AH HA HA so remember when I conjectured that this story would be around 15 or 16 chapters? So not happening. (sorry, my ability to guess the scope of projects is always pathetically awful.) You're stuck with me until 19 or 20. Possibly more. Of course, only if you're willingly stuck. Feel free to only read until chapter fifteen, if that makes you happy. Whatever floats your Galleon, dude.

Something new this chapter (which actually turned out normal length, despite what I thought was going to happen!). Hope you like. Warning, bits of it may feel like an acid trip.

speech

"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell."

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Alengurd Bansherwold arrived back from an evening of mingling to an empty flat and set about waiting.

Alen had grown to despise waiting more and more. If patience was a virtue, it certainly wasn't his. Which was inconvenient, as so much of what he'd been doing in transit involved just that: excruciating delays, some of months, some of days, some of minutes that somehow felt longer than the months. The planning itself was fine; he was practically a planner by occupation. But biding his time and skulking about different years to set up the events just so? It took astounding amounts of bloody awful waiting.

It's worth it, he reminded himself, and busied himself with preparing for the New Apotheosis tracker he knew he'd have to set up.

Admittedly, it surprised him that Hermione and Riddle had taken off so suddenly. He'd debunked their first plan as efficiently as possible in hopes of expediting the process, so really, it had all worked perfectly … but after 1878, part of him was still unused to having things fall into place. It had been so long since 1878 – yet this certain type of paranoia seemed to have intensified rather than faded over time, growing like an unwelcome weed in the folds of his mind.

Alen warded off memories of Gellert, gently reminding his teeth to stop grinding, as he would probably need to use them at some point, and not as some powdered element in a potion. Bitterness was no use, anyway. There was nothing he could have done.

In all honesty, though, he hated and resented his older self for 1878 as much as he despised Grindelwald. Inasmuch as that was the case, Alen felt vindictively satisfied at having sent his older self to meet his fate.

Alen brought his wand to his wrist, tapped the watch-like Gauge, and murmured, "Ascorius." A gentle hiss of breath slipped between his lips as the Gauge's centimeter-long needle slid from inside his vein. He unbuckled the Gauge from his arm and laid it gently on the counter, eyeing the ruby-red liquid within. As he laid it flat, the liquid peeled away from its 1/6th mark into a flat, viscous line.

His Gauge had been frozen for the last twelve years, of course. Admittedly, tracking his lifeline was among the more obsessive of dark magics, but it reassured him to have the physical reminder there, just as the sight of his unaging face in the mirror reassured him daily. He had especially needed these petty comforts while dealing with his older self, as disgusting and withered as the man had been.

Vanity was such a petty vice in general. Occasionally disgusted by his own obsession with physical intactness, Alen made excuses to himself for it through reminders that Ravenclaws tended toward it … but it was a weak argument. He knew that vanity could hardly be pinned on his House affiliation, no more than could his odd preference for the color orange or his crippling terror of what might happen in 2349.

Alen crouched and drew a small golden cauldron from beneath the kitchen sink. He filled it with water, set it on the table while humming lightly to himself, and let a drop of blood fall from the pinprick on his wrist into the cauldron. It swirled down, a single unfolding bud.

He reaffixed his Gauge and the silver needle slotted back into its place in his vein. He checked its measurement compulsively. The red liquid did not budge.

When all was said and done, acquiring the secret to the Elixir of Youth had been embarrassingly easy with Timeglass in hand. All it had taken was investigation of a rumor in the mid-2100s and a brief expedition into the bowels of the Department of Mysteries. Admittedly, the actual ingredients for the potion – including a teaspoon's worth of matter from a white dwarf (so dense it weighed approximately five tons) and an entire pelt from the incredibly toxic Aggleback – had been somewhat difficult to rustle up. Worth it, though. Of course.

Alen went back to the preparation of his New Apotheosis Enhancer.

Jackson's New Apotheosis Theorem stated that the tunnels through space-time were detectable because magical energy left fine traces wherever it went that held a certain magical gravity. However, to track these traces to other universes entirely was far beyond Alen's – or, well, anyone's – natural capacity. As such, a simple gravitational tracker to find the magical signature would not suffice, and barbaric as it seemed, blood magic was always the greatest amplifier of power. In 2045, for instance, a new blood-based derivation of the Polyjuice Potion had been developed which could make someone look like someone else for the rest of their entire life. In 2051, an odd blood-based experiment on Veritaserum developed in the Department of Mysteries had given one test subject a brief ability to read truths out of people's minds. This latter sample had been destroyed immediately, the method for preparation stricken from all record.

As for adding blood to the process of a New Apotheosis Tracker, it could amplify sensitivity to traces a thousand-fold. With the other potion-based tweaks Alen had designed, he could conceivably determine someone's location anywhere in the megaverse, piggybacking tracers from tunnel to tunnel.

Alen poked around under the kitchen cabinet a bit more and came up with one bottle which contained three dark hairs from Riddle and another which held three from Hermione. It hadn't been hard to find them – hell, he could probably have just walked into the bathroom and retrieved hairs from the drain – but he still felt a little awkward as he uncorked the vials and sprinkled the hairs into the cauldron. Alen supposed that he'd become so accustomed to his own privacy that invading others' felt practically sacrilegious. He hadn't used Legilimency since 1878.

He was halfway through shredding glowing purple Garblick roots when his wait ended. A gasping Hermione burst out of the air in front of him. Her hair had grown out to shoulder-length, a satisfying bushy sunburst. The sight of it lit something up in Alen's chest like a candle. He'd expected himself to be the deliverer. This was a pleasant surprise.

He laid down the knife immediately, flicked his wand at the cauldron to suspend its stewing time, and steadied Hermione by the elbow. "All right?" he said.

She nodded and straightened up, her eyes darting around the kitchen. "This is the right time, isn't it?" she panted, her whole body heaving with the need for oxygen.

"Perfect timing," he said, letting go her elbow. Curiosity prickled at the back of his neck. "If I may ask, when are you from?"

She gave him a warning look, her breaths steadying.

He pressed further: "You're not from …"

"Yes?"

"From afterward, are you?" Even using all his available restraint, he couldn't keep the taut edge from his voice.

Hermione's warm brown eyes softened. She gave him an apologetic look. "I … you know I can't say anything about the future."

The candle in Alen's chest flared, roaring into a sudden inferno. His muscles tightened all the way down to his toes, and he restrained himself from using Legilimency on her right then and there, breaking his twelve-year streak. Curiosity burned at the back of his mouth like bile. "So you are," he managed, and as the words came out, more spilled over, words he knew he should not be saying. "I need to know, Hermione. I must know. Tell me; you've got to tell me if –"

"No," she said. Her voice was firm, but not unkind, and as always, he was drawn to the gravity in her expression, the full-fledged feeling she devoted to every moment of her life. Sometimes, even just looking at her, he thought he might break down.

"It's more important than you could possibly know," he said, though he was grasping at straws and he knew it. She may have been from 2349, or she may have been from bloody 2897 – possibly, she knew more about the situation than he himself did at this point. In all honesty, he only knew the bare minimum of information about the Horde. He didn't even know what he was supposed to do about them. His older self had been infuriatingly, purposefully vague on that subject.

"Alen," Hermione chided. She took a step toward him, her expression creasing. "Really, I know it's been a long wait, and a long … process, but you're nearly … just a little more patience."

He bit back a curse. He could not look at her.

"Anyway, I've come to give you the Timeglass, of course," she said, withdrawing the Timeglass in a plastic bag and handing it over. "So you can fetch us back. I'll be down to retrieve it in 2102 when you land. July the first."

"How do you plan to get to 2102 without the Timeglass?"

"Time machine."

So she was certainly from after 2321, at the least. "And you're returning to your future time now via … what method, exactly?"

She withdrew a jet-black disk from her pocket, one engraved with runes. "Active manifestation of Priori Incantatem. Should undo the Timeglass' effects, get me back to 23 –" She cut herself off.

A silence wobbled between their eyes. Hers were masked. He wondered if she had used the Timeglass to get here herself, or if his future self had assisted, sent her back. If she had used it herself – if she'd mastered it …

He didn't let himself wonder what that would mean.

"Please," he burst out, anxiety throbbing in his temple like an overactive vein.

She shook her head, took out her wand, and placed it to the surface of the disk. With a sibilant noise somewhat like deflation, she faded from the air, gone as quickly as she'd arrived.

Alone again – alone as bloody ever – Alen hunched over the kitchen table, his fists balled and trembling. He slammed one of his fists down onto the wood with a tremendous crash and an animal noise of rage tore from his throat.

Then he straightened up, his features eerily blank. He flicked his wand, returned to shredding the roots, and his hands didn't shake.

###

Bang. They were certainly not on Earth, let alone in 1998. Hermione and Tom appeared in the middle of what seemed to be an ocean of writhing white strings. Their bodies moved neither downward nor upward; they could hardly move at all, supported by the strings' mass. Hermione wondered what the light source was. Cream-colored luminescence seemed to issue from everywhere, every place where the strings touched each other.

She tried clawing the tiny strings away from her face, tried to gasp in a breath. She got a mouthful of what felt like living plastic angel-hair spaghetti. She was going to suffocate.

Suddenly, a thin layer of air painted itself over her skin, creeping, spreading. It slid up her nose and down into her lungs. She didn't recognize the spell, but she felt eternally grateful that Tom had thought to keep his wand drawn.

Her arm still tight around him, Hermione made an executive decision and battled to draw the Timeglass from her pocket. "Again!" she said, trying to avoid getting any of the wriggling strings in her mouth. As Riddle's hand found hers amidst the chaos, she shifted the Timeglass from sleeve to their skin.

Bang. They appeared in a deep black void, the air so dense that she felt it might crush her to death. Adrenaline drove her through the residual pain of the journey: she dragged her arm back to her pocket as Tom struggled to flick his wand properly. Blessedly, a sphere of something bright blossomed out from his wandtip, and the resistance from the air lessened. She withdrew the Timeglass, holding it back up between them. He grabbed on.

Bang. They ripped out onto on a wobbling, jellylike surface of some colorless iridescent sheen. Her foot broke the surface and sank about a foot in. More gel floated through the air, in blocks and blobs and wavering tails, glistening in the blistering red sunlight. A deep, resonant, hollow moan drifted across the surface of the place, making the gel ripple. Foreboding struck Hermione like a hammer. She drew the Timeglass, desperation washing hotly across her.

Bang. They landed at the peak of some perilous spire, its tip ivory-white and barely three feet across, the only thing separating them from a thousand-foot drop. Other spires rose around them, dreadful and thin like delicate fangs puncturing a black tarry landscape. Tom teetered wildly, and she clutched him closer, her palms breaking out in an instinctive sweat.

As she took the Timeglass from her pocket, her hand slipped. It dropped away, flew into the abyss glinting like a teardrop. She let out an instinctive shriek.

"Villinger's Bond," Tom's voice said instantly, close and jarring and immensely reassuring, and she let out a quivering breath, drawing the Timeglass from where it had reappeared in her pocket. She glanced up at him this time before holding up the Timeglass. The tiniest bit of a smirk touched the corner of his lip.

Bang. They were within a curved cloth-like sphere, a thousand different shades of sky stitched together like patchwork above them, a team of black creatures trundling around them like disembodied wheels. As they swiveled to face Tom and Hermione, she felt faint, not to mention nauseous from the unrelenting agony of the transit, which was not fading when they landed anymore. The aliens emitted bursts of color to each other, airy whizzing noises passing back and forth from their shiny black surfaces. Tom raised his wand, but she said, "No! Don't frighten them! Let's –" and with that, she tugged out the Timeglass again.

Bang. They were on a mossy surface that was moving, swinging through a cloud. It took a moment before Hermione realized that the surface itself was moving, too, undulating. And as they passed out of the cloud, soaked by the moisture, her breath stopped in her chest. They were borne through a vast catalog of sky on the arm of a creature so enormous she thought she could never call the giants of Earth giants again. The colossi swam through the sky's infinite navy depths with hundreds of arms, their bodies miles long from tip to tail, moving slowly and gracefully and flickering like continents of green living fire. Their tongues lolled out of cavernous mouths and lapped at black thunderheads. A gust of wind slapped Hermione back to life, nearly shoving her off the colossus' arm. Slipping, she fumbled for the Timeglass.

Bang. A world with massive insectoid creatures that fired glass from their pincers. Bang. A world where aliens the size of ships nested atop airborne seas of swans. Bang. A world filled with a hazy, amniotic light and an earsplitting, unceasing roar. Nowhere to stay. Nowhere to think. Bang. Bang. Bang. It grew too painful to think at all. It grew too painful to do anything except forge forward through hostile world after hostile world, screams choked up in her esophagus.

God knew how much time passed.

Bang.

This time, upon landing, Hermione's knees collapsed. Her nerves were shredded, so brimful with pain it was remarkable that she could still feel anything at all. She brought Tom crashing down with her, and for a minute they could not move at all. They just lay there, sprawled over each other, paralyzed amid a cascade of what felt like completely normal rain.

She dared to hope for a moment that they had actually, by some freak accident, found their way back to a lock of universes somewhere near Earth. The ground beneath her, after all, felt something like asphalt, and she'd gotten a glimpse of what looked like buildings …

When she cracked her eyes open, though, she noted that the building structures around them – which were floating and almost entirely transparent – had neither external walls nor roofs. They rose high into the sky like plastic models of spines, each floor a vertebra-like disk. Bursting raindrops were landing in the buildings in heavy sheets amidst large, hopping sponges, who apparently lived inside the buildings and who seemed all too happy about the rainfall. For once, nothing seemed to be immediately endangering them.

Hermione groaned and closed her eyes, content just to breathe, to be alive and finally – finally – feel the pain subsiding from her body.

After a while, Tom shifted atop her, and she became instantly and intensely aware of the weight of his body, the way his leg had landed between hers, his knee rubbing against the inside of her thigh.

She summoned her willpower and dragged herself somewhat in a backward direction. He flopped sideways-ish, and they lay next to each other, staring up at a watery sky. The raindrops were truly huge, a glass of water apiece. Hermione managed to muster the energy to cover her mouth and nose with a shaking hand, struggling to breathe even though Riddle's air-creation spell had remained thankfully intact through their travels. She was sure at least one of the universes they'd gone through would have had an unbreathable atmosphere.

By the time the fire of pain died down, they were both drenched. Hermione got back to her feet, and Riddle did the same. He finally pocketed his wand.

"Least this place looks remotely habitable," Hermione said, her voice hoarse and practically inaudible over the drum of the rain.

"Emphasis on 'remotely,'" Tom replied, shifting his sodden hair off his forehead. He looked around, squinting through the rain's quicksilver veil. This had to be closer to Earth than a few of those other worlds, at least – if water existed in this universe, that was certainly a step in the right direction. "Let's find shelter," he said. "Somewhere to sleep."

"Yeah," said Hermione.

They headed down what seemed to be an actual road, a twisting blue line of rock that trailed between the hovering buildings. Every so often, a hopping sponge would pass them, releasing enthusiastic ululating sounds. Tom mused that there was a certain threshold for the utterly bizarre that his mind could conceive. He must have passed it quite a while back, and as such, he found it strangely difficult to be fazed by any of this. It was all highly reminiscent of the dreams he'd had while delirious with fever last summer, inclusive of the physical exhaustion as well.

After a few minutes' walk, they came across a building that actually had walls and a roof. They had to climb a set of hovering stairs to make it to the entrance hole, and by the time they reached the top of the steps, they were leaning on each other again, her shoulder pressing against his bicep, his hand loosely pressing against her back. Tom could feel her trembling. He was sure he was shaking himself, and for once, he couldn't even muster the presence of mind to force himself to control his body's actions. Even extended Apparition was rough on the human form. This was sheer insanity.

They slipped through the entrance hole into a narrow hallway. More holes were cut into the walls that flanked them, as if someone had replaced the inside of an apartment building with slices of Swiss cheese. The building, perhaps, was outdated for the sponge-people; that would explain the building being completely empty bottom-to-top, as they could see it was through the transparent walls and ceiling. Tom couldn't help wondering how sponges could build buildings in the first place, but he didn't have the energy to care properly, let alone conjure up an intelligent hypothesis.

Beside him, Hermione drew her wand and vacuumed the water off herself. Tom did the same. Exhaustion weighed heavy on their every movement.

"Through here," he said, walking down the hall a bit further and slipping through one of the holes in the wall. He didn't fancy having a run-in with angry denizens of this universe; the further they were removed from the outside world, the better. Hermione followed.

The room beyond was little more than a cubicle, woefully undersized as apartments went … though, Tom supposed, if you were a sponge, you hardly needed amenities such as beds or bathrooms. They both finally sank to the transparent floor. A warm headache lit up somewhere deep in Tom's cranium as he stretched out, his body nearly too long for the room. He flicked his wand, casting a light heating charm on the chilly air. Then he tapped the wall nearest to him. "Scuro," he mumbled, and the walls and ceiling of the room darkened, turning an opaque charcoal color, canceling the strange world outside.

He hazily observed Hermione, who was curling up on her side facing him, her eyelids already drooping shut.

It occurred to him that on Earth, it would be bizarre for them to sleep in the same room. Here, it seemed bizarre that they might not. Who cared about connotation here? It was human companionship, and thank God for it.

For a brief moment, Tom found it unfathomable that he would ever return to being alone, after his one fear – universe after universe – seemed to have become Hermione letting him go, taking the Timeglass and leaving him to rot in some other universe. With that feeling, an oppressive sense of separation anxiety that he would surely have found laughable were he in a state of actual cognizance, he closed his eyes.

Tom drifted awake several hours later and received a shock. Hermione had shifted, fitting snugly to him, her head tucked right beneath his.

For a moment, in his mildly panicked sleep-haze, options flung themselves through his mind. He considered shoving her away. He considered waking her up. Then he found himself wondering why he was panicking at all, really, as the warmth and closeness of her was actually quite something, grounding and honest, real and ordinary, satisfying and just a little bit intoxicating.

In fact, looking down at her mild frown in sleep, her knuckles brushing against the fabric of his shirt as if to knock at his heart, he actively resisted the idea of her sleeping any other way from now on.

He slipped his arm over her waist and tugged her the tiniest bit closer before falling immediately back to sleep.

Riddle and Hermione moved cautiously over the next several days. They tried various methods of using the Timeglass, from using their wands on the thing to handling it in a multitude of different ways. Riddle recalled how Bansherwold had turned translucent in the flat of the elder Hermione Granger, an event that seemed like a lifetime ago. How he'd held onto the Timeglass for a while before turning incorporeal and vanishing altogether. What had he done? Hermione said that when Bansherwold had essentially used Side-Along transport for her out of the cottage, he hadn't done anything special to the Timeglass. Simply picked it up.

If there'd been a silent incantation involved, then they'd have to do significant analysis on the structure of the object to work out how the incantation could be bypassed. By all accounts, incantations were usually just a shortcut, a way to verbalize a magical sentiment so it could be more easily expressed by a wand – thus why nonverbal magic was a purer form of the art.

Riddle supposed they were lucky for the Second Chaotic Assonance Theory. It seemed a little absurd to suggest that the places they went one after the next were similar to Earth, but they were at least survivable, not immediately fatal if Riddle kept his wand drawn and stayed on his toes. They hadn't imploded yet, or frozen in deep space, or appeared in the center of a star. The pure statistical likelihood of avoiding everything fatal to humans was probably infinitesimal, so … well, for the first time in his life, Riddle found himself thankful for small mercies.

By all accounts, though, their inability to return to Earth infuriated him. Hermione had said that when she'd left the Crown, she'd had a fleeting impression of the cottage on the plain, and had thus appeared there … in the right time, at least, even if it was the wrong universe. It seemed that time was manageable enough; there was an element to navigating the universes that they were getting wrong.

Riddle blamed his own power. If he'd been a feeble wizard, surely they wouldn't have gotten quite so far off-track.

They'd found themselves in a swampy reddish-brown planet at one point that smelled oddly delicious. After a few charms to determine if the swamp glop was edible, they'd eaten their fill and conjured flasks to hold more. Who knew, after all, when they'd come across something else that wasn't toxic or simply disgusting?

Whenever they were too tired to continue, they stopped in the next convenient universe and slept. Once, they'd been so exhausted that they'd fallen asleep right where they landed, Hermione's arm still locked rigid around his back. One way or another, they usually ended up in contact by the time one of them woke up, a fact about which neither was sure how they felt.

Riddle couldn't help but feel that she was becoming somewhat of a distraction, which was a feat given what exactly she was distracting him from. Still, though … human emotion was arguably just as alien to him as actual aliens, so maybe that made sense.

It was undeniable: becoming used to the feeling of her body against his, regularly and closely, created an anchor amidst the chaos. The sight of her, the sound of her voice, became something of a balm, as thin as all this was wearing his nerves and his restraint. The grip of her hand caged him inside himself, but inconveniently, it certainly did not assuage the increasingly physical urges he found himself fighting off more often than not. It was easy to attribute all that to a simple need for human reassurance, so he did, and tried to think nothing of it, and tried not to want to touch her face, her hair, the curves of her.

He also refrained from meeting her eyes too often, because whenever he did, he often felt that they saw too far past his own. They were hazel probes into thoughts he did not ask to have.

After four days of on-and-off travel, they eventually came to a stop on a planet that was more of an oversized asteroid than anything else. They ducked into a cave formation in the barren rock.

A short while later, they had settled in and set up a small green-burning fire. Taking a bite of swamp glop, Hermione levitated the Timeglass between them.

"I hate you," she said to the Timeglass, her mouth full.

It hates us too, Riddle thought. Evidently.

She swallowed. "I was actually thinking, though," she said, her sharp eyes narrowing at the point of fire in the center of the Timeglass. "I thought of it as a sort of Side-Along Apparition the other day, and it made me wonder if it functions in essentially the same way. Alen did compare it to Apparition, after all, though obviously it's much more advanced – I wondered if maybe it's impossible to use it properly with more than one person at once. After all, whenever we get tugged along, it's Alen who uses it, not either of us. Just him."

"I suppose it's a thought," Riddle said slowly. "I hesitate to suggest that only one of us try using it, at risk of one leaving the other behind."

"Well, it's bonded to me, Tom. I don't know how possible it would be for it to leave me behind anywhere, not without my consent."

"So, I would be the one to use it, then?"

Hermione nodded. "I think it's definitely worth a try. I can think of several magical objects that work with only one person at a time. A wand, for instance – two people trying to cast a spell out of the same wand, simultaneously, even if it's the same spell –"

"Massively unsuccessful. Yes." He rubbed his chin lightly, somewhat peeved that he hadn't thought of this himself. Of course, the only time he'd seen Bansherwold use the Timeglass in a normal, proper way, he'd been half-mad from imprisonment. He got to his feet. "Come here, then."

Hermione walked around the fire to his side and slipped her arm around his waist. He held out his hand beneath the Timeglass, she lowered her wand, and the solid weight of the thing dropped into his palm.

He pictured the Chamber of Secrets, dark and foul-smelling in 1998.

Something was definitely different, this time – the rush of light was not so tangled; their journey was a few degrees less exquisitely painful; it was easy for him to separate his hand from the Timeglass when he felt he should.

And they tumbled out of the air onto the surface of the same asteroid they'd left, only a few feet away from the long-dead remains of a fire within a cave.

"Interesting," said Hermione, in-between the customary gasps for breath. "Oh, this is interesting –"

"We're in the same universe," he said. "Future time."

"It's something in your mindset. It must be."

His eyes narrowed. "Excuse me?"

"The only time it blasts us forward on a timeline is when the ideology isn't being properly embraced. I think …" Her face lit up. "You know, maybe it's that I've been supplying the understanding of the anonymity ideology, and it's just that you're so naturally powerful that we've been careening all over the place."

"Oh, well, if you have such a thorough understanding, then why don't you simply take us back?"

"Don't be catty, Tom. You've got to admit, it's not as if you've ever had any great appreciation for anonymity before. And I mean proper anonymity, not all that pseudonym business." She bit her lip. "Besides, I don't think I can take us back, even if we wanted to risk trying it and leaving you behind. I don't think I've got the magical strength for that. I'm quite good with technical work, Transfiguration and Charms and such, but this is hardly technical; we're ripping open doors in space, for Merlin's sake." She shook her head. "I don't think I'd be able to get us far enough, especially with the distance we've traveled now."

"So … what, we stay here and you try to teach me how to properly internalize anonymity?" Tom said. "Sounds utterly delightful." Admittedly, the prospect was far more appealing than more bursts of agony and sights he couldn't begin to fathom. And extended discussion with Hermione would hardly be torture, even if it was on such an inane topic as wanting to be nobody at all.

Still.

She shrugged hopelessly.

"Well," he said. "I suppose I must, then."

Hermione brightened. "If you're receptive, that's a good start. Just think of it, anyway … this actually feels doable, for the first time. Once you can get your thoughts under control, you can finally get us back to 1945 and 1998."

"The latter, maybe, but the former, no," Tom said coolly.

"Right," she said, sighing, "or you could try evading your impending death. Of course. My mistake."

An image of the elder Hermione's dead body flashed with alarming clarity in Tom's mind's eye. "I maintain that you shouldn't return, either," he said quietly.

The optimism dripped from Hermione's face like makeup melting out of place. "Please don't play Devil's Advocate with me," she said, sounding hurt.

"I'm not. It was a legitimate suggestion. You are worth more than what that life has lined up for you."

She tilted her head, giving him a curious look. Riddle straightened his posture, clasping his hands behind his back. Perhaps he had gone too far.

"And what else would I do?" she said. "Where would I go?"

"Oh, I don't know, maybe anywhere that still retains possibilities rather than dreary actualities."

"Such as?"

"Back to 2075, if you wanted. You are a national hero there."

"I'm also under a false name." Hermione shook her head. "No, I'd rather be in a time where nobody knows me. Make a fresh start. Maybe go back and finish my last year of Hogwarts a couple decades after that, catch up on a century's worth of reading, pretend I was a transfer – " She cut herself off abruptly.

"What is it?" he said.

"Well, that's just it, isn't it?" she said, her eyes looking alarmingly wet all of a sudden. "I do want to explore, don't I? I do want to have a life where I don't know its confines, where I can look at – at possibilities, and ask questions, and … but I can't. That's just it. It's time, Tom. And I've got to go back to mine."

She started to stride past him toward the cave, but he caught her arm. "Hermione." He turned her back around, let out an impatient sigh, and roughly wiped two tears from her cheeks where they'd fallen. "Don't be preposterous. You don't have to do anything. You've spent how long now exploring the farthest realms of possibility, and you still think you're locked into just one?"

Hermione gently shook him off. "It's scary, all right?"

"What is?" he demanded.

"The potential that I could do that. Just ignore what I know I should do and be utterly selfish and possibly muddle everything up."

Tom could barely keep himself from rolling his eyes. Leave it to this girl to be scared of her own potential, of all things, after nearly getting killed in the infinite depths of space a generous handful of times in the last few days.

"It's too scary to let myself consider the possibility that I could be happy doing that, chasing after that," Hermione said. Resolve entered her eyes. She drew herself up. "I've got to fix my energies on being happy enough with what I've got. That's what I've always done."

"What, settled for less because you assume there's nothing more lined up for you?" he scoffed.

"I – what? No!"

"That is almost verbatim what you just said."

"No, it's not. Realism, pragmatism, the acknowledgment of my human limits, that's what I'm talking about!"

"And pursuing happiness is not within your human limit?" Tom said. It was easy to fluster her usually, but right now it felt almost humiliatingly so. He had a hunch that it was because he was right, and she secretly knew it.

"Yes, of course it is, but – but I'm just one girl; I'm smart and I work hard but I'm not some … I'm not like Harry, I'm not a Chosen One, I know logically I can't be chasing after these huge, inaccessible things!" Hermione shook her head. "I've had to pick my battles, choose stepping stones to big issues. House Elf Rights. Prejudice against blood status. Tangible goals. I can't just toss everything away on some nebulous concept of happiness all of a sudden, and I'm certainly not going to –"

"House Elf Rights?" repeated Riddle, appalled. Saying the phrase felt like an Acid Pop was dissolving some vital part of his mouth.

"– oh, hush! And I'm certainly not going to prioritize my happiness above the right thing to do!"

"What you define as 'right' seems to be just a bit arbitrary."

"Do you even have a definition of 'right'?" she shot back.

"Yes," he said drily. "Something that House Elves shouldn't have."

Her fists flew up as one, and for a moment he thought she was going to try to punch him. But she forced her hands back down, her expression comically thunderous. When she spoke, she sounded near hysteria. "Well, I'm alone in this," she said. "That's a given, no matter what I do. So I might as well do what I think is right, just as long as nobody's going to understand what I've been through."

"On the contrary," Riddle said, keeping his expression glacier-smooth. "I understand."

She blinked a few times, and the anger melted away from her expression entirely, something dangerously close to comprehension appearing in its stead.

"What are you planning on doing, then?" she asked cautiously.

Riddle shrugged. "The possibilities, as I've learned, are infinite. Once I master the Timeglass, I can go anywhere, though I'd rather stay on our Earth. I suppose I have somewhat of a foolish semantic attachment to the place. In any case, I intend to live out one continuous block of infinity, starting somewhere following 2075 until an indeterminate time."

"That's your plan?"

"That is the plan. Yes."

"It sounds awfully lonely."

"As you said," Riddle replied stiffly. "I am alone in this. A given."

Hermione half-smiled. "Alone together," she said wryly.

Riddle met and held her eyes. He did not look away. Hers was the weight of a thousand gazes, but he did not bend. He thirsted to look at her stubborn mouth, at her folded arms, her chin held high, but her eyes were suns with an unimaginable gravity.

Perhaps he was going mad again, because for a moment he thought he might like to kiss her, simply and deeply.

Then she nodded to the cave, saying, "Come on, we should talk about the anonymity ideology." But they did not get the chance to do so, because then Alengurd Bansherwold burst from the air beside them, shocking them both out of words entirely.

He straightened up and took them both in with clear, hard eyes. "Finally," he said, sounding irritated. Without a further word, he grabbed their arms, held the Timeglass up again, and the three left the asteroid a cold and lonely satellite.

"They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places."

- Robert Frost

Heh, all those crazy worlds were too much fun to write. DON'T DO DRUGS KIDS

(do reviews instead, they have no adverse health effects and boost both your and my quality of life)

love you and hope you liked the plot-thickening!

-speech