One more mini-chapter after this one, and then we're back to regular length. Thanks for hanging tight!
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"In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance."
-Jeanette Winterson
When Hermione's hand finally unstuck itself from the surface of the Timeglass, she plunged down into a scalding ocean.
Almost faster than her body could register the blinding pain, Tom Riddle had drawn his wand, and a thick bubble of protection formed around them, forcing the raging scarlet waters back. It looked like a sea of boiling blood, lapping at their confines.
Tom's eyes shut, and he held a hand over his wand, murmuring an extended incantation. The bubble expanded further, giving them a bit of breathing room, and solidified, turning more opaque.
Hermione moved gingerly to take her wand from her own robes. The burns that had already swelled into life on her bare calf were grisly at best. The damaged red skin shimmered, emitting an angry heat. She could feel the blisters from the boiling ocean all the way up to her waist under her clothes, although it all felt dim compared to the hellfire roaring on her exposed skin.
Riddle took half a limped step. Hermione glanced over at him and flicked her wand in his direction. His wand rose instinctively as if to block the spell, but then a cool wind knocked him back a step, ruffling his hair, and he lowered his wand as the charm went to work on his burns. Hermione cast the same external healing charm on herself. When the wind cleared from around her body, the damaged skin had melted back to its original state.
As she and Tom sank to the floor of the bubble in unison, she mulled over how oddly used to each other they'd become. Even the frantic, hostile conversation of the green planet had had a strangely personal note to it, even if he'd all but told her he couldn't care less what she did with her life. Don't flatter yourself. Honestly …
"Were you thinking of Earth when we left?" Tom asked.
"Yes," Hermione lied. Really, at the moment of their departure, it had been difficult to focus on anything but his overwhelming closeness, the fierce grip of his hand on her hip, the breath from his slightly-parted lips brushing against her forehead, the way she could feel his hipbone digging into her body just below her waist. She'd tried to focus on anything but him, anything at all, but it had been an ill-fated attempt. Hermione found herself suddenly glad there were a few feet between them. "This go around," she said, "we should both think of a specific time and place, probably."
"1998," he said. "In the Chamber, right when we left."
"Yes, that's a good idea." Hermione looked out at the water, trying not to be afraid of how vicious their surroundings were. The sky was empty and black, devoid of moon, stars, anything at all. The dull water churned ferociously.
"Where did you and Bansherwold go for the ten months of my imprisonment?" Tom asked suddenly.
Hermione looked over at him, though he was busy staring out at the dark blood-tossed world. "Well, it was actually just one night," she said, before really thinking about how the words would sound.
At that, he met her eyes. Staring at him, she wondered if he was angry. In all honesty, that simmering glint in his dark eyes looked like something quite different from anger, but … well, there was no reason for him to look possessive; that was just ridiculous. Wasn't it?
"Not … er, like that," she said, her cheeks turning an unfortunate Gryffindor scarlet. "I just appeared back in that cottage on the plain and he explained what the Timeglass does."
Tom let out a noncommittal sound and looked away again, though his hands seemed to have tightened on his wand.
"He also told me some things about his past," Hermione said. "He was orphaned by the American Civil War; he was living on the London streets when his Hogwarts letter was delivered. He couldn't even read."
"In that case, how did he read the letter?"
"The messenger read it aloud."
"Special treatment," Tom said, almost absentmindedly. "As I understood it, Hogwarts didn't do that sort of thing often before the Reorganization Statutes of 1903."
Hermione nodded. Hogwarts, A History had devoted half of chapter twenty-eight to the Reorganization Statutes, measures to keep students more reliably informed and connected to the Wizarding World when they dispersed over summer. Before then, the Hogwarts mail system had operated on patchy networks of family names and rough divinations of Muggle-borns' locations.
Riddle looked somewhat distant. Hermione wondered if that was a patch of residual madness from the Crown.
"I couldn't believe he left you there for ten whole months," she said quietly. "I was really angry, actually. I had quite the row with him over it."
His lips thinned. He shook his head, but gave no response.
She bit her lip. "I'm sor –"
"Don't apologize for something you had no chance of preventing. Waste of time, waste of breath."
Hermione swallowed. "Are you … you know, all right?"
She half-expected him to scoff, not respond at all, or snap at her. His response came as a surprise. "I am intact," he said crisply, "and I stubbornly refuse to let a band of Muggles and their electric contraptions make any lasting marks."
"Well, in that case, thank God for your obstinacy," Hermione said, the words out before she could filter them.
He gave her a disbelieving look. She felt the sudden inclination to laugh.
After a minute or so, Tom said, "I've been giving more thought to that ridiculous legend than is really appropriate."
"Me too," Hermione said. "I actually thought … but … well, never mind."
"Thought what?"
"I thought maybe his supposed 'lost love' might be me," she admitted, her cheeks turning pink. "Which is ridiculous, of course," she added hastily. "Anyway, it can't be."
"Why not?"
"Because I kissed him just to see, and he wasn't exactly … receptive."
"You –" said Tom, but he cut himself off instantly, as if he hadn't meant to say anything.
"Yes?" she said curiously, but he gave no response except a shrug of his slim shoulders. It did not satisfy her wonderings, especially since the smolder in his eyes had kindled to an outright flame.
"What happened?" he asked.
"Well, I, erm, I kissed him, and for a moment he … you know, responded, or …" Hermione wished her cheeks would stop glowing. She felt like a living Christmas ornament. "But then he pushed me away. Bolted. He looked distressed, you know - and he kept avoiding me afterward."
Tom shook his head, leaning back against the sloped wall of the bubble with his arms crossed. "Still."
"Still what?"
"You'd have to be an idiot, or blind, not to see the way he looks at you from time to time."
Hermione swallowed. "I … well, I mean …"
"It must have something to do with you," Tom said, closing his eyes. "Merlin, even considering this legend rubbish is completely absurd, but … maybe it's tangentially related. If he's bent on ruling the world, he must have a plan. Maybe you factor into this plan, and maybe this other … person is also a part of it."
"Maybe his lost love is you," Hermione said, keeping her expression wide-eyed and earnest.
Tom narrowed his eyes at her. "I highly doubt that, unless you think it's a standard way of expressing affection to lock someone in solitary confinement for a year."
"Naturally. That's the only way I ever express affection."
He gave her another unimpressed look. "You're in quite the mood."
"I'm always like this," she said with a sigh, sinking back against the bubble wall opposite him. "I just don't show it around you, at risk of being Transfigured into a vampire bat or having my skin cursed off or what have you."
"Prudent."
She found herself smiling. His expression was one third offended, one third nonplussed, and one third drily amused, and on his gaunt, serious features, it was an oddly entertaining mixture.
"Shall we go again?" she said, getting to her feet.
"Yes." He approached her, fingers curling around the handle of his wand. "It's best I keep this drawn in case we land in another unfriendly location. Put your arm around me."
Tentatively, she slipped her arm around his back.
"Hermione," he said testily. "Unless you'd prefer we get split up in the middle of ripping through space-time, you're going to need to hold on tighter than that."
"Right." Pointedly not looking at him, she constricted her grip, tugging him closer. He was still frighteningly skinny - she could feel his spine like a hard cord against her forearm. Her mouth slowly dried. Her heart felt like it was contracting.
Almost immediately, shock, tinged with horror, rang deep in her chest. Merlin, this was Lord Voldemort she was holding onto. Get a hold of yourself, Hermione! She rattled off a string of curses at herself mentally.
"Timeglass," he said quietly. His voice was too close. She heard it from his chest rather than his lips. In an ill-judged moment, she lifted her eyes to meet his. In his irises, she could see bands of deep brown against black like spokes of a bicycle. He was looking down at her with that unidentifiable burn raging higher, a dangerous wildfire of a gleam.
Hermione didn't understand. She'd thought Tom Marvolo Riddle had nothing inside him. As much as she reasoned with him, spoke with him like she'd speak to a normal person, she'd thought - no, known - that he was emotionally empty, psychopathic, a power-obsessed shell. But now it was like she could see every one of his actions since he'd strode into the Chamber in 1998, every tiny action lined up in a row: the healing of her broken leg not an hour ago; the calm way he'd spoken with her in the headquarters of Merlin's Order; his manic despair during the time they'd shared in the Crown; the way he'd stewed over the possibility of infinity up to the moment of battle in the Palace of Westminster. And there was something more behind that than power. Something more than madness and cruelty. There was in him a fervor beyond ferocity, a thirst for something that could make up for all he felt he'd been cheated of, a hunger for knowledge and for human gravity and for true everlasting importance. More than all this, there was in him a deep and brittle need to shove the world's inhabitants away as quickly as possible so that they could not see, so that they could not know.
"1998," she said vaguely, forcing the image of the Chamber to the forefront of her mind. "The Chamber of Secrets."
He inclined his head in the tiniest of nods, bringing his face that much closer to hers.
She was suddenly all too aware of the warmth of his skin, separated from her hand by only the thin layer of his shirt. He did not feel empty. He felt human. An illusion? A deception?
She drew the Timeglass from her pocket and held it up. It slipped from her sleeve into her hand, and his hand wrapped over and around hers, and they left the sea of blood far behind.
"Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities."
- D.T. Suzuki
hermione and tom awkward-ing it up in space awyeah space.
as always, thanks for reading and holla at me -
xx speech