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"Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all."

― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless


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Some muggles grew up with a touch more magic than others. It showed up in the brilliant shine of their hair, in luck at cards, their ability to go unnoticed; in the persuasive resonance of a politician's voice. Some Muggles were almost – but not quite.

In some people, magic never showed up as much more than the ability to turn needles into mice or clean dishes or lock the door. Some people had it – but not much of it. Hardly more than squibs even if they did get into a school.

Most people in the wizarding world were the ordinary kind of witch or wizard. They could do most of the spells taught at school adequately and after they left they forgot much of what they'd learned, using only what they needed to get by. Magic was ordinary; it was not magic.

But some, a very few, people were brimming so full of it that it spilled over into their lives in invisible ways. As children, strange things happened around them even by normal wizarding standards. At school, they learned spells faster than their peers. Their curses were more powerful, their enchantments lasted longer.

And some people were born in a world where magic was a myth - they had all the wonder but not much of the power. Some Muggleborn children who grew to hate magic, resenting how hard they had to work to perform it. Some studied it and fought it into submission. Some cut their losses and left. A few crippled their wrists practicing wand movements over and over until their technique made up for some limits on their power.

Rarest of all were those born into a world without magic but who bristled with just a little too much. Children so full of wonder it spilled over and made others wonder back at them. The children who pushed and did not see limits where only convention had placed them. Hungry, curious, hopeful children who grew into adults that did not use magic only as a tool for their work and ease of life. Children who grew up to be magicians.

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Tom Riddle had been born hungry and he'd stayed hungry all his life. He had never suckled from his mother's breast; he had never been held in loving arms. He had learned to sleep with a growling stomach, not to fight back when knowledge was barred from him. He had learned to sneak and to lie and to steal to try and sate his hunger. Hunger for food, hunger for knowledge. Hunger for power.

And even though he'd never had enough to eat, his teeth came back white and strong when the little ones fell out. He grew taller than his fellow cast-off children; his hair never brittle, his skin as creamy as a farm girl fat with milk and sunshine. He grew up beautiful and strange and they wondered at him.

Hermione Granger had never been hungry for food in her life, until she was. She had learned what a gnawing stomach did to the soul for day after day after day, and when Tom Riddle told her snatches of a lonely and hungry childhood it made her heart weak and fierce towards him.

But it made her clever too, and she began to see something that no one else ever had: Magic had grown Tom Riddle, for he was more full of it than any child before him. Tom had never had anything else and it had taken a deeper hold in him.

He had told her once, you are magic made flesh, and maybe she was - but not like he was.

And, oh, he was magic. Magic seeped into some people's lives – like the way she always found the knowledge she needed. Nicholas Flamel's stone. Goblin silver growing stronger with venom. A basilisk hidden away. No one else could have found out these things. That had always been a special blessing all her own. Harry's magic had seeped into his physicality – he was fast and stronger than he looked and then they had given him a broomstick and that was that. He'd dodged spells other people would have been killed by.

But with Tom everything was magical. He was more beautiful, more persuasive, more brilliant. He was a wild thing formed into the shape of a man.

And she had become more magical too. Mabel Jefferies's death on Samhain night had pushed more into her and it spilled over into more of her life. Magic could be cold because all power can be cold – it hardened her to the brutal world she had chosen and she liked it. She never thanked him for helping give it to her, the price had been too high for that, but she could feel it there and she liked that too. She liked the way things seemed clearer sometimes. It was in her spells but it was in more than that. It was in the way she kissed Tom Riddle. The way she brought down a mountain. She way she could see how she might use a golden apple. She was more magic than she'd been before and magic was power.

She thought about how Tom had made her his equal without meaning to. About how they had shaped each other over the course of two years. She had once believed you fell in love with someone for who they were. She had not known you could fall in love with the person for what you could forge them into. For the person you became with them.

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But because Tom Riddle had always been more magical than anyone else it made him believe he had no limit at all, and he wrecked himself on his own power.

It went like this:

Hermione Dearborn loved Tom Riddle but she never told him. She did not need to. Hermione Dearborn loved magic as hungrily as a parched forest loves the rain in autumn and as fiercely as the trees long for sun at the end of winter, and Tom Riddle was magic and loved it as she did.

She knew him for all he was; what he would be and what he could have been and she loved him despite it. She loved him for their shared hunger, for their obsessions, for the way his lips made her feel like she was flying and drowning all at once. For the glitter of his black eyes when they shared a secret. For the way he respected her ambition and her obsessive pursuit of knowledge. But most of all she loved him because he was magic and she loved magic.

One day when Tom Riddle told her he needed to seduce an old woman for her secrets, she fought him, cruel word for cruel word.

But as she tore into him she remembered: he was what he was and she could not blame him for that.

"You are making the wrong decision," she told him, the tears drying on her face. "But I cannot stand in the way of it."

"I won't touch her," he promised, misunderstanding. "I swear it. She's disgusting anyway."

"That," Hermione said into that otherworldly liminal light of the early morning as she watched him dress, "wouldn't matter."

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So time passed and the old woman was dazzled by him as everyone had to be, but not enough. And then one day Tom Riddle murdered for greed for the first time and burned away the last traces of the man he could have been, and Hermione loved him anyway.

He hung a gold locket around her neck and, though she cried and she argued and she said she hated him and he had gone too far, she wore it - and this time when she wore it, it felt like home.

It felt like a part of her.

It was only later that she realised why. It was this: Tom Riddle, who was more magic than any child before him, could split himself into pieces to keep himself from what he feared most. He had grown up with death; it was not magical, could not be magical. He ran from it.

But Tom did not know what all those pieces took from him. Only the first price was a death alone.

So, for the first piece, Tom Riddle paid with his innocence. He had not known what it was to take a life. He had not quite meant it, but it was close enough. Tom Riddle poured all of this into his diary, and because he was more than ordinarily magical his soul seeped into a book and stayed there.

The second piece took away his family. It ate up the secret, burning desire he'd carried all his life for his unknown father's recognition and love, that his mother's family would want him. This time he had learned, he put his soul into something deliberately to keep it safe. If he could never die, he would never be like them.

And for a time that was enough: three parts, balanced together. Three was the most perfect number for, although seven was more magical, it was less stable. He should have stuck with three, but he did not doubt himself or his power. At seventeen years old he had already done something no one had before.

(This the thing about greatness: you can never become great enough.)

Once in innocence and once in anger. His soul could have taken those losses. But the cost was greater the third and fourth times he ripped it up, for these were a different kind of murder. Accident and anger were followed by fear and greed.

The locket had been his mother's and he imagined it hanging around Hermione's neck as he put his soul into it along with some of the blood of his victim, and he never knew it took away what was left of his heart as well.

She worked it out as the months passed and he grew colder. He began to deceive her, to try and use her, to play crueller tricks. He stopped dreaming of a throne beside his own. He wanted her body and her mind but they became things to use. Tom Riddle sought dominion over her and because she had made a promise to another man she stayed and let him believe he had it.

Hermione began to visit Albus Dumbledore again. But she did not wear the locket for long – without the part of himself he had cut out to put inside it, Tom forgot why he had made it for her and took it away and hid it, never knowing that this would be his downfall. Hermione did not wear the locket for long, for she left to one place and he to throw away another piece of himself, but for the time she had it, it was more hers than any other part of him he had left.

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They did not part, because there was little partnership left to break, and because she had sworn herself a spy. So she let him use her body and think he used her mind for himself and she watched and she waited. She watched him dazzle two sides of a broken coin into extremism and she said nothing. She went with him to meetings of radical Muggleborns and meetings of the people who radically feared them and she watched him dazzle them out out out out to the harsh knife edges of their beliefs until any bridges between them were broken from violence against each other and he stepped back and waited to see which would be the stronger, which side would hand him what he wanted most.

She watched his mortal body, his beauty, begin to fade – given to a cup that once could have healed him. She watched his mind fracture, the best of his brilliance sacrificed to a diadem. She watched him leave again and this time he was gone for far longer. He wrote to her, sometimes, of the things he had seen, of the things he wanted her to learn but the time between letters became longer.

Time passed. One day, she left again to one place and he another. Hermione went to Russia to learn about a new magic. The old magic was dying there, stamped out by a new order. But it had its own new, harsh magic. There was no more dangerous place to have magic and yet magic was hard to destroy – but there were no more firebirds.

The girl in the castle who had been given a fairy tale to live inside put a golden apple in a cauldron that her father had brewed for a year and a day and watched it transmute. For she knew what Tom Riddle did not: the only price you can pay to live forever is to sacrifice eternity. The girl who'd become a woman drank the potion made from the stone that had been the apple and though time passed it no longer touched her.

This was her truest magic: to see the connection between two things others had missed.

Time passed and it did not touch the woman who came to feel old and young together.

She took other lovers but they did not make her feel like she was flying and drowning at the same time. They did not hold a challenge in every burning atom. They were not wild things forged from magic into the shape of a man. She had become too much and they were never enough.

Time passed and she learned and she watched and she waited.

Time passed and the wild magic man came back, twisted and faded and broken. He was still hungry but now his hunger was as ravenous as wolf pack at the end of winter. He was still wild but now he was as wild as a wounded bear separated from her cubs.

He still wanted her, but not as a queen and she warned the wise man that it was time, it was here. He had transformed two suspicious groups into enemies and had come back to claim his war.

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As always thank you to my v dear SallyJAvery for looking at this. You are beyond rubies.

The halcyon days are over; I am sorry. This will make more sense later but if you need it translating from this fractured and whimsical fable let me know. It describes the decade or so between where we left off last time and Tom's return to Hogwarts in the early sixties to leave the diadem there. Next chapter you'll get more of a close up.

Love you all and I hope this experimental bit of writing works?

This chapter is dedicated to paperbackbones, who you can find on tumblr and instagram.