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Things are sweeter when they're lost.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
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They nearly got away with it. Hermione kicked herself for her own stupidity a hundred times over in the weeks that followed, as she lay awake listening as her housemates fell asleep one by one.
It was her fault, really. She'd woken pressed close against him to find he'd covered them in the discarded quilt and fallen asleep, the sculpted marble angles of his face softened and content. He had looked, for the first time, innocent and at peace and she'd indulged herself by letting him sleep on so she could catalogue the tiny changes in his expression, revel in the way he reached for her when she pulled herself up to wake him. She'd lain in his arms too long and when he'd woken, eyes yielding into wakefulness as slowly as a winter dawn, it had been past eight o'clock and the castle was awake.
It was a portrait who'd informed the Headmaster, Dumbledore told her.
(He'd kissed her, before he left, not rushing to break the spell on the room. But they'd both known he'd been there too long.)
The portraits were tricky things; some were trustworthy and others weren't.
"You are adults, and as such you will not be expelled," Dippet had told them, as she and Tom sat white-faced and embarrassed in his office that Sunday morning after breakfast, "but there must be consequences."
And so, her private sanctuary was gone. The two cleverest students in years and they'd been so stupid. Fifty house points, and a month of detentions – and the loss of her room. It was a light punishment all things considered. But it stung.
("I went to make sure she knew I wasn't angry about the duel," Tom had told the Headmaster, charmingly. "We stayed late talking. I swear on my honour that we didn't…" and he blushed becomingly. The Headmaster softened. "I understand, Tom, but it's how it looks…. Justice must be seen to be done.")
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Hermione was left far more mortified after her conversation with Albus. She'd never disappointed him, in all the many years and versions and certainly never since they'd grown so close. Just one day after he'd exuberantly congratulated his star pupil, his protégé, on her duelling, she thought. What a difference a day makes.
He'd been waiting outside the Headmaster's staircase when she'd left. Tom had had to stay for an extra dressing down; the price of being Head Boy. She could still hear Dippet's disappointed monologue (behaviour unfitting of a student leader, Tom, however kindly it was meant) as the Gargoyle statue opened to let her out.
"A chat, I think," Dumbledore said. She nodded, refusing to hang her head, and followed him to his office.
"I'm not going to tell you off, Hermione. You are an adult," he echoed the Headmaster, "but all I will say is that you have abused a privilege today. I had thought you would be more careful, or at least subtler."
It wasn't the words, but she realised it was the first time in months she'd seen him without that warm sparkle in his eyes. They were grey-blue and drawn, and he looked older than he had the day before.
And, she thought of the future, when he would know what Tom was and that she had known and remember this, with her sitting before him.
He didn't press her more than that, and she didn't make an excuse or apologise.
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She'd had to move her own things that afternoon, no elves to help. She did it quietly, unblushing under the judgemental gazes of the other girls in her year, the girls who were not her friends, as she carried in her trunk and set it down by the bed. She'd cried just a little as she'd taken down the paintings, and packed up her books. What a fool she'd been.
Sophia and Ancha had come up to help, standing close in solidarity as they helped her carry Pevensie's cage and the other things that didn't fit in her trunk, but to the others she'd gone from the House's hero to a disgrace overnight, and it stuck in her throat. There was no sympathy; she'd been too privileged. This was a fall from grace, and they were pleased to see it. She had not realised how keen they'd be to see her fall.
And perhaps she'd scared them too much with her power. Greatness inspires envy, she thought. Tom's future self had been right about that at least. Perhaps he was the problem.
She stayed behind as they drifted off to supper, and stared around her new home. It was a beautiful room, but it wasn't a sanctuary. She'd rarely be able to be alone here. There were eight other beds; Sophia, Ancha, Claire and the five other girls whose presence had little affected Hermione before this point.
She lay on her bed and stared up at the blue velvet of the four-poster. She hated it. She felt trapped and exposed. She went to the Library, and then back to the Tower, feet leaden as they headed to the dormitory, to bed.
Sleep was hard to come by.
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Tom and Hermione served their detentions together, a tacit agreement of leniency by the staff, perhaps. Professor Slughorn took them for the first week, every other night at nine, and largely left them to their own devices. Like Dumbledore, he seemed more disappointed they'd been caught than bothered by the fact that Tom had been in her bedroom. Indeed, he made a point of leaving them alone for most of the hour, assigning them a simple task – a cauldron each to clean or twenty lines. The token punishment only emphasised how stupid she'd been.
But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the punishment brought her and Tom closer. He didn't apologise and he didn't express regret, but Tom was unusually gentle with her for a few days. She had told him, after all, why she'd had the room.
"These shadows grow darker by the day, Hermione," he said, brushing his thumb along the bruised parabola beneath her eye.
She shrugged helplessly.
"I can't sleep in there. I'm scared I'll scream myself awake, and then what will they think? How could I possibly explain it?"
She wished she could go to the Room of Requirement but she didn't know if he knew everything it could become, and bumping into him there would be too much to explain.
He had no answer, but he looked worried.
Eventually, she grew more used to sharing again and sleep did come, uneasy and light and never truly peaceful.
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They fell together cautiously, at first, and then with a swiftness that left her dizzy.
Without her room, they found secret, hidden places to be together like every other couple. The spring rains kept them indoors, and the thing between them built like a fire buried beneath soaked peat, turning from tentative flames to a smothered furnace until she woke at night, sweating not from nightmares but from the raging thirst for him, for his lips and the trail of his fingers, woke aching to feel him inside her.
Weeks passed.
He beat her in the final duel, in the end, and was crowned Duelling Champion. It took him nearly two hours, and by the end he was burned and shaking, but he won and she didn't care. He'd wanted it more, this time. She'd driven him to the very edge of the spells he could acceptably use in front of people, though, and she marvelled at her own power.
Weeks passed, with gentle touches under classroom desks, the brush of his hand against hers as she passed him in the corridors, weeks of studying together in quiet corners of the library, of intense kisses in secret classrooms, pressed against the wall body to body and mouth to mouth, mouth to neck.
And even as she ached for more of him, he fulfilled her in ways she'd given up on; challenging her in hours-long debates, vying to out-do each other in class.
His reaction when she'd beaten him in front of the whole school had allowed her to shuck off most of her remaining doubts about what exactly she was getting herself in to; whatever he might one day become he wasn't that now. And she – she was still a girl torn out of time who would do anything to get back to her old life and claim all she'd fought for. The world, as it was here, was not the world she'd bled and starved and screamed for.
She had decades of waiting to do before she was back in the world she'd saved. Decades of time to kill, to plan, to learn. And, always, there was the logical decision that allowed her to do as she wished; she couldn't hurt him, she told herself, as she'd hurt Marcus. Tom didn't want the roots she felt unable to put down. There would be no marriage, no tiny versions of themselves combined. No dark haired devil children with angel faces hissing at snakes in the garden.
Marcus, who'd drifted from Claire into the arms of a fifth-year Gryffindor with auburn hair and green eyes and a family tree to match his own. Punishment, Hermione thought, enough for the girl who'd played tricks on her. The girl who now slept two beds over. She left it well alone, awkward in her own private joy at this reckless thing she had.
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They kept it to themselves, of course, especially after the inauspicious beginning. The prying eyes of the school could watch them walk around the cloistered courtyard at break, or study in the library, or whisper as he sat with her at the Ravenclaw tables on a Friday evening or Saturdays, the only times in the week they were allowed to cross House boundaries at meals. They could try and interpret the sliding smiles, the way his eyes warmed as they met hers across a room, but that was all they got. Perfect Tom Riddle and his perfect, proper relationship. The rumours quietened, the judgemental stares lessened, although the envious ones did not. People moved on to the next interesting thing to gossip about. They became boring.
Those people were not party to Tom's passion, his moments of rage and fear, the dig of his fingers into the skin of her back, the way his fingers trailed the bare skin of her wrist beneath the table. They did not see the Sunday afternoons Hermione warded a disused classroom door on the sixth floor with every spell she knew, the afternoons he'd push her back across Professor Binns' desk, pushing up her robes, tongue and lips and fingers bringing her half-sobbing to ecstasy. They did not know how she longed to take him inside her. How wild and wanton he made her, so that she hardly recognised herself. That she had liked it most the day he held her wrists together above her head as he pinned her against the wall, that she'd told him yes, do it again. How very fucking badly she wanted more of him than those stolen moments could give.
And he – he was not privy to her very innermost thoughts; the ones that compared the way she and Ron had begun to learn each other's bodies unfavourably to this. The secret loathing that she should feel so much for Tom Riddle, knowing everything she did. The most buried, warded knowledge that if she looked into the Mirror of Erised now, she would see them standing together, in her own time, happy and successful and whole. That she hoped somehow, despite everything, wanting her might be enough to change the world.
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She didn't dwell on it, though. There were too many distractions; even aside from their stolen hours together, she had her research into Avalon and the founders and the Fae to do. Helena Ravenclaw had been conspicuously absent since Christmas; for someone who wanted Hermione's help in moving on, she wasn't exactly forthcoming. Perhaps she too was angry that Hermione had been thrown out of paradise.
But Hermione had made a connection, sitting listening to Cerdic's friend talk, back in the castle. The Fae had vanished, if indeed they had ever existed, right around the time Rowena Ravenclaw had locked the doors to Avalon – again, if such a thing was true. The research was not exactly easy.
"The Founders' personal materials?" Dumbledore had asked, surprised, when she'd asked if there was a special collection in the Upper Library (forbidden to students, the reserve of visiting scholars – once in a blue moon – and the staff. It was, she understood, usually empty for months).
"Please, can you ask? It's to do with something Mr. Ollivander said when he wrote to me about my wand, you see. Any documents from the first hundred years or so after the school was founded would be great."
He would, he said, see what he could do.
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One morning, a Sunday in March, she was sitting at the Ravenclaw table eating a bowl of porridge when the post arrived. There would be two items of note in the newspaper that morning, but Hermione wouldn't see the second until much later.
She could hardly miss the first. The Sunday Prophet's headline screamed NO WANDS AT HOME. She read, interested, and found herself astounded for once.
The Ministry had passed a new law, it informed her, prohibiting the use of magic by underage witches and wizards in the company of a family member as had previously been the case. It was effective immediately, and applied to any student under the age of seventeen.
Hermione had never known the change in law came so late, and she'd actually read up on it when Harry had been in trouble for casting a Patronus. The books had all made it sound like the law had been in place for much longer than it had. She wondered why the date had been obscured.
Still, it seemed sensible enough.
Looking up from her paper, it was clear to see that her reaction was not the majority's.
"They can't do this," Sophia was saying and Hermione was shocked to see tears in her friend's eyes. "They can't."
"Does it say why?" Hector replied, grabbing Hermione's paper. He scanned the page, and then read aloud, "The deliberate underage use of magic has now been proved to be detrimental to a child's development up to the age of eleven, and as such the Ministry has taken steps to protect the future of the Wizarding world."
He looked up.
"So we're supposed to come to Hogwarts knowing nothing?" Ancha asked, plainly flabbergasted "Why?"
"Who proved it?" Hermione asked, interested. "What study are they quoting?"
"It doesn't say. This is awful." Hector looked worried, face absent of its normal exuberance and good-humour.
"This is because of Muggleborns," Sophia said, lowly. "They've been complaining for years about the unequal start. So now we're supposed to all come in blind? How does that make sense?"
Hermione bit her tongue and thought. Her initial reaction had been that this was a sensible measure, but she thought back to the first days of Hogwarts. She'd never thought about it, but hadn't it been strange that pure-bloods like Ron and Malfoy and Wizarding-raised children like Seamus had known nothing about magic before they'd started? She'd received her Hogwarts letter on her eleventh birthday like everyone else, and in the eleven-month period before she'd actually started Hogwarts she'd learned everything she could, practiced spells with a stick, read about the history of the world she was joining. But she hadn't had a wand until the summer, she remembered. Professor McGonagall had told her parents not to buy one before then.
"And what about people like Hermione?" Sophia was saying, "People who choose to educate their children at home. That's a tradition as old as magic. Some people can't afford to send their children to Hogwarts!"
"Surely there's some sort of special dispensation for that?" Hermione asked. She picked up the newspaper again.
"No, there isn't," she said at last. "No exceptions, it says it on page three in the continuation. None of the evidence is listed, either."
"We have to fight this. There has to be a better way." Sophia wiped the tears away, furiously. "They've cracked down on so many of our traditions, but this is too much. I spend every holiday practicing what I've learned with my parents! How are we supposed to be fully prepared for exams if we can't practice at home? And what if there's a terrible teacher or we're struggling in something? What, we can't have a tutor? That's insane!"
Hermione remembered how she'd felt when Umbridge said they didn't need to practise Defence spells because the theory should be enough.
"You're right," she said. "Alright, here's what we have to do. Firstly, we need to find out what evidence they've based the law on – Sophia, can you write to Abraxas? His parents must have enough influence to get hold of that. There may be some truth in it, but we need to see the evidence. Secondly, we need to propose an alternative. If," Tom slid onto the bench next to her but she carried on, "this is because the head start children brought up in Magical households get is seen as unfair on Muggleborns, then we need to offer a better way to make that even."
"I agree," Tom said, "and I have a suggestion. As you all know, I was unaware of this world until I was eleven despite my magical heritage. Why is that? I had a witch for a mother and yet I knew nothing of it. Magic is a gift, but the results speak for themselves. Most Muggleborn children leave the Wizarding world and the Ministry is scared our numbers are decreasing – so surely they should be brought in earlier?"
She stared at him, shocked. Around her the others were nodding.
Was this Voldemort? Then as Sophia answered, she understood.
"Muggle culture is a dangerous influence on ours. There is a constant danger our world will be exposed. But perhaps if those children weren't brought up to it, that risk would be diminished?"
"Do you mean taking them away from their families?" Hermione asked, shocked.
"We'll have to think about it. But that might be the solution. Traditionally, families used to foster Muggleborn children."
Hermione sat back and watched as they planned. It had taken a turn sharply in the wrong direction, but perhaps with her involvement she could ensure a fair and equal proposal so that both magic-born and Muggleborn children could come to Hogwarts on equal grounds.
Unequivocally banning magic was wrong, and she understood that. The gradual but insistent chipping away at magical traditions – so much so that by her time so many of them would have vanished entirely – was also wrong. There were a great many things about this world that were troubling; the ease with which magic could fix things bred brutality and recklessness in some ways. She'd grown slowly to understand her own Muggle ethics weren't a fit for a world in which the flick of a wand could leave someone bleeding out or healed. Magic and the lack of it didn't fit. Hadn't she grown gradually apart from her parents, until she'd taken their very knowledge of the existence of a daughter? To protect them, yes, but it had been easier, too. They'd been proud of her, but totally without a grasp on the dangers of her world. A world in which a fifteen-year-old girl could fight an adult man and win, because she had magic and magic was power.
And she knew, too, that she'd never felt like she fully belonged in the Magical world until she'd been thrown back in time and been given a family like a gift. How much happier would her life have been if she'd known about magic, known that she wasn't a freak, from a young age?
Tom's fingers brushed against hers under the table, tracing the creases and furrows like braille. He turned to her, and his eyes burned with confidence and passion and belief and she understood, really understood, why people would follow him all the way into the dark.
Thanks again to the frak-all/Gueneviere dream team for being dreamy and amazing. Go read their stuff.
And thanks to all of you for your kind words. I'm so touched and grateful. Your reviews are what keeps me writing.
