After an afternoon spent doing magic, after another dinner where Hermione had worn one of the dresses that felt like a costume, after a walk back to their room where she'd felt Tom's hand on her lower back like a fire she couldn't extinguish, Hermione felt like she was in a fever dream. Nothing seemed real. She ate with a man who was the grandfather of a boy who'd taunted her in school. She ate with men who didn't mention she'd murdered one of their own before breakfast. She ate with a man who would became a demon and who watched her with amused eyes. She walked to her room with a man who would become a demon and who didn't despise her for things she had done - would do - to destroy him. She turned and kissed a man who would become a demon as if she could devour him and burn her own inconstancy away.

He almost purred when she licked at his lips, he opened his mouth to her searching tongue, he reached his hands behind her and searched for the zipper of her dress.

"It's on the side," she muttered. "Stupid period clothes."

"Of course," he murmured and she turned so he could slide down the metal fastener and she could wiggle out of the dress.

"It always seems so smooth in stories," she gasped with a slight giggle as the dress got stuck halfway over her head. "No one ever gets - ow! my hair! fuck!" She stopped talking and began to fight with the dress which had snagged itself in a curl and was refusing to go any further.

"Hold on," Tom said. "Let me." He reached a hand through the full skirts covering Hermione's face and carefully extricated her hair from the teeth of the zipper where it had gotten caught then he pulled the dress over her head and tossed it to the floor. She leaned back into him and caught her hands in his hair, tugging on the dark curls so he'd follow her as she backed across the room to the bed. Along the way she shed her shoes and he unhooked the brasserie that had never quite fit correctly. He stopped moving when her breasts were uncovered and pulled his head free of her hands so he could lower his mouth to the tip of one breast while he ran one hand around the curves of the other. "I love these," he murmured. "Who knew they were so soft?"

"Anyone who's ever touched one," Hermione said before she gasped at the way his fingers moved along an erect nipple.

He shrugged, his mouth still on the other breast. "Why would I have done that?" he asked.

She pushed him away and stared at him. "Are you telling me you've never…." She trailed off and swallowed hard, suddenly uncomfortable as Tom Marvolo Riddle began unbuttoning his shirt.

"Is that a problem?" he asked, a glint of that endless and infernal amusement in his eyes.

Hermione shrugged and reached a hand out to slide it across the planes of the man's stomach. "If it's not for you," she said. "But how is that - "

"Why would I have sex with a victim?" Tom asked, reaching down to unbutton his trousers. "I've no interest in the weak. I can hardly imagine you've been off sharing yourself with people beneath you."

"No," she said slowly. "My only partner was a man widely considered a hero."

"Helped to kill me, did he?" Tom asked as he used his feet to push each shoe off and then let his trousers fall to floor. As Tom stepped out of them Hermione pulled her wand out of the holster she'd rigged on her thigh under the endless skirts of her dress and leveled it at him. Tom looked up at her and licked his lips. "I told you not to point a wand at me," he said in a husky voice, his response to her straining against his pants.

"You told me not to do it unless I wanted you to ravish me," Hermione corrected him. A small flock of birds flew out of the end of her wand for the second time that day.

Tom laughed and banished them with a word. "Try harder," he invited and closed the distance between them until the length of his body was pressed against hers. She opened her mouth to utter another spell and he reached up and plucked the wand from her hand and muffled whatever words she'd meant to say. He scooped her up and set her back onto their bed and knelt above her, his hands at the knickers he was pulling away and, she looked up, put a finger to his lips, and whispered a spell.

As his hair caught fire he licked his lips and shook his head to make the flames disappear. "I could easily fall helplessly in love with you," he said. "Be very careful, witch." She spread her legs as he slipped his fingers against her and watched her face as she gasped. "I must be doing something right," he said.

She sat up and pushed him over until she was straddling him. "Maybe you should let me show you how it goes?" she suggested as she began to pull his pants off. "I think it is time for you to stop showing off and let me play a bit."

"Mmm," Tom Riddle said. "I could be persuaded." She lowered her mouth to the lines of his hips and stomach she had been admiring - or not - all week. Tom Riddle in his twenties was a man just coming into his physical prime, with muscles that rippled under her hands and mouth. He groaned under her ministrations, letting his fingers trails through her hair. When she trailed her tongue along the length of him he inhaled sharply. When she took him into her mouth his fingers tightened in her curls. When she began to move he murmured her name. "Hermione," he whispered, "Tell me how you appeared in my room. Tell me who sent you to me as a present, as the best present I've ever received."

"I don't know," she said, letting him pop out of his mouth and wiping the spittle that formed a long string between her mouth and his cock before she straightened up and looked at him, her eyes serious. "It wasn't my doing. I don't even know any wizards left alive in my time powerful enough to have sent me back through time and through your wards like that." She shook her head and ran her fingers up his thighs. "Dumbledore could have done it, maybe, but he was killed at your behest years ago."

Tom tugged at the tips of her hair. "You are," he said.

"I am what?" she asked.

"The best gift I have ever received," he said.

"You grew up in an orphanage," she scoffed. "I doubt Christmas was a time of glorious excess."

"The paucity of gifts in my past does not make me not appreciate you," he said. "You are brilliant, not a word I use loosely, and fearless, and filled with useful information, and I find that I like your mouth very, very much."

Hermione's smile shifted from somewhat embarrassed and shy at being called brilliant to a more of a smirk at the comment about her mouth. "Stop asking me questions about the future," she said, "and I can use that mouth to do things other than talk."

"I find I am far less interested in the future at this very moment than the present," Tom said and she grinned at him before lowering her mouth back down and taking up where she had left off. When his groans had reached a point where she knew the end was nigh she pulled herself up and positioned herself above him. He was at her entrance before he said, "But you haven't - "

"The night is young," Hermione said. "Shut up." She lowered herself onto him and leaned forward, pinning his wrists with her hands. "Don't make me set you on fire again."

"Hermione," Tom whispered as she began to move along him, "Hermione." He took his hands and clutched at her back, the short nails digging into her skin as she rode him. He drew blood when he came, her name still on his lips and her skin beneath his hands.

She pulled herself up and then rolled to the side. He pushed her over so he could see and traced his finger along the bloody marks. "I'm sorry," he murmured, healing them with a single brush of his hand.

"What did you think," she asked as she turned back to him and pressed herself up against his side.

"I start to understand the way men are driven by lust to idiocy," Tom said. He brushed a finger across one nipple. "I won't be, so don't get any ideas, witch." She made a small sound and he laughed. "I think it's my turn," he said. "Or yours, depending on how we look at things." He inched down her body until his face rested on one thigh. "A favor needs returning, I think."

"We just," she mumbled, "I mean, it'll be… you…"

"Messy?" Tom lifted his head and looked at her in disbelief. He took one hand and swiped it over her, pulling his palm over her stomach and smearing the results of his own orgasm on her skin. "Do you really think I'm going to object to mess given how it got there?"

She lifted her head and looked at him, teeth working at her lip, as he eyed her and then said, "Some hero." He lowered his face back to her and ran a tongue over and around the folds of her skin, lapping at her as she made tiny whimpers and clenched her hands in the folds of the bed covering. "I think, Miss Granger, that I can determine how this works," he murmured. "You do an excellent job of providing feedback."

She gasped as he flicked his tongue across her then tossed her head back as he reached one hand up to toy with a nipple while he kept his mouth pressed to her. He slipped first one finger, than two, inside her and laughed against her as she writhed beneath his touch, her whole body tensed as she focused on nothing but how he touched her, how he played her for her pleasure and, she thought, his. This time the thought that she was in bed with Tom Riddle - Tom Marvolo Riddle - didn't send her running for the toilet but made her arch under his hands even more fervently. This man, the most powerful wizard alive, wanted her. Wanted her badly. Wanted her body but, more, wanted her mind, and not just for the way she could help him shape his future. The thought of the way his eyes had glinted as he'd shown her new magic, as she'd twisted reality to her bidding and turned twigs into ropes of pearls, as she'd turned those pearls into silvery fish that had leapt into Malfoy's pond and darted about in the water, that thought, that image was what pushed her over the edge as he murmured her name one more time against her skin.

"Hermione Granger," he said.

She propped herself on one elbow and looked at him. "Tom Marvolo Riddle," she said back, mockery in her voice

"I will make the world for you," he said.

She flopped back down. "Don't make elaborate promises in the afterglow of sex," she advised. "That doesn't always go well."

"I don't generally make promises at all," Tom said. He wiped his face on the blanket and then pulled himself back up so he could wrap an arm around her and feel the length of her back pressed up against his body. "Tricky things, vows. You never know how magic is going to interpret them. Everyone knows about Unbreakable Vows, of course, but you can lock yourself into all sorts of things with magic and promises. It's best to never promise anything. Safest."

"Exactly," Hermione said.

He ran a hand over the expanse of her stomach. "And I promise you, Hermione Granger, that I will make the world for you."

Hermione's breath caught in her throat. "Tom," she said, about to tell him again not to make promises he couldn't keep, probably wouldn't even want to keep in an hour.

He set his hand over her mouth, silencing her. "I will make the world for you," he said again.