PSA: Make sure you didn't miss last Monday's update before reading this!
.
.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector.
- The Republic, Plato
.
June 14th 1946
Hermione woke early on the morning of Sophia and Abraxas's wedding. Tom groaned and rolled over, burying his head under the duvet as she sent a dim light to glow by her wardrobe.
She pulled on the long silk robes, a beautiful silver-blue and fixed her silver circlet in her hair.
"Tom, are you awake?"
"No," he muttered crossly. "Nor do I have to be for about seven hours."
She laughed. "Alright. See you later."
Sophia had asked Hermione, to her surprise and tentative delight, to be one of her witnesses. The ceremony was more traditional than Bill and Fleur's, which unfortunately meant the bridal party had to make a pre-dawn sacrifice to bless the day. They'd chosen the full moon, which was meant to be auspicious, and the feast would continue long into the night. It would be a long day.
Yawning, Hermione hurried to the portkey, wishing she'd left more time for breakfast. She was rather nervous; this was a day bound up in traditions she'd never been invited to share. Fortunately, her disguise had long since been accepted and any ignorance was put down to an eccentric father and lack of a mother.
Her wedding invite was carved onto birchwood, and it began to glow portkey-blue not long after Hermione picked it up. She ran a mental check to make sure she had everything in her bag and then felt the sickening jerk-lurch carry her away to the Selwyn manor house near Aylesbury. Though prohibitively expensive, Hermione had learned this was the preferred way Purebloods invited guests to their homes. It kept the exact locations obscured, an important defence for the secretive society.
The portkey brought her to the manor's hall; an enchanting baroque festival, two storeys high with a great double staircase sweeping down from the galleried first floor. She admired it for a moment before following the voices through into a hallway at the back.
"Hermione! Oh you're so brown, you look absolutely radiant." Ancha, blue eyes too bright for this ungodly hour, leapt up to embrace her. "I can't wait to hear all about your trip, you've been gone an age! Let me show you where to leave you things and then I'll introduce you to everyone. Sophia has been in such a state, she's like a flitterby I swear."
Hermione followed her to the room they'd be sharing, and hung her evening robes.
"Where do I put her present?"
"Leave that here for now, we'll come back for them later before the ceremony. Trust me, you'll want to sleep afterwards."
.
The early ceremony went like this: creeping into Sophia's room to carry her out into the dewy darkness as the moon brushed the horizon. It was all women, all dressed in silver and white and the palest blues, the moon's colours through the year, apart from Sophia who was stripped of her loose midnight-blue robe. That was burned, as they cut the throat of a wide-eyed and pleading mooncalf, letting its blood drip onto the ground before collecting it in a silver chalice. It then followed the robe onto the bonfire. Fortunately, the fire was magical and it was incinerated rapidly, limited the smell of burning flesh.
After, they washed Sophia's naked body under the dying light of the moon, first with the blood, then the mooncalf's ashes, and finally water. As the moon finally slid to light the other side of the world and the sun began to take its turn, they wrapped her in silk robes all the colours of the dawn – pale oranges and rosy pinks and dusky blues and blues so light they were almost white. They wove rosemary, whitethorn, and gold into a crown and anointed her forehead, neck, wrists and feet with various odorous oils meant to bring love and luck.
When the sun rose on a clear morning it was taken as confirmation the wedding could go ahead – the moon giving up her maiden to the maleness of the sun, Hermione supposed – and they all went back into the house for breakfast, which seemed less appealing than it had before she had helped kill a sweet mooncalf.
It was a strange and ancient ceremony, woven through with the wild magic she'd felt in Norway or on Samhain, and despite her misgivings Hermione had to admit it was beautiful. There was a holy sort of terror about it, something secret and wholly feminine she'd never experienced before.
They were joined by Sophia's male relatives for breakfast, which aside from ritual food for the bride was altogether normal and merry and accompanied by several glasses of champagne. After that, Hermione gladly followed Ancha to lie down until it was time to change for the wedding itself.
.
She was deeply asleep when Sophia's mother came to wake them. This, Hermione realised as she blinked blearily at the grand woman sitting at the end of the bed, was Marcus's aunt. She'd completely forgotten when she'd met her in the morning, but now her dark hair was unbound from its silver circlet and she was in what passed as loungewear for the wealthy witch, and Hermione could see the resemblance to her former boyfriend.
"Sorry," she said yawning, "what was that?"
The woman – Fulvia, Hermione remembered – smiled.
"I was wondering what time you would like me to send my elf to do your hair dear?"
"Oh! Thank you. Whenever it's convenient is fine. I don't need anything too fancy."
"She can start with you two, then. That will annoy my sister. Please tap your wand on that panel by the fireplace if you require anything and someone will come."
Apparently, unlike at the only other magical wedding she'd been too, it was customary for the bride and her attendants to change three times during the day. That meant three sets of robes for the three-part ceremony, each increasingly lavish.
Hermione's second set of robes were golden-yellow, a yellow that sang of summer sun. Slashed sleeves left her arms bare and were fixed at the wrist with solid-gold cuffs. The elf came and fixed a golden circlet in her long, dark hair leaving it loose. It was a colour that made her grateful for the tan; in winter it would have turned her sallow.
"Smashing," Ancha said, twirling in her citrus-yellow. "What a pretty pair. Let's go and help the bride!"
The second stage of the ceremony was the wedding itself. Sophia, clad in green robes, was pale and nervous and snapping at the various people helping her get ready.
"You look wonderful," Hermione said, perching on the window-seat of Sophia's childhood room. "How are you feeling?"
"Dreadful, I think I might be sick."
"I think you're supposed to feel like that, although I, too, would feel sick if I had to marry Abraxas," Hermione teased. "What about some tea and toast? Will you keep that down?"
Sophia wrinkled her nose as the coiffeur yanked an errant piece of her dark blonde hair into the complex braid she was creating behind her head.
"I'll try it. Did you sleep well?"
"Goodness, like logs weren't we Hermione?" Ancha said, as she tapped the jade panel and informed it that the bride needed tea and toast.
"So how difficult was it to pretend to be asleep when we all came in this morning?" she asked as she stole some of Sophia's buttery toast.
.
She didn't see Tom before the start of the ceremony, occupied as she was with the bustle of helping Sophia get ready and then distracting her with chatter until it was time to go down. And so, Hermione also hadn't seen the hundreds of people arrive while they'd been in the manor. As she and the other 'maiden' attendants walked up the seemingly never ending aisle under a bright blue June sky she tried not to look for him too obviously.
The wedding took place directly outside the house, so the aisle made by the chairs continued straight westwards from the door in a perfect line. The finery on display, Hermione mused as she took her place next to the altar, could have blinded someone. She'd always thought Cerdic and Albus were eccentric dressers, but now casting her eye over the extraordinary robes, she realised in fact most wizards of their age, and many younger, were not constrained by colour choices they might deem feminine. They were as many decked in lilacs or rose-pink as there were in emeralds and blues. It reminded her of a tapestry she'd seen once, a medieval court scene perhaps, though she couldn't precisely remember.
Abraxas, hair gleaming in the sun, watched his bride walk towards him with an unsuppressed grin. He was too arrogant to look nervous even on his wedding day, but his happiness was radiant and Hermione found herself smiling too. It was not a day to dwell on the choices their child would make.
Instead, she looked at the bowers of flowers and branches built around the altar, discerning the meaning of the carefully chosen foliage. The manor itself was beautiful, rising up behind the standing crowd in their dizzying array of colours, its warm red stone glowing against the sky. The scene felt timeless somehow and her vision began to blur oddly. She felt Tom's eyes pull hers in before she saw them. He was sitting next to several of his friends quite near the front. His lips quirked up as she met his dark gaze. It said; this is a lot isn't it and hers replied you have no idea.
Sophia's Great Aunt was presiding over the ceremony and so she was last in the procession. Her skin was hardly wrinkled but her hair was as grey as a midwinter sky, and she was almost as tall as Abraxas. She strode up through the fan of bride, groom and the six attendants on either side and waved her hand to light a great pillar of fire on the low altar.
Everyone sat and it was only after that that Hermione realised the entire ceremony was in Latin. She was very glad she'd read the instructions Fulvia had written for her so carefully, and for the Latin tutor her parents had hired in the holidays when they'd realised that was the primary language of spells.
"Auspicato, omina bona accepi. Sic purgatus est hoc locus ad ritum matrimonium. Venite nunc nova nupta et novia maritus ante hanc aram ut affirmetis fideles coram Diis vos libenter adnuere his nuptiis."
Abraxas dutifully stepped forward, taking the various offerings from his father beside him and throwing them into the flames. He held his left hand over the fire and made a vow.
"Ego adnuo libenter hanc feminam in matrimonium ducere. Veni consens, hoc est non ad haec consensi foedera ut eum vellum discedere, non liceret."
Sophia, thus called, stepped forward and offered her own gifts to the fire before repeating that she, too, came willingly to this marriage and agreed to take this man as her husband.
Then the tall witch took their hands and bound them together over the fire before binding them with golden ropes of light from her wand that glowed and then sank into their skin, and more Latin vows.
Then Hermione and the other attendants joined in, giving their own offerings to the fire and vowing they witnessed the binding and saw no reason for Sophia and Abraxas not to be married.
Hardly any time had passed before the older witch cast a shower of stars fell over their bound hands and everyone stood up to cheer and send great reams of sparks into the air with their wands.
And then they all had to sign the official wedding notice for the ministry while the rest of the guests were distracted by duelling matches and various other magical contests until sunset, when the feast began. Hermione missed that, however, though Tom told her about it later, because she had to change again.
.
.
August 13th 1946
Hermione wasn't sure why Tom chose to read that particular outdated copy of The Daily Telegraph over a year after the events scrawled across its front page, but it changed everything.
It had been gathering dust in the newspaper rack in her sitting room in the castle, along with a dozen others from key events. That they might be dangerous had never occurred to her, because Tom's complete lack of interest in current affairs usually meant he ignored all newspapers – magical and muggle alike. He must have grown intensely bored watching her as she checked her packing before her second, overdue, trip to Norway to pick one up.
Tom was paler than usual as he read it, dark eyebrows drawn together, and that caught Hermione's attention. She watched as he put it aside and rummaged through the stack of papers until he found another reference.
She reached for the paper he'd discarded. It didn't have the most dramatic headline, considering what had happened. There was no photograph to give a visual guide to this unprecedented event.
ALLIES INVENT ATOMIC BOMB; FIRST DROPPED ON JAPAN the front page from August 7th 1945 announced in relatively restrained capital letters on the left-hand side. It was followed by an appraisal of the scientific marvel of the thing, and an off-hand comment that no extent of the damage was yet known.
"I have always believed," he said quietly after a while, "that we were encouraged to hide from Muggles for their safety. I have resented it, even. But if they can destroy an entire city in a moment, perhaps it is we who must be protected from them."
"I don't think Muggles are a danger to us, Tom," Hermione started but he interrupted, throwing the newspaper at the wall.
"How can you say that? They destroyed an entire city, and these newspapers report it with pride. Even magic couldn't stop this, Hermione. Not magic that we're taught at Hogwarts. We've been left defenceless against a people whose science is growing powerful enough to match magic. It couldn't, if we were allowed free reign but every day the Ministry issues another decree limiting us and - what, one day some powerful Muggle will have a witch or wizard for a child and they'll find out and they will fear and hate us, because that's what Muggles do."
His hand ran through the dark hair, cut back shorter since their Albania visit and he sighed before continuing rather earnestly, "I've seen it my entire life. I've seen the rich pass starving children and not care, I've seen London bombed into rubble, and millions of young men dead for some idea of national pride or fear another country may grow more powerful than them. How can you say the creatures that could invent this - this 'A-Bomb' are no danger to us?"
For once in her life Hermione was silenced. She realised with horror that she actually agreed with him; that Muggle technology was advancing at a rate so rapid it would soon mean the magical community was under an unprecedented threat most people weren't even aware of.
The corners of his dark eyes were drawn tight with concern, but he met her gaze as fierce and savage as a leopard. She thought of the bombed-out cities she'd seen first-hand since she'd been transported into the past. She thought of the revelations that would come of the holocaust, of the eighty-thousand people, mostly civilians, who'd died instantly when the Americans dropped the first atomic bomb, of the half a century of knowledge she had that saw nations develop increasingly more powerful and deadly weapons. She knew no one would use it again, that the memory of the horror of WW2 would bring half a century of unprecedented peace - but the future after her was unknown.
What would happen when people began to forget?
She had grown up in a largely peaceful time, had seen the Berlin Wall crumble and had barely grasped its significance – but:
"You're right," she said, finally. "Muggles are becoming more of a potential threat. But I don't think that's grounds for panic - the sequence of events that would lead to dangerous, powerful, and conscienceless Muggles attacking the magical world would be... unlikely. Very unlikely."
"They are so many of them, though. And with the radio… they could get a message around the world even faster than with magic. Faster than we could stop it. We don't have the numbers, Hermione."
"I don't - there are things you're right about and I don't disagree, but I don't have time to talk about this now. It's nearly time for my portkey. Write to me about it."
(No wonder people would follow him into chaos and destruction and death, she thought.)
.
.
.
Hermione, 15th September
I can't agree with what you say about the level of this threat: I really do think we'd be in imminent danger from Muggles were they to discover us. They are not accepting or welcoming of any sort of 'difference' and would find our innate power over them on an individual level terrifying. All I have seen of them makes it clear they would take immediate action to counter this threat. We would be subdued, captured or killed, and then studied as though we weren't people but animals.
More positively, the Peruvian wizard I have been in contact with has agreed to a visit. I shall be away for about two months, and mostly out of contact in that period as we'll be deep in the jungle. I am sworn to secrecy over the locations and what I learn, however, so you will forgive me if I say no more for now.
I look forward to it – not least because I find sleep comes more slowly without you by my side.
How are your Valkyries?
Yours,
Tom
.
.
(She missed him too. Her bed was cold and empty and she would wake herself up seeking his warmth. She was relieved he was going to Peru, distracted from horcruxes and the threat of Muggle fear. She wondered if he loved her. She wondered if she loved him.)
.
.
My v dear Hermione, 13th October 1946
We are not long returned from our marital trip, but I write with a frown despoiling my handsome brow nonetheless. The new political faction I told you about seems to be veering in a remarkably outlandish direction. I recently examined the bills and reforms they plan to put to the Wizengamot (radicals are not immune to galleons it appears!) and they plan to undermine almost every proud magical tradition. It seems the campaign against pre-Hogwarts magic and sacrifice-magic was the least of it. If they have their way we'll all just be Muggles who can do a few tricks.
For example, and this is not the worst of it, they want all properties returned to the ministry upon a witch or wizard's death to create a more equal society. These people have no idea of the relationship between family and home! A thousand years of reciprocal magic, blood wards, the lot! Imagine your castle deadened and empty and hollow! It's unbearable. Malfoys have spent five centuries bonding with our bloody manor, and I want it a safe haven for my future children. I want them to feel it greet them when they return, to know they can never be truly harmed within its walls so long as they don't betray the family.
These things are greater than individuals and, frankly, are none of the Ministry or anyone else's business.
They also want to outlaw unlicensed spell creation or use of unlicensed magic! Imagine, every time you tweaked your wand movements to make your summoning charm more efficient you'd have to write a fucking application for use.
I know we often disagree on politics and such, but you know I have enormous respect for you and if you can find sound reasoning in these things I'll listen. If not, perhaps you can bring your clever logic to countering this move.
Sophia sends her love, and says she wishes you'd spend less time abroad. Can't say I blame you at the moment. Heard Tom's off somewhere in the Americas researching. You're a pair of swots but with this dire and endless rain who can blame you. My parents are heading off to warmer climes for the winter, but Sophia and I will be at the Manor. Hope to see you then.
Abraxas
.
.
.
Dear Abraxas, 20th October 1946
I cannot imagine you in all your vainglory would allow a frown deep enough to mar that overbred brow, but it does fill me with pleasure to know it is possible nonetheless.
On a serious note, what you describe does indeed sound worrying and out of balance. I understand that many people feel marginalized by the power and secrets of old wizarding families, especially newcomers to the Magical world, and perhaps they have good reason to if we consider all we were fortunate enough to grow up with and expect. But to bring everyone to zero because they cannot start with ten is also markedly unfair. There must be a softer path of reform. I urge you not to react by damning everything they seek but to find some compromise. Extremity is dangerous, on either side.
Perhaps a lobby for the importance of family magic, and an agreement to share more of it would be an effective counter? It seems to me instead of leaving our children with no legacy we could share some of it with those who have none. I would not be averse, so long as my father agreed, to going through the Dearborn archives and publishing some of our knowledge and research, and perhaps we could pay a fee upon inheritance that went towards helping people adapt to our world?
Tremendous love to Sophia. I'll be back at the beginning of December and we can discuss this further over dinner. Please also come for New Year in Wales and stay for a few days.
Best,
Hermione
.
.
Dearest H, 15th November 1946
Have indeed made some progress with the you-know-what, but must counsel you it's likely to take a few years to perfect. Alchemy is a slow and frustrating business! Speaking of which, an old friend (very old – hah) of mine has invited us to stay. Nico has heard of your interests, perhaps through Albus, and wants to meet you. He lives in France with his wife, Perenelle.
Caradoc came for dinner last week with a young wizard, who was tremendously charming. I suspect his adolescent interest in young witches has veered to fresh pastures at least for now, though it seemed rude to ask outright. That will annoy his mother – Hestia is awfully excited for grandchildren. I must say I'd forgotten how much I liked my family, seems odd now I didn't see them for so long. Perhaps when you're home at Christmas I'll tell you a little more about how that happened.
What you're learning sounds tremendously interesting – don't listen to Albus too much. He's a bit turned around from all the Grindelwald stuff I think. Can't trust himself with old magic, but that doesn't mean it's all bad. You've got a good head on your shoulders. Magic's all about balance from what I can see.
All love,
Cerdic
.
.
Hermione,
Why are you always bloody travelling or away. I hate letter writing, would much rather see you in person! But have been tasked with sending good news from Ivy – she's getting married. Not a great shock but very nice anyway. It's to James, obviously. Her parents are a bit sniffy about it – they were hoping it would fizzle out and she'd pick someone of wizarding birth - but nothing too dramatic. James treats her well so what does it matter?
Saw your pa the other day, with Lanval. Think you'll like him, if it lasts that long.
See you at Christmas
Love
Caradoc
.
.
.
December 31st 1947
Tom Riddle was a liar. He'd always been a liar, trained by a cold place where truth earned punishment. A place for children that seemed to hate children. A safe haven that had never felt safe.
Tom Riddle was a liar and, like all those who are deceitful to their souls, it was not so much that he intended to deceive but that he simply did not recognise truth. Liars are not trusting creatures and this silver-tongued demon of a boy was no different.
Tom Riddle was a liar and a dreamer and a doubter and he made his lies real and his dreams become truths and his doubts a leash.
Tom Riddle was a liar and, like all liars, he loved stories. At the age of eleven he'd found - as he had always known - he belonged in a grander narrative than the one he'd grown up with, and then one day he met a girl from a fairy tale. He recognised the tale because, like all liars, he loved stories. But he did not believe in it until she made him part of the story - for most of all, liars love the stories that are about themselves.
This liar who had made himself into a tale found someone else who lived inside one. And strangely, then, it was this fairy tale girl to whom he could only offer truths. For she was not a liar, though like all fairies she wielded truths like shadows with which she cloaked herself.
Around the fairy tale girl who used the truth like a ward, the liar found his tongue reversed itself and scorned lies.
But as they dressed on the morning of New Year's Eve, after an especially satisfying birthday breakfast of first Hermione and then food, he told her a truth and found it might have been better to lie.
"I've got a job. At a shop for magical artefacts and antiques," he explained, "called Borgin and Burke's. Do you know it?"
She said she'd heard of it but he heard a lie in her voice and in the lie he heard disappointment.
"Are you sure that's really... befitting your talents?" she asked, fastening her robe and looking over her shoulder at him with a frown.
It was not and yet - it was. He had to find the locket. It was a part of his story, both past and future.
"It's hardly forever, but I think it will be useful - and besides it'll be interesting."
That was three truths and she shrugged, recognising them.
"Well, alright then. When do you start?"
"Next week."
And that was that.
Later, as he lied with a smile and welcomed the guests he wondered why they needed other people. These people in their glittering finery were all liars too, and Tom knew liars and hated them, because like all liars he despised deceit in others. He watched Hermione play-act the gracious hostess, the golden compass against her skin a truth. He knew many of the guests: it was Hermione's party as well as her father's, but their company bored him.
Insofar as he liked any of them there was only Sophia Malfoy, who was a woman he'd like very much to have on his side and was probably wasted on Abraxas , and Cerdic: a King in his realm. That he was a wizard who dripped gold from his fingers and had gold in his laugh was true, too, and moreover of all the storytellers he was the best Tom had ever met - turning silver niceties into golden laughs.
.
.
Hermione was miserable for the first few months of 1947. This was in part because she had argued with Dumbledore about her time in Norway during her first lesson of the year, just before term began at Hogwarts.
He had praised the increasing magical departure from such brutal magics as modern, expecting her to agree. But she'd spent too much time with those who'd been born into a different world now and she had to ask him - was it worth the loss of power and knowledge?
She could never condone magic used against Muggles, she told him, choosing to forget her own juvenile straying into that area when she'd obliviated her parents. And of course, human and even animal sacrifice was no easy thing to accept. She still woke up wondering at it - and yet there was something to be said for the ancient magics, for cutting open a palm in offering to the earth for its raw power.
Was magic, she asked him, not so wholly removed from the mundane that it was a truly a world apart, and as such could not be governed by the same ethical considerations?
"No, Hermione. Power is too tempting. Limits must be imposed or else we shall again be surrounded by those who wish to conquer Muggles and enslave them."
"Either magic can exist only watered down and secret," she argued, "or it can exist as powerful and true as it has ever been - and our secret all the more secure for it! Why should only power mean exposure? That makes no sense."
And therein grew the rift - and not an easy one. For they were both right: most wizards and witches in full possession of their powers would not necessarily choose to hide them, and yet a powerful witch or wizard was just as likely to use their power to help hide the world away.
She was angry he could not see - or chose not to see - why so many people in the wizarding world felt dispossessed by the new laws proposed by those capitalising on the post-Grindelwald climate. Anything thought to be Dark was gradually and quietly being outlawed - even some harmless spells - and the mutterings among those with magical ancestry were suppressed as those of an old world, irrelevant and to be forgotten. It worried her that she'd been ignorant of so many interesting and extraordinary magics and traditions, that they seemed to have been lost by her time. There was need for reform, but it seemed to her the target was off.
.
.
April 1947
Every now and then Tom's friends required a reminder of who he was, and who he was going to become. The young wizard at the end of his wand was a man full grown. He'd been two years below at Hogwarts, bright, capable and in awe of the Head Boy. He had been carefully manoeuvred into a junior position at the Ministry after graduating, but was currently failing at the task he'd been set.
While Abraxas Malfoy and Hermione played at politics, Tom played with power. Other people's secrets were power; this was a currency Abraxas had been taught, and that Tom had learned at a young age, in a cruel place for children where bartering secrets could keep you safe, if not happy. And so, while Abraxas held dinners and drinks parties and lunches with important people and tried to outmanoeuvre his ideological opponents, Tom, who was now ostensibly a simple antiques dealer, was setting up a web. He very much wished to add the Senior Undersecretary to the Minster for Magic to that web. It would be his most powerful thread yet. A man whose life he could easily own for the rest of his unworthy span if only this clown of a wizard could carry out the simple task he'd been set.
All he needed was a piece of evidence proving the Senior Undersecretary to the Minister had been a very badly-behaved wizard. But as the young man's incompetence showed, there were some things it was better to do one's self. And so, as the young wizard sweated and screamed and sobbed at the wrong end of Tom's wand under a spell he rarely had need to cast these days, Tom reflected that he would have to go and find the link showing Alastir McLaggen's taste for teenage witches. He'd find it, he was good at finding things, and it would become McLaggen's life sentence. But gods, it was such a boring secret, he deserved to blackmailed with it.
He ended the spell. Edgar Stenton gasped in relief, hands still clawing at the floorboards.
"You understand why I had to teach you this lesson, don't you Edgar?" he asked softly. Hermione wouldn't like it, but Hermione wasn't here.
"Yes, my lord. Thank you."
"Just Tom, Edgar. We're friends after all, aren't we?"
Despite the shudders as his nerves settled down, the young man smiled.
"Call into the shop next week with a better progress report. You may leave."
Borgin and Burkes hadn't been Tom's first choice of occupation. However, it made a sort of sense. Certainly he had a genuine interest in magical artefacts, whether dark or light. Anything of power interested Tom. He had less of an interest in people who thought he was just a shop boy, but he'd found it to be a convenient disguise sometimes – if he didn't matter, they didn't have to hide. And if it rankled too much, there was a way of meeting people's eyes that showed a rather different picture. Tom understood that charisma was a weapon and he wielded it well. Old witches and wizards handed out the contents of their most secret and valued chests to him willingly, much to the distress of their families once the Wills were read.
Better to sell it now, and not leave your relatives with the burden of such an item… shifting it can be hard in this current market. You know. As we see all this pro-Muggle legislation, having such an artefact could be viewed rather badly and while of course it's not precisely banned it might take a little too much effort for a grieving family, he would tell them, voice low and earnest as he underpaid with a smile.
Sometimes a different technique – Why leave it to them? They'll squabble and divide over it and isn't family just the most important thing? Isn't it kinder to remove the temptation?
If you believe they deserve such an item, of course I'll be on my way. Although – I do so enjoy our visits, perhaps I could call occasionally anyway? Just socially, of course, he'd tell the rich old magician whose family never bothered to come, and weeks down the line he'd be rewarded: the object would be placed into his hands and he'd have won.
Tom was good at collecting secrets. Secret knowledge, secret items, the secret keys to controlling people.
But he'd made an extraordinary mistake in the search for what he really wanted. He'd brought back several items to sell to Borgin and Burkes after his and Hermione's (unsuccessful) trip to Albania. They hadn't just gone there, and he'd collected several very interesting things along the way. He'd been patient: it was the third time he'd sold to them, and the third time they'd offered him a job.
And he'd asked. Like a foolish Hufflepuff, perhaps because he'd come straight from a visit at the Dearborn castle and he'd been too relaxed and softened and he'd just asked openly. It was what Hermione would have done, and no doubt she'd have got what she was looking for because she had that sort of effect on people, but Tom did not often get things through asking openly. He earned his things through deceit, trickery, spying, extortion and outright thievery. He researched and wheedled and persuaded and tracked and he never simply asked.
"I'll consider it," he'd said, when the usual offer was made again. "Now, perhaps we can negotiate the price of these… if you know the whereabouts of a certain locket?"
And Caractacus Burke had smiled, for he too knew the currency of secrets.
.
.
A little Tom pov for your viewing pleasure. Been a while. As always: thanks to the angelic and extremely talented SallyJAvery.
You should all know the first thing I do when I wake up every morning for days after I post a chapter is check my email to see if you liked it. You've all given me so much confidence as a writer over the years and there is, frankly, absolutely no way I'd be still writing this six years later if you hadn't shown it so much love. Thank you.
(This applies to pretty much anyone sharing their writing on here so make sure you spread the love and stop the flow of quality fanfiction drying up! I've been binge-reading Dramione recently and I'm so impressed and, just, awed at some of the talented people who could be writing for money -and possibly do- but choose to spend their time on fanfiction and share their brilliance on here for free. Do always send me recommendations for anything good you've been reading lately.)
Also! If anyone fancies making some cool edits for this I'd love that - there are a few floating around tumblr but I'm greedy to see more visualisations! You can reach me there at cocoartistwrites.
Love you all.
