'Cause I saw the end before we'd begun,
Yes I saw you were blinded and I knew I had won.
(- James Blunt)
Hermione wasn't precisely nervous as she made her way down Platform Nine and Three Quarters. There was a lingering sadness at leaving her idyllic new home behind, the sort of home she could hardly admit to herself she wished she'd always had - inherently magical as it was, mixed with the usual start-of-term excitement and dread.
Sophia was bidding Abraxas goodbye, his shining blond hair easy to spot even in the muted January light, and so she made her way towards them slowly, returning various greetings as she did.
She tried to stop herself scanning the crowded platform for a darker head, but they drifted willful and hopeful.
"Hermione!" Sophia greeted warmly, kissing her cheek.
She paused to make small talk with Abraxas, who was off to Asia for the next set of his travels. It had only been a few days since the wonderful, confusing, terrible night at Malfoy Manor. Days that had flown by far too quickly. He filled her in on the inevitable gossip that had emerged after the party and as he did someone shouted her name.
Hermione turned, and there was Caradoc, half-running down the platform, dark curls caught in the wind.
"Phew, thought I was going to miss you," he grinned, picking her up in a completely ridiculous spectacle of a hug.
"I didn't know you were coming!"
"Wanted to see you off. They grow up so fast," he said solemnly to Abraxas who laughed and shook his hand in greeting.
"Caradoc Dearborn," he introduced to the couple, giving Sophia a slight bow.
"I remember. You were hardly an inconspicuous figure," Abraxas said drily, and Hermione reflected that it was rather nice to see the arrogant aristocrat just ever so slightly intimidated. Caradoc, as she'd gathered even before meeting him, had been cool.
"If you'd owled me we could have had breakfast," Hermione exclaimed bossily. "Now I only have what, ten minutes of your company!"
Sophia gave a slight cough. "Tom," she said with a rather cat-like smile, "is just over there pretending not to wonder who the handsome man you're talking to might be."
Hermione's stomach lurched as though she'd been punched and lit up with a sunbeam all at once. She turned and sure enough, there he was, talking to Avery at such an angle that he was very deliberately not watching and also still at a vantage point to see everything that was going on. Just days and his beauty was a shock again.
She waved shyly, and as she'd known he would (because of course he was looking, honestly he was about as subtle as Ron sometimes), he turned an with a word to Avery walked to join them.
"Tom," she said, trying to remain poised.
"Hermione," he said with his awful fake head boy smile twisting his lips, the lips that had sent her body whirling far more than champage.
"Caradoc, this is my um, friend, Tom Riddle. Tom, my cousin Caradoc."
She'd learned to read him well enough that his almost imperceptible relaxation, the smile's transformation into a real one, was as obvious as simple Arithmancy. His jealously should have irritated her, as Ron's always had, but instead it warmed her.
Whatever else he was, he did care.
"How do you do," Tom offered his hand.
"Ah," Caradoc said, smirking as he took it, "two. Nice to meet you Hermione's friend Tom."
Tom's smile broadened into smugness. Hermione wanted to fall into a pit. The downsides of family.
"I quite see why Blishwick didn't make the cut," he muttered in an undertone to Hermione as Tom greeted Abraxas with their customary mix of mutual dislike and respect, and Sophia with more genuine pleasure.
"Oh shut up," she hissed and he laughed.
The first whistle blew, interrupting, the signal for everyone to being scrambling for compartments but Sophia said, "Ancha's on it, don't worry."
"I'll see you to your compartment," Caradoc. "Where's your trunk?"
"I've got it, don't worry," Hermione said, pleased at the chance to show off.
"Where?" Caradoc scanned the platform around them.
Hermione pulled the tiny thing from a pocket in her cloak and he laughed. Tom didn't, but his eyebrows lifted slightly and his eyes warmed and she reflected howmuchit mattered that he saw those things. How nice it was not to have her magical feats considered less interesting or impressive than how someone flew a broom.
Perhaps that was why she was being so stupid, so reckless.
"I'll see you inside," she told Sophia. "Have a wonderful trip Abraxas." And then, to Tom, bravely, "Are you sitting with us?"
"I'll have to patrol for a bit, but I'll leave my trunk with you." He was pleased, she thought, to have been asked.
His was floating obediently behind him, she reflected smugly.
"Oh you're Head Boy aren't you?" Caradoc asked in a tone of despair worthy of Fred and George Weasely. "And I thought you seemed alright."
This rather confused Tom, who smiled politely but was unused to being teased.
.
.
And after Caradoc had left, with a promise to come and visit, Tom followed. Unlike her cousin - and what a glorious surprise that had been - he had been, Hermione reflected, rather stiff with her. She wondered if he would even have said hello had she not called him over.
"What's got him in such knots?" Sophia asked, voicing Hermione's own thoughts.
"I'm not entirely sure," she murmured thoughtfully, surprised at the other girl's ability to cut through someone's facade but knowing her well enough that it shouldn't be a shock. And after-all, Draco had been able to pinpoint precisely the right thing to say to cut through someone. This was the flip side of that coin.
"Men," Sophia pointed out, "are rather silly when it comes to having what they want. And yours is more... shall we say, complex, than most."
"He's something," Hermione agreed.
You're in my veins, he'd written to her afterwards. Nothing else. Love letters from the Dark Lord.
She sighed.
"Would you like some advice?"
"I hardly think I could stop you."
Sophia smiled, pleased.
"He's never dated anyone, Hermione. Never been in the slightest bit interested. You're not, I think, part of his plan. And however you deal with that I'd recommend you do it slowly. It's difficult when you make someone completely reassess their priorities and call me a badger if I'm wrong but that's what you do to that boy. Shake him right to the core."
It wasn't, on the whole, the worst advice she'd ever been given.
.
.
Being back at Hogwarts was an unwelcome change after the peace of the Dearborn castle. Hermione missed the good-humoured magic of the house, the quiet space to read, the subtle melody of water crashing on rock through the castle walls. She missed Alhabor and the food. She missed Cerdic.
Hogwarts in contrast - and for perhaps the first time - seemed like a chore. July and the freedom it promised seemed miles away. And yet, as she met Tom's dark eyes across the hall, at least it was never boring. She was, she knew, being quite extraordinarily stupid. But at least with him she only had herself to hurt. They'd hardly spoken after those delirious kisses as one year turned into another, stars burning her skin from a distance of a million, real fireworks exploding the air. Afterwards, he'd held her in silence on the dance-floor, touch and eyes and skin singing a song to each other than needed no words. Someone had come over as though to cut in, but whatever look Tom had sent him - whoever it had been, she'd been entirely too caught up in him to notice - had sent them scurrying away again.
She could hardly contain the dancing joy that still flooded her, drowning out her caution, her disgust, her hatred. She'd never believed such a thing really existed - kisses from the sort of novels she'd found exasperating at best, for films she'd turn off halfway through.
Explosive. Dangerous.
You're in my veins.
But now, here, back in reality, she was confronted by who he was and what he stood for. It had been so easy to forget, even on the train in that liminal space between the outside world and here. But the familiarity of Hogwarts, the place, she thought with some coldness, that he would eventually die.
The Ravenclaw seventh years sat in the seats they always sat in, but rearranged as though someone had cleaned a desk and put everything back wrong. Hector and the others were a wall between Hermione and Marcus and Claire. The mood was tense, too-bright chatter in the middle of the group attempting to conceal it.
But across the Hall, Tom's gaze still rested on hers, fierce and proud and confused. He looked at her like no one ever had, and despite everything she knew would come it made her glow, insides fizzing like uncorked champagne.
Sophia nudged her side.
"Not very subtle, dearest," she murmured. Hermione forced her attention back to the table, embarrassed.
"Am I mad?" she asked her friend.
Sophia just smiled fondly and handed her the roast potatoes.
How far she'd come in less than six months, Hermione reflected. How changed she was.
She down the table and met Claire's cold stare. It was stupid, really, but how she'd come to dislike the girl - not least because despite everything she was clinging to Marcus like a barnacle. Hermione liked to think if a man had treated her as he'd treated Claire she would have more pride. And it was additionally ridiculous that she be blamed for his rejection earlier that year.
"You'll have to deal with that soon," Sophia muttered, her gaze slyly focussed up to the top table and far away from the pretty blonde down the table.
"I don't believe in kicking people when they're down," Hermione retorted. "Haven't I done enough?"
"We'll see."
.
.
As the days passed Tom continued to be slightly off. It wasn't so much that he was ignoring her, or not acknowleging her, as he'd become inexplicably busy and never around. His minions were, not so subtly lurking in the library or walking ten paces behind her in the corridors. Watching for something. It was frustrating, and yet - and yet - had he come on full and expectant perhaps she'd have run no matter how dazzling his kisses.
This unexpected reticance, on the other hand, was fascinating. It preoccupied her as she puzzled out what exactly was wrong. It wasn't a lack of interest - that much at least was obvious from the heated stares, the way his hand had traced her thigh in Runes one afternoon, his constant gaze.
And so, she wondered. Fear perhaps. Or, just as human, if more unexpected, a subtler fear - one of rejection, of doing it wrong, an awareness of his own inexperience. Perhaps she was fucking up his big, evil ambitions. Perhaps he'd never thought he'd be genuinely interested in another person.
Whatever it was, it was getting tiresome.
And so she threw herself into her work. Perhaps even a three months ago she'd have confronted him, pulled him into some classroom, asked him what was wrong. But that was then. That was a tactic for a different life. In this one the latent side of her that liked this game, liked getting the upper hand, liked plotting and second guessing and planning and - the side that had brew Polyjuice at twelve - took a step back. Because she knew he'd crack eventually. He would come to her.
And, so, she waited.
.
.
And while she waited, there was plenty to do. Oh, not schoolwork. That was the least of it. No, the more interesting project were the whispers of Avalon and apples that had been wandering through her head all of Christmas, and so she read. One of the things she'd read and reread until she could recite it was Ollivander's letter.
It is said, and this is conjecture, for that wood is more than a thousand years old, but it is said the wood from your wand was part of a gift made to Rowena Ravenclaw from the High Priestess from the eternal realm of Avalon.
That island is now lost to us and the veil between closed forever. But it is said the Four Founders once visited Avalon to learn from the lady Nimue. In return for the knowledge she shared, Nimue asked them to close the entrance from our realm, which was found on Helga Hufflepuff's lands. She feared the turning tide of those we now called Muggles against those with magic.
Rowena Ravenclaw devised a way, alongside Helga and Godric Gryffindor and in payment the lady Nimue gave them seven relics from the Isles: Ravenclaw's diadem, now lost, a sword for Godric Gryffindor, a cupful of water from the lake, which could heal any wound, three golden apples, and the wood from the tree which grew over Merlin's grave.
But Salazar Slytherin refused to help the founders: he believed the immortal realm should not be closed off because of Muggle fear. And so, the founders argued, and he stayed on the Isle. It is said Rowena Ravenclaw loved him, and it broke her heart to seal him away and that is why Nimue gifted her the apples, so that she might live in eternal youth and open up the island again when it was safe, and be reunited with her love.
But she did not, and she took a lover and had a daughter, and died many years later.
Rowena Ravenclaw, whose daughter haunted Hermione's room. Rowena Ravenclaw, whose daughter Hermione had apparently restored from some faded and invisible state.
The daughter who'd been returned to Hogwarts as a ghost and who was never around for a chat just when you wanted her.
The daughter whose founders' blood tied her to the castle.
Something about that bothered Hermione, in the sort of irritating and illogical way Harry had worried about things. Some intuition that it mattered, and she was being told those things for a reason. And really, she knew of the sword and the cup and the diadem. Those things held little interest or mystery outside of their role in a past-future she tried not to dwell on.
But the apples. Those had become very interesting when she'd been browsing through the book she'd bought Tom for Christmas (just to check she wasn't giving him a headstart on what to make into a Horcrux or anything unpleasant).
On one page, one she'd carefully removed, spelling its absence fifteen times over so Tom would never guess, if he could tell a page had gone at all, that she'd done it, on that page there had been a beautiful drawing wrought in fine gold leaf, of an apple.
The rumours, the Medieval book told her, had that Imortalitie was rejectede byy wise Rowan Raveneclaww who coulde hav bene a godde yf shee hadd so wished.
And then she'd remembered, that golden apples had been the source of immortality for the Norse gods. And she'd begun to wonder, in that sifting pathless way her brain had sometimes when it was at its most brilliant. She'd learned, at great cost, to trust her intuition.
Apples, Hermione thought, as she settled into the library with a stack of Arthuriana, ignoring her Charms homework, and Avalon.
Hi sorry this took so long. I love you all so so so much. I haven't even read it over, so let me know all the inevitable typos.
And thank you, if you're still there, for your patience, your reviews which have been full of love and never blame for my hiatus. My life is incredibly hectic but I've settled a bit now (moving countries and jobs takes some settling) and, so, I write.
Let me know if you're still out there.
x
