DISCLAIMER: The Harry Potter Series and its extensive franchise belong exclusively to J. and all the parties that she happened to allow copyright. I own none of the characters, nor the settings, nor some of the quotes from the fifth book. I'm just playing around a bit with her characters within her HP world.

It was an impossible crusade, raising a Dark Lord. He was insufferable in diaper, obstinate when potty-trained, and a homicidal horror at terrible twos. She felt almost in her perimenopause by his third birthday, despite barely entering the spring of her twenties.

Tom Marvolo Riddle was a quiet child. Quiet and creepy, especially the way that he kept his indecipherable eyes (It's baby's eyes, she reasoned, what is there to decipher?) strain on her every bloody minute that he wasn't sleeping. He stared unblinkingly at her when she picked him up (clumsily, but learning), he frowned at her when she shove the bottle of milk into his mouth (ungrateful little brat), and he downright glared at her many poor attempts at soothing him to sleep. It was not her fault her voice was not melodic, and it was even less her fault that she never thought to memorise lullabies of higher quality than whatever her parents had hummed to her once upon a time. Baby Voldemort just had too high a standard, she thought. So demanding, she grumbled, for one who had only been able to open his eyes just a few months ago. Though he rarely cried (sure, it must be beneath a dark lord to bubble in tears like a normal human being at the infantile stage), he huffed often, and with such blood-boiling superior air that Hermione had half a mind to throw him out of the window and be done with it. In the end, though, she never found it within herself to actually do it.

Maybe it was because he was also a beautiful baby, unbelievably so. Large cobalt-colored eyes that appeared more black than blue, unmarred cherubic cheeks, tiny nose and mouth that bespoke of undeniably good breeding and screamed of unholy symmetry in the future (unless he was one of those unfortunate enough to suffer from a failed puberty). A few months in and already she had a future heartbreaking scoundrel on hand. Vaguely, she remembered in amusement that the Voldemort of her time was a known asexual narcissist who probably found sex a confusing thing and a penis a redundant biological part that served no particular purpose other than going to the toilet. Maliciously, she vowed to bring him up to be a salacious young man that would cavort anything and anyone under the sun until dying and/or being confined to bed from a horrible case of STD. That would surely deter him from amassing his evil army, propagating his discriminatory ideals, and slaughtering innocent people for the heck of it.

She rethought it, of course. She wasn't that evil.

The bell chimed midnight, and in the cradle by the fireplace, Tom gave an annoyed cry and moved his arms in mighty arcs. Hermione had no doubt he would purposefully howl at the top of his lungs if she did not appear in his field of vision in the next ten seconds. Scowling, she staggered out of her seat by the window, the book forgotten on the windowsill. She was somewhat used to it by now. The very first time Hermione had been sleeping and ignoring the bundle of horror in the crib at the foot of her bed, Tom had allowed exact ten seconds of mild fussing before exploding into screams and howls the likes of which could raise the dead. When she had scrambled to him in sheer panic, the baby had looked straight into her eyes and continued howling tearlessly for another five minutes until she had fairly been half-crazed bouncing him on her arms. He had sounded like he was crying, but there had not been any tears. The sound had been murderous, though, leading her to conclude that he had purposefully made it just to punish her lack of punctuality and attentiveness to him.

Breathing a long suffering sigh, Hermione bent down to gather him in her arms. The huffing stopped instantly. The baby was looking up at her, once more silent and watching. After frantically checking his diaper and ascertaining that it was still clean, Hermione shushed him lightly, before leaving him in his crib just a bit to make a bottle of formula. Shoving the bottle of milk into his mouth, she frowned at him:

"I hate you."

He narrowed his (pretty) eyes at her, but deigned the statement too stupid to warrant a reaction and started sucking without complaints. She sighed but lap held him carefully as she sat down on her chair and stared out of the window.

They were living in a cottage near the sea, though calling the place a cottage was a vast understatement, considering how uselessly huge it was. Three floors sans attic, grand sitting room, one kitchen fully equipped with distressing tools that Hermione had nightmares trying to learn how to use (the fundamentals of cooking, oh, the horror!), four bedrooms, one of which was the master bedroom with needlessly extravagant bed and furnitures that even Sirius got creeped out staying in it for more than one night, and three other bedrooms that were furnished in that cheesy gothic style that made even the House at Grimmauld Place seemed moderate (She would know. They were invited to stay there for two nights and Merlin's cotton socks that place in the 20s was frilly and tenebrous.) This was actually one of the many real estates under the Black name, and the barely-concealed disdain with which Arcturus Black had looked at them when he handed her father the key to the cottage had had Sirius bursting several blood vessels out of justifiable indignation and him swearing (privately, to her, because even he wasn't that tactless) to Merlin that he would earn back the money and slap the sack of Galleons into the bloody tosser's face as soon as possible.

"How?" She had asked, more than a bit surprised, "Have you found a job already?" That was fast. It had never occurred to her that her father were that resourceful.

He had looked distractingly at the key to the cottage as if by staring at it enough he could see his owner and burn his face off with the sheer power of his blazing eyes.

"...Hm? Ah yes. The Unspeakables recruited me the other day."

"I beg your pardon?" Hermione had been outraged. How come this important piece of information had only reached her ears now?

Sirius had looked up, finally, at her tone:

"It's not that important. And you have just waken up for only a few days."

Hermione, being his daughter who should really have been informed much sooner, had made to protest and to press him for more information as to how this boggling arrangement came to be. Sirius had cut her off in a tired and dismissive way, though, making perfectly clear that he would be a textbook Unspeakable and would not divulge any secrets even to his own daughter. She had left it at that, but had resolved to ambush him one of these days and find out whatever it was he had been hiding.

On her arms, baby Tom were fussing now, pushing the empty bottle of milk away and arcing his back in that annoyed way of his. He was nearly six-month old now, and though Hermione knew for a certain that he had been trying, and occasionally succeeding in trying to sit up with support, she had still never caught him voluntarily turning himself in front of the audience. At first, after reading a great number of books on parenting and babies' development stages, she had been worried that the kid was underdeveloped (and wouldn't that be a fascinating irony), seeing as at four-month going on five-month, he still hadn't shown any indication of turning himself, and only ever stared at her with those semi-disgusted eyes every time she tried to encourage him (in a very very horrific cooing voice) to do so. Her worry seemed to be ill-founded, after all, seeing as she caught him turning, no, rolling himself around, really, on her bed one pleasant day when she left him there (with pillow barriers near the edges) to find the little toy Sirius bought him just the other day. When she returned and witnessed his antics through the crack of the barely opening door, she had to stifled a laugh and made a great deal of noise before pushing the door fully open and entered. Just as she suspected, the kid had rolled himself back into a respectable position and was looking up at the cellar in a bored manner as if he had never moved an inch. The Dark Lord must have found wiggling around like a worm too undignified for someone such as him and thus only did so in the privacy of himself and the four walls.

Cleaning up after his meal, Hermione changed his diaper again and cuddled him close as she looked back outside the window. Sirius hadn't been back yet. He was held up at the Ministry everyday now, coming back with dark circles under his eyes and faint smile filled with exhaustion. She had asked, of course she did, but he made it clear that what he was doing (or having been done to, as Hermione had been worried about) would not be a topic of discussion at the dinner table.

As if her disgruntled thoughts could summon him, Sirius appeared a few feet away from the door with a loud 'pop', windswept hair looking wilder than usual and eyes blazing with something akin to exhilaration. He has adamantly refused to register this house into the Ministry Floo's Connection, grumbling about 'busybodies stalking respectable citizens' and 'bloody control freaks with espionage tendencies'. And so instead he had been Apparating to and fro the Ministry and complaining about backache and claustrophobia every once in a while.

Dinner that night was an eventful affair, what with baby Tom throwing a tantrum at being forced to bed early (other babies screamed and yowled and cried when having a tantrum, her baby bursted lamps and shattered windows and quaked the house with accidental magic), Sirius unveiling his new gift to Tom in the form of a very hairy rabbit (she had no idea what he was thinking, the house consisted of a dog-person, a cat-person and a snake-person after all), and Hermione bringing up the sore topic of her uncertain education prospect.

"I need to know, Sirius." She was putting her fork down now, looking seriously at her father, "It is June already and I need to know if I'm going to Hogwarts in the next few months."

Sirius stopped eating, swallowing with more force than she would have recommended, and said slowly:

"... I am working on it."

Her temper flared. Yes, she knew already that someone had to take care of Voldy, and her being half a country away for more than ten months of the year would leave him in the disreputable hand of Sirius Black III. Yes, she had an inkling that the Ministry wouldn't let them go about doing whatever it was that they want so easily. Yes, she was certainly aware of the risk that her real time period would be exposed once she interacted with the herd of opinionated hormonal adolescents for a long period of time. She knew all that. But Merlin above, she just wanted to finish her education! That was all. The perfectionist in Hermione was getting hysterical at the prospect of having a curriculum vitae with 'Unfinished Secondary Education' branded on it.

"How? How are you working on it?" She demanded, teeth gritting, "Father, is this one of the things that the Blacks have over us? Why would they care about whether I go to school or not?"

Sirius slowly put another piece of fish into his mouth, chewing calmly:

"Because you will be a sensation, Hermione. Talks of mysterious time-traveling Blacks have already been circulating. That is not what they want to encourage. Besides, they have no idea how well you will do with arrogant purebloods poking their noses into your business."

"In other words, they find me inadequate and believe that I will be an embarrassment to the family. Is that it?"

He was swallowing now, still so disturbingly calm that it made her want to poke him with a fork just to see him jump.

"That, too, but the thing I'm working on is with the Ministry."

That proved all her suspicions were true, then.

"Father," She felt calmer now, but her heart ached and her stomach roiled, "Are you really working at the Department of Mysteries, or are you being monitored there?"

He stopped, blinked at her, and gave a small smile:

"A little bit of both, love. I was recruited both because of my qualities and because they want me in a position where they can legitimately monitor me."

"You said being Blacks save us from that." She ignored how petulant she was being. She was sixteen, she had every right to be juvenile once in a while.

He shrugged, looking too uncaring for someone who were probably being probed and experimented on day after day:

"Not being Blacks means that they don't even need legitimacy to put both of us on an examination table, that they have no compunction to inform the public of our existence, or decapitation when they are done with us. Not being Blacks also means that we don't need a house, because we will not be considered existing, or proper human beings. It also means that we could never have been able to adopt Voldy, and that I would have no chance to even negotiate the possibility of you going to Hogwarts, since I would be too busy finding out drastic ways with which we can kill them all and escape in glorious explosions." He looked her in the eyes now, face bland but serious, "Understand now, daughter? We are unauthorized time-travelers with no outward proofs of our allegiance or identities. We aren't having a lot of choices, true, but we're still having much more choices than if we have denounced our relations to the Blacks."

Hermione grumpily picked up her forks after that, shoving food into her mouth with more zeal than necessary. Sighing, she conceded:

"Never mind, father. I need to stay home to deal with Tom, anyway. You're busy...working and nannies of the wizarding kind are not at all trustworthy." She hesitated, just for a bit, "But I can at least take the N.E.W.T.s. in the next two years, no? I can study on my own."

For a startling moment, Sirius had an ashamed look on his face. It passed quickly, though, and he gave her a tight and sad smile:

"Of course, Hermione. Let's go buy you books this weekend."

In spite of his grueling schedule, Sirius always made sure that he spent one hour per day talking (or disciplining, as he put it) privately with baby Tom. Today was the same, even though the Dark Lord was still feeling indignant for being forced to sleep before and Sirius still seemed shame-faced from the discussion at the dinner table. Hermione never know what exactly Sirius was doing with Baby Tom, but seeing the dazed look the kid always sported after the session, and reconsidering her father questionable sense of morality, she half suspected that Sirius was actually the one going through with the STD plan. Today was one of the worse days, though, as little Voldy didn't just look dazed, he had this constipated expression on his face that projected either the verge of tears or the fabulously loud explosions of gas (somehow that was not beneath the Dark Lord). As if wanting to take revenge on his torturers, Tom did not immediately reach for her like always, but gritting his teeth on Sirius's arms and opted for the second option. The sound was echoing, the smell was interesting, and Sirius's face turned into a magnificent color of purple. She snatched the baby back before her father could explode in everyone's face.

Tom Riddle spoke first, before even started walking. His first word was, in fact, 'Wanker', when he saw the picture of the Minister of Magic spitting passionately on the Daily Prophet Hermione left near his seat. For her part, Hermione dropped the pan she was washing to the floor in astonishment, and thanked Merlin Sirius was home that day because she could not help feeing an overwhelming urge to deal him a withering glare because who else would Tom had learned that unsophisticated word from? Now she knew what her father was doing to the baby behind closed door. In response to her reproachful gaze, Sirius only shrank back on the sofa and gave her a sheepish smile.

Ignoring the pan still full of soap, Hermione washed her hands quickly and picked Voldy up. He was getting heavy now, and even just helping hold him up to practice walking everyday made her arm ache. She should have exercised more often.

"Bad word, Tom! You don't call people that to their face." She scolded him.

"You only call them that behind their back." Sirius inputted unhelpfully from his position on the sofa.

Hermione could actually felt a blood vessel being bursted open from her aggravation. She glowered at her father:

"You! Shut up!"

Jostling the boy again, she held Tom's eyes seriously:

"Bad. Word. Understood?"

The infant stared back at her, eyes dark and thoughtful, black lashes fluttered just a bit (Was this a honeytrap? Wasn't he a bit too young for this?). Then he tilted his head in that semi-innocent way of his (Alert! This was definitely a honeytrap!) and said, very clearly, his second (and third, and fourth) word:

"...stick. In. Mud."

Sirius roared with laughter, Hermione went full scarlet, Tom gave a satisfied huff, and Bobby the rabbit threw himself off of the fleet of stairs.

"It couldn't be him." She was saying, her voice distressed and her demeanor tight, "He... he's too young, Sirius. And why would he even do that?"

Sirius, too, looked like someone had ran a car over him, backtracked on his dead body, then ran over him again.

"Then the rabbit is just suicidal by nature, Hermione? And I thought you would know Riddle better than that? He blasted off windows and induced mild earthquake over a little tantrum! What would stop him from accidentally Imperio-ing a rabbit into suicide over his exhilaration of saying the first words?"

Because that would just be too scary, she thought, even for him. He was barely one year old and could already wandlessly command a living being to kill itself? She refused to believe in such a thing!

"What kind of accidental magic do that, Sirius? Mine was only ever smashing books on bullies' head and creating small swirl of wind to blast leaves into the air. And the youngest my parents could remember me doing any of that was three, four years old!" Her voice was turning hysterical, "Sirius! I don't think we are doing this right! The first time around, he grew up in Wool's and there weren't any incidents of mild earthquakes or window blasting or rabbit jumping to their death when he was a baby! We are making it worse!"

She should calm down, she told herself, or Baby Tom would wake up and the situation would deteriorate even more. Sirius messes up his own hair angrily, and asserted:

"There were or there weren't, we could never know for certain. Perhaps it just wasn't recorded." Taking a deep breath, he ceased his endless moving about and looked at her, "Or maybe being exposed to magic so much earlier in life made his awareness and grasp of it more securely. You and I both waved our wands a fair amount of time everyday, in front of him."

Hermione, too, sat down on the sofa and gave a miserable sigh:

"Father, at this stage, do you think the problem is the terribly high level of magic he has been using, or the fact that there are enough screws loose in his head for him to kill rabbits on a whim?"

Her father shook his head, still looking agitated:

"... Maybe he didn't mean to kill the rabbit. He was too happy, so maybe he wanted it to jump with joy, just like he was."

She gave him a disbelieving look:

"And Bobby was just stupid enough to jump down the fleet of stairs instead of jostling up and down? Or was he just bad at landing? A defective eye, perhaps?"

Sirius glared at his hands, as if the answer could automatically pop out of the palms of his hands if he stared at it long enough. In the end, he only sighed heavily and concluded:

"I don't know, Hermione. But we really should wish that this was the case." He stood up, dragging a hand across his eyes, "If not, daughter, I think we need to steel ourselves to kill him in the next few years."

After the Bobby Incident, Hermione and Sirius both resolved to act as if nothing had happened, though Hermione endeavoured to start reading pious and educational fairy tales to Tom as often as possible, and Sirius took care not to bring back any other living thing as pet anymore. To a point, it did seem that nothing had really happened that day. Baby Tom grew up healthy, talking well, eating well, sleeping well, walking and running about well. Potty training him were an awkward affairs, though, because he kept looking back and forth at her and the pot with dispassionate unimpressed expression (She should stop over-analysing him, she knew, but he made it so difficult!). After being fed up with explaining to him what to do (to no avail, by the way), Hermione reached to tug his pants down, but were stopped when he squealed and shoved her hands away. That made her laugh:

"Okay, fine! You do it yourself then."

Somehow, they got through it pleasantly enough.

But then, before she could allow herself to breathe out a sigh of relief, the little Dark Lord entered his Terrible Twos.

Normal toddlers rebelled against their parents by screaming in public, spitting food back up at dinner time, and running buck naked around to horrify the neighbours and embarrass their caretakers. Her toddler opted to rebelled by burning her books at random intervals, calling snakes into the house and having them hide at random places (to give her heart attacks of various degrees), and magicking the neighbourhood's dogs into tearing each other apart after they barked too much into the night. And though she was not a dog person, she drew a line at that.

"Tom. You have to stop killing living beings." She told him one fine morning near his third birthday, stooping down and holding him in place, "No commanding them to jump to their death! No having snakes eat them and Merlin forbid no magicking them into fighting and killing each other!"

He stared at her, chubby cheeks seemed incongruous with his contemplative face:

"... living beings?"

It was creepy how he nearly never pronounced a word wrong, but they got used to it.

"Anything that breathe, walk, eat, fly, or swim." She answered, still making sure that he met her eyes.

He narrowed his eyes and grumbled in his childish voice:

"Like Bobby?"

"Yes. And the dogs next door, and the strays your snakes left on the porch. And Sirius. And I."

He didn't react to Sirius or her name, but did grunt at the other animals in question:

"Bobby is clingy. The dogs are noisy. The strays are dirty."

He said it with so much conviction, as if those were enough justification to kill the poor things. In short, her toddler killed animals just because they annoyed him. She wondered mildly when he would graduate from animals-killing and progress to human-extermination.

Saying 'it's bad' or 'it's horrible', or even 'I don't like kids that kill things' to him would just induce more confusion and cynicism, the creepy natural psychopath. Hermione felt the sudden and inexplicable urge to smash her head into the wall. She refrained, though, such wonderful patience she had. Instead, she took a deep breath, and said slowly:

"Tom, listen to me. Living things will die without us killing them. Investing time and efforts into doing so will just dirty our hands." She took another deep breath at his unimpressed expression, "Tom. The things that annoy you, they are like poops. They smell, they're gross, they're difficult to ignore, but do you want to clean up poops?"

His chubby cheeks were of a distinct pallid colour now, and he shook his head vehemently:

"Ew."

Finally! Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, Hermione cracked a smile:

"Yes. Ew. So the next time you don't like something, you tell me, or Sirius, or try to ignore it and do something else." Something healthy and not homicidal, she added in her head.

Tom still seemed dubious, but he nodded anyway. Let's all hope that this innocent fear of poops will at least survive until he turns five. She would have to think of a better explanation by then.

A/N: First, I'd like to thank all of those who have reviewed, followed or favourited my story. Your opinions make my day. I will try not to disappoint you.
Second, in case anyone still has questions regarding the way I portrayed the young Tom Riddle (too cruel, too precocious), I'd like to clear up something. The Bobby Incident wasn't necessarily his first murder case, it really was an accident in which his emotions affected the rabbit and it jumped off the fleet of stairs. However, it is the first time little Tom had an inkling of what 'death' is and by that point, he felt absolutely no shame, or shock, or uneasiness (which were the basic and most reasonable reaction children tend to have once they realise that they have accidentally killed something). So yes, he didn't purposefully kill the thing, but he didn't grieve for it either. In fact, he even use this incident as a standard way of dealing with things that annoy him later (the strays, the dogs) - useful: keep; not useful (dirty, loud, annoying, nuisance, etc.): make them disappear, or just plainly not care once they do. He wasn't born a ray of sunshine, sure, but I will not describe him as absolute evil or twisted beyond repair (still twisted, but marginally repairable, by this point, at least).