As the days passed Tom Riddle pulled his attention away from Hermione and returned to what she assumed was the tedious work of being an evil mastermind. Abraxas seemed to have been assigned to her as a babysitter and any time she wasn't with Tom she turned to find him there ready to be charming and a good host. He took her walking in his extensive gardens and talked to her about the girl he was engaged to, a pretty thing, he said, based on the picture he'd seen. He'd never met her. Hermione would have been appalled by that but she found it hard to think clearly and she was tired all the time. She supposed that was a side effect of time travel and made a joke about jet lag at which Abraxas smiled politely but which he clearly didn't understand.
Her toothbrush started to feel too big for her mouth and she wondered if she were losing her mind, if the strain of time travel and sleeping with Tom Riddle hadn't snapped something somewhere. All the rich food at the Malfoy estate didn't seem to be sitting well with her either. She wasn't used to multi-course dinners and full breakfasts every morning and she woke up queasy more often then not. She hid it from Tom, an urge to keep him from knowing any weakness still in force despite the way they spent every night exploring the myriad ways human bodies could fit together and please one another, until she couldn't, until one morning she staggered to the toilet and tried not to retch.
"Are you sick?" he asked her as he stood in the door of the bathroom, naked and erect and observing her.
"I must be," she said. "Or maybe something was off in the damn soup last night. I told Abraxas it tasted funny. Get me a glass of water."
Tom handed her a glass, transfigured from dust in the air and filled with magic, and she took a tentative sip.
He watched her wipe her mouth and watched her straighten up and watched her mutter about how she was tired of feeling like this. At that he said, "How long has this been going on?"
"I don't know," she said. "A few weeks maybe. The food here isn't what I'm used to."
Tom summoned his wand and did a quick charm. He began to laugh as the white light glowed above her abdomen. "You're not sick, Hermione," he said.
She knew the charm as well as he did and what colour had been left in her face drained out when she saw the glow. She became very controlled and walked from the bathroom to the bedroom and began getting dressed, every movement deliberate and considered.
"This is not possible," she said at last as she fastened the strap of her second shoe.
"I didn't do a contraceptive charm," Tom said. "Not ever. Did you?"
"I cannot be carrying the goddamned baby of Lord-fucking-Voldemort," Hermione said. Her tone never wavered, never was not calm. "That is not possible."
"I realize the Hogwarts education is poor," Tom said, "but surely you know how babies are made."
"This is not possible," she said again. The rage and despair came through more clearly that time and she picked up a hairbrush and threw it as hard as she could at the mirror, which shattered. She stalked to the bed and picked up her wand and said, "I will be in the garden considering my options," when she started to fade.
Tom, who hadn't yet moved from the doorway of the bathroom, flung himself across the room. She looked down at her translucent hand, then up at something he couldn't see. "Why does your room suddenly look like my flat?" she asked. With those words she disappeared even as he grabbed for the air where she had been.
Tom exhaled very slowly. "This is not acceptable," he said into the empty room.
. . . . . . . . . .
Tom Riddle permitted himself to get very drunk exactly one time in the wake of Hermione's disappearance. "I still don't understand how she even got past my wards," he complained to Abraxas.
The man eyed him and said, "I thought no one could get through those except you."
"No one," Tom agreed. "I could tunnel you in, but I would have to do that. You couldn't do it on your own."
Abraxas risked a small joke. "I'm glad I'm not your type," he said. "I wouldn't want you to decide to tunnel me across space and time and dump me in your bed."
Tom set the glass he had in his hand down with great care and turned to Abraxas. "Say that again," he ordered.
Abraxas tried to control the shaking in his own hand at his Lord's sudden intensity. "I just said I was glad I wasn't your type," he said. "I wouldn't want you to - "
" - tunnel you across space and time," Tom repeated. "Thank you, Abraxas." He took a drink and didn't explain despite the obvious confusion on the other man's face. "She liked you, you know. She asked me not to kill you."
Abraxas gulped. "I'm gratified to hear that," he said.
"Your investment in her as a cousin has, one might say, paid off," Tom said. "Since now I won't." He shrugged. "Even if you manage to really irritate me as we go forward. There are a few changes I find I will need to make to my plans. You may not care for all of them."
Abraxas tried to control his reaction.
"Go away," Tom said. "I want to be alone."
. . . . . . . . . .
Hermione turned and looked around her flat. It was, indisputably, her flat. It was the flat she had gone to sleep in when she'd somehow woken up in the wrong place and time. Her books were on the shelves. Her cat meowed at her, somewhat displeased to have her appear from nowhere but without the urgency or anger of hunger. Either someone had been feeding the beast or she hadn't been gone long. She touched the leaf of her mint plant. It wasn't wilted. The day's paper had been dropped by an owl through the open window and she picked it up and looked at the date before tossing it down, unread. There wasn't a pile of papers.
She'd been gone one night.
She'd woken up in Tom Riddle's bed in 1953, told him about the future, slept with him, gotten pregnant, and only a night had passed in the real world.
Or her time.
Or however she should think of it.
She put her hand over her abdomen. How was she going to explain this?
She prowled around her flat. There were things, small things, that were different. A beloved photo of her with Ron and Harry had been replaced by one of her with a girl who looked like Parvati Patil. She supposed she'd changed things by going to the past and laughed to think that somehow she'd rippled herself into being friends with Parvati. She rubbed her face and realized she had no food in the house and she wanted - needed - something to calm her stomach.
Oranges. She wanted oranges.
She grabbed her bag and headed out the door and down to the market. She noticed small changes but nothing dramatic and, as she was buying a bag of fruit from the corner vendor she saw Ron Weasley, his arm around - Hermione's eyes narrowed as she identified his companion - Lavender Brown.
Still, it had been ages since she'd seen him by her own experience of time and she nearly ran over, her heels dancing over the cobblestones with the ease of a woman who'd spent the last weeks walking on stone gravel paths in a variety of high shoes, and grabbed his arm. "Ron," she said, nearly breathless. "How are you?"
"I'm…fine," he said, looking at Lavender with a question in his eyes. "Hermione? Right?"
She took a step back. "Ron?" she asked him.
"One of Padma's friends," Lavender hissed under her breath.
"Right," Ron turned back to her with a big smile. "Good to see you. How've things been since school?"
She took another step backwards.
"Did you go to a themed party?" Lavender asked her. "I love your shoes. I can never find good period shoes. The clothes are easy enough but… you'll have to tell me your source."
Hermione looked down at her dress, one of the many Abraxas had gotten her, and began to feel faint. "Good," she said. "I'm sorry. I think I might be getting a little… be sure to tell Parvati - Padma - I said hello, okay?"
"I'll do that," Lavender said. She gave Ron a look and he added, "It was great to see you. We have to head off now but you keep on just… yeah." The both hurried away and Hermione closed her eyes for a moment.
She couldn't imagine a world where she and Ron Weasley weren't friends. She almost fell as she walked back to her flat, bag of oranges in her hand. She'd gone into the past and traded her friendship with Ron - and probably Harry - for Tom Riddle's baby. By the time she reached her door the tears were running down her cheeks and she pushed at them with angry swipes of her hand as she let herself in.
She pulled a Hogwarts yearbook out first. She found her name in the index and flipped to her page. She was in Ravenclaw. She was best friends with Padma Patil. She'd gone to the Yule Ball her seventh year with Draco Malfoy ("just because we're cousins you loser" he'd written in the margins near the image of the two of them smiling for the photographer).
She didn't remember any of this. She remembered a war. She remembered punching Draco Malfoy's ferret face. She remembered camping for a year in the cold with Ron and Harry.
But…
There was almost an echo. Like a dream she'd half forgotten, of Draco handing her a cup of punch and telling her something, and of her going shopping with Padma for a dress. For that dress.
She put her hands over her head and shook it as if she could force the memories to be right, to match up with the book in front of her, or make the book match with what she knew had happened. She flipped the pages as quickly as she could. Ron and Harry were still best friends. Harry a Seeker.
There had been no war.
There had been no war.
There had been no war.
She put her hand to her mouth as she realized that. There was a Muggle-born club. There was a page for S.P.E.W. There was a bored looking Draco Malfoy as Head Boy shaking hands with the Minister of Magic who was there to cut the ribbon on the new Muggle Studies section of the library. She squinted at the bad photograph and then pulled the yearbook closer to her eyes and put her finger on the unaged face.
"It was very strange to watch you as a child," said a familiar voice behind her, the upper class accent still a little too perfect. "And your warding magic needs work."
She didn't turn.
"I had to learn to step between realities to send the right version of you back," he said. "The version here would not have tried to kill me."
"So you would have killed her," Hermione said.
"I do like you better as yourself," said Tom Riddle. "This world I made for you has a number of advantages. I'm sane, for one, and alive, and the most powerful man in Wizarding Britain, and no mewling officials dare try to tell me what spells I may and may not do. But you were a right bore in this world. And I needed the real you - this you - to make the loop work. Paradox."
Hermione still didn't face him, though she set the yearbook down.
"I made a world for you," Tom Riddle said. "I have waited multiple decades for my Hermione to return."
"There's nothing wrong with my warding magic," she said at last. "I just didn't set it up to keep out the Darkest wizard the world has ever known as you were dead at the time. I could arrange for you to be dead again."
He laughed. "I've missed you," he said.
She stood up and turned to face him. "Minister of Magic?" she asked.
"For about thirty years now," he said in agreement. "Better that than the mad creature you helped to kill, I think." He had picked one of the oranges out of her bag and was passing it from hand to hand. His voice remained amused and calm but his eyes roamed over her as if reassuring himself that she was really there and that drove home that, for her, she'd faded from his view less than an hour ago but for him it had been fifty years.
He'd waited for her for fifty years.
"Your parents are alive in this half of the loop," he said as she looked at him, as he took in every detail of her appearance. "They know you. They are probably different - you were certainly different - but they are here and they know they have a daughter."
She nodded, silent as she considered him and what he had made and the promise he had, apparently, kept.
"Wait until you meet my assistant, Regulus," Tom said. "He's got this tedious thing about house elf rights."
She twisted the engagement ring on her finger.
"We should get married before you start to show," Tom said, ignoring her continued lack of response. "I've managed to make the world friendly to - or at least not overtly prejudiced towards - Muggle-borns, though thanks to Abraxas' paperwork you are, amusingly enough, still a distant cousin of the Malfoys, but people remain socially quite conservative."
Hermione smiled when she realized at last that Tom Riddle was as close to nervous as she was ever likely to see. She let his squirm for another long moment before she gave in to the inevitable and said, "It's going to be so uncomfortable having Padma Patil as my maid of honor when I'm quite sure I've never spoken more than a dozen words to her."
"Yes," Tom said, closing the distance between them and kissing her forehead. "I suppose that will be a bit odd."
She leaned into him, relieved to have him there, horrified she was relieved, still queasy with what she now knew was morning sickness. "Let me peel you an orange," he said. "I understand they are good for this sort of nausea. My love."
"That would be nice," she said. "Thank you."
"You're welcome," he said.
. . . . . . . . . .
A/N - In theory this is the end of the story proper, though I remain uncertain whether the first epilogue belongs as a regular chapter rather than an afterthought.