London, England
1939
Hermione keeps her hair tied back now. It sort of helps the bigness, but it doesn't do much for the frizz. She celebrates her twelfth birthday alone. Tom sends her letters all year – but not as many as he did before.
And then it's summer at last.
Tom tells her stories about Hogwarts, as he always does. He makes her go bright red when he tells her about dirty things he's done with the girls there. He calls the other boys virgins and snickers when Mrs. Cole reprimands them for waking up stiff and soiling their sheets. He's much taller. Somehow, he's even handsomer.
He watches her like a hawk.
Hermione moves away from an entrancing painting filled with cubes and bright, distinct colors, and she opens her latest book. It's Henry V. She's about to go back to her seat when Tom stops her.
"Wait." He's staring at her in a strange way. He chew his eraser thoughtfully. "Stay right there for a few minutes."
"Why?" Hermione asks.
"Just stay still," he presses.
She sighs and cast a glance around them, at the section they stand in. It's empty, save for a woman carting a baby stroller and her husband. "Alright."
While Tom draws her, she stares at a distant sculpture, studying the Hermioneful way the marble figures curve and arch, as if they might embrace the light surrounding them at any moment. They're gorgeous. They're pure. And slightly boring, if she's being honest. Tom is finished.
"Can I look?" she says, coming over. Tom shakes his head furiously.
"No." He rakes his fingernails over the cover of the sketchbook, chipping at the cardboard and his initials stenciled into it. "Not yet. Maybe later.'"
Hermione is surprised. "It's not finished?" she questions.
"Not exactly." He shifts, restlessly. "I couldn't get your eyes right."
"Oh."
"Let's go," he says, standing up. "I think I'm done with observation. And I'm bored of this place anyway."
She smiles. "Already?"
He grins back and takes her hand, tugging it into his. Tugging her up so she falls into him. So he can kiss her cheek and slip his arm around her waist and sneak his fingers into her pocket. "Don't look so surprised," he says, steering them toward the exit. "One would think you hardly know me at all."
She scoffs.
The weather is perfect. Hermione kicks her feet in the shallow end of the pool, drying off from her swim, while Tom does breaststrokes in the turquoise ripples. He tires of this soon and comes over, dragging himself up beside her and plopping his head down on her lap. He's lanky, but his skin is smooth and pale like milk. Not pimply, like the other boys'.
Hermione remembers kind, loving fingers weaving through her hair when she was little. She doesn't know why the memory comes to her just then. Mum's face is only a blurred smudge of pastels and sadness now. The details have gone soft.
She looks down at Tom's wet black hair and his closed eyes, where those girl eyelashes curl and brush the tops of his carved cheekbones. He could be made of porcelain.
She touches his hair slowly, experimentally, and pulls her fingers through the soaked strands. They leave streaks behind, like gaucho or stiff strips of black acrylic paint. Tom's eyes flutter open and watch her curiously. She bites her lip. His gaze falls on the movement.
"Is it ok if I…?" she trails.
Tom's eyes are intent on her hesitating fingers. He pulls them back down to his head, bending the knuckles so they curl. "Yeah. It feels nice." And he closes his eyes, breaths slowing when she continues to comb his hair with her hands. The sun warms their skin and turns hers gilded. But Tom stays white as snow.
Hermione sees one of the older girls run by in the distance and stops her exercise, watching and realizing with shock that the older girl isn't older at all. It's Amy Benson. Amy Benson with…with breasts.
What the devil?
She blinks, wondering when Amy developed this new asset and why she hasn't yet. She's still flat as an ironing board, for God's sake. She feels self-conscious for the first time ever. Insecure about something besides her impossible hair.
Tom opens his eyes, frowning at her. "What did you stop for?" he says.
"Oh, sorry." She shakes herself and puts her fingers in his hair again. Soothing him the way her mother used to soothe her. It works. "I just got distracted."
"Oh." Tom's eyes look catlike, the way they slip and slide and slumber. He sighs. "That feels like heaven."
She smiles, scratching his scalp gently. Tom smirks and tucks his arms under his head.
When they have to go back, it's nighttime. Hermione stands up on the rickety bus to see the billions of twinkling stars outside their window, peering out of the glass and squinting up at the blue-black sky. Tom tells her to be careful and keeps his hands on her waist, steadying her even though she says she's just fine. But he's worried she'll fall. He's worried his toy might get broken if he doesn't keep an eye on it.
London, England
1947 – present
Cormac McLaggen asks Hermione out to dinner.
She tells him no.
Hermione hates herself for doing it. She hates him more. He's ruined her life.
She sits down in her little cupboard of a room in the Dursleys' flat, on the twin-size bed. Her feet are exhausted from running around in the high-heels that Madame Pomfrey makes all the employees wear. The high-heels that get her extra smiles and wolf whistles when she crosses the street.
She presses the heels of her palms into her tired eyes, wondering what it would be like to date Cormac. She tries to imagine it, to imagine him in a nice blue suit and in a restaurant, smiling at her as she sits down in the booth across from him. The candles are romantic. He's gotten her flowers. He wants to hold her hand, but the night's only just begun so he doesn't try to just yet…
Bam.
Her fantasy is rudely interrupted.
Because instead of Cormac McLaggen, she sees him. She sees Tom holding her hand for all to see, twirling his fingers through hers, kissing the tips and sucking them and blowing on them so she shivers. He watches her reactions with dark eyes that laugh at her. That laugh at her weakness for him. That take delight in their toying. That pull her in like fish hooks reeling in a victim for the kill…
I'm not anyone's toy. Hermione yanks herself out of the daydream, viciously. She's not going there. Not ever again.
It's far too dangerous.
And it will get her nowhere.
She makes a grab for her painful shoes, swipes up her library card, and leaves before the haunting memories can catch up with her. Before her heart can dare to miss what it lost so long ago.
London, England
1939
"Tom, let go! I don't want to go in-"
"Stop being difficult," Tom hisses. He gives her a rough shove and Hermione buckles, falling into the boiler room that seems much smaller now than when she was ten years old. Her shoulder bangs on the cement wall. She barely fits. It's screaming hot. "I'll come back for you in a few hours."
"Tom, don't," she pleads. "I'll just hide in my room or something-"
"No."
"Please, Tom," she says desperately. "It's so hot. Don't make me stay here."
Tom glares at her with angel eyes gone demonic. "Stop that. You're staying here and that's the end of it." He adds, threateningly, "Don't try to call for help either."
"Please. I hate the dark," she chokes. "Please, please don't make me…"
Hermione sobs when the door slams shut.
It's suffocating in here. It's muggy. It's humid. She sweats through her clothes and stays standing, crammed against the locked door and praying silently as her legs begin to cramp. She can barely breathe. After the first thirty minutes, she tries to break loose. She rams her body up against the metal door, again and again, harder and harder, until she feels dizzy and can't draw one single breath. She pounds her fists against it and screams and screams – but no one is on this floor during orientation. No one can hear her through the cement walls.
She gets angry.
And at last, two and a half long, long hours later, the door opens. When it does, she tumbles onto the floor outside. Breathless. Sobbing. Busting her lip on the tile floor.
"Hermione," says Tom, surprised. Like he didn't even know she was in there. "Are you al-?"
"Get away from me!" She slaps away his hands when he reaches for her and glowers at him through sweat-drenched strands of hair, panting. "I hate you, Tom Riddle."
Tom's eyes go wide.
She runs then, dashing down the hallway and over the black-and-white tiled floors, knocking over some kid's bucket of soapy water and escaping upstairs to the third floor. When she finally reaches her room, she throws herself onto the cot and screeches into her pillow. She sobs miserably.
She's locked the door… but he comes in anyway.
"Go away," she shouts through the pillow, but he doesn't listen. He never listens.
Tom shuts the door and goes over to her, sitting down on the bed by her head. She recoils from him when he tries to touch her. He pulls his hand back and doesn't say anything for a while, and eventually, she quiets.
"Do you really hate me?" he says at last.
"No." Hermione wipes her raw eyes on her sleeve, looking over at him. He looks scared. "But…but I don't like it when you do things like that to me."
"Things like what?"
"Like locking me up," she mutters. "Like not letting me have any friends."
"But you don't need any other-"
"No, Tom." She meets his eyes bravely. "I do."
"No."
"Tom, you can't-"
"No," he says angrily. "No, no, no. You can't, Hermione. I won't let you." He draws himself up, eyes narrowed into slits, balled fists quivering with rage. "If you do, I'll hurt your friends. I'll kill them. I swear I will."
Hermione's face crumples.
"Don't cry." Tom frowns and scoots over, taking her in his arms and wrapping himself around her. He pulls his thumb over her wet cheek. She hides her big sad eyes inside her elbow and he rubs her back, soothingly. "Hermione, you can't, you can't… I won't share…"
"Why not?" she says. "I don't understand, Tom. I don't understand you."
"Because you're mine."
It's just a whisper.
Hermione is so surprised her tears stop instantly. She stares at Tom, bemused. "What do you mean I'm yours?" she says in a scratchy voice.
"I mean… you're mine. You belong to me," Tom repeats softly. He picks up the quilt and puts the edge to her sticky face, wiping it clean. His eyes are round and cherubic and begging her to accept this, to love him again. It's like looking into the eyes of a kicked puppy. "No one else can have you, because you're all mine, Hermione. Just mine. Ok?"
Hermione doesn't know what to say.
"Please don't hate me. Please, please, please."
"I don't hate you." She hesitates. "But I-"
Tom cuts off the rest of her words though, by pulling her close and encasing her in a bone-crushing hug. He kisses her forehead, smiling. He says he'll make everything up to her, that she'll love belonging to him, again and again, until she starts to believe it. Until she really does believe it.
Hermione's eyes burn with a sleepy spell.
She dreams while Tom keeps on whispering.
London, England
1940
This summer, Tom returns with his hands.
Hermione is reading Oliver Twist in the makeshift library when she feels them: cool fingers moving aside her incorrigible hair and going to her neck, playing up and down it like she's a slide. She shivers. She recognizes the touch. The tempo of breathing just behind her. The scent of cigs and acrylic paint and spearmint on the air. They are all third-degree burns seared into her senses.
She knows who is here without looking.
He's back.
"Did you miss me?" Tom whispers into her ear, grinning when she jumps.
"Yes." She toys with the edge of her page, flicking it. Tom's long girl eyelashes tickle her skin when he blinks and closes in to kiss her fluttery pulse. She's nervous. He can tell because he feels the way her skin thrums under his lips, his fingertips. He loves it.
"Good," he says. "I missed you too, you know."
She bites her lip.
"Scoot over, will you?"
Hermione bookmarks her page, wriggles over on the armchair, and Tom slips inside it. He's very tall. His dark eyes dance with a newborn wickedness she hasn't seen before and he pulls her into his lap, looping his arms around her stomach as he leans back. She tries to concentrate on her reading.
Not a minute later, Tom pushes away the book and it tumbles to the floor in a splash of yellowed pages and torn binding. Hermione sighs. "What is it?" she says, twisting her head around to see him. Tom swoops in and nuzzles her nose instantly.
"I just missed you is all." He meets her eyes. They're so close it feels like he's looking right into her soul. Stripping it. "Don't you want to know how my year went?"
"I suppose."
He eyes her shrewdly. "Maybe later then."
Hermione looks away and bends down to retrieve her book, curling up against him once she has it and resuming the tale. Tom's hands make a reunion with her familiarity. They rub her back and arms. They snake down her spine and under her shirt, scraping her skin with round boy nails. Tom kisses her temple. He sings a song from the radio.
"Tom."
"Hm?"
"Do I…" She pauses. "Do I look any different to you?" And she faces him fully, expectant and hoping and anxious in that insecure girl way.
Tom glances at her face, scans it, then looks back at the window he's been gazing out of. He lifts and drops a shoulder noncommittally. "Not really."
Hermione deflates.
"Did you get all my letters?" he asks.
"Yes." She traces the book spine of Oliver Twist, absently. It's hard to read with Tom back. He makes everything harder. And infinitely better. So, so much better. "They were interesting."
Tom nods. A second later, a mischievous smile twists his lips. "Do you want to hear about the girls?" he prods. "They're all idiots. Nothing like you, obviously."
Against her will, Hermione smiles. "So you think I'm smart?"
Tom hums.
"Thanks." She's flattered. He chuckles.
She nestles her head in the crook of his neck and he rests his on it, telling her all about the countless hearts he's enraptured and broken like glass in the months he's been gone. About all the different girls he's enticed into bed. About his popularity and many, many friends. About the besotted teachers. About his upcoming art show. About the critics who call him the young Picasso. About everything.
Hermione laughs and frowns and disapproves and snorts through it all. Tom bathes in her attention. He looks to her for reactions and kisses her mouth when she smiles. She doesn't really know why he kisses her, since they aren't together or anything. But she doesn't ask.
Because she knows Tom would never tell.
After they come back from the chapel, Tom sneaks them out of the line streaming back into the orphanage and takes them to the empty courtyard. Daffodils have grown in patches and he plucks one up for Hermione, giving it to her with a dashing smile. She blushes. He keeps his hand on her right hip and guides them into the shadows, out of eyeshot.
"What are we doing back here?" Hermione whispers, peeling the petals off her flower one by one. The white teardrops float to the ground sadly.
Tom shrugs. "Nothing really. I just like it better over here."
She nods.
Tom watches her as she twirls the stem and plays with it, stroking his thumb along the soft inside of her wrist and gazing at her silently. She sees him looking and raises a brow in silent question. He smirks. She rolls her eyes. It's a wordless language only they understand.
"You know," Tom says quietly. "I haven't been with any girls since I left Hogwarts."
Hermione sighs. She knows where this is going. "Oh?"
He hums. "But I'm getting a little…" He sidles closer. "Restless."
She sends him a disapproving, withering glare. "In your dreams, Tom."
Tom laughs. "What? I didn't even ask you anything."
"But you were going to." Hermione flicks what's left of the poor daffodil at their feet and narrows her eyes at Tom when he lifts her chin with a single slender finger. When he bends close and pours his breath down her mouth in a cool, minty blow.
"You're not like the other girls." His voice is a seduction in and of itself. His beauty is painful. She's sorry to say she still isn't used to it. "I don't really care about them. I just tell them I do."
"That's horrible of you."
Tom doesn't seem to hear her. He skims his soft lips up and down her chin, making her shiver. "I care about you though," he murmurs.
"How do I know you're not just lying?" she murmurs back.
"I would never lie to you." He smiles. "…and I know you want me to kiss you anyway."
Hermione feels weightless when he gently pushes her back into the brick wall, smoothing his body into hers. They click together like yin and yang. Tom's lips drip down her button nose like cool, velvet raindrops.
"But we're not together," she says.
"I know." Tom kisses the corner of her upper lip, nibbling it. Her heart skips a beat. "I just want to kiss you for a while."
"Why?"
"Your lips look soft."
Hermione bites her lip when Tom bends down toward her, his mouth headed straight for hers. It's different this time. Because he's not going to give her a light peck that'll be there for a second and gone in the next. No, he really wants to kiss her this time. Just because he wants to. Just because her lips look soft.
He's kissed a lot of other girls.
Tom's mouth pulls and pushes hers up and down, like a yo-yo. He puts one hand at the back of her neck and the other on the brick wall behind her. She still has the chest of a nine-year old even though she's thirteen and Amy Benson looks loads more woman than she does – but Tom's not kissing Amy, she reminds herself. He's kissing her.
Since he's Tom, that's perfectly fine.
When Tom's wet tongue pushes at her teeth, she opens her mouth, and she gasps when his tongue sweeps inside it. He's hungry. He doesn't kiss her like she's seen him kiss other girls when they're out on daily trips to the park and he sneaks away, far from Mrs. Cole's watchful eye and behind the apple tree with some blue-eyed blonde. He kisses her hard. He kisses her like the demon he really is.
That's why he's kissing me, Hermione thinks, afraid and breathless and excited all at once. Because no one else can see him like this, in his real form. Because I'm his, so he can hurt me without getting in trouble. So he can kiss someone the way he really wants to kiss someone.
And Tom wants to kiss someone so that it hurts.
He bites her tongue until she cries out, but then he strokes it with his so she feels better again. He crushes her to him. He traps her in his artist hands. He gently scrapes his nails under her blouse over her back and kisses her until she can't breathe. He peppers fast, anxious kisses down her throat and pulls down her sleeve so he can suck on her shoulder and leave red blotches there. He gravitates back to her lips like magic is pulling him there. Her mind whirls. Tom is carnivorous.
And when he's finally finished and pulls back, he doesn't say a word. He only lopes off, back to the orphanage with his hands in his pockets. Like nothing just happened.
Hermione watches him go, mystified.
She touches her tingling mouth and frowns.
"Come on, Hermione," calls Tom. The water breaks around his lean chest like blue glass when he moves. "Don't be such a baby."
"I'm not a baby!" She scowls and glares at him, but she has to look away because the sun is right behind him and burns her eyes. She regards the deep end of their secret pool nervously. She's wearing the new bathing suit Tom bought her with money he earned from his art show. It has two lace flowers on the right shoulder and green stripes. He had her try on lots of other ones in the store and model them in the dressing room, but ended up picking this one. "I just… I just can't swim."
"I'll hold you up," he says.
Hermione bites her lip. "Well…"
He smirks, triumphant, and pads away, kicking his long legs and streaming through the glassy cerulean over to her. He comes up, sparkling with water droplets and looking like someone from the cover of a fashion magazine. Hermione carefully treads toward him. The water feels colder out here.
"Don't let me go, ok," she says warningly.
Tom grins.
Taking her in his arms, he kicks them into the center of the pool and keeps them afloat where Hermione has never ventured before. The deepness scares her. She wants to go back, but doesn't say it. She doesn't want to look weak.
"Don't worry, baby," Tom murmurs, seeing right through her. Like she's made of tissue paper. He always makes her feel like that. "I've got you."
She nods. But she's still nervous.
"Here, hold your nose," he instructs and she does, squeezing her eyes shut when he dunks them. They come back up with a grand splash and she laughs, breathlessly. She's surprised by how fun it is. Tom grins at her and counts to three, dunking them again. By the seventh time they rise and dunk, she's laughing so hard her ribs hurt.
"Enough, enough!" she declares through her giggles. Tom raises a brow.
"Enough?" He feigns an innocent look and lets her slip in his arms a little, dropping her an inch. She yelps. "Enough of what? Swimming?"
"Tom." Her smile falters. "What are you-?"
He lets go.
A shriek rips itself free of Hermione's throat a mere second before she sinks through the water like a stone, choking on the dark water and into a pool that is much deeper than she originally thought. She tries to grab onto Tom's trunks, but they slip right by her.
And she's sinking.
She's drowning.
Her heart beats frantically and she kicks and thrashes for what feels like hours but is only minutes. The water offers nothing for her to take hold of except slimy seaweed. Bubbles surge out of her mouth when she screams. Black dots float around the endless water. Muddy sand crawls between her toes and something scaly flits over her foot.
Something's down here. Hermione's eyes widen when a shape surges toward her in the blackness. Her ears pop and her lungs sear hotter than fire from lack of oxygen, when she's so desperate her body automatically sucks in a breath only to fill her lungs up with burning seawater. She slowly goes limp. A blob with five short seaweedy limbs reaches out to her and pulls her up, up, up – up back to air.
She sputters in the daylight, coughing. Tom is laughing beside her.
"What? Did you think I'd actually let you drown?" he snickers. Hermione gasps and clings to him, holding his neck tight and refusing to let go when he tugs at her. What she'd thought to be some sort of seaweed urchin are actually his hands. "Come on, Hermione, let-"
"No!" she shouts.
Tom stops tugging and lets her hold onto him, chuckling. He likes the way she clutches him. Like she'll die without him. Like she's got no one else. "It was just a joke," he says.
"Get me out, Tom." She's shaking like a leaf. Her frizzy curls are practically a hazard. "Please, just get me o-out-" Her voice cracks and trembles. Tom relents.
"Alright, alright," he says, taking pity on her and petting her hair. "Hold onto me though, alright?"
She nods frantically, gripping him so hard her nails dig marks into his pale flesh. Tom winces and pulls her firmly against him. She squeezes her eyes shut so she doesn't have to look at the black water.
When they're finally back on land, Hermione races as far away from the threatening pool as she can. When Tom sits down on the beach towel beside her, she buries her face in his chest and hides there, shivering. He rubs her back. He speaks in soothing tones. He dries her off with his towel, wiping down her goosebump-ridden legs and arms. He wrings out her hair and sits them down in the sun. He kisses her neck. He kisses her mouth while she stares at the cheery blue pool, whiter than a sheet and silent as the grave.
It's perfect.
On the bus ride back, Tom watches the tight-knit buildings in the city fly by through the windows. Hermione sleeps on his shoulder, mouth parted and snoring softly. He wants to draw the city. He wants to paint the way Hermione's bottom lip juts out more than her top one, and how the skin between her eyebrows bunches when she has a bad dream. He wants to go back to Hogwarts. He wants to put everything he sees on paper.
He looks away from the windows and catches the new kid, Dennis Bishop, staring at them with blatant disgust on his face. He arches a brow and Dennis looks away quickly, scowling. Tom makes a note to leave the younger boy a special picture before summer ends.
He's distracted when Hermione stirs in her sleep, murmuring a dream or two. There's a strand of hair caught under her nose and he pulls it away carefully. They go over a speed bump, jolting the whole bus, and her eyes snap open. She blinks up at him, and smiles. He finds that he likes being the first thing she wakes up to, the only thing she smiles at. He does not like to share her affections.
Because he's afraid that if he does, he'll lose her forever. And Tom is determined to never lose again.