"Beware of those in whom the will to punish is strong."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Tom's journey to Brecon took him right down the Welsh Marches. The railway ran through what seemed like endless rolling green hills, forests and fields that were only occasionally interrupted by towns and villages, but the glorious scenery left him indifferent and flashed largely unnoticed passed the window.
Thankfully, he had the compartment to himself most of way, and even more thankfully there was a direct wizarding train at Platform Five-and-a-half from Manchester. A plump old witch joined him for a while between Crewe and Shrewsbury and made some dull conversation, which he made a decent attempt not to be rude about but found frustrating. Although he could hardly concentrate on his book.
He was distressed to find himself excited. Most of the anticipation was to have a chance to see Hermione's personal life, to look for the secrets he was sure existed, to finally satisfy the instinct that told him something is not right. But, loathe as he was to own it even to himself, a part of him was looking forward to seeing her.
After what seemed like days the train finally pulled into Brecon and Tom disembarked, bag in hand, hoping Hermione had received the owl informing her of his arrival time. The station was tiny enough to share platforms with the Muggles, just one either side of the track with a bridge across to the ticket office and waiting room. There was no porter in sight and only one wizard, who was sitting reading The Daily Prophet and eating a sandwich.
There was no sign of Hermione outside the station, and he set his bag down in irritation. He hated to be kept waiting, but at least the weather was dry and crisp after weeks of rain. His breath came out in icy plumes. The late afternoon sunlight bathed the hills behind the town with golden light. She'd said she was coming by carriage, and he scanned the sky hopefully.
The roar of an engine disturbed the quiet station and he glared as a sleek car pulled up in front of him, his irritation swiftly turning into shock as it got close enough for him to see her through the windscreen.
"Sorry I'm late," Hermione said, jumping out of the car and for a moment Tom was too overcome with surprise to answer. "I got a bit lost actually. I'm not used to going by road."
He stared. Her hair pulled on top of her head and she was wearing a cream silk blouse tucked into brown trousers, which emphasised her tiny waist. He'd never seen a witch dressed like that, with all the casual glamour of a Muggle film star posing in one of the magazines Mrs Cole had hidden from the nuns in her office.
"Hello," he muttered, trying not to react. "Is that a Muggle car?"
"Yes," she said, grinning. "It was my Christmas present from my father. Do you like it?"
There was a familiar teasing edge in her voice. It told him she knew very well he wouldn't like it but didn't care and it recovered him.
"I'm just not sure it'll be safe… Not the car, I'm sure that's fine – more the driver."
"Oh, honestly. I have actually passed my test. This morning actually."
"Well, now I feel fully secure," he said sarcastically, and eyed the vehicle again. It was low-slung and sleek and silver with a soft black roof. He didn't know much about them, truth be told, but he knew enough to see this one screamed expensive and impractical and...
- it was a Muggle car. She was a witch and here she was with a car and trousers and he felt displaced somehow, like he'd been thrown into a narrative he didn't understand.
"Come on," she said, biting her lip as she waited. He was relieved to see it: she must be as nervous as he was. "Let's go."
She put his bag in the boot, and he warily climbed into the passenger seat. He couldn't remember the last time he had been in a car, although there was one sitting in the stables at the Riddle manor. (The horses had been sold off immediately of course. Tom had absolutely no desire to prance around the county playing the country gentleman on his father's hunters - found the very idea revolting). Indeed, aside from the odd taxi, he'd never been in anything like this one. It wasn't as though anyone he knew owned such a thing. This car smelled of leather and Hermione and it made an aggressive purring roar. The dashboard was covered with incomprehensible dials, needles spinning between numbers that made no sense.
He watched her as she drove, studying how her eyes flicked up to the little mirrors, the relaxed, focused look, and the way her beautiful mouth curved in concentration, how she handled the stick between them with calm assurance.
"You're better than I thought you'd be at this," he said, eventually.
"Yes," she agreed. "It's quite wonderful actually. Driving. It's very freeing, in a strange way. I think I prefer it to flying."
"Really?" he asked, surprised yet again, off balance because as always she'd cut through his expectations and sent him spinning off-kilter.
"Yeah, I used to be scared of heights and I'm much better now but I've never really loved it. Let's just say I'm not a born Quidditch player. And, gods, have you ever ridden a hippogriff?"
"No."
"Well," she said, turning off onto a winding lane. There were no houses now, just endless trees and sheep and hedgerow and hills, "it's very strange. It's a bit like riding a non-magical horse, except a thousand times more disconcerting. Oh, I wish we could have the top down - it's much nicer, but it's too cold."
"Honestly, are you a witch or not?" he teased and she choked slightly, frowning. She didn't answer.
"I love flying," he admitted, unsure of what he'd said that had caused her face to shutter.
Hermione was driving quite fast now, the hedgerow speeding past in a green blur. She looked surprised for a moment.
"Why don't you play Quidditch?"
He rolled his eyes at her and, catching it, she laughed.
"Loving flying and wanting to play Quidditch aren't the same thing. I do sometimes with the Slytherins at weekend and in the summer term. Naturally, I'm very good."
"What position?" she asked, and he could tell this time she was the one taken aback.
"Seeker, of course. I partly don't like it because it has the most ridiculous rules. What's the point in the other six players?"
"I've seen a team win even when they didn't get the snitch, but yes – I completely agree. It's so irritating. And as brooms get faster and the snitch gets caught more quickly the disparity in points will just get more unfair. Anyway – we're nearly there. If you look to your left you might be able to see the castle."
He peered out of the window, and indeed there it was in the distance, on the edge of a shining body of water he suspected might be an actual fucking moat, tucked into the cliff of a green hill rising behind, beautiful parkland flowing down the other side, with what looked like a herd of winged horses grazing among the great trees.
"We're almost there," she said, signalling left although there was no turning yet, and that was when it all went to hell.
She squeaked suddenly and his eyes snapped back to her, surprised at the noise.
"Tom, the compass you gave me – it just warmed up."
"Let me see it," he said, leaning over and pulling at the chain around her neck without asking. The needle was pointing straight at the wood they were about to drive through.
"Stop the car, Hermione, now," he ordered, grabbing his wand as she slammed on the brakes.
"What is it?" she asked, and he admired how quickly she'd reacted to the concern in his voice, how unthinkingly she'd obeyed.
But they were in the coppice now, and he scanned the shadowy trees for a sign, his eyes hardly adjusted to the sudden change in light. "I think there's someone or something in here who means you harm. Wait here."
He was out of the car before she could react, casting a disillusionment charm over himself. However, perhaps because of her instant reaction to his past order he'd forgotten she wasn't one of his Knights, who would have done as they were told: she scrambled out of the car almost as quickly as he had, and then there was a man's laugh, and she was firing a spell and Tom was on the wrong side of the car. He crept around quietly, hoping he hadn't been seen.
"This is awful convenient," the man said, his accent rough, with a curious intonation that was half Estuary, half foreign. Tom still couldn't see him, but he brushed Hermione's hand to let her know he was standing beside her.
"Why's that?" she asked, eyes straining in the direction the voice had come from. Tom wondered if the man had had the same thought as him and disillusioned himself, and wished he could use her necklace to pinpoint his exact location.
"Missed you on the way out, din I? Thought you was flying, see, so I was waiting on my broom… then I saw the Muggle car and I thought to myself, I'll catch you on the way back little goose. You was sposed to have a friend with you, thought I'd have two of you to deal with."
"What do you want?" Hermione asked, and Tom marvelled at how calm she sounded. There was no tremble in her hands as they kept up the shield around herself. She'd have to drop it to cast, which was perhaps what the man was waiting for.
"Me? Just my paycheck, pretty goose. Nothing personal, see?"
"So you're just a mercenary. Who do you work for?"
"You'll meet him soon enough," the voice was closer now and Tom cursed under his breath. The man had rendered himself invisible, or near enough in the dim light of the wood.
"Try hominum revelio," she whispered, from the corner of her mouth.
He'd never heard of the spell, which irritated him, but he did it anyway. Casting something for the first time non-verbally was far beyond most people, but Tom was not ordinary, and so the shimmering outline of a man, closer than he'd thought, appeared for a moment.
"Keep him talking. When I count to three," he breathed in her ear, "drop the shield and get on the floor."
"I don't think I'd like that," Hermione said to the man. "How did you know I'd be going to collect a friend today?"
"Been reading your post. Camped out in the hills for a fucking month, I've been, since you left that damn impregnable school. But Gaelfric always gets his mark in the end and I've got you now little goose."
"Why do you keep calling me goose?"
"Golden goose, see? You're worth a fortune little girl. Your daddy'll be paying like Croesus for his riches."
"One-two-three," Tom commanded, and as she dropped he fired six stunners in succession. A thud on the ground indicated one had found its mark.
"Thanks," Hermione said shakily as she she took his hand and let him pull her up.
The horror that she'd nearly been taken from him rose up inside him and, impatient and far beyond angry, he pulled her to him pressing his mouth on hers for the first time, pushing her against the car. It was rough and blissful and blistering and demanding and hard and comforting and when he pulled away from her her eyes were glazed and dark, black pupils eating into the brown.
And although she wasn't planned for, although she was more distracting than anything he'd ever seen, although she made him act irrationally and made him feel desires that had never occurred to him, he felt a burst of fucking triumph and something that might be joy, the sort of happy burst of feeling he'd only had after achieving extreme magic – but then she was magic, wasn't she, magic made flesh, he thought and he pulled her against him, his hand still wound in her hair.
The words burned at his throat, but he couldn't quite get them out: No one touches what's mine. No one.
"I told you to wait in the car," he said at last.
She pulled away, wincing as his hand took a few hairs with it.
"I am not the sort of girl that sits in the car, as you know perfectly well, you arse," Hermione snapped and spun around. "Hominum revelio," she cast, and then when the body glowed she followed it with incarcerous, the counter-spells to invisibility, and summoned the intruder's wand.
The man was enormous: blond and brutish, with tattoos peeking out from under his robe that didn't appear to be aesthetic choices but indicators of a life of hardcore crime and prison. Tom hoped he'd never have to rely on inept mercenaries like this one.
"Enervate," he said, walking over to the prone figure.
"What are you doing?" she hissed.
"Getting information, obviously. Stop acting like such a Gryffindor."
"Shite," the man muttered when his eyes were open, struggling with the ropes.
"Who are you working for?" Tom asked coldly.
The man spat in his face in answer.
"Legilimens," he commanded, and then he was inside the man's mind, one so shallow and idiotic that even its cruelty was mundane, ripping through his memories, extracting the information he needed so mercilessly that the man howled out with the pain of the mental ransacking.
Too late, though, to notice the man hadn't been alone.
He pulled back out of the man's mind and span around, but there was a wand pointing at Hermione's head, another rough-looking wizard standing behind her, and both the wands she had been holding on the floor about a foot from where she was standing. He took in the signals betraying her fear, and incandescent, Tom could hardly see for a moment, until the mingled rage and panic settled and he remembered that he was magnificent - far more than a match for these idiots.
After all, orphans learnt to fight dirty - and so did Slytherins without a proper wizarding name.
"Drop yer wand, boy," the man ordered and Tom smirked. If the man had been cleverer, he'd have picked up the spare wands and have one pointed at Tom as well as at Hermione. But he wasn't.
Hermione shook her head very slightly and he wondered if she also had a plan.
That would be unfortunate: he'd quite like to rescue her from this. Surely, surely she'd have to start trusting him if he did that? Coldly, Tom weighed up in his mind the speed at which he could curse the man, without giving the man a chance to hurt Hermione. They didn't want to kill her immediately, but kidnap and ransom, so overall the risk was worth it. There was a plan to kill her but only once the gold had arrived.. He couldn't kill the bearded wizard though. He was too close behind Dearborn and if Tom missed and struck her instead...
So, instead of dropping his wand, he made as if to lower it, and then, snake-quick, sent a well-aimed and highly potent diffindo at the man's wand-hand.
It cut clean through the wrist and his hand, still clutching the wand, dropped to the ground. Hermione's attacker stared down at the bleeding stump of his wrist in shock as she threw herself to the side, and so he didn't have time to duck the Avada Kedavra that followed, and toppled down to join his severed hand on the leaf-littered ground, quite dead.
"You killed him," Hermione said, frowning as she got up, wand in hand.
"I did," Tom agreed, thinking he was probably owed a thank-you, but as her voice was shakier than normal he didn't comment.
She walked past Tom and looked down at the still-living assailant.
"Are there any more of you?"
"Might be.."
She sent a silent curse that had him howling and Tom informed her that no, according to what he'd seen in the man's mind it had just been the two of them.
"They were going to grab you and go," he told her. "The other one was further back in case you got past this cretin. I suppose he heard something and came looking."
"What transport method were you using?" she asked the man, her wand still trained on him.
Cowed now, he told her. "Got a Portkey innit."
"How long until it activates?"
"About ten minutes," he said. "If ye can work out what we was usin'."
She rolled her eyes. "Accio portkey."
A tobacco pouch came flying out of the dead man's pocket behind them and Hermione waved it mockingly at their captive.
Tom watched, fascinated, as she calmly levitated the corpse over to the surviving attacker, Gaelfric he'd called himself. Ropes wrapped around them both, binding them together, but she ignored the darker haired man's screams of horror.
The wand-hand followed: she levitated that into the living man's pocket, at which point he began to cry. Hermione snapped both their wands by hand, and then scourgified them, curiously, before tucking them in another pocket. He wondered at her thoroughness, at how calm she was... as though she'd been attacked before - and often.
In fact, he thought, staring at the dark-haired girl bent over the corpse of her attacker, that made sense. If she'd been attacked - taken perhaps - it would explain so much...
"Obscuro," Hermione said, blindfolding the man, and then, "Obliviate."
What was still visible of his face became completely slack for a moment, and then he began to yell and scream for help, scream where was he, what had been done to him, scream who was he. She clearly wiped his mind completely. It would almost have been a pitiful sight, were it not for the gruesome corpse tied to him turning the scene into something from a nightmare.
Finally, Hermione tucked the portkey into his other pocket and then, as though she'd forgotten all about him, looked up at Tom. She looked half-defiant, half-embarrassed, as though he'd walked in on her changing.
He couldn't quite read her, but whatever she saw in his face seemed to relax her and she looked back down at the man who'd become her victim.
"Tell your master not to bother me again," she said, but he ignored her, thrashing on the ground, too panicked to listen.
"Silencio." She waited until he was still, and then continued, "I said, tell your despicable master not to come after me again. We know who he is and there will be consequences if he does. Repeat that back."
"Not to come after you again," he stammered when she'd lifted the silencing spell. "Know who he is. Consequences."
She cast one more spell, but silently, a soft red beam hitting the man's chest and then there was a blue glow from the portkey and the bodies were gone, leaving them alone in the coppice.
"That was quite brilliant," Tom said, admiringly.
"I like things... tidy," she said, all of a sudden looking fragile, her face white and eyes huge. "Um. Look - thank you. If you hadn't been here... that might have gone rather badly. I didn't - Father said - but..."
He stepped over to her and, for the first time in his life voluntarily pulled another person into his arms for comfort. It wasn't an automatic gesture by any means, and indeed he didn't really see the point of it himself, but he had seen people console others in such a way, and he presumed it was the correct action.
To his horror, she started crying; the vicious eyed, vengeful witch turning into someone who was just a girl.
"I killed him," she said, words muffled against his chest.
He wondered if she was in shock or something: he'd very clearly done the killing (and, unlike the time before, this hadn't hurt him, hadn't left an empty ache - he'd think on it later).
"You didn't," he told her, awkwardly stroking her back.
"No, I did. I spelled his blood to clot. I- I used a healing spell and made a little clot by his heart... He'll be dead in three days."
Unable to resist any more, he pulled her back and pressed his mouth back against hers again, overcome with desire.
.
.
Hermione's vengeful streak has always interested me. Like, she can be a real bitch to be honest - but not a normal bitch, a terrifying one.
THANK YOU ALL I've had an amazing response to the last couple of chapters.
I'm pretty nervous about writing any action sequence, not my forte, so please let me know what you think!
