surveying her clinically. How couldn't she have realized what would happen? "You'll see the people who've been dead for decades, the vast majority of whom you have already outlived. You'll want to tell people about this, about all this, about the future. You will want to tell the world what's coming next, that you know how and why and for what purpose everything will change. You won't be able to. You'll arrive back in 1998 and everything will be meaningless."
Hermione's lip quivered, and as she stared him down, he realized she had already thought those things, a hundred times. She - somehow - just didn't care. "I'll do it because I have to do it," she said, which sounded approximately like the most idiotic thing he'd ever heard.
"What if you didn't have to?" Riddle said, crossing his arms. "What if for once you let your insufferable sense of duty and honor fall behind what you want and need as a human being? Time cures its own ills. What if you stayed here for the rest of your life?"
"Why should you care what I do?"
"Don't flatter yourself," he said icily, though for a second he wondered exactly that: why was he pursuing this debate, trying to convince her to break free of her self-imposed shackles of duty? It certainly wasn't his concern.
"So, staying here for the rest of your life," she said, looking around the flat green planet, her expression deadpan. "Is that what you're planning on doing?"
"I'm certainly curious as to whether I could. I wonder if it's possible. I wonder if someone might step up as an impostor Lord Voldemort, the one I've read about, the weak mortal man who died!" Riddle's words rang out through his teeth.
Hermione considered him. Riddle saw no sympathy on her face, though perhaps a touch of compassion. He saw no judgment, though perhaps a touch of disappointment. And that disappointment, that compassion, enraged him. He wanted to take her chin in his hand and tear that expression blank with rough lips and fingertips. He wanted to bite the consternation right off her mouth, rip the lines from her forehead, get so close to those brown eyes that the mere presence of him would be all she understood, all she knew, all she cared about.
He narrowed his eyes at her, wondering how these strangely specific desires had pummeled their way into his mind. Usually he was only struck by vague plans of inflicting pain, not all of this odd … animalistic …
"Riddle," she said, at last, and her voice sounded exhausted, and weary. "There's so much of the world. Haven't you seen enough to realize?"
"Oh, please. Realize what, exactly? Let me guess: that rulers rise and fall and that's the way of things; that I am one of infinite conceptions of a tiny flawed insect and I should be happy with my own iteration?"
"No, that's not what I meant." Hermione sighed. "Our choices, our actions, our existence – none of it is even about ourselves. The world is too big to know. It's certainly too big for us to stake a claim on it. We're grains of sand, Riddle. We were tossed onto a beach and left to sift." She shrugged. "Be happy with the things you've sifted through. You've been given far more of them than most."
"Again, this patently false – lucky. Just like Bansherwold. You think I'm lucky." Riddle couldn't help but spit the word.
"No. You're not lucky. You're lonely."
He let out his most derisive laugh. It sounded small and strangely sad in the huge open space.
Hermione took one step closer. Her small hand ran slowly through her hair. He clenched his teeth tight together, hating how careful she was being, hating the hesitance in her motions, as if he needed coddling. He wanted to yank that hand from her hair. He wanted to pin her by her hair to the surface of this planet and crouch over her, lean down over her, hear those asinine philosophical ponderings turn into curses, raw sounds –
She said, "You know, maybe you wouldn't need a whole world's domination to anchor yourself to, if you had a person or two instead."
At the insinuation, a cold layer of instantaneous dismissal slammed down on him. "Timeglass," he said curtly. "Let's go. Now. Before you say anything else so pathetic and ridiculous."
She didn't protest, but her expression grew hard. And as she drew the Timeglass out in her sleeve - as she held out her hand for him to take - she stared resolutely over his shoulder.
Her averted eyes were the last straw. No one would ignore him, especially not her.
Riddle strode forward, slid his arm around her. His forearm locked into the small of her back, and his hand clamped to her waist. He felt her inhalation as he yanked her tightly against him.
Now her attention was certainly all his. It did not soothe his frustration. It agitated him further. Her eyes burned up into his and he wanted to tell her, You are wrong. I need nobody but myself. I need nothing but myself. He wanted to growl it down her fucking throat. He wanted noises from her, a scream, hard hoarse breathing. He wanted control, he wanted release, he wanted a fight, he wanted concession, he wanted her to stop being so goddamn noble about going back to her time – he wanted everything from her.
The girl was his constant. The girl was his one remainder from the life this journey had ruined. The girl was exasperating, obstinate, willful, argumentative, and very nearly incandescent. The girl was his. The only thing he had left.
It did not occur to Tom Riddle, of course, that if she was all he had, he was perhaps as much hers as she was his.
She shoved the Timeglass against his hand. The door opened on infinity once more.
"Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean."
- Maya Angelou
Leave a message at the shit! Oh, oops, is the censor beep off? my bad
-speech