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Dataset card Data Studio Files
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"Of yourself?" Merope said pointedly, but a grin was tugging at both sides of her mouth.
At last, Severus smiled. It was a wry smile, but his so often were. Merope liked them that way.
No one was watching, especially not the younger couple who were still wandering the grounds, as they embraced in the summer starlight.
Tom and Hermione returned to the castle when the summertime damp started to vex them. They retired to their bedroom, instantly stripping off their robes, the inner set of which were beginning to cling to their bodies.
"Ah," Hermione said, collapsing on the bed. "Much better."
Tom took off his robes but put on his sleep robe, belting it loosely around his waist. "You will get cool quickly," he remarked to Hermione, joining her on the bed.
"I could just steal your warmth, then," she replied immediately.
Tom smirked. "Very funny."
"You won’t refuse me."
"I won’t," he agreed mildly. He sighed. "Hermione, love, have I ever told you that you actually keep me warm?"
"You have said it in winter, when it really is cold, but I doubt that is what you mean."
He cracked a smile. "Well, yes, that is true too... but you’re right. I haven’t wanted to talk about it for a long time, but it was one of the effects of creating a Horcrux. I feel cold unless I am thinking about someone I care about."
Hermione stared at him. "I never knew that. Oh, Tom." She curled against him, gazing tenderly at him. "Don’t hold painful secrets for years. You can share them with me. I would rather know. It won’t hurt me."
"I understand that now," he said. "It’s more that I haven’t wanted to reflect on that memory much until now. It was traumatic at the time, and so many other traumatic things happened around the same time. Then we had to fight a war, and I learned the truth about Slytherin and didn’t want to think about the locket at all.... Some scars take a long time to heal."
She hugged him. "I miss my family every day. I understand that... and they never truly heal. We’re always different for what happened."
He sighed again. "I hope that the children don’t have to experience anything like what we did, but I fear they will."
She drew his robe open and caressed his lithe body, making him shiver—not with cold, external or otherwise, but with the warmth that comes from the touch of one’s beloved. "It won’t be their fight alone, if it happens. We will be there for them."
He considered that. "Yes. We will be."
 
Harry Potter is dead. Harry Potter is dead, and Voldemort is not.
Hermione does not have her time turner – they were all destroyed – but she knows there are spells, dark rituals that she wouldn’t touch if she had any other choice. She doesn’t see another way, though. The plan is half-formed before Neville even steps up to confront Voldemort himself.
Hermione watches him die. The others, members of Dumbledore’s Army and the Order, fall around her, and she commits to the half-formed plan. She runs from the battlefield – let them think she’s abandoning them. Where she’s going, it won’t matter.
She sees Ron on her way out, and she grabs him. She thinks for second about taking him with her, but no, that would be selfish. She’d never be able to come back. And if she dies doing what she plans to do....well. She didn’t want to leave Ron stranded without her.
Instead, she grabs him by the shoulders and kisses him for the second and final time. She almost doesn’t feel guilty when she leaves him, standing among rubble in an empty corridor.
It hurts. It hurts. It won’t stop hurting.
Hermione aches – more than an ache; it’s tearing her apart. Her bones feel like an ever-tightening cage. Her veins are strangling her. Her blood is acid. She is too small on the outside and too big on the inside. She cannot contain herself, and yet she seems incapable of exploding. Always on the verge of death, she thinks.
This is what time feels like when it rearranges your atoms and reconstructs itself around you.
This is why Hermione Granger does not mess around with dark magic. Usually.
Hermione Granger is a legend in her own time. She will be a myth in a 100 years – the girl who outsmarted Voldemort, who rode dragons, who brewed illegal potions and destroyed horcruxes. Hermione Granger, best friend to the-boy-who-lived, uncommonly called the-girl-who-could-not-be-bothered-to-give-a-single-fuck.
In 1943, she is nobody worth mentioning. Perfect.
She sees him in Diagon Alley. He does not see her.
This is where the plan ends – the half-formed plan that never made it past phase one. Get to Tom Riddle before he’s fucked over the whole world. Check.
Phase two, she thinks, should be to kill him. Timeline be damned.
Hermione decides to follow him and wait. She knows she can’t attack him in broad daylight in the middle of Diagon Alley. She is willing to die for this cause, but she is not willing to risk being imprisoned before she can finish the job.
As predicted, he ventures into Knockturn Alley. This is her chance. No one will question if he’s killed in a back alley in the seedy part of wizarding London. She follows him into the shop, Borgin and Burke’s, and is close. Close enough to see the way he fiddles with an ugly black ring on his right hand.
The fucking ring.
Hermione wants to scream because, for the first time in her life, she has made the most carelessly stupid mistake. Tom Riddle is a murderer twice over, and he has the horcruxes to prove it.
Think Hermione, think, she tells herself, all the while keeping an eye on the unfairly handsome boy. She could kill him, still, and take the ring, but where’s the diary? And even if she could find the diary, what would she use to destroy them? The basilisk is still alive. The sword of Gryffindor is useless.
Her only option is fiendfyre, but she doesn’t know how to control it. Yet.
She watches with only the slightest twinge of regret as Tom Riddle leaves the store alive.
How does one go about learning to control fiendfyre?
Very carefully, Hermione discovers, and not without getting a few burns in the process. It’s difficult magic, but even in 1943, she is still Hermione Granger, brightest witch of her age. And she has a talent for fire magic.
There is something about the way it moves that entrances her. She no longer flinches away when it licks at her skin. The ugly scrawl of "Mudblood" has been scorched off – not even a scar from an enchanted knife can linger when you have to regrow the skin of your whole arm.
Hermione thinks this is her rebirth, and she is reminded for the first time in months of Fawkes, which reminds her of Dumbledore, which reminds her of the Order, which reminds her of Ron and Harry.
She only cries once, and then she gets the fuck over it.
In the summer of 1944, she sees him at the gates of Wool’s Orphanage. He sees her.
This was not the plan.
Hermione was going to break in after dark and kill him. Light the whole fucking building on fire and watch it burn. There is no room in her heart for all of the other children she would have killed in the fire – their lives would have been an acceptable sacrifice if it meant Tom was dead. If it meant he would never raise an army and slaughter thousands.
But he has seen her, and he is watching, head cocked to the side like he thinks he can make sense of her presence if only he stares hard enough. Hermione is careful not to make direct eye contact, but it is too late to pretend that she was not looking specifically at him. She is not disguised; he knows her appearance now.
She can only hope that she is plain enough that he will forget about her. She will have to kill him another day, when he is not on guard.
Tom Riddle does not forget her. Not for the rest of the summer. He almost forgets about the young woman with the bushy hair and the dead eyes and the magic he could feel from fifty-yards away crackling like raw electricity on his way to the Hogwarts Express. He is a 7th year and Head Boy and hell-bent on world domination – lots to think about, after all.
But then he sees her. How could he not? He supposes that she means to blend in, but even leaning against the wall, head ducked down, wearing non-descript muggle clothing, he feels like he’d know her anywhere. Her hair has been tamed, but those eyes – those eyes that never quite meet his own – are the same as that day at the orphanage, only three months before. They are filled with cold hatred, the same as her magic. It’s so potent, Tom marvels that the muggles can’t at least sense something off about the air.
She looks...infuriated (if he had to put a label on the borderline murderous expression) that he caught her staring at him. He’d think she was just drawn to his classic looks – Merlin, he’d even pass her off as an over-eager stalker – except she didn’t look at him like she wanted to sleep with him; she looked like she’d peel his skin slowly from every bone and very much enjoy doing so.
It was enough to put him on edge.
From the other side of the train station, she watches as Riddle rubs at the ring on his right hand: a sure sign of his discomfort.
She grins. He squirms.
He gets on the train alive, but she still counts this as a win.
Hermione Granger is compiling a list of things she is good at. Fire magic makes the list (most magic would make the list, but she’s being picky).
Memory charms make the list too.
In the past months, she has built a new identity for herself. Still Hermione. Still Granger. But now she is an up-and-coming magical archaeologist, steadily gaining global attention. It’s a shift in tactics – going from completely invisible to famous in the span of only two-or-so months, but a necessity. Most of it is fake, but she hadn’t wanted to completely "pull a Lockhart" and ride off false success, so she decided to actually do a bit of actual work. Luckily, she’s rather good at hunting things down. She goes after a rare Egyptian text that wasn’t found in her timeline until the mid-fifties, an early form of a wand from one of the first-suspected wizarding societies in ancient Mesopotamia, and a cursed totem shaped like a man-eating frog from a crumbled Aztec temple. She doesn’t think it counts as cheating that she had read how each of these items were obtained when she was in the 1990s.
Plus, it’s not a waste of her time. She can’t very well kill Tom while he’s at Hogwarts, and if she does manage to survive murdering him, she knows she’ll need some kind of life to fall back on.
In October of 1944, she goes after Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem, mostly just to spite Tom. It’s in a forest in Albania, in a tree trunk. She feels a small surge of pride when she collects it, knowing that Riddle will never get to trap his disgusting soul in the rather beautiful piece of jewelry.
She sends a letter to Headmaster Armando Dippet later that day, claiming that the diadem really should be returned to Hogwarts. Where it belongs.
Hermione is really not surprised by the invitation she receives less than 48 hours later.
In her own time, Professor Slughorn’s special club meetings had been dull, stunted, and extremely awkward. In 1944, Slughorn’s party reminds her of what she imagines a ministry cocktail party would look like.
It’s a gentlemen’s affair, mostly, and Hermione is one of the few women who was invited directly and not as a plus-one. But she is world-renowned now, and she found the lost diadem, so she’s the honored guest. This does not sit well with most of the men, though Horace – as he insisted she call him – seems oblivious to that fact.
"Really my dear, it is a shame I never had you as a student," he blabbers. Hermione had forgotten how tedious the man was. "Where did you say you went to school again?"
"She didn’t."
Hermione looks up at the young man who has joined their conversation and fights to keep a grin from spreading. Tom Riddle, who is annoyingly almost a head taller than her, passes her a fresh glass of champagne. She takes it graciously, but does not drink. She wouldn’t put it past him to dose her with veritaserum the first chance he got.
"Homeschooled, sadly," she says. "I would have loved to go to Hogwarts."
"Miss Granger, this is Tom Riddle, my brightest student in years," Horace says, clapping Riddle on the back. The older man has had a bit too much to drink, and doesn’t notice the way Tom tenses at the jolting touch.
"I’m very interested in your line of work," Tom says, flashing her his most charming smile. Hermione is pleased with how unaffected she is. "Perhaps you could tell me more about it."
Hermione almost rolls her eyes. It does not take an idiot to see that he is trying to use his charm to manipulate her – though she notes that Horace seems oblivious. The older man excuses himself from the conversation to go speak with the Minister of Magic.
"Perhaps you’d like to go be introduced to the Minister too," she suggests. He laughs, and for a split second, Hermione thinks he might see right through her.
"I’m much more interested in you, Miss Granger." Tom’s eyes harden almost imperceptibly, but Hermione is looking for it. She’s looking for anything she can use. "I believe we have run into each other before."
"Hmm...I don’t think so," she says, though her face tells a different story. It amuses her to see Riddle get frustrated by her obvious lying, especially since he can’t call her on it in the middle of the party. At least, not without being incredibly rude. His smile thins.
"Quite alright. It happens."
Tom thinks that it most certainly does not happen, not to him. And knowing that she’s lying – and she knows that he knows she’s lying – is only making his desire to find out what she’s hiding so much stronger. He listens as she tells him about her job, and he feels her magic reach out to him – he suspects now that it is unintentional – and jab at his own. Like a dance, or more likely a fight.
Tom wonders what it would be like to fight her. From her stories, she sounds competent, but he wants to know. He wants to know everything there is to know about Hermione Granger.
He doesn’t realize until she’s long gone from the party and he’s lying in bed, wide awake, that she didn’t really tell him anything about herself at all.
In December of 1944, Hermione receives a letter from one Tom Riddle. She did not give him her address, but if she had to guess, she’d put money down that Horace Slughorn did. She checks the letter itself at least two dozen times for different curses, and eventually catches one. It’s obscure. It’s dark.
It’s not a threat, though it could have killed her. It’s a challenge; she’s sure of it. The only thing she’s unsure of is why her stomach flutters in excitement at the prospect of a competition.
Inside the letter, he merely asks her more questions about her work, and whether she’ll be coming back to Hogwarts anytime soon. It’s mindless chatter – she knows that he doesn’t actually care about her response to these particular questions.
She writes back anyway.
"No plans currently, but I’m sure I’ll see you around. Nice curse, by the way, but still detectable. Needs improvement."
Short, sweet, and to the point. Plus, she figures her cheek will irritate him.
Her next letter from him arrives only a few days later, but she takes the next week to scan it for any more surprises, and once again finds something. A blood-boiling curse. It would have killed her in less than an hour if she had so much as removed the seal on the parchment.
"Curious to see if you’re as good as your reputation claims. T.M.R."
Hermione almost doesn’t write back. She knows she’s just adding fuel to a fire at this point, and not the right fire. You are here to kill him, Hermione reminds herself. Just do it, and be done with it. Stop toying with him.
She writes him back anyway, just two words.
The next day, Tom’s owl sits on the window sill, not with an envelope, but a simple card. Hermione doesn’t even have to touch it to read the two words written in his ever-elegant script.
Tom’s birthday usually passes with little celebration. Even his knights are not privy to that information. It is always a quiet affair, with no presents and no cake. Which is why he is not expecting the parcel that drops on his breakfast plate. The owl – Hermione’s bloody owl – perches on the mostly-empty table, watching him expectantly.
He knows it’s incredibly stupid of him, but he’s so anxious to see the contents of the package that he does not check for curses. Logically, he knows that Hogwarts will keep out everything that’s genuinely harmful, but he also knows that Hermione Granger is creative and annoyingly clever. And if her reputation is true, she’s a brilliant, slightly-scary witch that he should be very careful with.
The package does not kill him, but he thinks he might have died anyway.
Wrapped in a dark green ribbon is Slytherin’s locket. Slytherin’s fucking locket – the one he had been looking for since he found out that he was the heir – is staring up at him from the package. And there’s a note.
"If you turn this into a horcrux, I’ll have to destroy it, and I think both of us would hate to lose such a valuable artifact just because you decided to be an idiot. P.S. Happy birthday, Tom."
He had the presence of mind to wait until he returned to the Slytherin common room – the locket now hidden just beneath the neckline of his robes – before lighting the note on fire.
Tom could not figure out how she knew what she did, but he was smart enough to recognize that this was her response to his challenge. Perhaps, he thought as he tugged at the chain of the locket, he ought to have been a little more careful with Hermione Granger.
"If you tell anyone I’ve made a horcrux, I’ll have to kill you, and I think both of us would hate the loss of such valuable magical talent just because you decided to be an idiot. P.S. Thanks for the gift, Hermione."
Smug bastard, she thinks to herself, even as she laughs.