When Hermione opened her eyes Tom Riddle was staring at her. He'd settled himself into a chair by the fire in his - their - room and had his legs stretched out in front of him, his hands steepled together, and his eyes fixed on her. "Creepy to watch me sleep, Tom," she muttered as she sat up.

"I have killed multiple people, have violently split my soul into multiple parts, and am hoping to avoid a descent into madness by exploiting your knowledge of the future," he said. "Somehow watching you sleep seems like the least of my sins."

"Still creepy," she said.

He shrugged. "Dress for dinner," he said. It was clearly more order than request.

"And here I was planning on wearing nothing," she said, scratching at the back of her head and wiggling her toes. "You people and your social codes are very oppressive."

He chuckled and stood up and she felt, again, like rabbit in the eye of a hawk as he came just a little too close to her. "I might enjoy that," he said, "but do you really want to pretend you don't care that Abraxas and Antonin are ogling you? Usually the naked girls at dinner aren't having a good time and they might get the wrong idea."

She shivered at that reminder of the company she was keeping and Tom lay a hand across the side of her face. "It would be a shame if that happened," he murmured. "They are barely competent, I know, but recruiting is harder than you might think and if I had to kill them for inappropriate dinner table behavior I'd have to find new flunkies. Be kind to me, Miss Granger, and put on a dress lest I end the evening gouging out their eyes."

Hermione turned her face so her mouth was pressed into his palm. His whole body momentarily stiffened at the feel of her breath on his skin before he relaxed again and she thought smugly to herself that two could play at this game of making the other uncomfortable with a touch. She kissed the hand and murmured, "Who knew you were such a gentleman, Tom Riddle. I don't believe I've ever had man offer to blind his friends for me before."

He took the hand away and she tilted her head to smile up at him, pleased that she seemed to have won that round. "I do believe I've already commented that manners in the future seem sadly lacking," he said. "Now go get dressed in something pretty. We have company and I'd like you to seem untouchable."

"Who?" she asked.

He watched her for a moment and then said, "A man named Orion Black. He looks down on me, and will certainly look down on you if you mention your unfortunate heritage, but he's curious and powerful and a member of the elite."

"Sirius' father," she murmured, "I think."

Tom's face took on the expression of a cat in the cream and he knelt down on the floor at her feet and nearly purred. "You know something, my love," he said.

She shook her head. "He doesn't join you." She had to struggle to remember what she'd heard. Sirius' troubled family history had only been interesting to her in how it affected Harry. "You're too extreme, willing to go too far. He's… he's a blood purist, certainly."

"Hard to miss that," Tom said. He lay his cheek on her knee at looked up at her, a charming supplicant who could barely keep from licking his lips. "Tell me more."

"He was a terrible father," she said.

"Will be," Tom corrected her.

"I don't know much," she said helplessly. "I'm not an encyclopedia of the future. You… one son joins you. The other fights against you You are…" she paused and considered. A powerful Orion Black, young lord of the Black family, would only support Tom Riddle if he thought the man likely to keep purebreds in power without burning the streets down. He was a lever she could use. "If you want his help," she said, "you have to be a politician, not a revolutionary. You have to work within the system." She looked down at the beautiful face gazing up at her with raw lust in his eyes. "You'll have to be willing to take power the usual way, not by war and violence and…"

"But he'll help me," Tom said. "If I seem reasonable."

"I don't know," Hermione said, letting one hand run through the man's far too temping curls. "It would all be different. I'm not a bloody crystal ball."

"I want power," he said softly. He reached up with one hand and removed her fingers from his hair as he sat back onto his heels and considered what she'd said. "You have your reasons for telling me this, don't you, my love?" He took the hand he still held and kissed the back of it. "Play me false and you'll regret it."

She snatched the hand away and he laughed. "Get dressed and get ready to charm, Miss Granger. We're going to go and wrap Orion Black around my finger, where, after all, you seem to want him."

"I hate you," she whispered.

Tom Riddle rose and held out a courteous hand to help her stand. "Then it must be killing your soul to help me like this." He smiled. "How amusing."

. . . . . . . . . .

Hermione came out of the shower and fought to get her hair to wind up and stay on her head in a coif that looked even remotely right. She made a frustrated sound and Tom Riddle pushed open the door to their bath and eyed her, standing there in lingerie in front of the mirror with her hands in her hair.

"I thought you were kidding about not wearing clothing," he said, letting his eyes wander down her legs and back up to her brasserie with only a raised brow. "This is quite the fashion statement."

"Bugger off," Hermione snapped at him. "Do you not have any boundaries? Who just walks in on someone like this?"

"I do," Tom said as he leaned up against the doorframe. "We're madly in love, remember. There should be no barriers between us."

Hermione gave the man a scathing look but, as he showed no signs of leaving, turned back to the mirror and made a point of ignoring him as she struggled to get her hair up. He watched her for several minutes before he sighed and approached her. "What's the problem?" he asked her.

"I can't hold it in place and do the sticking charm at the same time," she muttered. "I need two hands to twist it up and that leaves nothing to hold the wand."

Tom met her eyes in the mirror as he took the hair from her and wound it up with ease. He held it there and, without moving, murmured the sticking charm and took his hands away from her hair and settled them on her shoulders, running one thumb back and forth over her shoulder.

"Show off," Hermione said.

"Little Hogwarts witch," he said. "I can teach you how to be more."

"Tom Riddle's school of evil?" she asked, watching that thumb in the mirror as it caressed her skin.

"Evil is such a melodramatic word," Tom said. "Magic is magic. I could kill you by levitating you off a cliff and that's the first spell most children learn." He slid his hands down her arms and moved in closer to her so his body was just a whisper of an idea away from hers. "Didn't you do accidental magic without a wand as a child?"

"Yes," she said, the word hoarser than she meant it to be.

"Are you less powerful now than you were at five?" he asked her. When she just shivered under his hands and didn't say anything he whispered, "They try to limit you, you know. It's not an accident that everyone is taught to need a wand, that you're all taught the same spells, the same tricks." He whispered a word and the water droplets in the sink transformed into tiny, white flowers. He reached his arms around her, pressing up against her to do so, and plucked one flower up and set it into her hair. Then a second, then a third. Hermione stood, transfixed, as he used wandless spell after wandless spell to put the flowers in her hair. "There's far more magic in the world than what you learned in the classroom and, contrary to your prejudice, it's not all screaming babies dying in flashes of light and blood stains under the sofa."

"The Ministry," she began.

"Wants to control every aspect of magic use," Tom said. "Do you like having an oppressive government, Miss Granger? Or perhaps they become more trustworthy in the future, more open. Less dictatorial."

"No," she whispered, thinking of all the times the Ministry had denied Voldemort's return, had lied to the populace, had let laws fall away when they wanted to. "They… I'd call them fascist, or close enough."

"Would I be so much worse?" He put one last flower in her hair and stepped back; the few inches between their bodies seemed suddenly like a loss and Hermione ached to step back into him again, to have him wrap his arms around her again. When she met his eyes in their reflection, he knew, and his lips slowly turned up in a smile. "Would I?" he asked.

She closed her eyes. "I would support you for Minister," she admitted.

"You would help me," he corrected her.

"I am."

"I know." Her eyes were still closed when he leaned down and pressed his mouth to the shoulder he'd rubbed with his thumb earlier. She stood utterly still as he grazed the skin with first his lips and then his teeth. "I find it delightful."

"You find it useful," she said, swallowing hard.

"Mmm," he said into her shoulder. "I do. Thanks to you, Miss Granger, I shall apparently manage to avoid madness and shall turn my attention to owning the halls of power rather than burning them to the ground." She made a tiny whimpering sound. "I am Lord Voldemort," he whispered, "Minister of Magic."

She trembled under his mouth and he took his hands and turned her so she was facing him, her back to the sink filled with flowers and the mirror. Her eyes were still closed, screwed shut against him, as he took his mouth and pressed it to hers. She took a step back, away from him at last, and ended pressed into the lip of the sink.

He straightened and moved away from her. She blinked her eyes open to see Tom Riddle watching her again. "Now that your hair is done, put some clothing on and come with me to dinner. We haven't time for what I - and you - want."

"I only want to keep you from destroying the world," Hermione said.

"Then put on a dress, my love," Tom said, "and get ready to charm Orion Black."

. . . . . . . . . .

Orion Black looked like Sirius. That was the first thing Hermione thought when she saw the man standing in the drawing room. He had dark hair and grey eyes and the same disdainful tilt to his head that Sirius had kept even after years in prison. Where Sirius had scowled, however, and worn every emotion on his tattered sleeve, this man revealed nothing. Hermione suspected she could tell him she was a Mudblood from a future where he had already died and he'd take a sip of his wine and smile as blandly as if she'd informed him the forecast was for rain the following day.

Handsome, she thought, but cold. She flicked a glance at Tom, who had one hand on her lower back and a bland smile of his own in place. Tom, she though, burned. He wanted. He would set the world ablaze with the force of his desire for power, for knowledge, for life.

For, she was starting to fear, her.

She set that thought aside and greeted Orion Black. "We've not met before," he said.

Before she could open her mouth Abraxas murmured, "She's a cousin on my mother's side. Wrong side of the sheets, if you follow, but…" He trailed off and coughed in a way that, Hermione realized in fury, was meant to tell this man in encoded speech that she was a bastard, of course, which was why he'd never met her, but she was still okay. He could still acknowledge her because she was nevertheless a pureblood.

She was going to object to this absurd fiction when Tom's fingers dug into her spine and she remembered that this foul, blood purist wouldn't speak to them, wouldn't speak to Tom, if the girlfriend on his arm wasn't 'pure.' She wanted Orion Black to sponsor Tom Riddle because better a politician backed by the Ancient and Noble House of Bigots than a gang of Death Eaters terrorizing the country. She met Abraxas' eyes and he narrowed them at her.

"My cousin Abraxas has been very kind to me since I arrived," Hermione murmured. "I'm very grateful he's taken me under his wing."

It must have been the right thing to say because Abraxas relaxed marginally and Tom's fingers released their grip on her back.

"You can hardly do better than the Malfoy clan," Orion Black said. He was ponderous and pretentious even this young and Hermione remembered his future wife shrieking at her from her portrait. They would be well matched.

"I'm going to have her legitimized," Abraxas said. "A few bribes and she'll be eligible for a good marriage."

Hermione's false smile became significantly more strained and she had to fight to keep from giggling hysterically. She wondered what Draco Malfoy would have thought if she'd fluttered her eyes at him the way she was doing to Orion Black and whipped out some Ministry document declaring she was his legal, pureblooded cousin. He'd probably have passed out on the spot. It was too bad she'd never get to see him grit his teeth and accept her as a social equal.

She realized she'd probably be stuck with this crew, glued to Tom Riddle's side, for the rest of her natural life. She'd know Draco Malfoy as a baby. She'd see him whisked off by a nanny to have his nappies changed.

The giggle became harder and harder to control; fortunately she wasn't required to participate in this conversation now that her bona fides had been established. Orion and Tom engaged in a verbal dance where they talked around how they both felt the Ministry was both too liberal ("half-bloods in every department!") and too conservative ("while an Avada Kedavra is clearly not acceptable there's no call for the government to be regulating magic to this extent. They just slap the label 'Dark' on anything they want and swoop in and confiscate it.") Hermione stood at Tom's side watching the byplay and marveling at how good Tom was at this. He managed to promise nothing at all while convincing the other man that he'd be a full supporter of Orion's pureblood supremacy agenda. After what felt like far too long, Abraxas took her elbow and said, "Let me get your some wine, cousin."

"That's so kind," she said, and let him lead her away.

"Cousin?" she asked after he'd fetched her a glass of chilled and fruited wine and they'd moved to the patio.

"Welcome to the family," he said, toasting her.

"Tom's doing?" she asked. She wanted to be sour about it but, she had to admit, it made sense. An obscure, illegitimate cousin could flutter around the Death Eaters in a way a time traveling Mudblood could not.

Abraxas nodded. "Do you think you could stop cursing me?" he asked. "Now that we're related and all?"

She sighed as she looked at him. "Family means more to you than any cause," she said, assessing him. His face tightened a little. "Why?"

"He's already less… volatile," Abraxas said. "He's brilliant, don't misunderstand me, but you are… I had no interest in going to war." He looked past her at the Dark Lord charming Orion Black. "Having you moderate his bloodier impulses suits my own purposes and having Tom Riddle's wife be a Malfoy, even if through an obscure and unimportant branch of the family, does as well."

"Wife?" Hermione nearly squawked and Abraxas looked amused.

"You two have been sleeping in the same room for almost a week," he pointed out. "You're either a whore or a wife. I recommend wife."

Hermione glowered at him and he laughed. "Cuz," he said. "Accept it. There are worse fates that being Tom Riddle's wife."

"That is harder for me to believe that you might expect," she muttered.