Notes: I am grateful to each and every one of you who reads this. You have made a positive difference in my life during these trying times. What follows may be nothing as you expected, or perhaps exactly as you expected. Without further ado...
~*~ Forty One~*~
"You've gotten better at Occlumency."
"You hardly left me any other choice."
Ebony waves fell across molten eyes as Tom nodded, not quite meeting her guarded stare. He calmly tore a strip of his robe away from the hem and deliberately wrapped it about the weeping wound Draco's spell had engraved into his forearm. The steady bloom of red was swallowed by the dark cloth.
Tom returned his focus to her, undisguised hunger consuming his dark gaze. "I suppose not, but it was never my intention to hurt you, my dearest wife." Hermione merely stared back at him, making little effort to conceal her blatant disbelief. Tom worried his bottom lip, rekindling the staunched blood flow. He licked his lips, smearing the crimson away before murmuring, "I trust you received my letter."
"I won't be manipulated by your lies, Tom." She glared up at him, refusing to back away as he crowded into her space, as his breath ghosted across her cheek.
His lips skimmed her ear as he whispered, "I wrote nothing but the truth."
Hermione's teeth ground together in her effort to remain unaffected by him, by the temptation to believe yet another deception. She could feel him smile against her skin, could feel the paralyzing drag of his lips as he slowly shifted. She told herself to pull away, but the discordant string wrapped around her heart stilled the movement, delayed her retreat until it was too late and his lips were on hers. He tasted just as she remembered, dark and sultry with a hint of sweetness that had no place on a murderer's lips.
She tore away, stumbling across the room, putting as much distance as possible between them, the room suddenly far too small. "Don't."
"Don't kiss my wife?"
"I'm barely your wife."
He laughed, mirth laced with acid. "We both know that isn't true."
"I am not yours, Tom. You know that as well as I do. You tore into my head. You treated me like a possession, not a person." Her hands curled into trembling fists, the rage she held locked within threatening to burst free.
"I love you." He looked torn between misery and disgust as he hurled the words between them.
"You don't do what you did to someone you love, Tom."
He dug his hands through his thick waves, expression shattering, becoming more vulnerable than she'd ever seen. "There's something in me, Hermione, something wrong. It's a need I can't resist, an urge I have no ability to quell. I can't describe it, but it's always been there, ever since I was a small child. I must take what is mine."
"There's always a choice. If you truly love me, then you know there is another way. You can choose to be a good person, Tom." She wasn't sure she believed what she was saying, but a desperation she couldn't fully justify was building within her. He might not deserve the words, the chance, but she was powerless to resist giving him the opportunity to prove he wasn't lying, that his love for her was more than a broken, deluded need for control.
"No, I couldn't. We both know that. My need to possess, my ability to inflict pain, my joy that comes at the moment a life leaves a body at my hands. I can see how I became the monster in your memories." It was the first time he'd openly acknowledged Voldemort, that he knew what his future, her past, had held. "That you chose me at all, knowing what I could do, is impossible to understand."
She barely resisted pointing out she hadn't chosen him, but they'd already discussed that particular difference in opinion to death. Instead she glared at him, scathing and desperate, filled with a yearning she could not justify, backed by the sum of all the chaotic emotion he evoked. "But you did it anyway. You forced your father to kill your grandparents in front of me, Tom. You got your father's blood all over my wedding dress."
"If I could have spared you that horror, I would have." A lost look crossed his enticing features, making him look far too human for her comfort. "I did not want you in the midst of all that bloodshed, but it was necessary to achieve a far greater aim."
"Yes," she agreed bitterly, "Your damn Horcruxes. You saw what happened to Voldemort and you still chose to split your soul. Three times."
"No." He looked sharply at her, ebony locks waving frantically about him as he shook his head. "Twice. Once for you and once to ensure survival. No more."
"The ring…"
His penetrating stare flickered to the doorway, all too aware of what Draco was doing beyond. "Is just a ring. Well, not quite just a ring, but certainly not a Horcrux. I view it as a reminder of my ancestry, the power that is rightfully mine."
"Oh," her lips shaped the word slowly, the tightening vise in her chest stealing her breath away. "You didn't…"
"I bound you to me because I cannot bear a life without you by my side. I used our marriage bed to cement another union between us, a ritual more ancient than all the texts of Hogwarts or even the Ministry's libraries. I apologize for not being frank in that, but I was unsure of how you would respond… even so deeply under my…" Tom trailed off, suddenly unable to meet her stare, to admit just how profoundly he'd violated her. He cleared his throat, focus rooted on the stones between them. "Think what you will of me, but I am not a soulless monster. I bleed the same as you, I hurt the same as you and although I am… not as I ought to be, I am human despite it all. Every word I said on our wedding night and in that letter is the honest truth. Whoever I am, I am not Lord Voldemort."
That name on his lips had her gasping, her breath caught in the cage of her chest, the atmosphere suddenly far too thick to force into her lungs. It was a long minute before she could focus again, before she could regain her senses enough to study the boy before her, to truly look at him. At the sharp cheekbones and full lips. At the dark brows above liquid sapphire eyes. At the ebony waves that framed such a handsome face. He was beautiful, undeniably dangerous, still the exquisite lord of darkness. But the soul that lurked beneath that enticing exterior was darker still, laden with a wickedness she could not fully comprehend. He'd admitted the pleasure he found in pain, in death and yet she still wanted to find a way to help the boy, the irrefutably human facet of him encased within the vile urges and insatiable lust for control.
"I wish I could save you." She hadn't meant to admit it, but Tom had a way of compelling things from her lips regardless of his presence in her head. She certainly didn't want to mean it, but she could feel the truth of the words reverberate between them.
His head snapped up, a frantic swirl of emotion dancing through unfettered eyes. "Then come away with me. We can go somewhere else, far away from England, from all the temptations, from magic itself. I can be good if only I have you."
"You would give up your legacy so easily? This power you claim is rightfully yours?"
"I would give up anything for you."
The truth of his declaration echoed through her, certain and undeniable. He believed what he said—their connection rendering lies between them impossible. But would he mean it tomorrow, or the day after that? What about in six months, five years? Tom Riddle was capricious and cruel and she knew better than to believe those words would last. Not that she would go even if she didn't doubt his ability to remain sincere. No, she was firmly Draco's now and Tom had no place in her heart, not after his litany of trespasses.
"Then give me up." If he wanted to prove the veracity of his statement, then this was her price.
"That is the one thing you know I cannot do." He slowly closed the distance between them, luminous sapphire all but devouring her. "Ask me to give up magic. Ask me to renounce my legacy. Ask me to spare your precious Malfoy's life. But do not ask me to give up what is emblazoned on my soul."
That he would consider staying his hand against Draco and not exacting revenge on the man who had taken Hermione from him spoke to the magnitude of his attachment to her. She swallowed heavily, doubt beginning to fissure through her resolve. Perhaps this was no deception and that scared her more than anything.
"You feel it too, don't you?" His full, enticing lips curved in a smile that contained no malice, no hint of the wickedness simmering beneath the surface of his psyche. "You can't escape your feelings for me. I'm within you."
Her hands tore into her tangled hair. "Godric, Tom. I can't even hate you properly. You've taken even that from me. When Draco first pulled me out of it, before our wedding night, I wanted to murder you on the spot. I can still remember the rage that coiled within me, the righteous anger that I knew would guide me. But now? Now, I can't even hate you. What did you do, Tom? Why can't I get you out?"
He swallowed, Adam's apple bobbing. When his eyes met hers, they were pure sapphire, drenched in all the emotions she could not accept from him. "We are one now. Nothing so dark as the Horcrux, nothing life or death, but a partnership of the soul. I did not want to lose you and I knew there was a possibility the Horcrux could be destroyed. So I united us in another, more primitive way."
An all too familiar horror skittered down her spine. "Get rid of it."
"I can't."
"You won't."
He shook his head, something resembling genuine regret pulling at his dark features. "No, I can't. It's not reversible."
It took her a moment to find breath again. "So I just have to live with this… part of you within me? I have to second guess every emotion I experience because it might be caused by this… abomination between us?"
Tom's tongue ran over his bloody lip, the scarlet smearing across his full mouth. "It's not an abomination. It's a connection. I wouldn't have been able to perform the ritual if you hadn't felt something… significant for me of your own volition. I couldn't coerce this into being and I feel it just as strongly as you do. It's not like… what I did before."
"When you raped my mind and then raped by body too," Hermione hurled into the space between them, finding the strength to rekindle the rage simmering deep in her bones. That what remained between them was a product of her true feelings, of the foolish parts of her that had sincerely cared for him, was too nauseating to contemplate. She buried the disturbing truth beneath the rising anger.
Tom made a sound halfway between a sob and a feral snarl as his hands tore into ebony waves, the action threatening to rip the silken hair from his head. His eyes were limned with moisture, his deep voice threadbare as he rasped, "I only needed you to be mine. At first, I admit it was to control you, to ensure my own survival, but then I got to know you. I saw the powerful woman you'd become on the battlefield against… him. I saw the darkness and the suffering that made you lose time, that made your mind rebel against itself. I saw into your soul and I was captivated, Hermione. I only ever wanted you to be mine. I am powerless to resist you… please, Hermione…"
Perhaps even Tom did not know what he was begging for. Hermione certainly didn't. She could hardly forgive him, could hardly stand to look at him when such fraught emotion saturated his every pore. She turned away, staring at the wreckage of the room beyond.
"If you want to make it better, then figure out how to get this… invasion out of me, Tom. Let me be free." It wouldn't make up for anything, wouldn't change her view of him, but given the proper motivation perhaps he would put his razor-sharp intellect to use.
The silence hung between them, the only sound the scuff of his shoes and drag of his trousers against the stone as he shifted behind her. She could feel the moment he closed the distance between them, his breath making the hairs at the nape of her neck stand on end.
"I told you. I can't."
She shook, hands trembling at her sides. "So I have to live with this forever?"
"Or until I die."
Despite her better judgment she whirled to face him. His gaze flickered toward the door and Hermione was reminded that in mere minutes he would be mortal again. It was not nearly as reassuring as it ought to have been. "Why, Tom? Why bind us together so permanently?"
"Because you are everything. I saw that other life, that world of power and eternal life, but I was gone, destroyed in the quest to attain such power. I didn't want to lose myself so completely, so I bound us together, because if I have you, I know I can accomplish anything."
Hermione's stomach churned. He likely spoke the truth. Without Hermione his path was drenched in blood and darkness. But she could not save him, not with all that lay between them. "And what would you achieve now?"
"Now?" He shrugged, reckless and weary. "Now I want nothing beyond you."
"I don't believe you. I can't," she whispered, head shaking as she took a step back. "No matter how much a part of me—probably because of this thing you forced on me—wants to help you, to give you a chance at redemption. I will never forgive what you did to me, Tom. It doesn't matter why, or if you love me. It matters what you took from me."
"Then you know what you must do."
She shoulders shook as an unyielding wave of agony descended upon her. "Please don't make me do this, Tom."
His lips turned up in a wan smile that felt like a serrated blade across her skin. "I'm not making you do anything, my dearest wife. Not this time."
"I wish…" she fell silent, unwilling to voice just how much she wanted this conversation to end differently, to admit how much her next act would shatter what was left of her mended soul.
"Kiss me…" Tom caught his bottom lip between his teeth and the crimson blood welled again. His eyes were fractured beyond recognition when he whispered, "please."
It was the last thing she wanted to do; it was the wish of a boy with death's hand against his brow. Her lips were on his before she could decide it was the worst idea. The kiss was hard and desperate, more bitter than sweet, the culmination of all the tumult that lay between them. Tears dripped salt on their bloody lips as his hands—still encased in Grindelwald's incantation—reverently traced the column of her neck.