"Everyone pretends to be 'free thinkers', but few individuals pass the line into expressive territories that may be detrimental to their own social well-being."
― Criss Jami, Killosophy
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Spring and Summer 1946
After the Christmas season left, along with most of her new family tree, Hermione settled into a quiet life in the castle interspersed with trips to London to stay with Tom.
And it was in between research and visits that Hermione found herself drawn for the first time to Cerdic's workroom. She wasn't sure why it had taken so long. Perhaps the discomfort of finding herself beholden to him – something that had largely faded since he'd adopted her a year before. It was impossible to feel that she didn't belong when she could feel the estate's special magic thrumming through her blood. The warm rush of welcome when she came home; the particular fizz it sent her when Tom arrived. How it could sense where she wanted to go and a door would open into a stairwell that hadn't been there before to lead her through into a room in another part of the castle, or even out into the walled garden where they grew potions ingredients and Buttons tended neat lines of lettuces and sprawling raspberry canes.
Indeed, it was the castle's fault one day when she got up from reading a particularly dense Medieval tome in her little sitting room and opened the door to find the stone steps leading down into the vast stone workroom below instead of the hall.
Sighing, she followed the steps down, realising she'd been wondering about an illumination in the old text of a fire and a red rose. It wasn't an alchemical text and yet: she'd been reading up on time magic, but there was something odd about the image that recalled both Cerdic's work and something else she couldn't place.
As she entered the workroom the stormy sulphur-and-ozone smell hit her, cutting through the softer fragrance of rosemary and other dried herbs and the slightly musty, damp smell that lingered even in high summer.
He was sat, watching a great glass jar that to Hermione's eyes appeared to be doing absolutely nothing.
She pulled up a seat beside him and waited, grateful for their proximity to the enormous burning hearth.
Inside the jar was a great mess of entwining metal, silver and gold. Like two trees that joined trunks and then parted again to grow their leaves in different skies.
"An alchemical marriage," he said at last, "but you see how it is splitting after the bond? Another failure."
He vanished the contents, and stood to clean the great crystal jar.
"Could you travel through time with alchemy," she asked, "or only halt it?"
"Ah," he said after a long moment. "What a question."
That was not an answer and so she frowned, and waited.
"Perhaps," he continued eventually, "the principles of alchemy might be combined with something else to defy the passage of time. But only the stone can halt it, and then only in a person - not in the world itself. I have a friend -" he paused, then, and it seemed a struggle, even a betrayal to continue, "...who has... halted it for himself and for his wife. It is more a matter of great healing than truly stopping time, however. Is that what you wish, daughter mine? To stop time's passage on your body until you are, shall we say, grown to another place?"
It was the closest he'd ever come to acknowledging he knew she came from the future and Hermione felt a trickle of fear spill down her spine and then dissipate. This was Cerdic: she could trust him, if no one else.
"I think," she said, "I may know the final ingredient."
It was already spring outside, but down here beneath the castle it was always winter, damp and cool like Venice in December.
Cerdic sat heavily on his work stool, but he met her eyes levelly.
"I believe," she said, "it requires a tremendous sacrifice. And I think I know where to find it."
"What," he asked, his voice hoarse and longing, "sort of sacrifice?"
"To gain forever," she said, "perhaps you must give up forever."
The answer had come in the pages of a deceptively simple book she'd come across quite by accident in the end: the diary of a frustrated alchemist called Nicholas Flamel who, like her adopted father had advanced the potion far enough to make gold from coal but nothing more. And then, he had written, he'd found the final ingredient. He had made a stone with which he could create a potion that kept him ageless, forever. A healing potion so advanced it restored vitality beyond any other.
The Elixir of Life.
She hadn't even been looking for it. She had been in search of a way home anew when she'd found it among Tom's to-read pile, and recognising it for what it was, had smuggled it out of the flat.
Usually she found it hard to part from Tom's London home, but that afternoon it had been easy: the right question had finally asked itself in her head and she had held an answer.
"An apple," she whispered for the first time aloud, "an apple that made gods gods, turned blood to ichor. A golden apple."
Cerdic's breath huffed out of his chest all of a sudden and she knew, she knew she was right.
"I know of at least one, I think. If I find it... if I find it, can you make a stone?"
The answer was in the tear that slid down his weathered face.
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And so, when Tom murmured something about a trip to Albania, Hermione leapt at the chance to accompany him. She put off her return to Norway, again, and planned and researched and created an itinerary that would include the country's wilds, but had enough other stops in Europe that no one would find it a suspicious trip into enemy territory if they noticed.
In fact, she knew two things: the first that she had a more specific idea of where the tree they were looking for might be than he did, the second that she had to reach it first.
Despite its remarkable beauty, Albania was not a country especially welcoming to tourists. It had been devastated by Nazi occupation during the war and its new socialist government was waging the beginning of a long assault on religion as it tried to speed up modernisation. There were no trains, illiteracy was rife, and most people were poor. Getting in to the country had required several large bribes to a Muggle Communist smuggler in civil war-torn Greece and a boat ride that was neither comfortable nor easy.
Albania's magical community had been suppressed by its Ottoman rulers for so long it was hardly more sophisticated than the peasantry. There was little formal education and those they met were largely home-schooled hedge-witches and wizards who were by turns respected and loathed by the communities they lived in. Doubtful that they'd be any more welcomed by magicians than the communist authorities, Hermione and Tom avoided people and travelled in disguise. A Muggle married couple, enchanted just enough not to attract attention. They knew, however, that any too-powerful use of magic would have the opposite effect, and so they relied more on bribes than wands.
It was a miserable trip. Navigating a country dispossessed and divided, where they (as Westerners) were the enemy, without a common language, proved more than challenging. But Hermione knew that the Cold War was coming and it would get harder, not easier, to travel Albania, and so she persevered until they were finally in the great, mountainous northern forests on the border with Yugoslavia.
It had taken nearly a month to get to Dragobi, the last village where they could buy food and shelter before setting off into the wilds proper.
This was a mountainous country; rugged, harsh and unforgiving; and despite the unpleasant route there, Hermione fell in love with it. As May turned into June and they settled into their search, camping and hunting, drinking from the alpine streams of the Accursed Mountains, she wondered if she should keep him here forever. Even Tom's pale skin turned brown in the early summer sun, which bounced off the ever-white peaks to the north-east glimmering and majestic.
They met sheep-herders and woodmen and few others as the days passed and they trekked, climbed, and camped, but those Muggles shared stories of a forest they could not pass into, and it was that place that caught Hermione and Tom's attention. It would narrow down the search, but it was a vast area, and there was no spell that would just flag up a powerful magical object. Besides, Hermione knew from the ghost that she'd warded the tree well. Even with the information Helena Ravenclaw had given Tom the search could take a few weeks with good luck, and months or even years without it.
The Muggles also carried stories of a dangerous woman, who could cause harm – or protect – travellers. Translating their stories was lengthy and difficult, relying on Italian, which was widely spoken but not well, and which Hermione knew a limited amount of. However, the word zana or zanash was repeated often enough alongside the Italian fata and the little dictionary she'd brought provided the translation if not the explanation: some kind of fairy lived nearby and they were to be wary of it.
"I think it must be this area," she said joining up the little xs she'd marked in consultation with the muggles to create a possibly fairy zone. She wasn't entirely sure the shepherd who'd just left could read a map, but he'd drawn a specific rock formation for them to look out for and Hermione thought she'd seen it on a previous day's hike.
They were sitting by the campfire. Dusk had long since lengthened the shadows and cooled the air, but the dying sun lit up the peaks to the east of them in a promise of return and she couldn't imagine anywhere more beautiful.
Tom in the wilderness was a different Tom again. This was Tom unencumbered, the chips he bore on his shoulders weightless: Tom without need for defences. He did not, it had to be said, have precisely the same admiration for where they were as Hermione, but there was a freedom to his bearing she'd not seen before.
He pushed his hair back. It had grown too-long in the month they'd been in Albania and the way it fell forward was, frankly, almost unbearably sexy. He had a slight beard, having last shaved in the village. She rather liked it and as he looked up from the map she found herself caught in his gaze. The left-hand-side of his unbearably beautiful mouth quirked up and she closed the distance between them.
He kissed her differently, as the sun sank below the western mountaintops, out here in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but wolves and goats and birds and trees for company. Here, it was easy to forget there was anything else in the world but them. Even magic faded at his touch, the demanding press of his mouth, the sweep of his tongue against her pulse carrying away all thoughts and memories of anything else. Here, they were Adam and Eve leaving Eden for the unknown, together.
(In mee is no delay; with thee to goe
Is to stay here; without thee here to stay,
Is to goe hence unwilling; thou to mee
Are all things under Heav'n, all places thou)
She felt like Eve, lying in his arms on the grass, naked and unashamed together under the stars. The moon was dark and so the constellations shone all the brighter, littering the heavens innumerable and eternal. Hermione needed no snake to entice her to deceive him and take an apple, and indeed perhaps she was worse than Eve for she would never offer him a bite.
"Shall we go looking for the fairy?" she murmured as he copied constellations on her firelit skin.
"I suppose we'd better. It might know where the tree is – and if not, at least if we've sought it, it might not get the jump on us. We can split up tomorrow, cover more ground."
Her breath caught for a moment. Finally.
This was part of the game they played sometimes. She hadn't thought he'd need it here, and yet here he was asking her to prove once again that she was worthy. She'd led him into it this time and she smiled into the darkness.
"Alright darling, if you think that's best."
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As it happened, it was a week of splitting up and more traipsing through mountainous forests (far more tiresome without the diversion of his company) before Hermione found the fairy. She was bathing naked in a stream, flaunting her beauty and was certainly not 'just' a fairy.
This, Hermione recognised from one of the few books she'd found to help them navigate this strange and isolated land, was a zana e malit – and Hermione was on her mountain. She dropped to her knees respectfully and waited for the creature's attention, adrenaline pricking through her with icy pinpricks warning her to be very wary.
Finally, she rose from her stream, long dark hair floating out in some indiscernible breeze.
"A wand-bearer," the woman said and although Hermione understood she had no idea of the language she was hearing. "It has been many years since one of you crossed onto my lands."
A beat, and then Hermione realised the zana expected some sort of response.
"A shame," she said, "as it is such a very fine mountain."
"Not to mention the treasure it hides," the fairy said, with what could only be described as a knowing smirk. "You are a brave one aren't you. I can taste it, you know."
It - she - stepped forward, somehow dry despite her bathing, and peered at Hermione.
"Well brave young witch, you have my blessing to continue."
"Where is the treasure?" Hermione asked, and before she could even blink again they were in a clearing, far deeper into the forest. The stream rushed more fiercely past the trees here, which looked as ancient as the fey's eyes.
The creature smiled.
"Beware young witch – if a maze has no heart, it can never be solved."
And then, she was gone and Hermione was alone. She could feel the magic of this place; it was a cloying, choking magic that reeked of death and pain. Helena had died here, and the curse of her death still echoed a thousand years on.
But there was the hollow tree, and Hermione stood and walked to it. It was still living, but had space enough for a small human inside and she stepped into it. It was warded but they didn't stop her, and there in the dim, dark space, hanging almost carelessly from a jut in the wood was an ancient leather knapsack. She took it down and unbuckled it carefully before peering in. The diadem glimmered softly in the dim sunlight filtering through the space she'd entered, and there next to it were two apples, golden and shining like nothing she'd ever seen before. The gleam wasn't metallic, but a living thing and Hermione realised until she'd seen them she hadn't really believed they'd be here.
Fingers shaking slightly, she plucked them out and stowed them carefully, deep inside her magically-extended bag.
The diadem winked up at her, beautiful and enchanting and Hermione longed to take it and leave a copy in its place. Would he know? She wondered. He was arrogant enough not to question whatever he found her, arrogant enough he'd one day twist this treasure to an evil end.
But she thought of his fingers tracing stars on her skin and closed the bag, hung it back on the wood and stepped back into the sunlight. She took a moment to check for inconsistencies, any sign she'd been there, and then she span on her foot and apparated out of the clearing. It was enough to stop him becoming a god. He could have the trinket.
Now, she thought, they were hers. She could pay back Cerdic for his kindness to her. She would not take a bite, as Eve had, but save them for a higher purpose.
Immortality with no end had no appeal: history and literature dictated that men who played at gods met mortal ends. But Hermione was not a man, and she had a better idea.
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The day would have been wholly successful had one of the Muggle shepherds not been lying in wait for her on her return. He couldn't find the tent, of course; it was warded in their absence, but the remains of the fire were there. Presumably the man had hidden even without a tent to rob, knowing they'd likely not give up such a good camping spot easily.
It was in a lull above a valley, protected from both wind and prying eyes by a rocky outcrop and the mountain climbing up behind it, and just above the treeline of the forest. Bracken rose in straight green stalks, and the stream bubbled merrily from a spring perhaps forty feet further up, tracing its way down to the lake below. There, they washed and caught fish, with magic rather than lines, and swam naked.
A perfect campsite, and a good bet they'd return for a poor peasant who struggled to feed himself let alone his family after years of war and the confiscation of farmlands. To now find himself confronted by two foreigners who looked rich and were too far out in the mountainous forests to get help must have seemed too good an opportunity to pass up.
His greed was his death warrant.
He'd hidden cleverly and she'd been arrogant, dropping her knapsack to the ground in her eagerness to remove her boots and give her swollen feet some relief. Some things couldn't be done by magic. It had been a mistake however, though one she hardly could have predicted. Her compass had slipped outside her top and so, bending down as she was, she missed its heated warning until it was too late.
"Më jepni paratë tuaja, vajzë," came the voice and she looked up to find a gun pointed at her. Her wand was stuck in her belt at the back. Thoughtless. She couldn't reach for it. She wondered how much wandless magic she could conjure without it. She ought to have tested since her power increase, but she hadn't. She didn't understand what he was saying, though he kept repeating it. Para was money she remembered suddenly and almost laughed.
She pointed to the bag, and made to reach for it but he yelled something and waved the gun rather wildly so she stopped. The man stepped forward, bending to take it. Her heart froze in fear. The apples were not the only precious thing contained within, but they were by far the most important.
Her reaction to the green light that knocked the man to the ground, where he lay on his side, with unseeing eyes staring at her was initially, therefore, one of relief. Then a sickening lurch that followed.
"Hermione," Tom hissed, though he seemed calm otherwise, "are you alright?"
"I'm fine. You didn't need to –" she stopped, choked.
"I read his mind this morning. He had another kind of thievery on his mind. Trust me, the world is well rid of him."
"What do you mean?" she asked, staring at the man's glassy eyes. They'd been so hungry and now… nothing.
"He wanted to catch you. Alone. I've been here all day waiting. He thought he would help himself to you, as well as the gold."
She felt sick, and it was almost a relief that she still could. That death and her potential – her mind stumbled and forced it out – rape, were still horrifying despite with whom she chose to share her bed. Hermione stood, shaky in a way she'd forgotten, as the adrenaline surge began to recede.
While she had been undermining his plans, he'd been waiting to protect her. And yet, was death the best answer? She didn't know any more. She believed him; he had no reason to lie to her, who'd stood by him and killed a man for trying to kidnap and ransom her. But she couldn't bring herself to thank him for it, so she picked up her wand and considered the body.
"We'll have to leave. That spell will have attracted the authorities. I don't know if they'd sense it out here, but we can't risk it. Couldn't you have used something a bit more subtle?"
She felt again the weight of magic, the easy power it gave them. But the Muggle man had had power too, a gun pointed at her head. Probably she would have got to her wand and incapacitated him in time. Possibly she would have been raped and killed. She would never know. She was glad not to.
"I've already packed the tent. We'll have to come back another time. But I want to preserve the body. I can use it when I return."
This, then, was the Albanian peasant he'd killed to make the diadem a horcrux. It slid sickeningly into place. He'd murdered another man, for her. He had sabotaged his chances of finding the diadem this visit, knowingly.
And so Hermione held her tongue and packed their remaining things as Tom bespelled the body into a hole in one of the rocks. Not enough to call it a cave, but enough to hide a dead man. She watched him, unable not to admire his casting as she always did, even when it was for such a foul purpose. Preserving a body so he could later create a horcrux. She lost count of the spells, spells to keep it hidden, spells to preserve it, spells stop it smelling, smells to keep people away.
"Where are we apparating to?" he asked, sweating from the effort of casting such complex spells as quickly as he had.
Hermione had the map out already.
"This is where magical Albania's border is with Yugoslavia, it's slightly over the Muggle one so we could risk it but I think it would be harder to pass unnoticed there. We've only got one chance because we're not registered here so…. I think," she paused, considering it, "I think we should apparate back to the coast but get to Italy instead of Greece. It's a long way but if we steal a boat I know a few spells… and we've got enough food for a few days if we run into trouble. We'll need water though."
He grinned at her, easily shaking off the grim turn the day had taken and she knew what was in that smile. A Bonnie-and-Clyde smile of trust and of partnership. A smile that put her next to him, not below him. A smile that slid under her skin and made her feel alive and sick all together.
"It's a big jump. Let's go before the aurors arrive."
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After they smuggled themselves out of Albania, they spent the extra week they'd expected to be abroad in Italy. As they'd fled the mountains, they'd heard the crack of apparition, and it had been a slightly shaky exit all in all. But they'd managed to navigate the small boat (the first they'd seen), by some miracle and a great deal of highly illegal magic, to a hidden cove on Italy's Adriatic coast. They'd camped there for a night, taking it in turns to keep watch for any investigation by the authorities before deciding it was safe to travel.
They had a week before their international portkey would take them back to England. It had been unimaginably expensive, but necessary. Getting to Albania had been one thing, successfully returning on time for the Malfoy wedding was another. She hadn't known where they'd end up and so it was a homing-portkey, usually issued only to diplomats and spies. But galleons were galleons and Abraxas knew all the right people. Not that he'd known the purpose of the trip, of course, but he knew better than to ask.
Hermione chose Lake Como for their week in Italy, simply because it was the first place that came to mind. After several confusing telephone calls, which she allowed Tom to help her make because knowing how to use a train was a shared thing but a rotary dial telephone was quite another, and they were on their way.
"Yes, our honeymoon. The hotel we have been staying in has closed down unexpectedly," she explained, grateful for the front desk's English.
"The honeymoon suite is booked, but we have another suite available Mrs Richards."
"Thank you. We should arrive on the four o'clock from Milan on Thursday."
Tom became more resentful as she insisted they use as little magic as possible to get there, conjuring enough luggage to commit to their disguise. Hermione insisted on keeping up their disguise of being Muggles. The great advantage of travelling in such a manner was that few witches or wizards would suspect it, if they were indeed being sought. Few people, even in her time, could dress as a passable Muggle let alone use their currency, or move among them unnoticed. And it was a simple disguise for her. Any mistakes she made, as they headed north-west by a combination of hitch-hiking, trains, and taxis, Tom chalked up to her being raised as a Pureblood who was good at research, rather than a time-travelling Muggleborn. And it kept them well out of notice of the magical authorities.
She spent the week in the sun in the grounds of the Grand Hotel Tremezzo. Perhaps without it she and Tom might have really fought, but the pretence of their honeymoon bound them together. She let herself slip into a pretence they were nothing but a normal, wealthy couple, staying in one of the most romantic places on earth. Her summer-kissed skin turned darker in the June sun.
The hotel was quiet; it hadn't closed during the war but tourism was hardly on most people's minds, and so they found it easy to avoid socialising with the other guests. Their rooms looked out over the lake and it was easier to let the beauty of the place calm her than worry about the future. Besides, for all he seethed at having to play at Muggles, Tom's eyes had only grown more intense as they rested on her. What could she say, now, that would make him let her go?
Did she, Hermione wondered as she watched the sun set over the lake from their balcony, champagne in hand, robes transfigured into muggle silk floating in a kiss of a breeze, really him want to?
This adventure had tested and pushed her in a way she hadn't experienced since the war. That training, she reflected a little bitterly, had made her a master criminal.
Two murderers hiding in plain sight. She'd smuggled them in and out of one of the most isolated countries in Europe. She had done that, not Tom. Tom alone would have found a different way, she suspected. Probably, almost certainly, one that had cost more lives.
And, she smiled into the sun, which alone knew her secret. She had the apples. They were real.
"Where do you want to eat tonight?" he asked, coming up behind her, hand sliding down the smooth brown skin of her arms, and settling on her waist. The conjured diamond glittered in the sun's dying rays.
"Alone," she said, a little huskily. "Call down and say we'll eat up here tonight."
She felt his smile against her neck and his hand slide down to the hem of her dress. She let him spread her legs wider as he pulled her skirt up.
"There are few Muggle things I value, 'Mrs Richards,'" he murmured in her ear, as his fingers began to explore the juncture of her thighs, "but I must say I enjoy you in their clothes."
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In the end, they returned to England with no ramifications. They checked out of the hotel, boarded a train, and let the portkey pull them out of a café bathroom in Milan.
It was almost too easy, and that made it heady. He pushed her against the wall in his flat, as they stumbled from the landing, magicking her Muggle clothes away with a hiss, and took her there.
"I am so fucking glad to be home," he muttered afterwards, casting household spells with a vengeance to light the room, the fire, and clear away the dust that had gathered with nearly three months of absence.
"I rather liked Lake Como," she countered, pulling a set of day robes out of her bag. "But I am absolutely starving."
"All those Muggles. It was too much. It reminded me of –" he stopped and set his pile of Muggle clothes alight with another vehement curse.
"Of what?" she asked softly, laying a hand on his arm.
He tensed and then relaxed. "Of my thrice-damned childhood. All the rich people in their finery gadding about town and we were sleepless with hunger and cold in that terrible place."
"The wizarding world is no kinder to the poor, as far as I can tell."
He shrugged and brushed it off.
"However poor, no one's starving in the gutter if they have magic."
This was true enough, so she left him to his musings and went to examine the state of the rest of his apartment, a scholar's dream of books and parchment and cauldrons all keen to collect what dust they could.
Tom lived in what had been a Jacobean townhouse, protected from the Great Fire by virtue of magic and so the sort of building rarely seen in the other London. It had been converted into apartments for wealthy, unmarried young wizards. Tom's rooms were all dark panelling, mullioned windows and heavy Persian rugs over wooden floors and consisted of a bedroom, study-cum-potions lab and a sitting-cum-dining room for entertaining. There was no kitchen and though she'd never told him, it was similar to how wealthy young aristocrats had lived in the eighteenth century. A shared house-elf provided some food and cleaning, but otherwise they dined out or ordered from a local tavern. Tom loved the place for its magic and history and status. Hermione too enjoyed the history of it, though she was less enamoured of its old boys' club atmosphere. She was also less than enamoured of the bathroom, which appeared when it was needed with varying levels of accuracy.
She loved the way he'd already filled it with magic, though. Tom was a collector by nature; he collected artefacts, secrets, and people with the same verve he collected knowledge and power and this was where he put it.
"Was it all a test?" she asked him, several hours later as they sat down in the mullioned bay window to eat a simple supper of shepherd's pie. She'd sighed when the elf had brought it, already missing Italy.
"A test?" Tom asked, too innocent, as he poured some red wine.
She glared at him.
"Loyalty? Capability? Both?" It wasn't really a question.
"Well wasn't your little Muggle holiday equally a test? Yes, Hermione, of course I could have used another spell, yes. I could have killed him with a simple stunning spell if I'd aimed it right and blasted him into one of those rocks. Would that," his voice was low, with a mocking lilt, "make it better, somehow? More palatable because I didn't use a supposedly dark spell? I could do what you so cleverly did last year and use a spell meant for healing. Would that be more to your taste?"
"Yes, it would you arse. You sabotaged your trip just to give me a stupid test!"
He waved a hand dismissively and swallowed.
"We'll go back. You make everything so easy. That's what I was testing. How your brilliant mind solves almost any problem." He took her hand, gaze intense, "Your strengths are not mine and I admire them. And isn't testing each other what we do?"
"Not at the cost of other people's lives, Tom."
"He really was going to – to," he stuttered a little and she believed him.
"Alright. Fine."
"Did I pass your test?" he smirked.
She rolled her eyes. He had, although she'd only been half-aware it had been a test at all before he'd pointed it out.
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It wasn't until the following morning when her world came to a stuttering halt. She'd woken earlier than him, and was reading in the study when his voice drifted out of the bedroom, sibilant with sarcasm.
"Hermione. What are these?"
She tensed, a sick churning in her stomach answering the question for her. She'd hidden the apples as best she could in her bag, but anything too well-warded in there would have drawn his attention. She'd tucked them inside the bag she kept tampons and shampoo and hoped for the best.
"What are what, darling?" she called back, mind racing.
He appeared at the study door, eyes blazing, an apple in each hand.
"A snack?" she offered.
"Don't be so fucking facetious."
She sighed and put her book aside.
"I met the fairy," she started, uncertain, but relieved he didn't have his wand pointed at her, "she liked me, said I was brave and took me to the tree. I left the diadem there. I came for those and they are mine."
He relaxed slightly. "What are they?"
"An alchemical ingredient. Very rare," she replied. It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't a truth. If he bit into one they would never defeat him.
(If he bit into one would he go further down the dark path awaiting him, or would he take a different road?)
He set them down and she realised her necklace had stayed cool against her skin. It gave her confidence.
"If you have betrayed me…" his voice was strained, hands gripping the side-table.
"I haven't. I'll give you the memory when we're in Wales so you can find the clearing."
"Let me see it now." He was white beneath the tan she realised, jaw clenched, wand out but not pointed at her. She wondered if he might hurt her after all. But she couldn't let him in her head. Albus had said the spell protected her mind, but how far that protection went was a mystery.
"Tom, put that away. I'll show you in my Pensieve. We're going there tonight anyway, what difference does it make?"
He was still tense and frowning, but he laid it on the table and dropped casually into the other chair.
"At least I don't bore you," she reminded him, pretending to turn back to her book. She was very, very aware of the golden apples gleaming unnaturally by the door. In this dark panelled room, with the sun barely making in through the mullioned windows, they looked for all the world like a detail in a painting by Willem Kalf. That was what this room needed, she realised suddenly; the only art on the walls was a ghastly and rather chatty portrait of an apothecary who'd died in 1638 that had been left here by the previous resident. She pulled her thoughts back from that tangent as Tom huffed out a sigh.
"True enough. You are a devious bitch sometimes though, Hermione."
She smiled, and walked over to his chair, kneeling before him as though she were a supplicant.
"Let me make it up to you," she whispered, sliding her hands up his thighs, her eyes filled with a promise, turning his own tricks back on him.
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Firstly, I cannot believe it's been six years since I started this. LAWD.
Secondly and more importantly: Thank you thank you thank you to the angelic SallyJAvery for alpha reading this. Please go and read her hilarious holidayish fic The First Rule of Film Club. I was properly chuckling the whole time - it will be a perfect tonic for the messy drama here)
People who follow me on tumblr will realise this is shorter than I feared: it is actually only half the chapter I wrote but 12,000 words seemed too unweildy! I'll post the second chapter in a few days. If you don't follow me on tumblr you are missing out. It's cocoartistwrites.
Thank you all for still reading this mad epic. I love you so much. Happy New Year (unless you follow an alternative calendar or are particularly attached to the horror show that was 2017 and remain in denial, in which case I wish you a happy Monday).
