Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
- T.S. Eliot Four Quartets
After that, it would be easy to say the years slipped away like leaves falling in autumn; that the wind of upheaval shed them in gusts; that time simply flew past.
But it did not. Days and years passed as they always do: some sliding fast and hot and hungry and some dragging their feet in the mud of sorrow and waiting waiting waiting -
Hermione was busy.
In the period she sometimes came to think of as After Tom, and sometimes as After the Stone, she began to work in earnest towards the vision she'd had one day: sitting in a potions laboratory, debating Napoleon and Hitler with a man who could equal the worst of them for cruelty.
.
The century aged, but she did not. Like a spider she built a web, threading knowledge with connections, and she began to dream a world.
What, Hermione wondered after Russia, separated magic from the technology Muggles were developing? She knew of the technological advances that were coming, not just what was already happening. If magicians were no longer inherently more powerful could they be becoming weaker? Were they in more danger than they'd ever been?
Tom, she realised as the years stacked themselves one on top of the other, had been right to fear Hiroshima. He had been a boy dragged up through hardship and war and cruelty and Hermione had been given all the good of Muggles to see - but now she saw the danger too, and so she dreamed of Avalon.
.
.
But even as Tom raced on down his path to become a monster in truth it seemed that he, too, remembered. Letters came from strange places. The years passed and they became less frequent. She'd think the last one had arrived and then another would surprise her.
Hermione,
This is a strange place. The air is thin and magic seems further away. Not less powerful, but more distant somehow. I have learned to fly.
I still think of you.
.
Hermione,
Your voice haunts me: I hear it in my head like a conscience. You do not approve of what I am doing, but I hope one day I can persuade you that this course, though less pleasant than I'd hoped, is mandatory. The more I see of the world, the more I fear our exposure.
.
Hermione,
I found this in a market in Alexandria. Imagine my surprise when the old hag asked me if I wanted it for you - she named you. I had not thought of you in some time but she plucked your name from my head: a neat trick.
I wish you would stand with me in the times to come.
You would like the library.
.
Hermione,
They tell me it's Christmas, though you'd never know from the weather. It is always cold when I am here. Always winter. They tell me they have summer but I don't believe it. This is a winter land. Bitter and grey and miserable. I heard your name today. An associate told me you had been here, too. I hate it. I hate how the magic is being sucked out of this once great land. I hate how it feels, the metallic taste of it is like a bomb. You've probably never tasted that in the back of your throat. Dust and burning flesh and metal and sulphur. It is a smell I will never forget, a smell from the war.
They have made them so much bigger now. I fear even my magic couldn't stand against it.
.
Hermione,
Abraxas tells me you were away from that unfortunate Noddy Leach affair. This attack on Wizarding culture is terrible, but does help refine my own path. Honestly I almost owe the man a favour.
The idiocy of these people boggles the mind. I am rather glad Abraxas failed to get rid of him, however - the outrage his government is causing is helpful.
.
And then one day, he followed them.
.
.
.
It was a bitter winter night in 1967 the next time Hermione Granger saw Tom Riddle and the intervening decade had not been kind to him.
(Hermione,
I am home. Can we meet?)
The wind had been demonstrating precisely why people had used the word wuthering to describe it for days - a fouler winter she had not seen - and it chased him into The Three Broomsticks with a howl and a blast. The old door bounced back once, groaning, and then slammed shut behind him.
Ten years.
Their eyes met. The sound of the pub faded for a moment.
Ten years.
"You are wearing more of the monster on your face these days," she said by way of greeting,
"There is no one else left in this world who would dare say something like that to me."
The looked at each other, caught in that strangeness that comes of something not being strange when you expect it to. Time stuttered and then slipped away and just for a moment his reddened eyes turned dark and his waxen skin warmed up, unblurring around the edges. He was a man again, and then he was not.
"How was the school?" she asked, sitting down.
They sat at a table they'd last occupied more than twenty years before. It was snowing hard outside, keeping many of the pub's regular patrons at home. The smell was always the same at this time of year: the sharp scent of the greenery hung around, cutting through the familiar aroma of woodsmoke, hops and pie.
How old she felt, with that Hermione's eyes on her. She looked back down the years at her hopeful, righteous younger self, at the girl who'd fallen in love with a monster and tried to make him a man and felt weary.
When is a monster not a monster?
He waved the barman over, a junior model of the previous incumbent who'd reigned during their time at Hogwarts. A son, she thought; the stamp of his features was an unworn copy too close to be anything but a direct descendent.
"A bottle of your best firewhisky."
"Yes sir."
The bottle appeared, followed by two glasses. One still bore a faint imprint of some previous mouth. Tom looked at it. He looked back at the barman.
"My apologies," the man murmured, paling. The offending glasses vanished. Two new ones appeared, crystal this time and sparkling.
"Leave us."
The man left. Hermione rolled her eyes at Tom but did not speak. She took the glass he slid across the battered table towards her, two fingers of the rich amber liquid promising warmth.
"You've been busy," he said eventually. "I hear."
"So have you. I hear."
They assessed one another, predator to predator.
It had been a long time, Hermione thought, since someone had looked at her and seen so much.
"What is it you've been looking for? You've travelled nearly as much as I have; in fact we have nearly crossed paths at least twice by my count."
"Three times," she corrected smugly. "I left Peru about a week before you got there."
"We could have travelled together."
"No. We might occasionally end up in the same places, Tom, but I am not seeking your answers. I am asking a different question."
"What do you want?" he said, irritated, and she understood now. Understood part of why, after so long, he had wanted to see her.
Are you a threat?
.
.
.
"Do you remember how long I gave you?" Hermione Dearborn answered, in a way that Lord Voldemort found frankly nonsensical. He looked blankly at her. Three strands of silver glimmered against her mahogany hair.
"I gave you forty years, I believe. Something like that. I told you that I would sit and watch you burn the world to ash and I would come after you and remake it in my image. That is to say, no Tom, I will not stand in your way as you lead us all into what will no doubt eventually end up as a pointless and horrifying war. Be my guest. The stage is yours."
She smiled at him and he thought of the day she'd tried to kill him. She'd had the same look in her eyes then as she did now and he didn't know precisely what the look was, but he knew he didn't like it. A faint memory of once understanding that look drifted across his mind. He shook it away. He was more powerful now: he did not need to interpret Hermione Dearborn's precise expressions.
"Until 1985, that is," she added, her mouth - he still found it beautiful - curling up.
It was unbearably sexy, that threat. He shifted in his seat. It had been years since Lord Voldemort had wanted a woman. He'd had them, sometimes, to prove he could, or because some women told men anything they wanted to know if they were smiled at in a certain way, kissed in a certain way.
Not this one, though. He was a dark lord now, probably the most powerful magician alive. Perhaps, he hoped, he burned, the most powerful ever. He had plans.
But there was still something about the woman in front of him that made him question them, question everything, question himself. She'd always been able tie his tongue with a glance of her dark eyes and he wished he could hate her for it. He remembered the feel of her skin on his, remembered the fire she had lit inside him.
It didn't ignite now - couldn't - but there was still something. Something like reverence.
"Do you ever think about who we could have been if you'd chosen differently?" he asked, and realised with some horror that he sounded petulant.
"If you'd chosen differently," she corrected. "If you'd been better. If you'd decided to live with being just a man, instead of trying to be a god. Do you think about it?"
"I asked first," he insisted, and winced. Petulant.
Maybe he should have just killed her years ago.
"Yes, of course I have." The promise of a tear glistened in her eye. She blinked it away. An echo of a memory of a feeling flickered for a moment and then died.
"I'm doing the right thing," he promised her. "I will find a way to protect this world."
"I know you believe you're doing that, but you've already corrupted yourself chasing power and immortality. You will fail because you are spread too thin and you don't know what you really want."
Rage hit, hot and red and burning. He sipped his firewhisky and tried not to choke on it. She knew nothing of what he was, of all he could do.
"Why am I here, Tom?" she asked, softer than before and his rage faded.
"I wanted to ask you to look after something for me. Despite everything, I… trust you."
He had put his heart in a locket for her, and she'd turned away. (He had put his heart in a locket for her, and he had found an empty chest was a grey and lonely thing.)
He put his diary on the table. (He placed his soul on the scratched old oak.)
"No." She wasn't looking at it.
"People would die for this honour."
"I expect they will," she said, without humour. "Put it away."
"I got the diadem in the end."
"I know."
"And while I was there, I was thinking about your apples and why you'd put up with camping in the mountains of Albania for a month to get them."
"I rather enjoyed that trip," she protested.
He remembered her naked body under the stars, the sun that rose, dripping and shining and golden from the water of the lake where they'd bathed and swam.
"And then I remembered how much time you'd spent in northern Europe. The trips to Greece. Persia… to Norway. I did some reading."
As he watched her face faded to youth and she sat before him, suddenly untouched by the intervening years. She looked no older than she had the day he had left, perhaps even younger. The three strands of grey were gone, the faint lines around her eyes just a memory now, replaced by taut skin.
She smiled slow and secret. Lord Voldemort remembered a prowling leopard patronus in a long-ago classroom, sleek and clever and very, very dangerous.
"Yes," she said and sipped her whisky. "Apples. Gone now though."
"No longer just an alchemist's daughter, then."
She nodded.
"Sometimes, I think I'd almost prefer it if you lied to me," he commented, and sipped his own drink. He wondered if she'd consider going upstairs with him. It wasn't why he had come, and though that part of him was all but empty… he might have put his heart in a locket but something of her was still there, thrumming in his blood. In his bones. He didn't need a soul to desire her. "Are you not afraid I might steal your stone now you've told me?"
"This has saved my life a hundred times in the last twenty years," she said pulling on the gold chain around her neck to show him the compass he'd given her. "But it has never once heated because of you. Even now, when I can almost smell the darkness on you, when I can see that you've crossed so far over whatever separates right and wrong that you can't remember the line and you're half mad with dark magic - even now I trust you would never hurt me."
This was, irritatingly, true. It made her his weakness even now and he did not like having a weakness. But she was as strong a weakness as he was likely to ever have.
"I do wish it had been different," she said in a voice he'd almost forgotten. "But it isn't: you made your choices and you'll make worse ones soon enough and I am making mine so I ask you again - what am I really doing here, Tom Riddle?"
He wanted to say, "I do not use that name any more."
He wanted to tell her, "You may call me Lord Voldemort."
He said, a little bitterly, "Your godfather knows an awful lot about what I've been doing. I didn't think you agreed with his grand plan to make the magical world less magical. I saw him tonight. He turned me down, again, for the Defence job and I think he means to stand against me in the future."
She looked steadily back at him, waiting.
"Don't choose him. You know better than to trust a man who believes only he can be the guardian of great power. A man who would water down magic - for everyone but himself. Don't."
He'd wanted to make her beg, but this felt awfully like he was the one on bended knee. He loathed her. He trusted her.
"If have chosen anyone, I have chosen myself," she said after a moment. "I'm on my own team, I suppose. You're both useful to me in different ways. I love Albus, but I know his flaws better than anyone. And yes: I disagree with some elements of his vision of the world - but yours is far more brutal, and I can't ever support your pureblood agenda. And yet, I can't really stand against you because I made that fucking vow. So where that leaves me, Tom, is waiting for you and Albus to finish this game or war or pissing contest with each other. In peace."
The last, the in peace, was said with more sarcasm than he felt was polite. Sometimes when Hermione spoke it was with such conviction he could almost believe her a Seer if he knew her less well. It was irritating. It made him feel like a child instead of the most powerful dark lord to road the earth.
But: not with him, and yet not against him. It was far from a win but it was better than losing what felt like his second battle with Albus Dumbledore of the evening. He'd lost the first (for the hearts and minds of Hogwarts students), but he'd expected that. What he hadn't expected was for the old man to know as much as he seemed to. But then she'd always had a soft spot for him.
"I have a second proposition, then."
Lord Voldemort lifted the small case he'd brought onto the table.
"If you won't have my diary, maybe you will take this." He opened it to show her the vial of blood inside. "If this body should fail…" he could barely speak of it, barely imagine the horror - the possibility - of dying, "this will serve as an anchor."
She was staring at it strangely, as though it were the answer to a complex arithmancy problem she'd been struggling with for years.
"An anchor?"
"I have made several artefacts to ensure my survival as you know. Seven is a very powerful but unstable number. They should mean I cannot be killed… that it won't work... but there are ways. There are always ways."
He rushed past this, trying not to think about it. She was the only person to whom he'd even acknowledge this risk.
"The ritual does not require this, but even a drop would strengthen it. Just having this part of my mortal body still in the world will stabilise the… artefacts. It is linked to them. Will you keep it safe for me?"
She nodded, oddly pale, and took the vial. It vanished into some pocket or bag; Hermione was probably carrying a library and enough supplies to feed and arm a small army for several months. A small vial was nothing for her to hide.
"How do you know I won't destroy it?"
"For the same reason you couldn't kill me."
"And what if all your Horcruxes are destroyed, and they come for whatever's left of your mortal body. What then?"
"Then it would just be a vial of my blood. It has no special properties beyond its value as an anchor."
"We both know blood can be very powerful. Perhaps I could use it in a potion. The blood of the last Slytherin," she pointed out and he smiled at her, pleased.
"My associates will be waiting in the Hog's Head," he said regretfully, placing a couple of Galleons on the table and standing up. He hadn't enjoyed a conversation so much in years. "Good luck with your… quest."
"That," Hermione said, every inch her age again as she rose, "is a very apt word for what I am doing. Did you see The Grey Lady while you were in the castle, by the way?"
"Not this time," he said and wondered if he should push it, chase the bait she was dangling. But he was late to meet his former Knights and there was much to set in motion. "Goodbye Hermione."
"I would say good luck," she replied, "but that would be a lie. I'll be watching though."
Then she was gone into the fire with a flash of powder and green, and Lord Voldemort was left to pull on his cloak and step out into the winter night.
.
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This chapter is dedicated to whoever nominated this fic over at Beyond the Book Fanfiction Nook's Summer 2018 awards! if you'd like to vote for me you can find details at beyondthebookfanfictionnook dot tumblr dot com or their facebook page. It seems like a lovely group. Thank you!
And thank you to all my wonderful reviewers, especially the guest who said this story had given them back their sense of wonder for magic in a way they hadn't felt since PoS. You made me cry, in a good way. I've been chasing that feeling for so long and that's one of the motivations behind this story. I'm so glad I could take you back there.
Love to you all.
