"I was told love should be unconditional. That's the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge? [...] It makes me think that everyone is very wrong, that love should have many conditions. Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times."

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl


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Hermione stepped back and watched Tom take in her study. She'd apparated them from the gate. She could have brought him there directly, of course: Hermione could always reach her island. Only she had wanted to see how he reacted to Iðunna's strange entrance - although the entrance was all they'd had time for. Outside, it was almost completely dark: a September storm cutting off the sun's light long before true nightfall. There would be time enough for him to see Iðunna; time enough for him to explore its secrets and its wonders once she had settled him in and settled her own jangling nerves at this enormous thing she had done. Inside, the room was bathed in golden light. A fire cracked in the chimneyless grate and balls of softly glowing witchlight clustered around: some circling above her desk, some wandering off to explore the dark recesses, others gathering in the centre of the room.

It was a room that announced her like this: magician and scholar, yes, but she'd carved her leadership of the strange land deep into the rock. It was perched at the top of the cliff overlooking the town of Iðunna that held the shifting rock-glass-magic structure of the university. But everything that that was, everything she was, distilled here. It carried on back, transforming into a potions laboratory and then her private library, shelves and shelves of books clinging to narrowing stone walls, until it hit a great shaft that brought light down through the rock, a hundred feet deep and twenty foot wide. The room was open at the front, too, five pillars dividing the great arc separating inside from the sky beyond. It gave the impression it was bared to the elements, the town and the sea spreading out one into the other far below. Magical barriers kept out inclement weather, but Hermione had grown used to the breezes rolling off the sea. Now, she let some of the night's rage in, rattling the lights so shadows danced over the strange marvels of her collection.

This was where Hermione did her private research. It was also where those who sought her or were called into her presence were received.

She watched him gaze around and wondered exactly what it was that she had made. She was so aware of him it felt like every hair was reaching out telling her there, there, there, but his too-youthful face was as off-putting as her wariness.

She almost hadn't done it at all. Harry had confirmed what she had already feared: that the tattered pieces of Tom Riddle's soul would remain trapped in an eternal torment, neither living nor able to pass on into the peace of whatever lay beyond. Perhaps he had deserved that, and she had tried to leave it be, but she had remembered him before he'd become the man who had done those things and she thought how terribly unfair it was, that he had never really had a chance to be anything more.

How desperately she had wanted to save him, all those decades ago, how in vain it had been. Until it hadn't.

Who are you now Tom Riddle?

There was a bitter truth at the heart of it all and it was this: Hermione had been created by Tom Riddle. So much of who she was had come from polishing herself on the friction of him until she was blade sharp and diamond hard and shining, shining, shining. From the age of eleven when she'd received the letter that had changed her life she had been created in his image… everything had come back to him over and over and she had been wrought into something more than she ever would have been without him. In a world without Lord Voldemort, Hermione Granger would never have been more than a clever Muggleborn. Without him, she wouldn't have had Harry and Ron. Without him, she would have pushed herself to be the best in her class but she never would have had to push herself to be good enough to save the world.

And so, she had returned the favour. If he had unknowingly forged her in the furnace of his hate and his war, she had knowingly reforged him. Tempered, this time, with the magic of memories filled with love until the blade of him fit her hand, just right.

Love, they always said, had to be unconditional. But those rules didn't apply when you loved a monster who wanted to be a god. When you had had a chance to be a god yourself and had chosen to be a queen instead.

"Are you hungry?" she asked, polite as a hostess wielding a smile at a difficult guest.

"Yes. I suppose I am."

She tapped her wand on the bell to the University kitchens.

"Dinner for two, please Gladys," she told it. "No rush."

To Tom, she gestured at the chair facing her desk. Hermione had learned what a desk should not be once, in what Muggles called Libya in the mid-nineties. She had gone disguised as an arms dealer in order to meet a warlord and spell him into giving amnesty for captured witches and wizards. It had been very dangerous and very illegal, but those people had been some of the Island's first residents. She had taken away more than people from the meeting. When he had taken his seat, medals gleaming against the khaki of his jacket, the General's desk had exposed his knees, rendering him suddenly ridiculous despite his reputation. Hers, though, oh hers was a fortress all its own: a mighty thing, carved from the island's wood, guarding many of her secrets, with room for a dozen reference books and discarded sources and rolls and rolls of scrawled notes. She slid behind the polished wood and felt herself relax a little. The barrier was reassuringly familiar. It was the barrier of long meetings, of hours of study, of fending off petitioners and admonishing staff and students.

In the room's golden light Tom's eyes were shining, navy-dark as the sky after sunset in his beautiful face. It was younger than she'd ever seen it, and yet so familiar it cut through her with an ecstatic stab. She held his gaze.

This was her world, now.

"I suppose you have endless questions."

He nodded. She waited.

"You knew," he said after a moment. "All that time, and you knew everything. You are a fine liar, Hermione Dearborn. Hermione Granger Dearborn."

He said Granger like it was a mystery. Like it burned his tongue to say it.

"I knew. I hoped, oh how I hoped I would change things. But yes, I knew."

"What have you done to me?" he asked after a moment, fiercely, as though for all those months trapped in St Mungos this had been all he thought of.

"I have given you something you were robbed of." Hermione felt suddenly anxious. This was the part that sounded insane, the part where she explained that she had taken a few human moments from a thousand people and turned them into a magic to heal his broken soul.

"I've written it down for you, so you can understand the process." His smile quirked at that, a flicker of understanding sparking between them. It felt dangerous, that spark. Like the world had been seeing her with colour-blind eyes and his were the only ones that took in the full spectrum. "You were trapped, your soul in shreds. Harry saw a part of it when you tried to kill him, he told me - before I came back - and I remembered it one day when I realised they'd be destroying the diary. So I'd already decided to heal you enough so you could pass on. I made a trap for the diary part of your soul - it would have lingered in the Chamber because of your heritage. That was half of it, just gone like that. It was the biggest part and I thought maybe it would be an anchor for everything else. I trapped it so the other pieces would seek it out if they were close. Souls want to be healed you see. It would have taken - oh who knows. A thousand years maybe. But the broken parts would have come together and maybe you'd have passed on."

Hermione stopped, thinking about the day she'd decided she was going to bring him back. She had been sitting on the pillared terrace, watching the sun go down drinking a glass of wine and the longing for him had come like a thundercloud. There had always been moments, all through the years, when she'd looked at a lover and wished for something more. Moments when she'd wanted to write to him just to get his take. Moments when someone accepted a theory instead of pushing back. Nights and midnights and mornings alone in bed, or alone with another body in it.

She had always had her goals to sustain her. Had the rage and hatred of what he had become. And then one day, it hadn't been enough and she had just wanted him.

Once upon a time Hermione Granger had been a girl who wanted to do some good in the world. And then she had become something more.

"I just couldn't help myself," she continued, her hands gripping the arms of her chair to stop them trembling, though that didn't hide the quaver in her voice. "I kept wondering why I wasn't enough. Enough to take you a few steps away from that path and onto a better one. I should have been enough. And I thought one day… I realised I'd never had a chance. You had never had a chance. So I thought I'd give you one. Maybe not enough to make you a good man, but enough to make you a better one."

For a split-second the world was so bright it was just light, everywhere, and then the thunder shouted its rage, and it was like the world would split in two. The storm had rolled in off the sea.

"I wasn't enough," he said, over the sound of rain pounding on the stone outside the great arched opening.

A bell dinged through the room.

"Let's go and eat," Hermione said, rising from her chair. "I think that's sufficient for one night."

She lead him through the potions laboratory, and through the library to the edge of the hewn shaft. The rain didn't fall down it, blocked by a veil of magic like the one across her windows. A stream had sprung up above them, and was spilling over the far edge of it, clinging to the rock face as best it could on its way down.

"Merlin, what if you fell?" he asked, staring into the abyss.

Hermione did not reply, but stepped out into nothingness, where steps made of golden fire appeared in the air to meet her foot.

Tom laughed, appreciative of both the magic and the theatre, as she'd known he would be. This was the staircase to Hermione's private rooms: spelled against those who wished her ill. It had been years since she'd been truly afraid of heights, but there was always a split-second where she wondered if the magic would come, a split-second where she felt terrifyingly alive.

If an enemy tried to climb it those steps would not meet the sole of their foot. They would coil around it instead, and the intruder would hang suspended above the shaft until she came to release them, trapped by ropes of fire that would burn them enough to be painful but not enough to seriously maim them.

"Wait until I'm at the top to follow me," she said, never one to miss a precaution. The staircase spiralled upwards, and once she'd stepped off it she turned to watch. But the steps remained steps as he climbed, and one fear slid out of her heart.

Hermione's private rooms were simple, mirroring the size of the public space below: a bedroom, bathroom, and living-dining room. She lead Tom into the latter. Like its mirror downstairs, it opened into the air, but unlike on the lower floor a sweeping terrace was cut into the rock. Sheer curtains waved gently in a breeze far softer than the last of the storm outside, concealing the space beyond.

This was where she and Harry had gazed out over her realm and he had told he wouldn't be a part of it. Since then, she had planted jasmine to twine around the stone balustrades, and night-blooming flowers to trail down from the jutting cliff above. Pots of fragrant herbs, small trees, and other plants - some magical, some not - brought life and greenery to a small haven where the rain would never fall too heavily and the wind never blow too strong.

"Albania," Tom said, as though he'd been jolted back. She followed his eyes: he was looking at a hammered copper scrying bowl she had brought back. It was a lovely thing, and had been very useful for eating out of in the mountains.

If the study below was the imposing residence of a scholar-leader, the living room above it was filled with the art and artefacts of a woman well-travelled. An impossible skylight lanterned out from the roof. Merry kilims brightened the wooden floor. The walls were plastered smooth and hung with paintings. She had brought the greenery inside, too. Potted trees stirred in the breeze, and vines trailed neatly down the edges of shelves and cupboards. A rectangular pool of water reflected the light of the room and the dark of the night, jutting out onto the terrace beyond. A chair and a sofa curled around the fire, which lit at flick of Hermione's fingers.

"Let's eat," she said. "And then I'll take you to where you'll be staying. It's been a long day."

A tray of food sat on a round table, the tops of two chairs nestled in against it, by that pillared arch.

"Tell me about Iðunna," Tom said once they'd sat down, his voice full of longing.

And she did. She told Tom the truth of its creation, something she had never told anyone before. As she talked, they ate and they drank wine, though later she could never remember what passed her lips, and the minutes passed quickly and the storm slipped away.

Tom Riddle was a liar, and of course like all liars he loved stories, and this was a story he loved more than most: a fierce woman with a stolen apple sailing for a year and a day, blood and ashes on a rock, and magic magic magic. Hermione Granger Dearborn was a practical romantic and this was what she loved: the challenge of building up a society from nothing, of trying to create a better world for magicians.

Tom did not ask how did you pay for all this, because although he was an orphan and a liar and a story-teller, he was not especially practical.

Iðunna's riches weren't magic-made though. They were earned from the investments of a girl with too much gold, five decades to kill, and certain knowledge of the future. Hermione had bet a lot of money on all the right things and she'd given it to her island.

Tom did not ask, how are the refugees and the university staff and those who've chosen to live her integrating? Have you written laws? A constitution? Who governs and who pays taxes and who sweeps the streets and builds the houses?

Instead Tom listened as she spoke, his eyes alight and intent, and when she had finished he sat back, and held her gaze, and asked, "Where can I get a wand?

"I can give you directions," Hermione said, "but it's up to you to persuade the wandmaker. He is very old, and we are very lucky to have him - and he knows you very well."

She enjoyed how realisation played across his face like a shadow on a rushing stream, there and gone again, just that fast.

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This chapter is dedicated to SallyJAverywho makes me a better writer. Good news! she's just updated her own Tomione, Orphea. Highly recommend it.

And to paperbackbones for all her support. Tes - you're a miracle. Please find/follow her on instagram!

Thank you all so much for sticking with my mad epic. I love you so much. Next chapter is in the works. I estimate we have 3 or 4 left but we'll see.