…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover's whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.
― Homer, The Iliad
He awoke triumphant.
It was freezing in the chamber. The fire had died down to embers and the soft, slender heat of her naked body was pressed against his.
Hermione was still asleep, eyebrows puckered together, an oddly endearing smudge of drool at the side of the pouting lower lip he'd last bitten just a few hours before. She looked younger, and more vulnerable, and yet as his eyes adjusted to the light he saw her wand within easy reach.
She was as damaged as she was imperial, he thought. And yet she trusted him. Hermione Dearborn was his, bound to him with murder and flesh. His, but occupying a role he'd never allowed for. His, but a queen.
His stomach rumbled loudly in the quiet room.
Hermione was in his realm now; she'd voluntarily tasted the pomegranate seeds. Here, in his Chamber, where the very air settled on his skin like a whisper of power.
They'd set the bed on fire.
It was hard not to feel smug that he was as good at this as he had been at everything else he'd ever tried. Hard not to feel like a god.
"You are magic made flesh," he whispered, running a long, pale finger along the smooth arc of her hip. As a child they'd told him hell was full of fire, but he'd knew the opposite was true. He'd left hell behind at the age of fourteen and one day he'd burn it to the ground.
Hermione murmured and pressed closer against him, burrowing away from the cold of the room. He reached for his wand, which had clattered to the floor some time in the night, and set a blaze burning in the hearth.
Tom rarely dreamt, but when he did it was dreams of power or nightmares of the orphanage, of being a god and being punished by one, or - more recently - dreams of her. He'd dreamt of cutting her open, inky words spilling out with her secrets, and he'd dreamt of taking her, and he'd dreamt of her dying, being taken away, killing and torturing. He had had bitter dreams and ecstatic dreams but they were shattered things, twisted and broken.
The dream he'd awoken from had been a new one. A dream of a summer day in a garden watching her read. She had been eating a strawberry in the dream, that pouting mouth curved around the red fruit, a dream both tender and inexplicably erotic. It was unsettling.
"Tempus," he commanded. It was only five and a Saturday at that. There was no need to leave the underworld for many hours yet. Possibly, neither would be missed until dinner. He pulled her closer against his side, and began to think.
Now he'd tasted this, he understood why the Greeks had camped on the shores of Troy for a decade. Why even the least boring of his housemates made fools of themselves for women.
But this was not what they had. This was elevated far beyond what those fools called love. There were two beautiful things in this world; power and Hermione Dearborn.
He understood he'd kill anyone who took her away. That when she looked at him, she saw him.
"Are you my making, or my ruin?" he wondered aloud.
"Both," she muttered sleepily, stirring at last. "What time is it?"
"Only five," he reassured her. "No one will miss us for hours yet. Go back to sleep."
"Don't do that again. Don't push me away with one hand and pull me closer with another." She'd never sounded so vulnerable before and he felt something stir inside him, a shade of guilt perhaps.
"I won't."
"I shouldn't trust you," she whispered into the dark room, "but I do. If you betray me, I'll kill you for it."
In response, he slid his hand to the juncture of her thighs, into that hot, wet place until she was awake and writhing against him, and he was inside her again in a magic they'd never cover in class and he felt again that burning triumph and that this, this, was a form of divinity in itself.
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After that came the halcyon days that not even exams could ruin. Spring became summer and even the Scottish Highlands revelled in it, the mountains basking in the June sunshine. Time seemed to speed up as the NEWTs rushed towards them, a ladder to the edge of a cliff they would have to jump off into the world beyond the castle. Their peers became snappish, overtired. Two students were treated in the Hospital Wing after taking an illegal memory-enhancer, and another for overdosing on energy potions.
They studied outdoors, claiming a spot by the lake just for them. Revision become less a chore than a joy as they showed off to each other, basking in their own cleverness, arrogant and carefree and happy. Hermione because she'd done the exams before and had the luxury of not caring about her results the second time around, and Tom because he simply couldn't imagine doing badly.
"No," she said gleefully, "it was Marion not Mary Fishburne who created the Draft of Living Death..."
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"Where are the apples?" she asked the Grey Lady, who was waiting on her bed one Wednesday night while the others were studying.
"With the diadem, where I died. Bring me a map and let me show you."
Hermione summoned a magical atlas from the very depths of her trunk and the Grey Lady showed her the closest approximate spot in the forest where she'd died. It was a radius of several miles; no small task.
"A boy... my Slytherin friend - he'll find you to ask about the diadem. Tell him of that if you like, but cannot know about the apples. I must find them first. Please -"
"He has already spoken to me many times but you are the reason I am here, Helen's daughter. You are the only one I shall tell of apples."
Hermione understood there was a greater secret to be held from Tom than a diadem. They would search together but she had to find it first and hide the true source of immortality from him.
"Another boy will ask, many years in the future. A boy called Harry. He will destroy it, for the greater good."
"I will wait, for this Harry."
"Perhaps after that, after the diadem is gone, you will be able to pass on."
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They snuck away to the Chamber when they could, although they didn't stay all night again. Stolen moments turned a place she had believed wicked beautiful. She fell in love with his passion, with his gentleness, with his hand around her neck.
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"I don't want to leave," he told her one day, staring out over the gleaming lake, the angles of his face sharpened with longing. "This is the only place that's ever felt like home."
They were three days into NEWTs now, and revision had become tiresome, the exams unsettlingly easy. Hermione was leaning against his chest, testing him from her notes. She was surprised he'd told her the cause of a now-rare bad mood so easily. Almost suspiciously easily, she thought, but then she was trying a new tactic. Perhaps it was her most stupid and Harryish plan ever, but no one who'd mattered to him had ever believed Tom Riddle could be anything better than Bad. Not just bad, but capital-B- Bad. Not even Albus, who perhaps could have changed everything if he'd given Tom a chance instead of suspicion.
"What are you going to do, when we're out?" she asked, knowing sympathy was not something he accepted easily. And she couldn't tell him that once she had felt the same, that Hogwarts was the place she had most belonged. She couldn't tell him how hard it was to go back to the Muggle world every summer and watch herself slowly leave her own family behind. How when Harry had said it was time she had followed because she had to, because Harry was as much home as Hogwarts. How odd it was to not feel like this was home, to have left her own in a place so unreachable it was like a tortured memory of happiness. To have, against the odds, fallen swiftly into a new one, one that had made a bitter little coil inside her that whispered sometimes she had been robbed of a magical upbringing. She couldn't ever tell him she understood his bitterness, but she did.
She loved her parents, loved the memory of her childhood, but she had never felt fully at home in their world. She had lived for twenty years with one foot either side of an unbreachable divide, long before she'd even known about the world she'd been thrown into.
She'd had a period before she'd ever had a wand.
No, she couldn't tell Tom that. But she could show him that a person could be a home, too.
"I'm not really sure," he said, trying to sound casual but she wondered at the tension in his face as he did. "We haven't discussed this in a long time."
She smiled, and ran a finger down the cut-glass jawbone.
"I still want to change the world," she told him, leaning her head on his shoulder, remembering their first real conversation. How different, how human he was to her eyes now compared to then.
"So do I."
"You called me a ludicrous creature," she told him teasingly and was rewarded by the glimmer of a smile. "It was the first time you ever said my name."
"You were very frustrating, then. You still are - with your irritating morals and your hypocrisy and the way you use your smile as a weapon when you don't want to answer a question."
His tone shifted from fond to something darker as he finished and she sensed something beneath the teasing.
"What question," she ventured, "did you want to ask?"
He twisted round and took her chin in his left hand, fingers pressing hard into the bone, an angry reversal of the tenderness moments earlier.
"Are you going to stand by my side while I do all the things I want to do, or are you going to decide one day that I am too broken, too dark, too ruthless?"
They stared into each others eyes, tension amping up as she wondered for the first time in weeks if he'd actually hurt her.
"I told you to be better," she said eventually. "That's the deal, Tom. Be better or yes I will walk away from this."
He laughed bitterly and let go.
"I thought love was meant to be unconditional," he sneered.
Love? she wondered. Was that what this was? They sat in silence for a while, the wind stirring the surface of the lake, shadows beginning to lengthen.
"I don't think so," she said eventually. "You deserve a Hermione who challenges and pushes you, who can keep up and who balances you. Would you want me if I chose the simple life that, say, Ancha wants? No. You want the best version of me. And I want the best version of you. I want the apex Tom Riddle, not someone corrupted by power into madness."
He rolled his eyes, and the anger melted from him as turned over onto his stomach, pulling out another book.
"That's not going to happen," he told her dismissively.
There was nothing she could say in the cliff-face of his arrogance, so she opened her book and they read together in silence for a while.
"More than anything," he says breaking the slightly sullen silence, "I want to learn. Your father said it best in fact. He said they teach us the basics and expect us to be satisfied. He said most Wizards and Witches never access a fraction of their power. They just learn the bare minimum of spells and go and push paper for the Ministry or have children. He said it's because too much magic can be a dangerous thing... But I am already a dangerous thing, my love, and so are you, and I want to find out what, if any, limits exist."
"What if you lose yourself along the way?"
"I won't. I have you to tether me to myself."
He was tense again now, she could feel it vibrating between them, thrumming through her own disquiet at his words. If she was truly his tether, what would happen between them to break it?
"I want to learn too," she conceded. "Learn like that - I want to know."
He was kissing her before she'd finished her next exhalation and his mouth dripped with the promise of power. A dangerous thing, indeed.
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"I know you are... involved," Albus said, over a firewhisky in his rooms on the night she finished her last exam. "And he certainly seems the better for it. But I find I cannot trust him. If there ever is anything..."
"I would tell you," she reassured her godfather. "He is good to me but he is not a good man. I hope he can be, but I fear he can't."
"Then why...?"
"Surely," she said, "you of all people can understand that."
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"I'm not leaving till August," Hermione told him, rolling over in the Chamber's bed. "And it's only for a few months."
"Why can't you tell me where?"
"Because," she said firmly, "it's not my secret. a friend of Professor Dumbledore's - I can't tell you where - and I don't know exactly anyway - but it's somewhere in northern Europe so I'll be miserably cold and missing you the entire time."
He smiled at that, and kissed her.
"I can't fault your hunger for knowledge," he said. "It's what makes us the same."
"Where will you be? Have you decided?"
"No. I am looking for something. Something important. Besides, people like us don't need to work. We have all the time and money and power to make our own route."
And it was true; in that, they were the same.
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"Do you know," he asked her on the last night at Hogwarts, in almost the same spot, their spot, tucked out of sight of most of the school grounds, with only the lake spreading out below them for company, "what the official difference between light and dark magic is?"
Hermione thought she did know, but she was curious enough to see where he was taking this detour from Ancient Runes revision and gestured for him to continue.
"They have a list of spells that are forbidden, but it doesn't say why. No one has ever defined why. But they don't understand that any spell can be dark, really."
"Any spell?"
"All magic has a price; most so-called light magic uses an infinitesimal amount of magical energy. It's not permanent, you see. You can change a needle into a mouse, but it is just a needle that looks and acts like a mouse. Only a so-called dark spell can make a needle become a mouse. You can kill a person with light magic and you can hurt a person with light magic but you cannot fundamentally and permanently change a person with light magic. If I turned you into a cat, a Professor could undo the spell... a cut could be healed. It's simply timing, you see. The spell you used on our mutual acquaintance near your house... a healer could have stopped the clot. But Avarda Kedarvra - that cannot be blocked if performed correctly. And so, the cost is far greater. Dark magic takes something as it's cast... but it gives back too. That's the bit they never remember to mention. It rewards the user but it demands a price."
Tom liked to ramble. He liked the sound of his own voice. He was not a detail oriented man. And yet, what he was saying, made something she had missed about magic click into place.
Great magic required sacrifice. She had made one earlier this year, when she promised herself - promised her rage - to create Gubraithan fire. She had made an oath, she realised, to magic itself that she would wait and learn until she could step into the smoking ruins of a world wrecked by war and change it for the better.
And she remembered that as she smiled up at him and spoke a truth she had been swallowing for weeks.
"You say you want to change the world... but problem is that you've never been able to understand that power and glory are separate. People with real power don't get much glory. They certainly don't allow themselves to be ruled by a chip on their shoulder or a need for revenge."
"How would you do it then?" He asked, white faced and furious.
"Oh darling, I'm not telling you that. You can have first shot - say the next forty years - and then when you've failed it's my turn, and you can watch my masterclass. Agreed?"
To her surprise he took her wand hand in his and said. "I won't fail. So it's a deal."
A lick of magic flickered over their hands and Hermione realised she'd quite by accident made a binding vow to this man.
"I'll let you burn the world to ash," she told him, "and then I'll come in and build it up in my image. And they'll love me for it."
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She wore red and blue to the Seventh Years' farewell party. Floating silk robes in blood-red burgundy, the colour of blood as it returned to the heart, a jaded sister to Gryffindor red, striped through with the blue of uncut veins on the surface.
They hadn't danced since New Year, and with the knowledge of uncountable nights naked between them their steps flowed together, majestic and seamless.
"You should be queen of all of this," his whispered, half-drunk on champagne, holding her tight against him. "I'll make you a queen."
"A queen of ash," she replied. "I can make myself queen, if I want."
But she had promised, and so she let him guide her.
And after the feast, he took her down to where his Knights were waiting for one last time, and she watched unflinching as they celebrated their release onto the world.
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HALCYON DAYS.
So that's it, that's the Hogwarts Years done and over and we go forth into the bright beyond many chapters later than I had planned. It'll speed up now and be more vignette-y like this chapter (I think). I know where we're going, but the exact road isn't definite if that makes sense?
There's a lot of years to cover...
Hope you're still out there but most importantly thank you to everyone who has reviewed - chapter one or chapter thirty six, it all means the same. I love you. You are why I am still writing this and I'm sorry I get so caught up outside of it to regularly update.
As always you can find me on tumblr at cocoartistwrites.
