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You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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People always talked about the power of imagination and dreams and hope, and how those things were pure and good and saved the world.
Hermione Dearborn thought those wise old men with their aphoristic pens had never met Tom Riddle.
Tom Riddle was a voracious collector of knowledge, but he was also very specific.
He had an extraordinary ability to ignore key events or facts because they simply didn't interest him. He was obsessed with power, but couldn't tell you who the Minister of Magic was. ("That's not power," he told her once. "It's an irrelevance.") He had not noticed the ending of the Second World War. He knew the most obscure spells, but forgot fairly simple ones that struck him as pointless. Likewise, Tom was uninterested in the rules of magic as she understood them, exerting his seemingly limitless will and imagination to redraw the lines.
It was why she got fractionally higher marks overall in her NEWTs than he had, and it was why after a tense moment he laughed and said he didn't care.
"You're a better essay writer," he said, one August morning after they'd opened their matching parchments. "Who cares about that? Besides, I wouldn't be here if you were ordinary."
Hermione cared; his strengths were not hers and the victory was not hollow. But Tom's practical marks were off the scale in every single subject, and he'd gained a record result in Defence Against the Dark Arts earning him a special commendation from the Ministry.
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Tom was a creature of dreams, but unlike most dreamers he could make them real. His dreams weren't contained in the sleeping night to be wiped away by the sun's rise: he dreamed with his eyes open and his wand in his hand and there was no part of him hindered by the doubt of ordinary men. If he wanted to do something, he did it.
Hermione suspected a great part of his power came from that unquestioning certainty.
It was how he'd been able to frame Hagrid for the Chamber, his uncle for his father and grandparents. There was no line Tom wouldn't cross - but the flip side of it was that he performed magic she didn't think even existed before he did it. He believed, and so it was.
He created as much as he destroyed.
It was intoxicating and she couldn't walk away.
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Hermione Dearborn was a logical creature who let her heart rule her far more than she'd ever realised. She remembered almost everything she'd ever learned, and could coolly apply it to complicated situations. Hermione had turned tapestries to stone in the midst of a battle. She'd solved mysteries and kept Harry Potter alive for years against all the odds. She'd blackmailed and used others to do her dirty work, she'd prepared for treachery and she learned to use her imagination to complement her logic. She could reason away morally problematic acts, so long as they didn't seem selfish. She had grown up questioning everything, except the rules.
She'd begun to learn that the impossible was possible over months in a tent with a boy not wholly unlike the one whose bed she shared.
She sometimes thought if she could teach herself to be as limitless in belief as Tom, and still be sensible, she'd be unstoppable. Tom's arrogance would one day be his downfall. He would make mistakes, she knew, that she would never make if she ever decided to bypass the rules. He was not good at planning or detail and he consistently under-estimated other people.
But she knew it would be twenty-five years before he returned to begin the rise of Lord Voldemort, and as Hermione looked across at him in her little sitting room in the castle in Wales one morning, the summer sun shining through the mullioned windows, to see him smiling at one of her Muggle novels, she wondered again how it was possible that this boy, this dreaming and intoxicating boy, could transform into a monster.
"What are you reading?" she asked, distracted from an obscure C14th scroll Dominic Gonzaga had sent her on the fae. It was one of the rare written records of their vanishing and she was starting to believe in the leap of intuition she'd had about why they had disappeared – a connection she had made thanks to Tom.
(A year ago she hadn't even believed they'd really existed. What a limited thinker her younger self had been, and how grateful she was now to Xenophilius Lovegood for pointing it out, to Albus for the hard lesson of using her to slow Harry down with her doubting.)
"The Heart of Darkness," Tom replied. "It's very good, although the main character is a bit weak."
Perhaps she was deceiving herself and he was already a monster. A murderer, certainly, but so was she. She wondered what made someone a monster. She wondered if she was one too.
"What do you mean?"
"He's half of one thing and half of another."
She called for coffee, and as they sat and debated the novel Hermione wondered if she would ever meet anyone else who challenged her as he did. Perhaps monsters needed other monsters to feel truly alive.
They'd never really discussed the oath they'd taken, but it had unleashed something in Tom. He'd begun to open up about his goals and dreams and desires, even his past. She was surprised to find his plan for world domination far more moderate than she'd expected, with the notable and unwavering exception of achieving complete immortality.
She could not tell him that he'd put two and two together and made seven. That she believed he should stop at three. He hadn't told her about the Horcruxes or that he'd killed his father, but she thought he probably would one day.
Tom was a boy who dreamed of death, but she'd slowly gleaned it was the fear of his own that consumed him.
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They spent much of the summer together in Wales, reading and walking and falling closer together and she woke one morning in July with the realisation that when she slept beside him her dreams were a riot of warmth and colour and that she was no longer afraid of meeting her reflection in the dark.
Tom made the world sharply technicolour, and the grey tinged miseries of her past and what she'd lost became unfocused, fading into the background until she could hardly see them.
She was happy.
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The days passed and they read and rode horses in the hills and valleys and kissed by the waterfall and boated on the lake. Sophia and Abraxas visited - a dull and unsunny day made luminous with a picnic by the lake, empty bottles of champagne sprawling on the tartan rugs, red wine dripping onto the white tablecloth in the candlelit night as they howled with laughter at Cerdic's jokes, cigar smoke blowing out into impossible ships and dragons and stars. A week in the south of France with the Rosiers, whose second son was a friend of Tom's. Dinners with Caradoc and Ivy and Ancha in London, more cigar smoke and endless laughter and
she was happy.
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August drew towards its close, and she left, biting back tears with a case of thick wool and cashmere robes and fur-trimmed cloaks. Tom went to London, researching the ill-fated heirloom he so coveted. The locket was his focus still; his letters full of news of his search. He mentioned the diadem only in passing, asking if she would accompany him on some unspecific future trip to Albania. (Yes, she replied from the Norwegian castle where she was studying Higher Transfiguration, of course. Perhaps next summer, before the wedding. I don't fancy it in the winter.)
She wondered if he knew she knew what they were for.
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Fingers freezing, Hermione held her wand steady as her host and teacher watched her try to turn a mountain into a lake. The island was bitter enough in summer, but in mid-October it was desperately cold and warming charms were forbidden. The mountain was the only high ground for miles, in the witches' territory and invisible to Muggles.
"My ancestors were burned to death on this ground," Innegborg Lauritzdotter, who was as tall and proud as she was terrifying, said coldly. "Feel the power of their ashes, the blood spilled out on this earth." Her white hair whipped back in the sharp knives of the wind whipping in from the ocean behind them.
Hermione looked across to where the mountain stood gazing out to the arctic sea.
The devil himself was said to have danced with witches on its peak before leading them down through its entrance into hell itself for a tour. She'd never heard the stories before coming to the strange and barren place.
They'd been out here on the cliff every day for a week, and nothing she'd tried had even shaken the earth. Her protestations that it was too far, too large, had been dismissed with a steely glare. It was the latest in a series of transfigurations Hermione would never have dreamed possible.
Not that she'd ever wanted to turn an entire mountain into a lake before. Nor had it occurred to her to learn the obscure branch of Untransfiguration she'd spent the first few weeks learning. And the process of preventing something from change had baffled her initially but it was starting - slowly - to make sense.
This, though, was the first test of her power rather than her ability to understand theory that the elder witch had given Hermione in two-and-a-half-months, and frankly it had been embarrassing so far.
And so, she tried, opening the senses Innegborg had forced her to get in touch with over the last few, rather miserable, weeks. Hours of meditation staring out to sea from the cliffs had not been how she'd imagined she'd learn magic from Albus's most esteemed contacts.
But this place, a village at the end of the earth, seethed with the angry magic of sacrifice. Two sets of witches had been executed here, a hundred in total, killed by god-fearing Muggles decades apart. They'd returned their power to the earth, driving away Muggles from the barren lands. Four hundred years later, it was a thriving magical community with only a small Muggle village nearby in a relatively peaceful co-existence.
But those living here did not forget the dead.
"You are not separate from the mountain. Magic is a force of nature and so are you. Don't exert your will weakly onto it with these little pushes... bend it to your will, child. You are mountain and lake and wind. You are the blood spilled and the axe that spilled it. Magic is in everything. Call to it. Invite the wild in."
As Hermione stared at the iron-hard earth, shadowy figures rose up, commanded silently by her mentor. They showed their story; the invention of Animagi had happened here, centuries earlier, a secret they had shared with the world. Then had come the fear and two terrible mass hunts and executions. She felt their power and their fear and as she did she realised she could taste the bitter rust-tang of blood on her tongue, that it was rising, dried to red brown dust, from the earth. It settled on her fingers and as she spoke the spell again the earth let out a sound beyond thunder, the mountain collapsing impossibly in on itself, a symphony of pure destruction, flocks of birds sent shrieking into the sky in fear, until in its place a churning lake spread out. The waters stilled and then froze and Hermione found herself on her knees, tears pouring from her eyes, exhausted.
"Good. Now, get up and turn it back," the white-haired witch queen told her, eyes like iron in her wrinkled face.
Shaking, Hermione tried. She tried until she threw up onto the barren earth, and still Innegborg made her push on.
"You will stay here until you succeed, however long it takes."
She drew a line of frost.
"You cannot cross this line until a mountain stands there again. You will not eat or drink. You will not warm yourself or protect yourself from the elements. Make a mountain, girl."
She left.
Hermione grew weaker, starving and freezing, tears turning to frost on her face. Two days became three. She thought of Tom and summer and belief. The shadows of past witches rose up from the ground and whispered to her. She thought of a wand that would do whatever she commanded. She thought of sacrifice and power and blood magic and -
She thought of the centuries old ash of burned witches still dusting her hands and she reached out, too desperate to doubt, for their strength.
The ice of the lake shattered, cracking through the wind. The earth shook, uprooting trees, water streaming down.
The mountain rose back up to meet the sky.
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As a reward, Innegborg allowed her to leave to visit her family.
"You have more potential than I had anticipated," the old woman told her. "You will return."
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"What's the point, though?" Tom asked, holding her close in front of their hotel room fire. He'd been researching a new interest in Georgia, of all places, so she'd taken a hideous international floo trip from the northern tip of Norway to a hotel in the Wizarding quarter of Prague to meet him there instead of going home. The Muggle part of the city was still recovering from German occupation and the end of the war, still so raw, and she was happy to spend the three days they had together in the Wizarding quarter. Then it was back to the barren northern island for her, and Hogwarts to interview for a position he desperately wanted but wouldn't get for him.
"To get in touch with all of my power, apparently. She wants me to scrape right down to the bottom and find out what I'm capable of."
And how to borrow power when you needed it, but that wasn't something Tom needed to know about.
"That," he said, kissing the top of her head and then once again behind her ear, "seems a very worthy goal. Would you show me?"
"Show you?"
His teeth grazed her ear and he murmured, "Let me into your head so I can watch you bring down a mountain."
Hermione stilled. That seemed like a terrible idea; who knew what he might see - or what he really wanted to look for - inside her head. She knew he was excited watching her perform difficult magic - and for all that he was driven by his whims, he often did things for more than one reason.
She'd read Harry's Occlumency books of course and had taught herself as best she could; how else would she have fooled Bellatrix? But it was too great a risk to let Tom into the library of her mind.
"There are things in my head I don't want even you to see," she replied softly. "What if I showed them to you by accident?"
He was quiet for a moment, and then said, voice low, "You can show me anything, no shadowed skeletons in there could scare me away. But, if you prefer, I can find another way."
She wondered what he was looking for. She trusted him not to harm her, but she wasn't stupid.
Great magic, as Tom had taught her, required great sacrifice. She could bring down a mountain with her own power, but it would tire her out. To keep it down she would need to give something more. A Horcrux took a life for a life - or at least the first one did. She wondered if the price was the death itself or the loss of innocence.
(She wondered what else the spell took - would take - from him.)
"If you can find a Pensieve, I'll show you the memory."
"A what?"
"A Pensieve," she said, "They are extremely rare but someone here must have one. You can deposit a memory inside it, and take someone in to watch... Albus gave me one for Christmas but it's in Wales."
Tom's breath hissed out.
"What an interesting gift. Is that the strange stone basin in the locked and warded cupboard behind the painting by your desk?"
She laughed, used to his prying, and twisted round to look at him. It had become a game for her now, what she could hide around her homes for him to find that would reinforce the mythology of her backstory. How many steps ahead of him she could stay in the dance of secrets.
Inside the cupboard he would have also found a portrait of herself as a child with Cerdic. She was almost glad he'd managed to break in, justifying the effort she'd made to have it created, and pleased she hadn't been stupid enough to leave any incriminating memories in the Pensieve. It sat empty. The only memory she'd taken from her head and not returned had been that Halloween. She thought she probably would, eventually, collect it from Professor Dumbledore, but she was in no rush to feel the attached emotions again. She wondered if it would change how she felt about Tom. She didn't think she cared to find out at present.
Harry's voice in her head was silent. It had given up long ago.
"Yes," she said, "the locked and warded secret cupboard where I keep all my most private things."
"Don't go in it again, you might not like what you find a second time," she warned. She would leave a nasty little curse for him to find next time they were in Wales, she decided. Something more embarrassing than painful.
"I thought," he said, his hand travelling to the apex of her thighs, "I'd uncovered all your secrets already."
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Prague's main attraction, for two knowledge hunters, was its enormous Library.
They wandered through the twisting streets to find it later. It was their first afternoon in the city, after a morning spent reuniting in their comfortable hotel room. Prague's magical quarter was extensive; bustling gothic alleyways with niche shops selling potions and artefacts banned in much of Europe. The city had long been a haven for the occult, famous for its astronomers and craftsmen. Hermione had never visited before and she gazed around in wonder - the small part of London that was still wholly magical was far smaller and less crowded and it was a joy to see their world so full and open despite the war that had affected this part of Europe only a year earlier.
"Which way is it?" Tom asked, as they came to a narrow fork, improbable buildings jostling for space.
"Left," she replied, rolling her eyes. She'd bothered to read a map before they set out. "Just down here."
There was a well-known Muggle library too, of course. Far grander than its Wizarding equivalent, but not nearly so large. The magical version had several pleasant, but functional reading rooms. But the real wonder of it stretched for miles, in caverns deep under the city. It was manned by tiny, rather demonic-looking creatures called domoviye.
"Welcome young mistress and master," the guardian at the front desk said. It was half Hermione's height with enormous yellow eyes and a beard covering its entire body.
"Good afternoon. We'd like to -"
"Follow me please madam," another one said, cutting off Tom's courteous inquiry as it appeared next to them. "We is aware of what you seek. Young master will be escorted shortly."
Hermione met Tom's eyes and shrugged. She'd been hoping to wander off to conduct her own research. This was easier.
"I'll meet you in that bar down the street in, what, five hours?"
"The Hag and Bone?" he asked, tone slightly mocking.
"That's the one," she grinned.
She followed the domovoi down a stone passage, to the main reading room. A place was prepared with a stack of ancient looking books.
"How did you know?" she asked as she caught the dulled-gold title on the top book's spine. Rowena Ravenclawe's Sacrifyce.
Hermione thought it might have smiled behind the beard, but it was so bushy she couldn't really tell.
"We's always knowing."
That was hardly an answer, but it was a mystery for another day and she'd didn't have long.
"Well - thanks."
It bowed and vanished and Hermione settled into her afternoon's reading. It was nothing short of a revelation.
Ollivander had told her that Rowena Ravenclaw, Helga Hufflepuff and Godric Gryffindor had closed the borders of Avalon. In payment they were given seven relics: a diadem, a sword, a cup, wand-wood from the tree by Merlin's grave and three golden apples. Salazar Slytherin had refused to help and chose to stay on the isle. The apples, he had said, were for Ravenclaw so that she might live eternal and young and be reunited with her love if Avalon was ever reopened.
This book's author agreed with this theory - by hand, for this was a vanity binding of an ancient text most had dismissed as mad - and went on to say that she had sacrificed the last Fae to close the borders of Avalon. It was the confirmation Hermione had needed to satisfy the burning question of how Ravenclaw could have closed off an entire realm; and to help a budding theory of her own to take root. The writer, Armand Cadeau, went on to theorise about magical sacrifice and the offerings ancient people had made to their gods.
Great magic, as Tom had taught her, required great sacrifice. She could bring down a mountain with her own power, but it would tire her out. To keep it down she would need to give something more. A Horcrux took a life for a life - or at least the first one did. She wondered if the price was the death itself or the loss of innocence.
She was longing for a photocopier after an hour, hand cramping as she made notes in the coded shorthand she'd developed to speed up the process at Hogwarts. She could duplicate it, but that was strictly forbidden and there was no spell to help make notes.
Time, according to her watch, was passing quickly and she'd only had time to gauge the main points of the book before she had to move on to the next one.
The other books, all focused-on Time Travel, were less revelatory; although they were interesting, there were no easy answers here. She made notes to discuss with Albus, and lists of other texts to find and they were fascinating but vague.
Until she got to the smallest.
It was a diary, written by a frankly ridiculous witch who complained about ageing so frequently Hermione almost stopped reading. It didn't help that her translation spell struggled with Venetian, but the other books had all answered questions she had - or at least posed new and better questions - and she flicked through looking for something to tell her why the domovoi had chosen it for her.
There was nothing, and then there was.
A merchant sorcerer had come to Venice offering the rich witch something impossible: a potion that stopped time. A potion that would keep her young and beautiful.
The stupid witch had no idea what she was drinking, but paid an extraordinary about of ducats for the little vial. She was given a gold potion, and claimed to remain ageless for the rest of the book.
Hermione thought about the years stretching out until she returned to her own time and she thought about little gold vials and she shut the book in a huff.
She wasn't that vain, she reflected furiously. There were, she thought, far more important things to worry about. How to stop her boyfriend from finding mythological apples that just so happened to be tucked away with something he would one day go looking for, and which were said to grant true immortality, for one. Golden apples that had made the gods gods. She didn't believe that, exactly, but it wasn't something she was going to risk. Horcruxes were quite enough of a problem for one wizard.
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She got to the pub before Tom, and was left to sit and wonder what the library had chosen to reveal to her power-hungry lover. Or whatever it was they were. Hermione didn't like to think of Tom Riddle, future Dark Lord, as her boyfriend.
Boyfriend had been Ron, who'd been innocent and gentle and young. Tom Riddle had never been allowed to be young, or gentle, or innocent. Boyfriend had been Viktor and Marcus, of a sort. Marcus who she'd hurt so terribly. She knew in whatever this was she would be the one left heartbroken. Hermione was fairly sure she was the only human Tom had ever cared about, but he didn't love her. There was something else between them, something both more and less than love. A catastrophic sort of inevitability that sometimes passed for romance and sometimes seemed more like obsession and sometimes simply like need.
You didn't put a collar on a wild creature, and underneath the mostly-normal face he presented to her she could see the storm broiling. It was still many years away, but she could see it in the way dark clouds passed occasionally across his face... it was in the way his knuckles turned white and his jaw clenched. But they hadn't argued since the day she'd found out how he'd manipulated Claire - rigorous academic discussions aside - and indeed she was shocked really now that she thought about how well he treated her.
She allowed herself a rare fantasy of what it might be like if he didn't descend further into wickedness. If, against all the odds, he chose not to step off his current, mostly law-abiding, path onto the hell-bound descent into madness and tyranny. Normally she was more disciplined, but he'd been so lovely and indeed it was such a nice change from the tip of the arctic she couldn't really help it.
She was still day-dreaming in the increasingly crowded Hag and Bone when a thickset bald wizard with a dark moustache dropped into the empty chair opposite her.
"გამარჯობა," he said in a language she didn't recognise. "My name is Iakob Khurtsilava... Can I buy you a drink?"
"No, thanks," she replied, polite despite the abrupt greeting, and looked down at the notebook she'd been ignoring in favour of her fantasy.
"I insist. No one as beautiful as you should be drinking alone."
She didn't look up as she replied.
"I'm waiting for my - my boyfriend. You should leave."
"Ah yes," he said, "your boyfriend. I vas hoping he would show up soon. He's been asking the wrong questions."
"He's," she answered tightly, meeting the man's dark eyes, "got rather a habit of doing that. Perhaps you should fill me in."
"Heard he's looking for something. Something that doesn't want to be found."
Hermione had absolutely no idea what Tom was after, but she suspected this man must have followed him from Georgia, so whatever it was was probably important.
"That's tremendously helpful, thanks for clearing that up."
"Little witches don't need details." He waved at the barman, who was at least half-goblin, and commanded him to bring brandy.
Hermione didn't reply. If this man wanted to take on Tom Riddle, he could be her guest. He was extremely rude and she doubted whatever it was that they both wanted would be very interesting to her. She began to read through the notes she'd made that afternoon, rather irritated now that Tom was so late. But if she left, this oaf would follow. Perhaps Tom had seen him and had gone to take advantage of his distraction.
That would make sense. If he'd carried on reading she'd be cross though; she'd left earlier than she'd like so as not to miss out on spending time with him. She chose not to dwell on that fact - or consider that she'd never have left a library early for Ron.
"Late, isn't he," the Georgian wizard said nastily after downing several glasses of brandy.
"You're welcome to leave," she replied with a charming smile, and then after a pause. "I wonder what he could possibly be doing while you sit here watching me read."
Something seemed to dawn on the man and he chuckled.
"He's not looking for it here, girl. I'll wait."
Hermione sighed, and put her notebook down.
"What do you want?"
"Just to buy you a drink, little lady."
"I wouldn't," Tom's cold voice cut down through the loud chatter of the crowded pub, "irritate her any more than you already have."
"Why's that then?"
Tom ignored this and met Hermione's eyes. They communicated silently: an apologetic smile from him was met by a sardonic eyebrow raise. Caught up with his books, she surmised. He was biting his lip, which usually meant he was thinking hard - and that meant he'd come in unprepared to find this man here. It also meant she'd probably have to help get rid of him if they were to leave the city without obliviating dozens of people or earning an arrest warrant.
"You're in my seat," Tom said, and the chair tipped the bald wizard onto the floor. Khurtsilava had clearly had a fair amount of brandy before he'd sat down because he positively splayed out across the tiles. The pub went silent for a beat.
"Drunkard," Tom said with a shrug and a grin, and they returned to their conversations.
The black-haired source of her irritation didn't take his seat, but stood with his wand out over the Georgian wizard as he tried to get up. Focused.
Too focused to notice the other bald, moustached wizard at the bar who promptly fired a spell at him. Hermione blocked it, annoyed at having to get involved at all, and even more annoyed that someone would dare attack them here.
This was clearly Tom's fault, but still. It was ruining her holiday.
A moment later, the ancient half-goblin publican was over waving his hands and levitating them outside.
She was so shocked at the audacity, and because fighting someone who'd picked it was one thing but attacking staff doing their job was quite another, she let it happen and they were flung out onto the cobbled pavement, followed by her bag.
Then, the real fight started. Or at least it tried to. The wizards were hardly a match for Tom alone and both of them together saw them stunned and on the ground too quickly to be an interesting duel. Grumbling, the pub's patrons returned inside for their drinks, leaving Hermione with a headache and two uninvited guests to deal with.
"Don't kill them," she said firmly. "You'll spoil our holiday. What are you trying to steal that could possibly be so important?"
"Medea's cauldron," he replied laughing, "it was supposed to be your Christmas present."
Medea. Hermione's brain clicked: Colchis, of course, was now western Georgia.
"Well that's terribly sweet of you darling, but perhaps just go to a shop next time," she said sarcastically, waving at the two men, stunned at her feet.
It was sweet actually, if rather over-dramatic. She didn't need a magical cauldron, but she did need a holiday.
"If I'm not allowed to kill them, what am I allowed to do?"
"Just obliviate them and send them on their way. They weren't exactly threatening! Or tell them you don't want the cauldron any more and let them go. I don't care, just fix it."
He gave a long-suffering sigh, but did as she'd asked in spirit if not to the letter, using the imperius to return them back to where they'd come from.
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They ate a tense dinner tucked into the corner of a rather lovely restaurant in an ancient stone cellar, with arched ceilings and walls lined with wine, and as she ate she slowly calmed down.
"I am sorry," he said at last. "I did not expect to get followed."
"Were you really there for me? I can't believe that's all you wanted."
Brown eyes met midnight-blue in the candlelight. He paused.
"Not in Georgia just for you. But that's what they were worried I'd find. They're called Fleecers and... they're, how shall I put it kindly? A gang of morons who're trying to find the country's artefacts as part of a nationalistic movement."
Hermione didn't really care, if she was being completely honest. What she was really interested in was the fact that she'd asked him not to kill and he hadn't. It was the third time he'd accepted another path, despite his instincts. First Fletcher, then Claire, and now these men.
It made her believe this was right, that she was causing less harm being with him than not. It gave her hope. It was arrogant to think perhaps she had at least postponed his rise to power, but it was not impossible. And if he had tried it earlier, she thought, knowing him as she did, that might have been far worse. This man was not as powerful as he would become, but he was far saner and that was a danger all its own.
"Let's not let it spoil the evening, then. How was your afternoon?"
"It was," he said thoughtfully, "not what I'd expected. What an extraordinary place. How was yours?"
She poked at the sauerkraut on her plate and took a sip of wine before she answered. She knew how to distract him from any real knowledge about what she'd learned.. but it might lead to another difficult conversation.
"Not," she agreed, "what I'd expected. One of the books was a diary about a Venetian witch who claims to have taken a potion to permanently restore her youth... It didn't wear off at least within the three years the book spanned. I should add that it was a very salacious read. She was very vain and easily flattered."
She repeated some of the witch's more outrageous stories to him, as they nursed their wine.
"I am immortal," he told her in a low voice a few moments later.
She bit her lip. Here it was, and sooner than she'd thought.
"I killed my father, and my grandparents, and as you know, that girl who haunts the bathroom at school... although that was more of a failed experiment."
He sat back and took a sip of the dark red wine. She considered again that if he was a monster, then perhaps so was. She had murdered the man who'd tried to kidnap her in the woods near the castle, bespelling him when he was tied up and unarmed. Perhaps with provocation, but it was murder nonetheless and motivated by revenge.
When she'd killed in battle it had been easier to pass off as necessary.
"Are you expecting me to be shocked, after all we've been through?"
His shoulders relaxed almost imperceptibly.
"I suppose not. I thought the patricide might bother you. He was a Muggle."
"It does. Of course it does but I'm not a hypocrite... and, I mean, not to condone it because it's terrible and I hope you can see there are other ways - but he clearly left you to rot in an Orphanage so I can't imagine he was very nice. No, I'm more concerned with..." she looked around at the diners unaware they were almost close enough to hear a murder confession, "...the other part. I'm not sure this is really the ideal place for that discussion however."
She wondered why he'd chosen that moment. Why he'd tried to get her a mythical cauldron. She couldn't remember what it had been used for; she'd have to look it up. Medea was an interesting woman, though, now she thought about it. She'd never had much interest in that particular myth as a child but now she had some sympathy for the wronged witch and of course Tom would admire anyone who took such uncompromising revenge.
"If those men had hurt you, today," he hissed, looking suddenly dangerous again, "I would have killed them. Whatever you said."
"Tom, if those men had hurt me, I probably would have killed them. I don't need protecting."
"But you could die."
Oh. Oh.
He looked terrified at the thought, gripping his knife as though he could use it on Death himself.
"I'm not murdering someone so I can live, like you did. I may be... I've killed but never for that."
As it happened, Hermione had a vested interest in not dying before she lived long enough to see her friends and family - her other friends and family again. But she would never make a Horcrux: it was inefficient and the price was too high.
"That," he said rolling his eyes, "was what the cauldron was for."
She remembered now: another thing that supposedly restored eternal youth.
"I think," she said, "I'll find my own way."
He sighed and tucked back into his roast pork.
.
.
This was long, and we were definitely meant to cover more plot ground here but it just sort of came out like this and so, as always, I am left gazing down the century at how much ground we have to cover... Tom doesn't return from his ~mysterious travels~ to start his rise to power until 1970 although I think he goes to see Dumbledore in c.1955-6. The time frame is... unspecific. All we know is he is rejected from teaching at Hogwarts twice: once in the Autumn of 1945, and once again around a decade later, at which point he (in a rly supreme fit of pettiness) curses the post.
Likewise, the timeline for him finding the locket doesn't quite add up. It's too rushed and doesn't fit in most fics - I can't see it making sense until at least a year after Hogwarts, maybe a couple of years.
ALSO: if you want to know more about the Norwegian witch trials I referenced they're real. Check out: ansatte . uit . no / rune . hagen / christma . htm
Please let me know if you have a particular topic you'd like to see Hermione learn - or place to study in - over the next few DECADES of her turning into an Absolute BAMF. It's actually very difficult to come up with spells and types of magic...
Love you all so much. Thanks for sticking with this complicated myth-ridden epic.
and huge thanks/shoutout to DrSallySparrow for checking this over and making several helpful suggestions. She's a fantastic writer in her own right so if you haven't then go and check out her stuff.
