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Chapter Text

PROLOGUE

Ash fell like snow.

Soft. Weightless. Mocking.

It clung to her hair, her eyelashes, her lips. When she blinked, it stuck to the wetness in the corners of her eyes. When she breathed, it coated her tongue and whooshed into her lungs and burned with a fury she could scarcely feel.

Hermione Granger stepped over the rubble where Hogwarts’ gates once stood. The castle— if you could even call it that now— was a husk. A carcass. It loomed, a great broken thing. Its towers snapped like bone, its great paned windows shattered like jagged teeth in the dark.

The Dark Mark hung overhead, verdant and bloated, writhing against the stars.

The battlefield stank of blood, not the sharp, clean scent of a paper cut, not the warm, metallic tang of a nosebleed, but carrion.

Rot.

Meat.

Coagulated blood soaked the ground, filling boot prints, turning the dirt to paste.

Hermione stepped through it, mud and bone, ash and entrails. Her boots squelched, something soft gave way underfoot, she didn’t look down; feared she’d break if she did.

A scream tore through the night, shrill, choked, cut short. Somewhere to her left a flash of green light flared, and was promptly snuffed out.

Another… another.

Smoke hung low, crawling through the ruins of the castle. A snapped flagpole jutted from the ramparts like a spear through the ribcage of a corpse. Stone split, crumbling under the weight of the burning firmament above her.

The air burned. Merlin, it burned… Scorched her lungs with each breath, thick with magic and the stench of charred flesh.

Her eyes stung. Her throat rasped raw. She did not think she could utter any incantation. And her hands shook, shook so violently— not with fear, no, she was past that: with sheer and utter exhaustion. Exhaustion that was bone deep, soul deep. She wasn’t quite sure how she was still standing.

Bodies littered the ground, not soldiers, not anymore.

Children.

Friends.

Families.

It was by the entrance hall where she found them, her boys.

At first, she thought it was a trick of the light— a shape crumpled against the stone, a fallen Death Eater, maybe, or another student— until she saw the glasses.

His glasses were intact. Polished, gleaming, set carefully on his nose. They looked newly repaired, how they did after she had spelled them, on the train, when they had first met. His usually untameable hair was combed back, smoothed, the scar on his brow pale and stark against waxen skin.

Someone had arranged him.

His arms were folded over his chest— but not naturally, not the way a body folds. No, they’d been placed there: fingers laced together, knuckles pale, wand slipped between limp hands like a priest might press a rosary into the fingers of the dead.

His mouth hung slightly open, a smear of blood darkening in the corner. His body was bare— his robes had been cut away, exposing the thin, pale lines of old scars, childhood accidents, curses survived.

But over his heart—

Hermione’s stomach roiled.

Over his heart, Voldemort had carved a mark.

Neat. Precise. Deliberate.

She knew that mark, knew it burned maliciously in the sky above.

The Dark Mark, etched into flesh.

Not burned.

Not seared.

Cut.

Gently, with care, if Voldemort were even capable of such a thing, he had taken the time to—

Hermione fell to her knees.

Not because she meant to; because her body buckled, folded, crumpled under the sheer weight of it.

Her hand lifted, shaking, as if reaching blindly— and then she saw it.

A flash of red, just out of her peripherals. She had to force her neck to move, her head to turn, had to force herself to come face to face with what she knew lay there— who she knew lay there.

Bright, coppery, like a flame guttering in the filth.

The body was twisted, limbs bent at angles she knew were not anatomically possible. Crushed, barely human. A mass of ruined flesh, battered bone, blood pooling the dirt beneath in a mockery of a halo.

But the hair— that unmistakable shock of red hair— untouched. Utterly untouched.

Bright.

Vivid.

Almost cruelly whole. There was no face, not anymore. Just the smear of where it had been, the caved-in ruin where features should have been, where freckles should have been, where the crooked grin and laughing cerulean eyes should have been.

She scrabbled at the ground, fingers slipping, nails breaking as she tried— stupidly, hopelessly— to crawl to him, to piece something back together, to smooth the skin, to fix, to fix, to fix— if she just— Ron would be whole again if she just, let her just— just move— let her fix this— she could— just let her— just—

She heard the whoosh of air before she felt the boot bury itself in her ribcage, her breath tore from her lungs in a jagged, strangled gasp, the world tilting, the pain detonating through her side.

Another kick, sharp, deliberate, and a huff of laughter.

Move.

Her mind jolted, panic cracking through the grief-fog, scattering the broken edges of her thoughts.

MOVE.

Her hands dug into the stone; her arms shaking, her ribs howling in pain, but she forced herself up, curling away, staggering to her feet—

Curses lit the air, streaking past, explosions rocking the ground, the cold night thick with screams anew and smoke.

Run.

She stumbled forward, vision swimming, her chest burning, her legs burning, her head a roar of static—

A shout behind her, a crack of magic.

She spun—

And time slowed.

A curse, searing purple, cut through the air— so close, so sharp, she could feel the heat of it graze her cheek.

Her eyes widened.

Her breath caught, just a hitch— her lashes fluttered as the magic’s aftershock stirred the tiny hairs on her face.

The world narrowed: the pulse pounding in her throat, the roar in her ears, the rush of wind as death missed her by a fraction, a whisper, a ghosts kiss.

RUN.

A gloved hand snatched at her cloak, she twisted, almost fell— lashed out, screamed a curse, heard a cry— and broke free.

Hermione sprinted, heart hammering, a tiny humming bird fluttering in her chest so relentlessly she thought she’d vomit. Breath ragged, robes streaming behind her, out through the crumbling courtyard, over broken stones slick with blood, past the shouts, the curses, the bodies.

Faster, Hermione.
Her legs burned, burned so fierce her eyes streamed, the gates—

If she could just get to the gates—

Another spell singed past her shoulder, blasting stone into shards, she dove, rolled, staggered back up again, legs pumping, faster, faster, faster.

The air thick with ash, the world shaking, her rage a song in her blood.

GO, GO, GO.

Her feet hit the gravel road, her wand lashed up. Eyes wild, teeth bared; and with a crack like the sky splitting open, she vanished.

Gone.

Her body hit solid ground, knees slamming hard enough to jolt her teeth. Her palms scraped jagged stone, her lungs rasping like they’d been set on fire.

Hermione gasped, head bowed, trembling, shuddering. Her ears roared; her vision swam. Blood trickled from her temple, mingling with the grime smeared across her skin.

Where—

She lifted her head, just barely, half a movement—

A gate. Enormous, wrought iron. Twin hedges, beyond them: a manor house that stood proud and tall, windows dark, its spires piercing the clouds like knives.

Malfoy Manor.

Hermione choked on a breath. She hadn’t meant— hadn’t known— but her magic had pulled her here, her body had carried her here, like it knew what had to come next.

Like fate had her by the throat, dragging her forward.

Her limbs shook, nausea coiled in her gut. She swallowed hard, pressing a bloodied hand to the earth, forcing herself upright. She had no plan, no map, no strategy— only a resolve that burnt white hot in her chest.

She staggered forward. One step, another.

She pressed herself against the cold stone wall, chest heaving. Her hands trembled when she raised her wand— but her grip remained steady, steady where it mattered.

A faint shimmer crawled over the perimeter. Wards. Old ones. Brutal ones. Etched into the very foundations by the first Malfoy, she suspected. The Malfoy’s didn’t let their magic rest; the defences were layered as thick as blood. She knew if she were to breach the gate it would be the last thing she ever did.

Lips cracked, voice hoarse, Hermione muttered under her breath. Counter-wards, complicated unravelling spells, over, and over. Her magic sparked weakly, flickering at the edges like a dying star— but it was enough. The shimmer rippled, and then parted.

She slipped through, quiet as a church mouse.

The gravel crunched faintly beneath her as she crept up the driveway, somewhere in the dark, a crow called.

She reached the side of the house, heart rattling in her chest, adrenaline slamming through her veins. Her head felt light— too light, like she might float away if she let herself stop moving.

A flick of her wand. A window eased open. Silent. She slithered through, landing with a soft grunt.

Inside, the manor was silent. Cold marble floors stretched out under gilded ceilings. Dark, ancient paintings lined every inch of every wall, their subjects watching with narrowed, suspicious eyes.

Her fingers clenched tighter around her wand.

She moved. Fast, quiet. Past the grand hall, past the vast, yawning staircase. The air smelled like wax and old wood, like money— like power.

She knew where it was.

Lucius Malfoy’s study. She’d read the intelligence reports in the last days of the war; she’d seen the blueprints, memorised the layouts, learned the secrets. She knew it was kept in the vault, tucked behind bookshelves masked with layers of enchantments.

Her heart hammered.

She reached the study door, whispered the unlocking charm, slipped inside.

The room was dark, she didn’t dare light a lumos. Mahogany shelves lined the walls, stuffed with leather-bound books. A great desk sat in the centre, sprawled with that many papers and artefacts it looked like a living thing. She itched to pour over his secret notes, his plotting, but instead she scanned the room, her breath a mere whisper.

There.

A faint glimmer of magic behind the furthest shelf.

She crossed the room on shaking legs, shoved the books aside, felt the cold kiss of wards prickle across her skin. Her wand flicked in sharp, practiced motions— spells to break, to unravel, to slice through magic far older and darker than she wanted to admit.

The wards buckled.

The hidden panel groaned open, revealing a small compartment— and there it sat.

The time-turner.

Gold and gleaming, coiled with delicate glass, faintly humming with restrained power.

Hermione’s fingers closed around it.

Her throat closed, too.

You’re so close, she thought to herself. Nearly there. Come on.

Behind her, a noise— faint, soft, deadly.

She spun, wand raised—

—but the room was empty.

A trick of the wind. Or a trick of her mind.

Come on, Granger. No time to waste.

She tucked the time turner into her robes, slipped back through the shelves, back through the study, out of the window, back into the night. Every step away from the manor, her pulse raced louder. She waited for the shout, the curse, the crack of apparition, the hot snap of pain— but none came.

By the time she had reached the edge of the estate, she was gasping, her knees buckling, her body screaming to collapse.

Not yet.

Not yet.

•

CRACK.

Hermione hit the ground hard, her ribs shrieking, her lungs refusing to pull in air— and for one, long, breathless second, she just lay there.

The Forest of Dean loomed, black and skeletal, trees bent at odd angles, branches like grasping fingers clawing at the stars. The veil between worlds was thin here, yes, ever so thin. She could feel it in the air, the stillness. As if the forest were holding its breath.

Frozen.

Silent.

And then—

A sound tore out of her throat, raw and choking. Not a sob. Not a scream. A howl, dragged up from the marrow. Her mouth stretched wide, open too far, a soundless, airless cry peeling her ribs apart. She tore at her own hair; dragging strands out by the roots, curling in on herself as if she could compress the grief small enough to fit in her chest, as if she could swallow it whole.

“Harry—“ the name fractured, splintering as it left her lips.
“Ron—“ her voice cracked, went thin, childlike, breaking under the weight of it.

Gone.

Harry’s glasses—
on his face, no, no, not on his face,
on his body, his body, his body
folded hands, cold skin, blood—
—blood at the corner of his mouth.

No, no, no, no, no.

Ron’s hair,
Ron’s laugh,
Ron’s—
smashed, ruined, gone
no face— no voice, gone, smashed, ruined—
red, red, red
like flames, like entrails, like the inside of her skull.

Why did you survive? Why?

Her fingers dug into her scalp.

She could feel her heartbeat in her teeth.

“Please, please, PLEASE,”

Gone.

“Come back— come back, COME BACK—“

They’re dead you stupid girl, they aren’t coming back.

Gone, desecrated,

dead.

She slammed her fists into the ground.

Once. Twice. Again—

And the earth didn’t care.

…enough.

Her eyes snapped open, wide, wild, gleaming.

Fix it, fix it, FIX IT—

Hermione ripped at her robes, tearing them off with trembling fingers, wrenching the fabric, yanking until it split at the seams, until she stood bare and shuddering under the black sky.

She dropped to her knees, muttering— no, snarling— as she dug her wand into the dirt, carving runes into the frostbitten ground, the hardened bark on the trees. Her hands bled, her knees bled. She carved until her knuckles cracked, until her fingers went numb.

And when the dirt, the trees, the rocks were done—

She carved into herself.

She scored lines into her thighs, her arms, her belly, tearing wounds into skin already battered and bruised. Blood welled, hot and thick, trailing down her legs, her calves, pooling at her feet.

The animals came next.

Small things first— mice, squirrels, rats— drawn by the magic pulsing in the air, trembling under the call. Hermione snatched them up, teeth bared, eyes wild, slicing them open with the tip of her wand, smearing their blood across her skin, across the runes, across the time-turner itself.

And when that wasn’t enough—

She went for bigger things.

A fox. A deer. Animals young and old, at all stages of life.

Time’s price.

The blood painted her face, her chest, streaking down her sides in hot sticky trails.

The magic hummed.

The runes flared.

Hermione tipped her head back, her mouth open wide, foaming at the corners, her breath coming in gasping, panting snarls, half-witch, half-something older… wilder.

And then—

She chanted.

Not words, not a language.

Sounds.

Hisses and croaks and ragged, ancient syllables that scraped out of her oesophagus like shards of glass.

The trees groaned.

Hermione’s body shook, shuddered, spasmed— her spine bending, her ribs straining, her hands flaring out wide as she danced around the circle, stamping her bare feet into frozen mud, clawing at the air, at the stars, at the very fabric of magic itself. Her fists slammed into her ribcage; sparking pain, sparking magic, her hair stood on end, the magic peeled the skin from her bones, pulled at the very edges of what she was.

Her eyes rolled back.

Her mouth split open in a scream-laugh, sharp and feral, spittle flying, blood flecking her teeth. Black veins spiderwebbed their way under skin stretched too tight, her chest arched—

The time-turner pulsed once, twice, a final heartbeat—

And Hermione flung herself forward, arms out, mouth open in a scream that wasn’t a scream, eyes blazing, body lit from within by the sheer, burning need to destroy, to fix, to change.

Her last thought before the light swallowed her:

take me.

And the magic did.

Chapter Text

It was the start of the school year, September 1st, 1943.

She stood frozen, breath misting in the evening air, eyes locked on the castle she remembered only as a grave.

A tremor ran through her legs. She pressed her palms flat against against the cold iron, squeezing her eyes shut, willing the roaring in her head to quiet.

Not now. 

Not the time for shaking, not the time for breaking. She had slipped through the jaws of death, torn herself out of time, carved a path into this moment with blood and bone and magic far, far too dark.

She would not falter now.

Hermione inhaled— slow, sharp, a hiss between her teeth. She rolled her shoulders back, lifted her chin. Let the freezing metal bite into her fingers, let the raw skin sting where she clutched too tight. Let it ground her; steady her.

When she opened her eyes again, the castle still loomed— but this time, she forced herself to see it.

Not a ruin, not yet.

Her chest ached, she swallowed the feeling down.

One step.

Another.

Shoes crunching on the gravel, she passed through the gates.

And there— waiting at the base of the steps, they stood.

Headmaster Armando Dippet: slight, silver-haired, sharp-nosed, his eyes cool with calculation. And beside him, younger, leaner, but unmistakably familiar— Albus Dumbledore, auburn hair gleaming in the lantern light, his pale blue gaze flicking sharply across her as she approached.

Hermione nearly faltered again.

Dead men.

“Miss Dufort,” Dippet greeted warmly, extending a withered hand. “We are honoured to receive you here.”

Hermione Dufort— not Hermione Granger, don’t forget, never forget— clutched her cloak tighter around her thin frame, feet raw and blistered in stolen shoes, heartbeat thudding loud in her ribcage.

She dipped her head faintly, wrapping herself in soft-spoken sadness. “Thank you, monsieur.”

Dumbledore said nothing, but his eyes raked over her— the shadows beneath her eyes, the trembling of her fingers, the faint tremor in her stance. She felt him catalogue every weakness, every threadbare edge. He was as familiar a wizard as any with the signs of dark magic exposure, and yet his features betrayed none of that burning suspicion she knew he felt. She resisted the urge to scratch at the faint lines still marked into her flesh. 

“We understand you’ve… come far,” Dippet said gently. “From France, yes?”

“Yes, sir.” Hermione kept her voice quiet, controlled. “My home was lost. The war—” she paused, let her throat hitch faintly, “—I had no where else.”

Dippet made a soft, sympathetic sound. “You’ll be safe here, child. But before we place you, we’d like to assess your level. We don’t want to overwhelm you, of course, but—”

“But you’d rather not underestimate me, either,” Hermione finished softly, a faint curl at the corner of her mouth.

A blink, surprised, from Dippet. 

And a curl at the corner of Dumbledores own mouth, whether from amusement or suspicion— she knew not.

•

The testing room was small— suffocatingly so— lined with ancient dark wood, faintly glowing runes carved into the stone, they breathed, like living things. She recognised them:

Algiz. Sowilo. Eihwaz. Mannaz.

Old magic. Protection, power, balance, perception. Wards of truth, of clarity, of raw magical detection.

The lantern hanging above her swayed slightly, casting slow, spinning shadows on the walls.

She curled her hands into fists.

It was like walking into a spider’s web. The magic in the room brushed over her frayed core, her splintering edges— her twisted, rotting magic— and the urge to flinch, to snarl, to claw at her own skin nearly overran her.

Wrong, wrong, WRONG.

Run, get out, go go go—

Breathe. Get it together you pathetic mess, a cruel voice cut into her head.

She forced herself still, forced her heart to slow. She counted the beats between her ribs, counted the breaths, counted the time between each pulse, counted her teeth in her mouth with her tongue. She felt her magic coil, shudder, spit sparks under her skin— her magic was a pacing, snarling thing, like a cornered beast inside of her, baring its teeth— and she pushed it down, deep, deeper.

The room was quiet. Watching.

In the corner something flickered—

A smear of red.

A mop of messy black.

No.

Hermione stared straight ahead, a thin sheath of ice keeping her rooted to the spot. She would not look, she would not look, she would not—

“Miss Dufort,’ said the cool, clipped voice— Dippet, seated at the far table, spectacles perched low on his nose, eyes sharp despite his age. “Shall we begin?”

A small, respectful smile. “Of course, sir.”

Her voice was calm, measured, smooth.

Inside, her magic howled.

Dumbledore watched from the corner, his normally twinkling eyes half-lidded and thoughtful. His fingers drummed lightly on the chair’s arm, she was reminded of a cat: the way it watched a mouse.

“Lets begin simply,” Dippet murmured, “Can you perform a Lumos?”

She flicked her wand— a sharp, clean light burst at the tip.

“Nox?”

Darkness.

“How about a shielding charm? Protego?”

Her shield flared up— shimmering, solid— but she felt the pull, the strange, dragging twist inside her magic, as if the core had been rewired, redrawn.

Her fingers clenched tighter around her wand.

Dippet’s mouth twitched slightly. “Perhaps… a Patronus Charm?”

Her throat closed.

No.

No, not that. Not now.

Her heartbeat thundered, her chest pulled tight.

But she raised her wand anyway, because she couldn’t hesitate, couldn’t falter, couldn’t show them the yawning fissures beneath her skin— and forced the words out through gritted teeth:

“Expecto Patronum.”

For one fragile second— silver mist. Thin, faint, shimmering like gossamer.

An otter— her otter— appeared, blurred, its body frail, emaciated, its tail stuttering, its bright little paws flickering like a dying flame.

Hermione’s breath hitched, her whole body trembling with the effort to hold it. This was the Patronus that used to leap, twist, somersault, chasing shadows across walls with irrepressible joy. This was the Patronus Harry had laughed at, Ron had teased her about.

Now— a ghost.

Pathetic. Weak. Flickering.

She felt the magic collapse, crumbling, snuffed out like a breath across a candle flame.

She wanted to scream.

But she didn’t.

She didn’t.

Dippet made a small, thoughtful sound, marking something on parchment. Dumbledore, silent. Watching. Always watching.

Hermione swallowed the burn in her throat.

“Aequor Suspendis,” Dippet continued smoothly, summoning a shallow basin filled with water.

Hermione’s stomach roiled.

Oh.

Beautiful magic. Elegant, fine, delicate magic. The kind she’d read about in dusty old tomes, in libraries she’d dreamed of visiting— before the war, before the deaths, before everything turned to ash.

She moved her wand through the air, carefully—

“Aequor Suspendis.”

The water lifted, morphing into a perfect, suspended sphere, floating like a tiny moon above them.

It was… beautiful.

Pointless.

Frivolous.

She ground her teeth together, lips pressed into a thin line.

Dippet’s fingers steepled themselves. “Memoria Extracta?”

Her breath shivered.

Fine.

Fine, she knew this one.

Her wand to her temple— a glimmering silver thread— she pulled it free, forced the magic to obey, even as her bones howled, even as her skin prickled and her vision blurred.

She could do this.

She could do this.

Dippet spoke again, eyes sharp, smile thin. 

“Silvatica Callens.”

Her stomach turned watery.

Old forest magic. Natural magic. Ancient, delicate, utterly unnecessary— a dance with roots and wind and soil, the kind of charm you learned when you had years, decades, to master the art, not when you were eighteen and dodging fatal curses in the filth.

She could feel the anger rise, slow, cold, blistering.

Her hands tightened.

Her wand drew the shape, the delicate loop—

“Inclinare… arboris… umbra…”

But the spell slipped through her fingers like water.

The collapse was silent, sharp.

The failure echoed.

Dippet sat back, his lips curling— just slightly, just enough. “Not to worry, Miss Dufort,” he said mildly. “That one… is rarely managed even by our best.”

His eyes gleamed— faintly satisfied. Faintly relieved.  

Hermione caught the look. Understood it, even through the haze of her spinning mind. Like a man watching a dog jump for a high stick, pleased it had missed. He wanted to see her limits, he wanted to see her fail. To remind himself that she was still… human. Still fallible. Still containable. How dare he. Her mind spat and roared and snarled—

I didn’t have the time for your precious, delicate, useless magic, you smug little man.

I didn’t have the luxury of summoning flowers and coaxing trees to dance.

I was busy bleeding in the dirt, burying my friends, fighting a war you will never understand.

She wanted to scream— to spit back that no one had thrown unforgivables at Death Eaters in the middle of the night asking if they knew fucking forest-summoning.

But she didn’t.

She forced herself still. She forced herself small. Let them see the clever little foreign witch. Let them believe she was just shy, just sweet, just gifted, just a touch overwhelmed.

She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. Smiled— thin, polite, brittle. “Im afraid I haven’t mastered that one yet, sir.”

“No matter, no matter. Still remarkable,” he supplied, exchanging a look with Dumbledore.

“She’s seventh-year ready,” Dumbledore remarked gently, “Possibly beyond.”

Hermione forced a brief smile. “I… would prefer to be placed below.”

The silence prickled, sharp-edged and uncertain.

“But— Miss Dufort, with your gifts—”

“I would rather grow amongst my peers, sir,” Hermione said softly, voice steel-wrapped in silk. “Its been a… difficult time. I’d rather not stand out too much.”

Dumbledore’s sharp eyes flicked up, “Wise,” he murmured, “Very wise indeed.”

Her stomach lurched— it wasn’t wisdom. It was survival. Less notice, fewer eyes. Fewer questions.

“Very well,” Dippet said kindly, clapping his hands together. “We’ll take you to the sorting shortly.”

Hermione dipped her head, hands clenched tight at her sides, magic sparking hot and wild under her skin. A bead of sweat rolled down her spine and she resisted the urge to writhe.

As they gathered their papers, her eyes flicked, just briefly, to the far corner.

Harry. Standing pale, glass-eyed, mouth parted faintly.

Ron. A mass of ruin, red hair bright as cursed fire.

Her chest wrenched, her breath caught in her throat—

“Miss Dufort?” Dumbledore’s voice cut across the room, a careful thread of sound reeling her back.

She forced herself still. Forced her mouth into a calm curve. Forced her gaze forward.

“Shall we?”

Her legs were fighting to keep her upright, her heartbeat pounded. She gave the faintest nod.

The Great Hall waited.

She turned to go— but something snagged.

A thread of instinct, a flicker in the air.

She shouldn’t have looked back, shouldn’t have risked it, but she did.

Her eyes lifted, just once, just a glance, to Dumbledore’s face—

—And there it was.

Not the twinkle, not the warmth; the sharp, cutting light. Suspicion. Not yet formed into words, but it hung heavy in the space between them.

Her tongue turned leaden in her mouth, her throat felt as dry as bone.

It took effort to curl her lips in a polite, deferential smile, took all her willpower to dip her head, just enough, and turn away.

She didn’t see the way his icy gaze followed her to the door, didn’t see the small crease of a frown appear at the corner of his mouth. She only felt the echo of it— a glinting edge, sharp as a knife.

Waiting.

Chapter Text

The hush in the Great Hall wasn’t just silence. It was something alive. It pressed in from the bewitched ceiling, crept along the stone walls, sank sharp little claws into her skin. 

Dufort. Hermione. 

Her name cracked across the space like the snap of a femur. 

For half a second— just half— Hermione thought, wildly, what if I don’t go? What if she stayed right there, still as stone, let the hush grow louder and thicker until it swallowed her whole? What if she ran? What if she screamed? What if she flung the table over and snarled and clawed her way out like an animal—

Her legs moved. 

She was walking. 

The scrape of her shoes echoed sharp across the floor, every step a little knife twist into the silence. She felt eyes on her, every one of them, peeling her open as if she were made of paper. 

She wondered, distantly, if they could tell. If they could see how the borrowed robes sagged on her frame, the sleeves too long, the collar hanging loose at the throat. If they knew how her bones ached, how her ribs poked sharp under thin skin, how her body was failing her from the inside out. If they could smell the smoke still clinging to her hair, to her skin, no matter how many times she tried to scrub it away. If they saw the way her fingers trembled at her sides, if they could hear the roar inside her skull. 

Her gaze flicked up, just once, just for a heartbeat. 

Dumbledore. 

Young, sharp-eyed, frowning faintly. Watching. Knowing.

A sick little jolt tore through her chest, and she had to bite the inside of her cheek to stop the laugh bubbling its way up her throat. 

What a joke. 

What a cruel, perverse little joke. 

Here she was, stepping up to a stupid little stool, about to play pretend in a school full of children, when she knew the taste of blood, the stink of burnt flesh, the sound a body made when it was split open. 

Her stomach twisted, her vision swam. 

Her fingers clenched in the sleeves of her robe— don’t shake, don’t shake, don’t shake— as she stepped up, perched carefully, felt the hard edge of the wood bite into the backs of her thighs. 

She was so tired. 

So hungry. 

So done. 

And all she had to do was survive. 

Just this. 

Just this one more thing. 

And then the next thing. 

And the next.

And the next. 

The Sorting Hat slipped down over her brow. 

Darkness. 

At once a voice filled her skull:

…no.

Hermione’s fingers twitched in her lap.

No.

The voice grew sharper, a thin wire pulled taut.

This cannot be. This is a mistake. You— you should not be here.

Her breath hitched faintly.

Oh, no, no, no, the hat whispered, like old silk tearing. 

You are not… you can’t be… this is all wrong. What have you done?

The denial cracked, like ice underfoot, the voice shifting— twisting— into fury.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE.

The words slammed into her mind like the blow of a hammer.

WHAT DID YOU BRING INTO ME, GIRL?

Hermione clenched her jaw, teeth grinding.

You— you have torn yourself. You are raw, flayed open, leaking magic that should never have existed. The hat’s voice hissed like storm, almost frantic. I feel it— old, old, OLD magic— the kind this school was built to hold back. Do you even understand what you have done?

She forced her shoulders to stay straight, forced them to not sag in despair— and her ears, traitorous things, strained— catching the faint hiss of whispers, snatched words:

“Hat-stall?”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s just sitting there—”

You reek of grief, the hat spat. You STINK of death. You carry ghosts, girl, you carry blood, you carry ruin.

A flicker, Harry’s pale skin, a flash, Ron’s crumpled bloody mass. The smell of ash, the sharp taste of copper.

She shuddered, grasping at the edges of her grief like she was trying to catch shards of glass mid-fall, hands bloodied, breath ragged, everything slipping through her fingers faster than she could hold.

You think you can just walk in here, slide under me, and hide? You think a false name will shield you? I see you, girl. I see everything. I was made to crown kings… it whispered. To shape liars, murderers, heroes, fools… but you—

Her fists ached as she clenched them in her lap.

The Sorting Hat’s voice sank low, like something ancient and cracked and crumbling to dust— But you… oh, child… I was never meant to weigh the souls of the broken.

And then, the voice dipped lower, quieter, almost pleading.

…why? Why would you do this to yourself?

Hermione’s throat closed.

You are so small, the hat murmured. So young. And you carry so much pain. I feel it— your brittle bones, your cracked magic, your breaking mind. You are a thread stretched too thin, a candle burning too fast. Why? Why did you step into the fire, little one?

Please…

It does not have to be this way, the hat whispered, almost coaxing now. We could place you somewhere safe. Somewhere quiet. Hufflepuff, perhaps— warmth, kindness, healing. You could rest. You could let go.

She nearly whimpered then; bit her lip to stop the noise escaping, dug her nails into her palm to ground herself.

You want to be placed with the snakes, the hat said softly, mournfully. You want to sink into the den. Why, child? Why Slytherin when your heart was once bright, so bright, all fire and loyalty and love?

Hermione opened her mouth. Her voice, inside her head, cut like a blade.

Slytherin.

The hat recoiled, sharp and cold. You think you choose? it hissed. You think you command me?

Her body held stiff, unyielding, the weight of all the watchful eyes pinning her in place. She could almost feel them measuring her: the girls whispering behind cupped hands, boy’s narrowed eyes, the teacher’s half-frowns.

The flicker of intrigue— or suspicion— in Dumbledore’s gaze.

Dread coiled in her gut, her skin was slick, sweat sluiced over her ribs like a cold river.

You are fraying at the seams, the hat snarled. You are barely holding yourself together. And yet you crawl in here, spilling your sickness, your rot, into me— the oldest relic of this place— and you dare to tell me where you belong?

Hermione’s mouth curved bitterly. 

You are a knife with no sheath, the hat rasped. You are a candle in a hurricane. You are a girl who has slit her own throat and is still trying to fight.

The voice sagged— worn, tired, ancient. I should not place you anywhere, the hat murmured, hollow now. I should cast you out. You are not meant to be here. You are not meant to survive. 

Slytherin, she begged, Slytherin. 

A long, shuddering pause.

The hat let out a breath, like wind through an empty grave. 

…very well, little one. it lamented. 

The voice grew brittle, thin, almost broken, as it called:

“SLYTHERIN!”

The word echoed— slow, final, rippling through the Great Hall like a stone dropped into deep water. There was no applause. 

And then, in the soft, private dark inside the hat, the whisper came:

But I wash my hands of this, the hat croaked, so frail and old, so old— You are not mine to save. You are not mine to mourn. Please… turn back. Please… before you break entirely. 

It wasn’t the words that undid her. It was the sound. 

Hermione felt something crack; soft and painful, inside her chest— like the ghost of a sob she couldn’t let out. She thought, deep in her bones, that this was the most horrible thing she had ever heard. 

She rose, slow, mechanical. 

Her knees locked, her thighs twitched. Her spine felt too thin, too flimsy. Vertebrae like building blocks stacked haphazardly on top of each-other, no care for structural integrity. She took a moment to smooth her skirts down with hands that shook like a leaf, took a moment to set her jaw in place and ground herself. 

She took her first step. 

The Great Hall held its breath. 

The stone floor stretched before her, long and pale and glimmering faintly under the floating candles. On either side, the house tables flanked her like rows of polished coffins, packed with staring students— she refused to look at any one of them. 

She forced her chin up, forced her shoulders back. Forced her legs to move, one after the other, ignoring how her muscles burned, how her ribs ached, how her lungs bleated softly with each inhalation. 

The Slytherin table loomed closer— dark wood slick with polish, silver goblets glinting, the house crest swaying overhead: green and silver, scale and fang. 

Hermione reached the table, and lowered herself, faint, like a marionette whose strings had been cut, folding into place with a quiet, hollow finality. 

Her hands pressed flat against the table, fingers splayed, white-knuckled, gripping. Her head hung limp, shadowed by the fall of her hair. 

She couldn’t breathe— she couldn’t move. 

The clatter of cutlery. 

The scrape of chairs. 

The soft murmur of a thousand voices, rising and falling, undulating like waves against the stone walls. 

The food appeared. 

She flinched. 

The sudden flood on her senses hit her like a sucker-punch— rich, heavy, greasy, thick. Steaming roasts, buttery pies, mounds of golden potatoes, fat, glistening puddings crowned with cream.

Her stomach clenched; her throat scraped dry. 

She reached, blindly— a goblet, cool under shaking fingers. Lifted it to her lips. Swallowed. The pumpkin juice slid down, the cold a balm to her throat. It grounded her, ever so slightly, for three or four heartbeats, enough to reach for a Turkey sandwich. 

She bit. Chewed, swallowed. 

Ash. 

It was ash in her mouth. 

Her jaw tightened. 

Her eyes stung. 

Her hands clenched around her goblet; her knuckles bled white. 

She hated them. 

Every single last one of them. 

They had no idea. 

No idea how fucking lucky they were. 

Her magic coiled under her skin, ribs flaring with every ragged, painful breath.

And then—

A shift. 

The faintest scrape of wood on stone, the lightest weight settling beside her. 

Hermione flicked her gaze sideways - and froze. 

A girl. 

Sitting perfectly still. 

Her skin was alabaster— no, not alabaster, bone-white. So thin and colourless it seemed stretched over the fine architecture of her face. Her hair was white, pure white, falling sleek and soft over her shoulders like fresh snowfall, untouched and soundless. 

But it was her eyes that caught Hermione’s breath— pale, almost translucent, the irises faint as bleached pearls, set in eyes so lightless they might have been of a creature dredged up from the depths, a thing that had never once known sunlight. 

She sat with her hands folded, fingers long and slender, her spine unnaturally straight, her chin slightly tilted— a study in stillness, in something so precisely still it felt wrong, like a doll left too long in one position, or a figure at rest that should never move again. 

There was no flicker of emotion on her face. No twitch of muscle. Only that cold, unblinking gaze, and Hermione felt, for one brief moment that she was not looking at a girl at all, but at something wearing the shape of one. 

Hermione swallowed hard, her hackles raised. 

She didn’t know this girl. Didn’t know her name, her year, her face. Didn’t know why she was here; why she was sitting beside her, silent, watchful. 

Hermione turned her gaze back to the table, her breath hitched faintly, shallow, strained. The noise of the hall washed over her, distant and muffled, like she was underwater. 

She didn’t look up again—

not until she felt it.

Sharp. 

Piercing. 

Unblinking. 

The weight of a stare. 

Her eyes flicked up, just once, unbidden—

And him. 

Sitting further down the Slytherin table, hands folded, head tilted just so— watching her like a hawk circling something already half-dead.

Chapter Text

Hermione jerked awake, her sleep fitful and restless. She grasped her wand from under her pillow, and listened intently into the darkness that greeted her. She was first aware of the coolness of the air, and then the soft sounds of her dorm-mates slumbering in their four posters. The Slytherin dormitory was cold, colder than she remembered Gryffindor tower— carved deep into the stone under the lake, the air smelled faintly of wet rock and iron, like an old tomb. 

No threat, no threat, no threat.

She lay still for a moment, eyes half-lidded, heart ticking in a slow, heavy beat. She felt it in her bones— that low thrum, that wrongness humming under her skin. Her magic pulsed sluggishly, sickly, like spoiled blood. 

Her fingers twitched where they rested by her side. She let them go loose around her wand, flexed them once, twice, feeling the faint tremor there. Faint, but real. 

Her teeth clenched. 

No. 

Not now. 

Not here. 

With deliberate care, she sat up. 

The curtains around her bed were heavy, dark green, edged in silver thread. She drew them back, slow, measured, the rings sliding against the rail with a whispering sigh. 

The dormitory stretched before her: stone walls, feathered beds, soft torchlight flickering across the pale faces of the girls sleeping. They were all beautiful, in that purebred, aristocratic way— glossy hair, smooth skin, delicate hands folded over embroidered blankets. 

Hermione stood, bare feet against the icy flagstone floor, skin prickling as the chill sank bone-deep. 

Her breath caught faintly, rasping in her throat. She reached for her dressing gown— but stopped. her hands hovered, trembling, and instead… she drifted. 

Soft, near soundless steps, gliding across the stone, to one of the ornate trunks tucked neatly at the foot of the other girls’ beds. The lock gleamed faintly in the torchlight; golden, delicate, little silver filigree shaped like snakes twisting over the clasp. 

Her fingers ghosted over it. She muttered a soft unlocking charm under her breath— the trunk creaked open. 

Inside: silk blouses, delicate lace gloves, perfumes in crystal bottles, jewellery tangled like veins of gold and pearl. Hermione’s hands moved fast, efficient— rifling, sifting, discarding— until she found it: a heavy, gaudy ring. Big, fat stone, wide band, something meant to impress and blind. 

She hissed under her breath, snatching it up. Her thumb rubbed the edge once, then she closed her fist around it, eyes narrowing. Petty theft was below her, but if the pitiful clinking of her coin purse was any indication— well, based on the contents of the trunk, she was sure it wouldn’t be missed. 

With a soft flick of her wand, she transfigured the piece— the gem shrinking, the gold dulling, reshaping into a plain, unremarkable band. A headache bloomed at the back of her skull as she concentrated, focused her magic— conceal, cover, shroud. 

Conceal. Cover. Shroud. 

It had to work. 

It had to. 

Her hands shook. She bit the inside of her cheek, forcing the tremors still, and slipped the ring onto her finger. 

The glamour sluiced over her skin like a waterfall. Her body… blurred. Smoothed. She exhaled, shaky. 

But she knew— oh, she knew— what lay beneath. 

The bruises mapped across her ribs, like fingerprints pressed too hard. The black veins spiderwebbing over her arms, threading up her neck, faint but there, coiling like oil under the surface. The cuts, raw and ragged, curling pink and silver over old scars. The burns, little pockets of ruined flesh along her palms, her forearms. The hollowness of her stomach, the harsh sharpness of bone at her hips, her collar, her wrists. Her face in the mirror— sunken, pale, eyes bruised-purple underneath, a tremor in her jaw she couldn’t quite bite down. And worst of all, crude and deep,  M U D B L O O D. Carved jaggedly into her arm - cursed, glowing, unhealable. 

It was all still there. 

The ring hid it. Nothing more. 

Hermione flexed her fingers once, twice— watching the smooth illusion hold, feeling the awful ache crawling beneath. 

She inhaled. 

Held it. 

Let go. 

No one could see, no one could know. 

The sixth year Slytherin girls’ washroom was silent at this hour. The marble floors glistened, freshly polished— the silver fixtures caught little glints of the torchlight. It smelled like cold stone, faint perfume, damp towels. She felt sick. 

Hermione let the door fall shut behind her, the soft click echoing too loudly in the cavernous space. Her fingers trembled at the buttons of her nightclothes. She peeled them away, layer by layer, swallowing hard, trying not to look. 

She stepped under the water. 

Scalding. 

It hit her like knives, needling down her spine, slapping against bruised flesh and scabbed lacerations, peeling a sharp hiss from between her teeth. Her hands shot out, bracing against the cold tile wall. 

She stood there— head bowed, hair hanging in wet ropes down her back, eyes squeezed shut— as the heat soaked through her skin, sinking deep, curling in her belly like an anchor. 

Her breath came hard, uneven. She pressed her forehead to the wall. 

The water cascaded over her shoulders, down her back, tracing the angles of her spine, the sharp line of her shoulder blades, pooling at her feet. 

Her mind spiralled. 

Harry. 

Ron. 

The time-turner. 

The ritual. 

The pain. 

Her fingers clenched against the tile, her nails scraping faint lines into the grout. 

Stop. 

Focus. 

Hermione inhaled slowly, shakily, through her nose— counted to five— exhaled through her mouth. 

Again. 

Again. 

The water hissed and steamed, clouding the mirrors, ensconcing the room in mist.

When she finally stepped back, her skin was raw, flushed red, the marks hidden under her glamour, her breathing shallow but steady. Her hands shook as she wrapped a towel around herself, patting dry, avoiding the mirror’s accusing flash. 

Hermione shuffled out of the bathroom. 

The heavy wooden door creaked shut behind her, and with it came a sigh— a rush of steam spilling out into the dormitory, curling like a wraith around her ankles before dissolving into the cold, thin air. 

It was as if she left something behind in that mist: her frayed grief, her brittle anger, her splintering edges. 

The dormitory was dim, lit only by the low flicker of the torches in their sconces. The hush was absolute— the delicate breathing of the girls asleep, the faint creak of old wood, the soft brushing of her bare feet across the floor. 

She reached her four-poster, and sat, fingers curled in the towel pooled across her lap. 

The uniform lay there— neatly folded, freshly pressed, all green trim and silver buttons, the snake crest sat imperiously on the breast. 

A humourless smile curled her lips. 

A uniform. 

A costume. 

A shield. 

She slipped her arms through the sleeves, each motion deliberate, as if preparing for battle— pulling the robe across her shoulders, smoothing it over her chest, fastening the tiny silver clasps one by one. Slung the unfamiliar tie around her throat like a noose, bullied her hair back - arms screaming in protest at the effort. 

Her breathing stayed tight, her jaw locked, her eyes flat, and felt the weight of stares before she even turned. 

Across the room, two girls sat upright in their beds— not asleep, not even pretending. They watched her with wary curiosity, something sharp and slitted flickering behind their gazes. 

Hermione lifted her chin slightly, not enough to challenge, but enough to mark herself: not prey. The girls held eye contact a breath too long, before finally looking away. 

Her heart thrummed, and she turned towards the narrow mirror in the corner, set against the wall. 

Her reflection caught her by surprise— not because of the new clothes, the borrowed uniform, the carefully braided hair— but because of the eyes staring back. Baleful. Shadowed. Too sharp, too sunken. 

Hermione’s hands brushed at her collar, smoothing the fabric, and for a moment, her fingers hesitated over the pale skin of her throat. Would they know? Would they see her— see what she was, what she’d done, what she carried inside her bones?

Her fingers curled into fists at her sleeves, yanking the fabric down sharply, covering her wrists, her hands, every pathetic, betraying inch. 

Let them watch, she told herself. 

Let them stare. 

Let them wonder. 

She exhaled once, slow and steady— and stepped out into the corridor.

The air outside the dormitory was chill and heavy, faint traces of lake water curling through the stones. Her footsteps carried softly over the flagstones as she slipped through the quiet, shadowed passageways, drawn by the low murmur of voices ahead.

Near the entrance to the Great Hall a prefect stood waiting— handing out scrolls, clipped maps, a murmured “welcome” to each passing student.

Hermione accepted hers without a word. Her fingers curled tightly around the parchment, eyes flicking over the tight script, the careful inked marks.

Schedule.

Map.

Room numbers.

Class times.

Her name—

Her false name—

scrawled at the top in looping hand.

It barely felt real.

She tucked the papers away, her pulse ticking, the day already pressing heavy against her shoulders.

The Great Hall was near-empty this early. Only a scattering of students dotted the long tables, their chatter muted, their laughter soft. The ceiling arched high overhead, pale grey with the faintest blush of morning.

Hermione slipped through the doors, her robes drawn close, her head down. Her stomach growled faintly; she ignored it.

She reached the Slytherin table, paused only a second, fingers brushing over the platters, plucked a piece of toast, cold and brittle, and slipped it between her teeth. Turning on her heel, she left.

No one stopped her.

No one spoke.

•

Charms passed in a blur.

Hermione sat near the window, light spilling across her parchment, the tip of her quill trembling slightly between her fingers. Professor Viridian’s voice droned in the background— a lecture on charm theory, wand movements, magical intent. Hermione’s eyes flickered from her notes to the demonstration at the front, but her mind gnawed elsewhere.

Her magic felt… wrong today. Heavy in her bones. She could still do the work, but it left her breathless, left her fingers cramping when she cast, like something inside was rusting.

She held herself too still, too composed, felt the way glances flicked toward her, the quiet hush of new faces, the subtle prickle of curiosity. She didn’t look back.

The bell rang.

Students packed up in bursts of chatter and laughter, brushing past her desk— the rustle of robes, the squeak of chairs, the slam of books into bags. Hermione rose slowly, smoothing her uniform sleeves, jaw tight. She adjusted her grip on her wand, exhaling once through her nose.

Potions next.

She walked the stone halls, counting the steps, her pace steady, unhurried. Down the narrow staircase, through the torchlit corridor, the smell of damp stone and alchemical fumes curling in the air.

By the time she reached the potions classroom, most of the seats were already filling— students clustered in groups, voices low, bottles clinking, pages rustling. She saw Slughorn bustling at the front, round and beaming.

Hermione drew a slow breath, and stepped inside.

The air inside had a sharp mineral bite— the kind that crept into her lungs and coiled around her ribs. Hermione sat on her narrow wooden stool, the surface hard beneath her thighs, hands folded neatly in her lap.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

She fixed her gaze on the tabletop, tracing the faint scars and knife-marks carved deep into the wood— initials, symbols, faint slashes from long-forgotten blades.

Around her, the room buzzed softly. She let the noises drift around her, let them coat her skin like a thin film.

Don’t stand out.

Don’t stand out.

“Now, then!” Slughorn’s voice rang out, fat and gleeful, rolling through the air like syrup. Hermione’s lip twitched— indistinct, involuntary. Merlin, she hated that voice. She hated him— his soft, pink-cheeked face, his beady little eyes, his eagerness.

She cursed him silently. The man who had once, in a moment of smug pride, handed Tom Riddle the key to immortality.

She shifted slightly on the stool, letting her robes pool loosely around her. She could feel the stares— feel the eyes on the edges of her skin like biting gnats.

The new girl.

The French girl.

The odd girl.

Let them look.

She smoothed her fingers down the edges of her sleeves, smoothed her fingers over her new ring. 

Hide the veins.

Hide the scars.

Hide the sickness.

A flicker of movement to her right. She caught it— a pale-haired boy glancing at her, too quickly, then away again. A girl with broad shoulders and narrowed eyes. Another, fiddling nervously with the tip of her quill.

She catalogued them all, cold and efficient.

None of them mattered.

“Miss Dufort,” Slughorn called suddenly, smiling wide, his fleshy cheeks dimpling. “Perhaps you can tell us— powdered moonstone? What’s it good for, eh?”

Hermione lifted her head, slow, measured, the way one might lift a blade off a whetstone. 

“Calming,” she said softly, voice cool and even. “Clarity of mind. Used in sleeping draughts, love potions, certain memory restoratives.”

She could have said more. She could have rattled off three dozen more uses, their counterreactions, the precise magical weight. 

She didn’t. 

Slughorn’s face lit up. “Excellent, excellent! You hear that, class? Well done— sharp as a tack!”

The whispers rippled again, subtle— a shift of attention, a pull of breath. 

Hermione dropped her gaze. 

Slughorn bustled on, laughing softly, rattling off stories to the other students, asking questions— one here, one there— as he moved through the room. Hermione tuned most of it out, half-listening, half-counting the heartbeats in her chest. 

She caught a few words here and there:

“…and the infusion mustn’t boil, remember that dear…”

“…excellent dear boy, just excellent work…”

“…yes, yes, but you must be careful with the ratio…”

Her breath hitched faintly. She forced herself still. 

Slow, steady, composed. 

She wondered if they knew— these classmates, these children, these pretty, privileged little things— how close they sat to something feral. How close they sat to a girl stitched together with dark magic, trembling at the seams. How little they understood the world outside their stone walls, their polished wood desks, their shining silver crests. 

Hermione pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, tasting the faint bitterness of bile. She could feel it now, surging under her skin— the sick, burning magic, curling slow and heavy around her bones. 

Her sat two rows in front of her. 

Her eyes flicked up, once, twice— watching the set of his shoulders, the straight line of his spine, the sharp cut of his profile when he turned to answer Slughorn’s question.

Tom Riddle. 

Diligent. Brilliant. Meticulous. 

She watched his hands— long, slender fingers, pale against dark wood— as they measured, weighed, poured, stirred. His movements were graceful, almost delicate, precise as a blade. Every action smooth, controlled, elegant. 

She felt her lip curl faintly. 

It was revolting. 

How good he was. How effortlessly, perfectly good. 

Not that anyone would call him good.

Not here, not yet. 

But they admired him, respected him. 

Hermione’s throat tightened as she watched Slughorn drift by his station, as the boy offered some quiet, perfectly polite reply, as the professor beamed, delighted, indulgent. 

Breathe. 

Steady. 

Her fingers trembled, she hated that they did. 

A hand raised to answer a question, another scribbled a note. Someone laughed softly under their breath. 

Hermione focused on her hands. 

Slow. Steady. 

She crushed the valerian root under the flat of her blade, working it into a fine paste. Her fingers moved almost automatically— measure, weigh, stir, add— her mind half-floating, eyes half-lidded, her pulse thick in her throat. 

The cauldron before her steamed faintly, a pearlescent sheen curling over the surface. The draft’s scent was delicate, sweet, just a whisper of sharpness beneath. A perfect balance. 

Slughorn galumphed between the tables, peering into cauldrons, clapping shoulders, laughing in his soft, rotund way. Hermione’s stomach clenched— a sharp, unbidden twist of revulsion. Fat toad. Fat little collector. How many brilliant minds had he stuffed into his trophy cabinet over the years? How many clever little pets had he polished and prized?

She stirred the potion clockwise— one, two, three— watching the colour shift from opal to pale lilac. Just right. 

The tremor in her hands was noticeable now, far too noticeable. 

She clenched her jaw, willing stillness into her limbs. 

Across the room, soft murmurs floated— students comparing notes, whispering over bubbling mixtures. Someone giggled. A boy muttered a curse under his breath as his cauldron let out a soft pop! and a puff of purple smoke. 

She risked another glance. 

Tom Riddle bent over his parchment, scribbling notes with swift, efficient strokes. 

A model student. 

A prefect. 

The golden boy. 

A fucking lie. 

Hermione fought to keep a leash on her temper. The bile rose sharp in her throat— not just anger, not just hatred, but something colder, more bitter. 

You murdered them. 

You tore the world apart. 

And here you are— here you fucking are—

sitting in the warm, flickering light, learning, smiling—

perfect. 

Her grip tightened on her glass vial. 

Not yet. 

Not yet. 

She dipped her head lower, curling inward, letting the mask slip over her face again. Kept her magic clamped down, tight, under skin that crawled with the itch of sickness, the dark stain she couldn’t shake. 

“Miss Dufort, my dear!” Slughorn’s voice chimed suddenly, too loud, too cheerful. Hermione’s spine snapped straight, her heart jolting against her ribs. 

He leaned over her cauldron, his round face wreathed in smiles. “Let’s see, let’s see… oh! Beautiful work, simply beautiful.” His eyes crinkled at the corners, greedy little magpie eyes flicking from her potion to her face. “Where did you learn such fine brewing, hmm?”

Hermione forced her lips to curl at the corners, a polite smile. She lifted one shoulder in the smallest of shrugs. “Family,” she supplied, feigning embarrassment. 

Slughorn chortled, delighted. “Ah, yes, yes, quite right, of course. Fine lineage, no doubt. France breeds excellent potion-makers.”

She nodded once, perfectly abashed, perfectly distant. 

His eyes twinkled. “I dare say, you’ve quite the talent, Miss Dufort. Have you considered joining—“

But Hermione cut him off— just subtly, just enough— by gently sliding her potion vial forward, placing it neatly on the grading tray. The soft clink of glass on wood. The universal sign: enough.

Slughorn’s eyebrows twitched up— surprised, maybe a touch disappointed— but he recovered smoothly, patting her shoulder with a jovial little chuckle. “Well, well, I’ll look toward to seeing more of your work, my dear, hmm? Keep it up.”

Hermione dipped her head, eyes shadowed under long lashes. 

Yes, yes, she thought darkly. 

I’m sure you will. 

She turned back to her bench, cleaning her tools with quick, efficient movements. She could feel it again— that pressure, that invisible thread pulling at her awareness. She let her gaze flick towards him, sharp and brief. 

She would wait. 

She would watch. 

And soon—

Soon—

•

The Great Hall glowed gold and amber, lit by hundreds of airborne candles that cast flickering shadows along stone walls. Outside the tall arched windows, the sky was bruised violet, streaked with dying light, the sun slipping behind the mountains. The long house tables gleamed under the lantern glow, silverware shining, platters piled high with steaming dishes, the scent of roasted meats and spiced puddings curling through the air. Above, the enchanted ceiling mirrored the dusky sky, stars just beginning to prickle through the darkening clouds, a faint crescent moon rising in the east. 

Yet for all its warmth, the Great Hall seemed distant, faraway— a place untouched by the shadow under Hermione’s skin, the cold in her bones. 

The laughter down the table blurred in her ears. She kept her eyes down, down, fixed on the grain of the wood, on her reflection in the silver goblet, on the way her pulse twitched at the hollow of her throat. 

Just enough to blend. Just enough to pass. 

But when she let herself glance, just once, along the table— there he was. 

Perfect posture. 

Perfect mask. 

Perfect control. 

Her rage had her standing, had her walking, the scrape of the bench against stone nothing compared to the roaring in her ears. 

Enough. 

She slipped away. 

The common room was almost empty, the green light of the lamps turning the walls watery, they looked ill. 

Hermione paused at the threshold, breath catching— because there, by the fire, sat the pale girl. 

Unmoving. 

Unblinking. 

She sat perfectly upright, hands resting on her knees, the fall of her white hair catching the green light, the faint flash of something silver at her throat. Her eyes were fixed on the fire, wide and blank, like she wasn’t watching it but listening to it— hearing something no one else could hear. 

Hermione’s skin prickled. 

She stepped forward, a brush of her foot on stone, as good as a pointed cough. 

And the girl’s head turned—

slowly, so slowly,

like a weight being pulled,

like the moon dragged on invisible strings—

and her colourless eyes found Hermione’s. 

Hermione’s stomach tightened. She jerked her gaze away, hurried down the far corridor; heart beating sharp and high. 

In her dormitory, the dark was thick. The stone walls closed around her; the curtains fell heavy at her back. 

Hermione sat on the edge of the bed, hands resting limp in her lap, head bowed low. Her hair fell forward, shielding her face, the sweat damp strands clinging to her skin.

She let herself breathe— just once, just deeply— and then she curled into the blankets, letting them swallow her whole. 

Her eyes stared into the dark, her chest heavy, her skin writhing with the pulse of restless magic beneath it. 

She thought of the day—

of Tom Riddle,

of the pale girl,

of Slughorn’s sharp eyes,

of the way her body shook beneath the glamour—

and she wondered,

with a weight like a blade pressing to her throat,

if she was already running out of time. 

Chapter Text

All day, Hermione had been watching. In classrooms, corridors, at meals— silent, still, coiled. Like a spider in a borrowed web, learning which threads to pluck. 

Now, in the common room, the air was thicker. 

Slower, more honest. 

Hermione moved through the Slytherin common room like smoke. 

Languid, unbothered, uncatchable. 

The low green light pooled in corners, casting shadows that blurred the edges of bodies and softened faces into masks. Conversations hummed low and velvety. Laughter rolled in the background— controlled, edged, never too loud. Always watchful. 

She moved past them like she wasn’t part of the same species. 

But she saw everything. 

A boy lounged in a leather-backed chair near the hearth, legs spread, one arm draped carelessly over the side. He laughed too loudly at his own remark, the kind of laugh that asked for attention, demanded recognition. People looked. They smiled. 

But no one moved closer. 

Hermione watched the subtle angle of their shoulders— turned away, not toward. Eyes flicked toward him, yes, but in the way one watches a storm, not a leader. 

He was trying; that was the problem. 

He mistook noise for power. 

I’ve seen this before, she thought. Percy. Draco. Men who talk like they’ve already won. 

They never had. 

She didn’t slow her pace. Her eyes moved, precise and cutting, cataloguing posture, tone, proximity. The signs of a hierarchy. Not the spoken rules— those were easy to fake— but the subtle ones, the cracks in people’s masks. 

A flash of movement in the corner— a girl, mousy haired and sly-eyed, leaning in close to whisper something into another girl’s ear. The second girl laughed, sharp and high, then immediately caught herself, glancing at the first girl’s face for approval.  

Not fear, no, deference. 

Interesting. Workable.

Hermione narrowed her eyes. 

That one didn’t speak often. But when she did— people listened. Her hands moved slowly, deliberately, as if she knew people were watching - and liked it. She had a presence that didn’t quite require the performance others did. 

She didn’t demand attention. She invited it. Drew it in like a courtesan might draw in a lover. 

Power like that made Hermione’s skin itch, it didn’t impress her, it warned her.

If it ever came to it, Hermione thought, she’d have to go first. 

Her steps carried deeper into the room. Near one of the tall, foggy windows, a knot of second-years were gathered around a book they weren’t quite reading. One of them kept glancing toward a group of older boys on the other side of the room— eyes bright with something like hope, or admiration. 

Hermione remembered being that small, remembered what it had cost. 

Her stomach curled, she didn’t let it show. 

Instead, her gaze drifted to the edge of the room— to a boy with close-cropped hair and heavy-lidded eyes, sitting alone with a book on his knees. He wasn’t reading. He was watching. Every so often, he looked up, eyes scanning the room like a chessboard. Calm, unhurried. Assessing. 

Their eyes met. 

Only for a moment, but he didn’t look away. 

Hermione held his stare. Let the silence stretch between them, unbroken. 

He didn’t blink. 

Nor did she. 

And then someone nearby laughed, and the moment shattered like glass underfoot. 

One to watch. Not loud. Not clinging. Quiet power. The kind that survives— outlasts. 

She turned slightly, enough to adjust the angle of her gaze without seeming to care. 

The fire crackled behind her, shadows flickering onto the low stone ceiling. Her fingers itched to curl into fists. 

They were predators, all of them— whether they knew it or not. And she was something else entirely. A new girl. A strange girl. A girl who didn’t speak unless spoken to and still carried a kind of silence that clung to her like mist. Not shy— just unreadable. She walked like she belonged there - they weren’t sure she did. 

A pair of older students brushed past her. Too close, deliberate, one of them letting their elbow knock into her shoulder. Not hard— just enough. 

Hermione didn’t flinch. Turning her head slightly, slowly, she looked at them with the blandest expression she could muster. 

They made two grinning wolves, the boy and the girl. 

They didn’t stop walking— but they looked back. 

Hermione filed their faces away, not because she needed to remember them. She already did— if she needed to hurt them later, she wanted to know what it would cost. 

Another group near the fireplace shifted, letting out a shriek of laughter— directed, unmistakably, at her. She didn’t hear what was said— didn’t need to— as her eyes, chips of ice in her head, slid past them dismissively. 

They think I’m quiet because I’m scared, she thought with an internal sneer. Let them think it. It’s better than them guessing the truth. 

Her ribs ached dully. The tension was like a blade between them— an old wound that hummed beneath her skin when the room grew too loud.  

She was already tired, already fraying; she couldn’t stop watching. 

She saw how the tallest boy always stood just a step behind the girl with the arched brows— not beside. Behind. She saw how another boy kept glancing at the door, like he was waiting for someone more important to walk in. She saw how people turned slightly when a name was spoken, and how others stiffened when it wasn’t. The hierarchy wasn’t printed anywhere, it lived in the room like a second language. 

And Hermione was fluent. 

She moved toward the exit slowly, like a rapier being drawn from a sheath. Her heartbeat remained steady; slower than it should’ve, maybe, but steady. She felt the eyes again— not from any one direction, but everywhere. Light, crawling, speculative. 

Still no sign of him. 

Riddle. 

But the shape of him lingered in the room. She could feel it in the way people left silences around his name. In the way their shoulders pulled slightly inward when speaking of power. It wasn’t fear, not exactly, but something else. 

Reverence? Apprehension? She wasn’t sure. Either way, it was worse. Much, much worse. 

He hasn’t approached yet. He will.  

She’d counted on that. 

Still— her skin itched with the tension of being watched, a dozen assessments, appraisals. 

Don’t look weak. Don’t falter. Don’t blink first. 

The stone archway loomed ahead. 

Her fingers curled at her sides, tight. 

One more step. 

Hermione kept her footfalls smooth, her face schooled into cool indifference.

As she reached the threshold, a voice cut across her path. 

“You’re new.”

Hermione turned, ever so carefully. 

A hulking Slytherin boy leaned lazily against the stone archway. Icy blond hair, sharp jaw, a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. He studied her with idle amusement, arms folded, like a cat playing with something small. 

“You’re French, right? That’s what you told the headmaster?” His tone was light— too light. “Funny. You don’t sound it.”

Hermione felt the muscles in her jaw clench. She let her eyes rake up and down him, head to foot, then back up again, like she was measuring something. 

“Funny,” she said softly, “you talk like someone used to being the smartest in the room. But you ask questions like you’re not.”

The boy’s smile twitched— for a heartbeat, something sharp flashed there— but then he laughed, an easy, dismissive sound. 

“Alright, new girl,” he murmured, turning away. “We’ll be watching.”

As she watched his back retreat into the shadows, she stilled. 

Not at the words—

at the we. 

A prickle crept up the back of her neck. 

Oh?

Her eyes lingered on the spot where he’d stood, now empty but somehow heavier. 

There was always a we. Every hierarchy had one— the circle just inside the inner circle. The ones who didn’t need to speak to be understood. And here, in this place, under these shadows— it meant something more. 

She turned. 

Kept walking. 

She rounded the corner— and then, just beyond the nearest archway, her foot caught on nothing. 

A jolt. 

A pulse. 

She staggered— hand slamming hard to the cold stone wall, a sharp, bitten gasp tearing from her throat. Her vision wavered, rippling at the edges like heat haze, blackness creeping in thin, clawing threads. 

Breathe. Breathe. 

Her free hand scrabbled at her ribs, clutching at the aching knot there— a bloom of raw, twisting heat, pulsing under her skin like a second heartbeat. Her fingertips dug in hard, shaking, pressing against bone. 

“Diagnoscere,” she whispered, hoarse— breathless— the spell faltering on her tongue. 

A shimmer ghosted across her vision— the glimmer of of magic tracing along her torso, crackling faintly as it sparked over the black-veined webbing seeping like rot across her side. 

Her stomach heaved. 

No— no, not here—

She shoved herself upright, stumbling forward in a half-run, half-collapse, heart hammering in her ears. The nearest door, the nearest alcove, the nearest anything—

There.

She fell into a side corridor, cold air rushing against her skin, and barely managed to brace herself on trembling hands as she doubled over— and retched. 

A hot, bitter flood surged up her throat— not blood, not quite, but something darker, something tar-thick, slick and burning, streaking down her chin as she shook, panting, bile rising sharp in her nose. 

Her hands jittered against the flagstones, nails scraping hard enough to split. 

Her mouth tasted like ash, pure ash. 

Her body, her magic, the very bones inside of her— they were burning out. 

And when she turned her head—

Dumbledore. 

Standing at the far end of the corridor, half in shadow, his eyes boring into hers— they flicked, once, to the dark smear on the stone, then back to her face. 

“Miss Dufort,” he said, voice mild, polite, almost amused. “Late night?”

Hermione’s heart pounded in her throat, the residual bile burning fierce enough to make her eyes water. Still, she forced her lips into a thin, cool curve. 

“Just restless, Professor.”

The air between them seemed to shimmer.

His eyes crinkled faintly at the corners. “Rest is important.”

She gave the barest nod, palms slick with sweat. 

She saw the way his gaze sharpened— just for a flicker, just for a breath— like he was seeing something she couldn’t hide. 

A thread of magic still rippled noxiously in the air, bitter, acrid, smelling faintly of something burnt. 

Did he smell it too?

“Shall I escort you back, Miss Dufort?” The question hung light, easy. 

But she felt the weight beneath it. 

“No, Professor,” she muttered, gathering her balance, forcing her spine straight. “I’ll manage.”

He studied her— briefly, but not unkindly.  

Then a small, almost imperceptible tilt of his head— and he turned, robes whispering over the stone as he walked away. 

Hermione’s chest stayed tight, her breathing shallow, until his footsteps faded. 

Even then, she didn’t move. 

Her skin crawled with the quiet, unshakable knowledge: he knew. 

Not everything—

but something. 

Chapter Text

The castle was too quiet.

Not silent— Hogwarts was never silent— but still. The kind of stillness that made her fingers twitch.

The staircases didn’t creak today. They paused. 

Like they were listening. 

Doors didn’t open on the first try. Not jammed. Not locked. Just… reluctant. Hinges catching like a held breath, as if the castle was deciding whether to let her pass. 

Paintings turned their faces too slowly. Eyes following her too long. Even the ones that usually dozed or argued or ignored her now seemed to watch— not with suspicion, but interest. 

Something had shifted. Not around her— with her. 

Hermione moved through the halls with practiced ease, her shoulders straight, her hands still.

But she catalogued it all. 

The hush. The hesitation. The way her footsteps landed just a little too loud, like the stone had forgotten the sound of her. 

There was something brittle in the air. Brittle and expectant. 

She’d felt this before. 

Before spells went wrong. Before battles started. Before the first scream. 

But there were no enemies here, no curses flaring to life. Only the castle— and the watching. 

She found herself holding her wand more often than she needed to, palming it like a comfort, a blade. The ritual of it steadied her. 

Her robes were perfectly pressed. Her hair twisted into a severe braid. Every book stacked, every quill sharpened. 

If she kept everything measured, she told herself, nothing could slip. 

But as she turned the corner to the Great Hall, her shadow lagged half a step behind her. And the torches lining the corridor guttered low, just for a moment— all at once. 

Like the castle was exhaling… and she wasn’t supposed to hear it. 

Breakfast was a ritual. 

Not of nourishment— she rarely ate more than a few bites— but of placement. Precision. Presence. 

Hermione sat two-thirds down the Slytherin table. Not close enough to be seen as overeager. Not far enough to be an outcast. Just close enough to observe. 

Her toast sat untouched. Her teacup, full but cooling. She held a fork in one hand like a wand and turned the pages of a Charms textbook with the other— elegant, composed, indifferent. 

Around her, the table murmured. Laughter rose in soft, edged bursts. People spoke in careful tones and meaningful glances. 

She watched them all. 

Watched the way one girl leaned too far into her whisper— a tell. Watched how another boy made space for a sharper one without complaint— a power shift. 

There was comfort in watching. Comfort in cataloguing. Names, glances, tells, fractures. 

If she could track the hierarchy, she could dismantle it. If she could dismantle it, she could survive it. 

Across from her, a red-haired girl dipped her spoon into porridge, never once looking down. Her ruddy eyes flicked from face to face— calculating. 

Hermione met her gaze. Cool. Unbothered. 

She returned to her notes without blinking. 

This was her armour: smooth movements, measured speech. The appearance of ease, the reality of control. 

No one questioned her silence. They didn’t have the context to. 

To them, she was just the French girl— polished, strange, brilliant, quiet. 

Not the girl with decay in her veins. Not the girl whose magic whispered warnings in the back of her mind, the girl whose very presence made doors hesitate. 

She lifted her teacup and took a slow sip. 

Bitterness, sharp and scalding. 

Good. It burned, she liked that it did. 

•

The corridor to Transfiguration stretched long and barren, quieter than it should have been. 

Hermione walked it alone.

She always did— not out of preference, but design. The other Slytherins filtered out in twos and threes, all low murmurs and shared smirks. She waited. Counted the seconds it took for the hallway to clear. Ensured that her footsteps echoed. 

But today, something about the space felt wrong. Tilted. Like the castle itself had been rotated a few degrees off-centre. 

The portraits didn’t speak as she passed. One, a woman in velvet, watched her from the corner of her gilded frame with narrowed eyes— not hostile, not welcoming. Just…studying. 

The brass weight in her pocket— today’s assigned material— felt too warm against her palm. She hadn’t held it long, but it pulsed slightly, like it remembered something it shouldn’t. 

Hermione straightened her spine. 

Ahead, the heavy door to the Transfiguration classroom stood ajar. 

She took one last breath of the corridor’s stillness, shoved the unease down into the cavern of her stomach— and stepped inside. 

The door clicked softly shut behind her, sealing out the corridor’s hush— but the quiet followed her in. 

Dumbledore was already speaking. 

He stood near the front; wand in one hand, the other gesturing lazily toward a flock of enchanted moths fluttering in slow arcs above his desk. The chalkboard was half-covered in looping notes, spell matrices curling like ivy. 

The air hummed with controlled magic— not heavy, but focused, the kind that required stillness to perceive. Students sat unusually straight in their seats, wands already drawn, frowns blooming on their faces in concentration. 

Hermione slipped into her place without drawing attention.

No one turned, but she felt eyes brush over her nonetheless. 

She placed the warm brass weight carefully on the desk. Rolled her wand once between her fingers, and watched. 

Dumbledore smiled at no one in particular as he flicked his wand. A moth spun midair into gold, then bone, then ash— and disappeared. He didn’t explain. He didn’t need to. 

The performance was the lesson. 

Hermione leaned back slightly in her chair, trying not to look like she was bracing for impact. 

He made it look effortless. 

Dumbledore moved like music. 

Hermione hadn’t expected that. 

She’d known him as a symbol. A myth draped in half-truths. The man who died before the final war ever began. Her Dumbledore had been a portrait on a wall, a tomb on an islet. Revered yes— but always distant, always gone. 

There was joy in his instruction. Not softness— no, there was steel beneath his whimsy— but joy. 

He made advanced Transfiguration feel like theatre; like spellwork was meant to be beautiful. 

He didn’t just instruct. He performed. 

And the class leaned in for it. 

Hermione didn’t. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction, but she watched. Of course she did. 

It was hypnotic. 

And unfair. 

Because Tom Riddle sat three seats to her right, and his transfigurations were perfect. 

No. Not perfect. Beyond. 

Today’s task: transfigure a brass scale-weight into a moth— not just the form, but the movement, flight, texture. It was a spell that required layering: a base transformation, then animation, then lightness. The kind of work that she knew she’d feel in her bones. 

His moth was already hovering. Its wings were iridescent. Wrong for a moth, almost beautiful enough to be unnatural. 

And Dumbledore said nothing, walked past it without a word. 

Didn’t pause. Didn’t praise. Didn’t even look at him. 

Not a glance. Not a flicker. 

You see it, she thought. Of course you do. She hated how that felt. That pinch in her chest— not for Tom, but for the injustice of it. She hated him, yes. But this— this was silence as strategy. 

This was deliberate absence— wounding in its cruelty. 

It was the sort of thing that shaped a boy wrong. 

You’ll feed that monster by pretending it isn’t there, she thought. You’ll ignore it until it grows teeth. Until it turns and bites. 

She gripped her wand tighter. 

Her brass weight sat motionless. Still warm from her palm. She exhaled, cast— and the metal buckled wrong. It folded in on itself, misshapen, a half-born thing twitching with wings that sparked not with magic, but heat. A pulse shot up her arm like snapped wire. She flinched. 

The desk rattled. A whine of pressure broke from the thing. 

It wasn’t a moth. It was a mistake. 

Hermione’s vision sharpened to pinpoints. 

No one turned. 

No one said a word. 

Except inside her— her magic shrieked. 

It slammed against her ribcage— wild, cornered, desperate. She clamped down on it. Bit her cheek. Corrected the wandwork like her life depended on it. 

It did. 

The second spell silenced the movement. The weight collapsed. She’d overcorrected— too sharp, too violent. The brass lay motionless. 

No one noticed. 

But the castle had. 

She felt it all around her— the watching. 

The walls were too close. The light too low. The space between her and the others didn’t feel real. 

She needed to go. 

Needed to get up, to move, to breathe—

Her eyes travelled toward the door. Then to Tom. 

His gaze was on his parchment. Not on her. 

And yet. 

Her magic still thrashed like it had been seen. 

Dumbledore passed behind her. His shadow grazed her desk. 

Nothing. 

Her hands were steady, but her body was shaking. 

The air in the classroom was too thick, the light too pale. 

She felt trapped. 

Like the stone around her wasn’t architecture— it was a great, gaping maw, ready to swallow her whole. 

Soon, she promised herself. 

Just a few more minutes. 

She reached for her quill, too quickly. It knocked sideways. Ink splattered across her parchment— dark, blooming, violent. 

She scrubbed at it with the edge of her sleeve, feverish, until the page tore straight through. 

No one noticed. 

After what felt like an eternity, chairs scraped back. Students filed out like ants. 

She stood, slowly. Steady. Step by step. 

Someone bumped her shoulder as she crossed the threshold— careless, laughing— and for a breath her wand was in her hand. 

She didn’t remember drawing it. 

The boy didn’t notice. Walked on. 

Hermione stared at his back for a long, cold second. 

Then she put the wand away, pressed her nails into her palm to ground herself— and kept walking. 

Not down the corridor. Not around the first bend. Not when her breath hitched halfway up her throat like it didn’t know how to be air anymore. She just moved— fast, smooth, silent— a thread pulled through stone. 

The castle walls narrowed. 

They didn’t actually, of course. She knew that. But the atmosphere felt thinner, the shadows denser. Her bag tugged against her shoulder like it weighed three times more than it had at breakfast. 

Her wand hand ached. She hadn’t noticed the way she’d been gripping it so fiercely under the desk. 

She forced herself to slow near a window. 

Outside, the lake was grey. Still. Flat as lead. 

She pressed two fingers to her stomach, just below the sternum, where the ritual scars ran deep and black beneath skin. It wasn’t pain, not exactly. Not now. 

It was pressure. 

Like something inside her wanted to move. 

Calm down, she thought, vicious. You’re fine. You fixed the spell. No one noticed. You’re fine. 

But the castle had noticed. 

She could feel it. In the way the wall beside her throbbed faintly under her palm. In the way a torch flared as she passed - too quick, too high. The air clung to her skin. Heavy. Damp. 

She adjusted her collar. Smoothed her sleeves. 

Control. 

Control. 

The doors to the library stood ahead— tall, quiet, open just enough to admit her shadow. 

Hermione took one more breath. Not deep. Not slow. 

She moved down the aisles without urgency. Her fingertips traced the spines of the books as she passed— slow, deliberate, rhythmic. Calfskin, cloth, cracked leather. The motion steadied her. The texture of the world felt real here. 

She let her hand pause over titles she’d already memorised. Pulled a few at random— old Arithmancy, obscure Magical Theory, even a crumbling volume on wandless intention she didn’t need.  

It didn’t matter; the weight helped. 

Hermione arranged her table like a soldier setting traps. 

One book left open— not for reading, just to look purposeful. Two others fanned beside it, angles precise, deliberate. Her inkwell uncorked. Parchment weighted in place. Chair turned slightly toward the exit. Back to the stone wall. 

Visibility. Control. 

It didn’t soothe her, not really. It gave her the illusion of ritual, and right now, that was enough. She couldn’t afford to look hunted. 

Even if every nerve in her body screamed that she was. 

She sat motionless for what felt like hours, her spine rigid, her shoulders tight, her fingers worrying the corner of the parchment until it softened under her nails. 

She didn’t read. 

Couldn’t. 

The letters on the page swam and flickered like they were resisting being seen. She blinked them back into focus, jaw clenched. 

Her magic whispered beneath her skin. 

Wrong. 

Twisted. 

More so than usual. 

Like it had caught the scent of something. 

Or someone. 

And then— he was there. 

She didn’t hear him enter. She felt it. Like a pressure drop - like gravity shifting its allegiance. 

Tom Riddle stood three shelves away. Not moving, not browsing. Just… there. 

Facing the spines. 

Facing her. 

Hermione didn’t look up. 

Not at first. 

Her body stayed still, but her blood roared. Her magic bristled— hot and alive and angry— curling like smoke around her spine. Warning her. 

Not just presence. Not just danger. 

Judgement. 

Not today, she thought. Not after Transfiguration. Not while my ribs are burning and my magic wants to eat itself alive. Not now, not ever, and especially not from you—

But the moment stretched. 

Too long. 

She felt it when he moved. Just enough. Just slightly. Staring. Watching…

Fine. 

She lifted her head— slow, precise, like drawing blood.

Their eyes locked—

and her magic screamed. 

It clawed at her throat, tore through her gut, flared sharp and furious beneath her skin like a lightning strike held just beneath the surface. She didn’t move. Didn’t blink. The only evidence of it was the faint, delicate crackle of hoarfrost blooming behind her, curling ghostlike across the nearest windowpane. 

His gaze didn’t shift, he didn’t acknowledge it. 

He didn’t smirk. Didn’t narrow his eyes. Didn’t tilt his head like he sometimes did when he was in class. 

He looked at her like a man confirming a theory. Like he’d already known, and now just needed to decide what to do with her. 

You smug, serpentine fuck, she thought, rage churning in her gut like acid. Say something. Raise an eyebrow. Do anything, so I know what comes next. So I know what game we’re playing. 

But he didn’t. 

He gave her nothing. 

No challenge. No threat. Not even amusement. 

Just assessment. Just… cold, clinical confirmation. 

It was worse than anything else he could’ve done. 

She felt her lip twitch, just once, and crushed it flat again with sheer force of will. Her body was still, her face a mask, but inside—

You think you’ve seen me? You have no idea what I’ve done to get here. 

Her fists tightened in her lap. Her nails bit into her skin. 

She didn’t blink. Neither did he. 

And then he left. 

He didn’t glance back. Didn’t touch a book. Didn’t linger. He walked away like the conversation had already happened. Like her answer had already been given. Like her fate had already been filed away under something useful. 

Hermione sat there long after he vanished. 

The hoarfrost melted behind her - gradual, silent. 

She stared down at the book she hadn’t read and hated the way her hands shook. 

Her magic still stormed beneath her skin.

Not from fear. From fury. 

And far from the library, another girl stilled. 

Just for a moment. 

Like she’d felt something shift— exactly as it was meant to. 

Chapter Text

Hermione sat on the ledge of the Astronomy Tower, her legs swinging slowly over open air. Far below, the castle stretched in silence— black stone, sleeping windows, the brittle shimmer of moonlight on slate. A breeze tugged at her robes, her hair. It whispered against her skin like a warning.

She didn’t belong here.

Not just in the tower. In the year. In this body. In this magic.

The stars above were too bright. Too many.

She tried to count them. Failed.

It had been a mistake to come up here. Too exposed. Too vulnerable. But she couldn’t stand the library, or the dorm, or the echoing silence of her thoughts.

She’d set her wand beside her. Easy reach. Just in case.

Her hands curled against the stone— steady, measured. Her ribs ached in their usual way. Her magic pulsed, low and erratic, scraping under her skin like it wanted out.

Then— a sound.

A single, deliberate step.

Stone scraped softly behind her.

She didn’t turn.

She didn’t have to.

Tom Riddle stepped into the night as if it had been waiting for him.

The air shifted with him. Not colder, not warmer— just… denser. Charged. Like the tower itself was holding its breath.

He didn’t speak.

Of course he didn’t. He never needed to.

She watched his shadow stretch across the stone beside hers. Crisp, upright. His stillness more unsettling than movement.

Finally— like dropping a stone into water:

“It’s quiet up here.”

That voice— that horrible, civilised voice. All smooth enamel and gleaming edges. A scalpel made of charm.

“That’s why I came,” she said.

“Most don’t.”

“Most are sheep.”

A silence. The breeze moved again.

“You’re not afraid of heights, then.”

Her voice was flat. “Only the fall.”

“Hm.”

He made no move to sit. Of course he didn’t. He wouldn’t lower himself to share stone with her. He stood just far enough to keep her peripheral.

Predator distance.

“You don’t speak much,” she said coldly.

“I speak when there’s something worth saying.”

Her nails dug into the ledge.

“And tonight’s monologue is what, exactly?”

He didn’t answer that.

He took a step closer.

She didn’t move.

“You carry it,” he said, low. 

That stopped her breath.

“That stain.”

Still quiet. Still polite.

“Dark magic isn’t invisible. Not to those who know where to look.”

She blinked. Once. Slowly.

The stars above swam, disinterested.

Her heart did not race— she refused to let it.

But her pulse thrummed like a war drum in her throat.

He had no proof. No spell. He was baiting her. Just… to see.

Fucker.

Her fingers tensed on the ledge.

“That’s a pretty theory.”

“I know what it feels like. That residue. The echo it leaves.”

“You’re imagining things.”

“No.”

That one word. Cool. Certain.

“I see it,” he continued. “In the way you hold your wand. The way your magic pulls wrong in the air.”

Her magic twitched— tensed, like a dog before it bites. 

She breathed through her nose.

He’s trying to get a rise out of you. Don’t give it to him. He’s a child playing god.

A handsome corpse in waiting.

A monster dressed as a prefect.

And still— her magic surged. Not fear. Not even panic.

Rage.

Something primal and ancient inside her snarled.

“You think you’re clever,” she said. “But you’re obvious.”

“Obvious?” A hint of amusement there. Or maybe he just wanted her to think so.

“You trail after me like a dog. You stare like you’ve never seen a girl before.”

“I’ve seen many,” he said smoothly. “They don’t interest me.”

“Then why the hell are you here?”

“Because you do.”

The silence snapped taut between them.

“Not you,” he added, softer. “Not your cleverness. Not your little secrets.”

“Your potential.”

Her stomach turned. Her magic howled.

You don’t get to measure me. You don’t get to prod and pry and decide. I see what you’re doing. Try to fit your hands around my throat and I’ll make sure you lose them.

“You don’t know what I am,” she said, her voice shaking from the effort of keeping her magic at bay. 

“No,” he said. “But I will.”

Then— the shift. It was subtle. Felt, not seen.

Something pressed, just behind her eyes. A trickle. A splintering cold.

Legilimency.

Not a push, not a force— no, a slither. Something refined, unnatural. A surgeon’s blade in velvet gloves. It didn’t knock. It didn’t ask. It didn’t even consider that it might need permission. Like a maggot creeping between ribs. Like oil sinking into cloth. He wasn’t trying to take— he was simply… removing the “no.” It just… slid. Between thoughts. Around memories. Too smooth to be accidental. Too soft to be clean.

Hermione felt it the way one might feel a silverfish scuttling across bare skin. Not pain— something worse. Contamination.

His magic was all surface.

Polished. Gleaming. Perfect.

And beneath that shine, it was rotten. Sterile and joyless. Stripped of warmth, stripped of wonder. As if he’d boiled the soul out of it.

It found nothing.

He moved through curated fragments— carefully walled-off rooms, echoes of false emotion. And when he slipped deeper— she felt it, that searching, that hunger—

He missed them.

Ron’s laugh. Harry’s hand on her wrist.

Gone.

His magic passed them, brushed the wrong corner, and kept going.

He didn’t even see it.

Didn’t see them.

Didn’t know what he’d missed.

Her grief coiled— not just pain now, but wrath.

A betrayal, not just of boundaries, but of memory.

She gritted her teeth. Her own magic reared like a wild animal, frothing, snapping at the invasion. But she didn’t fight with force. She didn’t scream.

She shut the door. Slowly. Deliberately. Like a guillotine.

She turned to look at him fully, eyes narrowed, shoulders tight.

“Don’t.”

“You’re occluding,” he observed, unbothered.

“I’ll do more than that next time.”

He only smiled.

Hermione’s breath caught— not from fear, but from how wrong it was.

It wasn’t a smile. Not really. Just the shape of one.

No warmth. No shift in his eyes. No human edge behind it.

It looked like something mimicking a person— as if the thing inside him had studied what comfort was supposed to look like, and decided this would do. Like draping a blanket over a dog’s cage and calling it safety.

Her stomach twisted.

It wasn’t for her benefit. It wasn’t for anyone’s benefit.

It was a placeholder. A gesture performed by something that didn’t feel, only calculated.

He tilted his head.

“I imagine it’s been… difficult,” he said.

The sentence felt pre-written. Like it came from someone else’s mouth. A script. From a play he hadn’t watched, only skimmed. Like he knew people said such things, but hadn’t cared enough to ask why.

The cadence was careful. Kind, almost. Almost.

Hermione blinked once— slowly. Her gut twisted.

He was trying on the words like a child might try on grief, wondering how it should fit. They dangled from him, poorly tailored, like a borrowed skin he didn’t know how to wear.

She didn’t respond. Just watched him. Waiting.

His eyes held steady— a fraction too wide. Like he thought that was how empathy looked.

There was no warmth in it. No depth. Just the chilling sense of something performing for her benefit. An imitation of humanity he hadn’t yet perfected. Like a snake flicking its tongue at a laugh it didn’t understand.

Her magic spat against him again, low and sharp.

“You don’t care,” she said flatly.

The corner of his mouth ticked. Not quite a smile. Not quite denial.

“No,” he admitted. “But I thought you might.”

She wanted to throw him off the tower. No wand. No spell. Just her hand on his chest and a push.

He looked at her like he knew it. Like he wanted her to.

He stepped back, just one step. No bow. No farewell.

And then— he turned and left.

He hadn’t sat. Hadn’t touched her. Hadn’t raised his voice.

But she felt flayed. 

Alone on the tower again, Hermione let her breath out in one sharp, shaking rush.

The stars no longer looked like stars. They looked like holes— punched through a black curtain— waiting to swallow her.

Chapter Text

He was kneeling in the mud when she saw him.

Not a boy. Not really. Not anymore. Too large for his frame, too quiet for his size. Shoulders hunched like he expected the world to strike— and had learned not to flinch. Just absorb it. Let it bruise.

His hands were enormous, still clumsy with youth. Still soft in that way no one had managed to beat out of him.

They cradled something small. A bird— twitching, feather-ruffled, one wing shattered like dropped glass. It trembled in his palms, and he… whispered to it. Nothing spell-like. Nothing sharp or showy. Just sounds. Soft, low, half-sung. Not meant for anyone else.

Hermione watched from the corridor above. Still. Silent. One hand flat to the cold glass.

He didn’t know she was there.

Of course he didn’t.

He only had eyes for the thing dying in his grip.

He couldn’t have been older than fifteen.

Already a target. Already a secret, a slur, a shadow passed between students like a dare.

Despite that, he still bent his back to the ground like it was sacred.

She watched him reach for the bird’s wing. Not to fix it— no, he knew it was too late. Just to steady it; to soothe the last moments. To make sure the end was gentle, if nothing else in its life had been.

Behind him, voices rose. Sharp-edged. Slytherin boys, smirking at the size of him, the softness.

Hagrid didn’t flinch. Just hunched lower— as if his very shape offended the air.

He didn’t look up, didn’t defend himself.

His whole body was folded around the bird like a shield, a nd Hermione felt it— down to the bone— the agony of being too kind for the story someone else wrote you into.

He should’ve been in class. Laughing. Eating. Dreaming.

Instead, he was alone. In the cold, the dirt, trying to hold one tiny piece of life together with hands the world already called monstrous.

She turned away.

Not because she didn’t care.

Because she couldn’t bear to see the moment it stopped breathing. Couldn’t bear to watch how he’d keep holding it anyway, until its warmth fled.

Because she already knew: no one would help him bury it.

That’s what Tom saw.

Tom Riddle, with his perfect wandwork and colder gaze, had found it offensive. That softness - that unwarranted gentleness. He saw it in Hagrid and stamped it out like a weed. Called it weakness. Proved it so. Set the world against him and smiled as it folded.

But innocence— real innocence— didn’t die so easily.

It sank.

Into soil. Into silence.

It rotted like old fruit and split its skin and seeded anyway.

What Tom crushed, the earth kept.

And from that mangled shape, something still grew.

Kindness, still. Bent-backed and mud-stained. Nurturing hands that had learned to flinch but never to stop giving.

It hadn’t bloomed in sunlight. No— it grew in the shadow of cruelty. It flowered in defiance of what had been done to it. And that, Hermione thought, was the truest kind of strength.

Not rage.

Not vengeance.

But tenderness that refused to die.

Not a threat. Not a beast.

A boy.

A boy who wanted to love something enough that it stayed.

And he ruined him, sullied him.

Made the world believe in the monster before the boy could prove otherwise.

Hermione’s throat ached, her eyes stung with unshed tears, she knew what it meant to be rewritten. To be handed a name, a fate, a punishment for someone else’s violence.

She turned before he could ever know she was there.

But the image stayed with her:

Mismatched coat.

Gentle hands.

A bird gone still.

And a grief so old, it had already learned not to cry.

Hermione walked the rest of the way alone. Not just through corridors— through time, through memory, through all the lives folded small beneath the stone.

Her steps echoed. No one followed.

The castle gave no comfort. Only silence.

And then— tile.

The girls’ bathroom was cold. Not the kind that made you shiver— no, this was deeper. Still. Like the stones themselves remembered, the kind of cold that came from too many memories pressed into tile. Too much grief clinging to porcelain and steam.

The mirrors were cloudy. The silver piping tarnished. One sink dripped, sharp and steady as a heartbeat.

She didn’t know why she came.

No— that wasn’t true.

She knew.

There was something rotting beneath this place. She could feel it through her shoes, in the bones of the walls. The castle was watching again. But not with curiosity. With memory. Somewhere below her feet, nestled in coiled pipe and ancient stone— the mouth of the serpent still slept.

She walked to the furthest cubicle.

It didn’t open.

It never opened.

A faint ripple of cold moved beside her. Then a breathy sniffle.

Myrtle.

Hermione turned her head.

“Oh,” the ghost said, lips curled. “You.”

The voice snapped through the stillness like a whip.

“They talk about you, you know. In here. The girls.” A flicker of satisfaction crossed her face. “They don’t like you much.”

Myrtle floated near the ceiling, arms crossed, her face twisted in a sneer. Her hair curled wildly around her translucent head, and her eyes glittered with a venom only the dead could carry so long.

“Come to mock me too?” she hissed. “That’s what they all do, eventually.”

Hermione said nothing.

“I see the way they look when they come in here. Girls with perfect teeth and perfect hair, giggling about their boy troubles while I rot here!”

She spiralled lower, robes billowing, voice rising in pitch.

“Do you want to see the spot where I died? Shall I re-enact it for you? Would that help you sleep better at night?”

“I’m not here to laugh,” Hermione said calmly.

“Oh, aren’t you?” Myrtle’s voice cracked with scorn. “Don’t think I don’t know what I look like. Pathetic little Myrtle, sniveling in her toilet. Pathetic Myrtle, too ugly to live—”

“I said I’m not here to laugh.”

The words hit hard. Flat. Final.

Myrtle blinked.

For a long moment, she floated in silence. Her mouth trembled. Then— softer:

“I just wanted to cry,” Myrtle whispered. “Is that so bad?”

Her voice was soft. Wet. Not dramatic. Just… tired.

“I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t even want them to notice me. But they did. They always did.”

Hermione said nothing.

Myrtle turned. Her translucent face pinched with remembered rage.

“They laughed when I spoke. When I walked. When I breathed too loudly. Olive Hornby said my hair looked like sea-slugs. Sea-slugs.”

Hermione moved to lean on the sink. The cold bled through her uniform.

Myrtle floated closer. “I came in here to cry. And then I heard it. That voice. Like ice in my head.”

Hermione’s stomach turned.

“Heard the sink hissing. I opened the door to shout at whoever it was, and— and—”

Her voice cracked.

Hermione knew how that sentence ended.

Myrtle receded into herself, like she was remembering. Her lips trembled. “It wasn’t fair. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t even want to be alive. But I didn’t want to die.”

Hermione closed her eyes.

Her fingers traced the rim of the sink, smooth and worn.

Beneath this very basin, a tunnel curled downward into the dark. Into the Chamber.

She knew where it led. Had been there, once— in another time, another body, another life.

The bones had long since vanished. The blood cleaned. But the rot never left.

This was where it began. Not just Myrtle’s death. His death. The first.

The waste of it made her sick.

Tom Riddle had seen the soft spill of magical life and decided to use it. He had looked at a girl’s corpse and thought yes. Yes, this will do.

He had watched the grief ripple out— Olive Hornby haunted, students mournful, corridors sealed— and thought perfect.

He’d built a Horcrux with it. Beneath stone carved with snakes. With spells older than Britain itself. With magic Hermione didn’t fully understand, only felt. Like oil slicked in her blood.

She opened her eyes.

Myrtle was staring at her. Something raw in her expression.

“I didn’t go toward the light.”

Myrtle’s voice cut through the stillness like a hairline crack in glass.

Hermione looked up.

The ghost hovered lower now, nearer the cracked mirror, her translucent form dimmer at the edges. Her voice wasn’t sharp anymore. Just bitter. Soft in the way curdled milk is soft.

“I could have, you know. I saw it. Bright. Warm. Like everything I ever wanted. Like someone was finally waiting for me.”

Hermione said nothing.

“But I didn’t go.”

“…Why?”

Myrtle’s lips curled. Not into a smile. Not quite.

“Because I was angry.”

She turned, spinning slow and weightless, her hair billowing like smoke.

“They all thought I was nothing. Just the weird girl. The loud one. The one who cried too easily and snorted when she laughed. They laughed at me when I was alive. And they forgot me when I wasn’t.”

Her eyes flicked to Hermione, gleaming.

“So I stayed. I stayed to remind them. To make them flinch when they heard the pipes groan. To ruin every laugh in this bathroom with my misery.”

She floated downward, hovering just above the sink now. Her voice dropped into something ragged, low.

“If they couldn’t make space for me while I was alive… then I’d haunt their reflection until they couldn’t look at themselves.”

Hermione swallowed, the words in her throat ran dry.

“Yes,” Myrtle hissed. “Not justice. Not peace. Revenge.”

She hovered still for a moment— eyes sharp, hollow, aching.

“And I liked it,” she added quietly. “At least I was finally something.”

Hermione’s hands curled tight on the porcelain. Her magic seethed.

“You were always something,” she said.

Myrtle blinked. Her form flickered. “You don’t believe that.”

“I do.”

“Then why did you wait so long to say it?”

Hermione didn’t have an answer for that.

“Do you know what happened?” she asked.

Hermione hesitated.

“I know you were alone,” she said. “And scared. And it wasn’t your fault.”

Myrtle looked at her for a long time.

Then, almost inaudibly: “Thank you.”

It hit harder than any scream.

Hermione swallowed. Her throat felt thick. She didn’t look away.

They stood in silence. One girl who’d died too young. One who didn’t belong in time at all.

Hermione thought of Harry. Of Ron.

Their laughter. Their ashes.

The pain came sharp. Sudden. She pressed her palm to the sink. Ground herself in it.

This wasn’t about Riddle anymore.

It was about every wrong he had folded into the walls.

She would unravel it all.

No matter how many names it had.

No matter what she had to become to do it.

•

The corridor was empty.

No students. No portraits. No breeze through the windows.

Hogsmeade weekend. The kind of day meant for laughter— for pockets full of sweets, for mittens and scarves and the blush of cold cheeks.

Hermione could almost hear it, even from inside: the distant hum of joy.

They didn’t know. Didn’t feel the grief that soaked these stones, didn’t know the names they walked over.

She walked slowly, her footsteps echoing.

They were out living— and she was here, tracing the outline of what had been lost.

She was still thinking of Myrtle’s voice— the way it cracked like bone when she spat her fury. Still thinking of the dirt under Hagrid’s nails. The way his hands trembled when he touched gentleness.

The air curdled slightly. Like the magic had twisted to make space for something. He always arrived like rot— never abrupt, never loud, just a quiet spoil, spreading beneath the skin.

“Dufort,” said Tom Riddle.

The silence hung heavy between them.

Then, soft and sharp as a switchblade. “We’d like to extend you an invitation.” 

That was it.

No flourish. No speech.

Like her name had been pencilled onto some list of outcomes, and he’d come only to confirm what was already inevitable.

She didn’t answer.

Not right away.

She thought of a girl dying in a bathroom, mocked into invisibility. Of a boy kneeling in the dirt, still trying to be good after the world told him not to bother.

She thought of what this castle let happen.

What it covered. What it forgave.

Her fists clenched at her sides.

She would play this role. She would paint her face with calculation, wear the uniform, sit beside monsters. For every girl who died alone. Every boy turned hollow. Every gentle soul crushed beneath the weight of someone else’s lie. Every drop of magic twisted into something monstrous.

She turned to face him. Her eyes were steady. Her voice colder than frost.

”Fine.”

And she walked away first.

Chapter Text

The Room of Requirement gave her nothing warm.

Bare walls. Dust that hadn’t settled in years. A mirror without a frame.

She stood in the centre. Hands trembling. Mouth dry.

She didn’t mean to speak.

“You’re not here.”

But the mirror rippled

“Aren’t we?” Harry’s voice. Or something like it. From behind her.

She turned.

Empty.

Then—

A laugh. Familiar. Wrong.

Ron stepped out of the corner like he’d always been there. Shoulders slouched. Socks uneven.

“This place suits you,” he said. “Dark. Damp. Full of secrets.”

“You’re not real,” Hermione whispered.

“Doesn’t matter,” Harry murmured, closer now. His eyes were too green. Too glassy. Like reflections in still water.

“You left us.”

She backed away. The room stretched with her, growing longer, taller, wrong.

“I didn’t— I came back—”

“Not fast enough,” Ron said.

“Not at all,” Harry added.

Her knees buckled. She didn’t fall.

“You should’ve died with us.”

She pressed her hands to her ears. Didn’t help.

“You think this is justice?” Ron asked.

“You think this is penance?” Harry’s mouth didn’t move when he spoke. The words echoed from the mirror.

“You’re wearing the skin of the thing that killed us.”

“You walk his halls.”

”You speak his name.”

“You smell like him.”

“No.” Her voice broke.

The mirror didn’t crack. It smiled.

“Say it, Hermione.”

She curled in on herself, fists clenched.

“Say what you did.”

“Say who you chose.”

“Say who you left.”

She breathed.

Shaking. Rattling. Like something coming loose.

“You’re dead,” she whispered. “Morte. Fuck off.”

The room fell silent.

But one shard of the mirror still shimmered.

And in it, her reflection stared back.

With slitted eyes.

The slitted eyes blinked.

Not hers.

Not human.

She staggered back, breath ragged, chest heaving like she’d been running for hours.

“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no—”

The Room didn’t change.

No warmth. No light. Just stone. Stone and echo and glass.

She gripped the wall like it might steady her, like anything could. Her fingers scraped mortar. She didn’t notice the blood.

“They were right.”

The words weren’t hers. Not quite. Slipped from her throat like something she’d swallowed long ago.

“You should have died.”

Harry again. Or her guilt in his shape.

“At least we died together.” Ron this time.

Hermione squeezed her eyes shut. The world didn’t disappear.

She could feel them. Not their bodies— their absence.

The place they had filled in her chest. Their laughter. Their bickering. The way Harry’s jaw clenched when he lied. The way Ron tapped things when he thought. Stupid, human things.

Gone.

She dropped to her knees.

And it hit.

The silence.

That they were dead and she was here. Wearing her cleverness as armour, trying to outwit time, trying to outplay him, as if she could undo what had already rotted.

As if she wasn’t already rotting too.

She reached for the mirror.

Her reflection didn’t match her movements.

It tilted its head. Slowly.

Mocking.

The eyes had gone wrong. Too wide. Too black.

“You’re already halfway to him,” it whispered.

No lips moved. Just sound. Thick and oily.

“You think you’re infiltrating.”

“But you’re becoming.”

“No,” she gasped. “No, no—”

The mirror showed her standing over a corpse. The face was obscured. It didn’t matter.

Her wand was in her hand. She was smiling.

The real Hermione sobbed once— then slapped the glass.

It didn’t break.

“STOP—”

The Room heard her.

And responded.

Books spilt from nowhere. Pages blank. Screaming. A desk collapsed under its own weight. The walls stretched further. Taller. The silence became pressure— unbearable, suffocating. Magic crept into her lungs like tar.

She clawed at her collar.

“I did this for them,” she gasped. “I did this for—”

But who was left to hear?

Ron was gone.

Harry was gone.

And all that answered her was her own breath, strangled in her throat.

The Room warped again.

The mirror shifted— and it was her again.

Just her.

Crying.

Cracked.

And in the reflection, something behind her. Watching. Just out of frame. Always just out of frame.

She turned.

Nothing.

“I’m still me,” she continued, her voice small, so horrifically small. “I’m still Hermione—”

The walls didn’t argue.

But they didn’t agree, either.

And then—

Like it had always been there—

Her beaded bag.

Torn. Bloodstained.

The one she’d carried through war.

She reached for it with trembling hands.

Her fingers brushed parchment.

A letter, once soaked in river water, dried stiff by wand-heat. The edge still singed.

Ron’s handwriting. A joke about stealing biscuits. A postscript— you’re brilliant. I mean it.

She folded over. Bent at the middle like she’d been kicked.

And wept.

No noise. No words.

Just the kind of sobs that didn’t belong in time. The kind that cracked bone. The kind that could echo for centuries.

And in the mirror, the slitted eyes softened.

Just for a second.

Before they vanished completely.

It started with footsteps.

Light ones. Familiar.

Then another. Heavier. A limp.

And then voices.

“Hermione.”

“You forgot me.”

“You left.”

“You’re still breathing— why are you still breathing—”

She turned.

The Room had changed.

No longer stone and shadow.

Now: bodies.

Rows of them.

Encircling.

Colin Creevey, pale and smiling, a hole in his chest.

Fred, grin twisted, jaw dark with blood.

Lavender, neck torn, one eye cloudy.

Tonks, Remus, Dobby, Moody, even her old Potions Master— hovering. Watching.

Even the ones she barely remembered.

Even the ones she couldn’t.

And there— her parents.

Not how they looked in life.

But as ideas.

As voids.

Faceless.

Gone.

They began to speak in unison:

“Why you?”

“Why are you the one left?”

“Was it worth it?”

“What did you save?”

She backed up. Tripped. Staggered.

“STOP—”

They stepped forward.

One voice became many.

A hymn of the damned.

“Brightest witch of her age—”

“Prodigy with blood on her hands—”

“You left us—”

“You let him live—”

“You’ll never be clean again—”

She dropped to her knees.

Laughed.

Laughed like it cracked her ribs. Laughed like it was the only sound she had left. “Brightest,” she shrieked. “Yes, that’s me! That’s me, isn’t it?! The clever one! The one with the plan!”

Tore at her hair. Clutched her head.

“Except you’re dead!”

“And I’m still here— I’m still—”

Her voice broke.

She screamed.

Screamed like she could tear through time with her voice. Screamed until blood rose in her throat.

Until the faces blurred. Warped. Melted into ash and names and echoes.

And then—

Silence.

Not peace.

The silence of ruin.

She sobbed.

Shaking, folded on the ground like a marionette with cut strings.

Hands pressed over her ears.

Eyes wide.

Whispering now. “I’ll fix it. I’ll fix it, I’ll fix it—”

The Room didn’t move.

But something shifted.

A chair. A desk. A mirror.

A new door— waiting.

The ghosts didn’t leave.

But they watched.

And she knew, somewhere deep in her blistered soul—

This was what it meant.

To wear grief like armour.

To go mad with purpose.

To remember.

Even when the remembering tore you apart.

The ghosts did not vanish.

They stilled.

Like breath held.

Hermione dragged herself upright— barely. Her limbs trembled. Her hair clung to her face. Her throat burned raw, torn open by too many screams, too much memory.

She didn’t look at them. Not anymore.

She looked at the door.

No— not a door.

Not anymore.

Now: a pedestal.

Alone. Silent.

Waiting.

Atop it—

A book.

Her book. The Tales of Beedle the Bard.

The spine was cracked in all the same places. The ink faded in familiar curls. The corner still folded on page thirty-two— she had done that, once, years ago, when she hadn’t had a bookmark and didn’t want to crease it too badly.

But this wasn’t hers.

She knew that now.

Because this one whispered.

Only faintly. Not words. Not yet. Just the sound of pages turning before she touched them. Like the book was reading itself.

She opened it.

The handwriting was hers.

But the words weren’t.

Each page bled with corruption. Spells she’d never seen before, names she’d never spoken, margins scribbled with notes like:

• Too merciful. Try again with ash.

• Pain leaves a better residue.

• A wand is not necessary when you understand cost.

• Bury it in bone. That’s where memory stays soft.

Some lines were underlined three times, jagged ink slashing like fury:

• “Love is just hesitation with better branding.”

• “Nothing haunts a curse like the hand that cast it.”

• “You cannot grieve and win. Pick one.”

And over and over, at the bottom of each page:

“Rewrite the story.”

Her throat locked. She flipped faster.

There were diagrams of hearts. Not romantic ones— anatomical. Dissected. Labelled. Dark veins running through them with notes like “This is where loyalty lives” and “This clots first.”

There were pictures of herself. Etched in ink. Watching.

In some, she was crying. In others, laughing. But in all of them, her eyes had been blacked out with thick, bleeding ink.

She flipped again— page after page scrawled with notes.

Until she hit the last one.

Blank.

Except for a sentence.

In her own hand.

Shaking. Familiar.

“It’s okay. You can become the monster. Just aim your teeth the right way.”

She stumbled back from the book, chest heaving, eyes burning.

The mirror caught her.

And she froze.

It wasn’t the same face.

It couldn’t be.

Hermione— no, the thing in the glass— stood taller. Straighter. Still, but humming with something awful just beneath the skin. Hair darker. Eyes colder. Her features were hers, yes, but not worn the same. This Hermione hadn’t wept. This Hermione hadn’t crawled through ash and begged the dead to stay.

This Hermione smiled.

Slow. Sharp.

Like she knew something.

Like she had already done it.

“I’m what you could be,” the reflection said softly.

Hermione shook her head. “No.”

The mirror tilted. Or the room did. Or she did.

“You’re tired. All that grief. All that restraint. And for what?”

She couldn’t move. Her feet were heavy, her mouth dry.

“You were never meant to survive as you are,” the mirror-Hermione whispered. “They made you clever. They made you sharp. But they never let you bite.”

Her smirk deepened.

“Let me help you.”

“No,” Hermione breathed. “I’m not— I’m not like him.”

“Oh, lovely girl…” The reflection leaned in. Her face was made of shadow now. Her teeth were too many, too white. “He’s not the monster you should fear.”

Hermione clutched the edge of the sink.

The room was freezing. Her breath came in clouds.

“You’re already halfway here.”

“No—”

“You like it. The power. The knowing.”

The reflection’s voice slid through her like oil— thick, cold, clinging.

“Don’t you remember what it felt like?”

Hermione’s throat tightened. She backed away from the mirror— slow, slow— as if the air itself might rupture.

“When you made her scream.”

A flicker.

Not a memory. A possession.

And she was there— saw it in her mind's eye.

Ash in the air. Screams down the corridor. The sick-slick weight of blood on stone. Bellatrix Lestrange, bound to a chair, hair wild, chest heaving. That perfect, cruel mouth no longer laughing.

She was begging.

Not with words— no, never that— but in the frantic twitch of her limbs, the wide whites of her eyes.

And Hermione—

Hermione had stood over her, wand raised, voice quiet.

“Crucio.”

Not shouted. Spoken. The way Bellatrix had once taught her. And it worked.

Bellatrix arched like her spine might snap.

Her scream cracked the stone.

And Hermione— Hermione didn’t flinch.

She watched.

Wrath had been a song in her blood. A song she hadn’t known she could sing. And it had soared through her— every note a rebuttal, a scream, a defiance of every time she’d bitten her tongue or swallowed her pain. The woman who carved mudblood into her skin was breaking beneath her.

And Hermione had not felt guilt.

Not then.

Only satisfaction.

Only clarity.

Because it had felt like justice.

The mirror twisted. Her reflection leaned forward, grin growing— sharp as glass.

“You think you’re different from him?” the reflection whispered.

“But I saw it. The way your hand didn’t shake.”

Hermione’s voice was barely a breath. “That wasn’t me.”

“It was,” the mirror said gently. “It is.”

Another crack split the glass— right down the reflection’s eye.

Still, she smiled.

“You tasted what it meant to undo someone. And you didn’t look away.”

Hermione’s fists shook. Blood trickled down her palm.

Her mouth opened— then closed.

Because the worst part wasn’t the memory.

It was how clean it had felt.

Like something that had always lived inside her, finally let loose.

The Room shifted.

It always did - to meet a need.

But tonight, it didn’t listen to her.

Tonight, it answered the part of her that should never speak.

The walls pulsed. The bookshelves vanished. The lamps dimmed into ash.

And stone crept in— wet, cracked, familiar. A floor she’d knelt on before.

Hermione blinked— but the illusion didn’t fade.

No. Not illusion.

That same memory.

But not in her mind— around her.

The Room of Requirement had called it forth. Plucked it from the marrow of her, still warm. It rebuilt Malfoy Manor from memory and blood.

And Bellatrix was there.

Alive.

Chained to that same iron chair.

Head lolled. Eyes wide. Lip bloodied.

“You wanted this,” her reflection whispered.

Hermione’s feet moved on their own. Wand in her hand.

Bellatrix twitched. Looked up, grinning, that same mocking smile. “Go on, mudblood, you have to mean it…”

Rage lit the air.

Hermione raised her wand. “Crucio.”

No hesitation. No pause.

The scream that ripped out of Bellatrix wasn’t theatrical this time. It shattered.

Her limbs jerked. Her head slammed back. The chair groaned beneath her.

Hermione watched.

Watched as the witch soiled herself, watched as her fingers grasped at nothing, watched with nothing but cold detachment.

Not weeping. Not trembling.

Silent.

The Room pulsed around her— pleased.

And when it finally faded, when the stone peeled away and the mirror returned, her reflection was waiting. Older now. Sharper. Smiling with her mouth.

“You didn’t look away.”

Hermione staggered.

She tasted iron.

Her knuckles were white. Her throat dry.

And the mirror whispered:

“She screamed for you. Just like you once screamed for her.”

Then:

“You’re not him.”

“But you could be.”

She clutched her head.

“No,” she whispered.

But the Room didn’t care what she wanted.

The mirror rippled. Warped.

And from its depths came laughter— hers, but twisted. Gutter-deep and too bright.

The air shifted again.

She turned— and the shadows had shape now. Bodies. Too familiar.

Harry. Ron.

And— her.

Naked.

All of them.

Limbs tangled. Fingers clenched in hair. Moaning. Writhing. Wracked with something that wasn’t pleasure— no, it was grief, rage, ecstasy torn loose from the root. Skin scraped raw with desperation.

Their eyes— open— found hers.

And smiled.

Smiled.

“Stop,” she rasped. “Stop, STOP—”

She stumbled back, hit the wall, hands flying to her face. She dug her nails into her scalp, clawing, clawing—

They laughed.

Harry, Dark Mark etched into his chest. Ron, a mass of bloody pulp. Her own dark twin, perched in the centre like a queen on her throne, stroking their faces with tenderness Hermione had never known.

“You left us,” rasped Ron, his voice wet and thick.

“You let us die,” Harry added.

Her reflection tilted its head. “And you loved it. The way it hurt. The way it made you burn.”

She screamed. High and wild and broken.

“I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t—”

They moved closer. She curled in on herself. Nails at her temples. Rocking.

”Please, please, please, please…”

The bodies unravelled. Like ash in water.

Gone.

Only the mirror remained. And her.

But she was on the floor now. Shaking. Soaked in sweat and silence.

The Room quieted.

No comfort in it.

Just the echo of what had been.

Of what still waited.

Inside her.

She was on the floor again.

Didn’t remember falling.

Didn’t remember standing.

Her knees were raw. Her thighs burned.

Nails— bitten to the quick— dug into soft flesh, dragging up welts like tally marks.

One for every scream. One for every lie.

One for every time she almost forgot.

She rocked back and forth. Slow at first. Then faster.

Then faster.

“He’s not— he’s not— I’m not— I’m not—”

Words tangled like thread, like hair in a drain, blocking her throat.

“No no no NO—”

Her hands shook. She slapped herself. Once. Twice. A third time, just to feel real.

Then she laughed.

Sharp. Too loud. Ripping from her like steam from a cracked pipe.

“Look—” she whispered.

“LOOK AT ME—” she was roaring now— voice amplified by her magic— roaring with a vehemence that had the stones reverberating. “Am I pretty now, Tom? Am I useful now?”

There was no one in the room. Just her.

Just her and the voice.

The mirror, fogged and silver, watched her.

And her reflection moved first.

It tilted its head.

Smiled. That same awful smile. That snake’s smile.

“You like it,” it whispered. “The power. The knowing. The hurt.”

Hermione slammed her fist against the glass. Cracked it.

“You don’t know me.”

A soft laugh, like a wind chime. “I am you.”

“You’re not—”

“You made her scream.”

The words clanged like a bell.

She jolted.

“NO.”

“You made her scream. And you liked it. Don’t lie to me.”

“SHUT UP— shut up shut up shut up—”

She slammed her fists against her head, clawing at her scalp.

Blood under her fingernails.

She didn’t feel it.

“You’re dead,” she whispered.

To Harry. To Ron. To all the ones standing there now.

She didn’t remember calling them.

Didn’t remember them arriving.

But there they were— hands outstretched. Writhing. Melting into each other. Wet sounds. Gasps.

Their mouths opened and her voice came out.

“You left us.”

“You let us burn.”

“You liked the screaming.”

She screamed then, too.

Bent double on the floor, forehead to stone.

Tears, spit, blood, snot. All of it.

“STOP— please stop, I didn’t— I tried, I—”

Her hands were covered in red. Or ink. Or something darker.

She didn’t know.

“I didn’t forget,” she croaked. “I didn’t— I won’t.”

The thought snapped through her.

The horcruxes.

She hadn’t spoken of them in weeks. Not aloud. Not even to herself.

But they lived inside her. Gnawed behind her ribs. Whispered when she slept.

She scratched the words into her skin:

H O R C R U X E S

“Horcruxes,” she sobbed. “Horcruxes, horcruxes, horc— hor— fuck— fuck—”

“Diary.”

“Ring.”

She spat the words like curses.

She didn’t remember how many times she repeated them.

Maybe forever.

The stone pulsed beneath her.

She pressed her forehead to it. Hard. Wanting to split her skull. Wanting to bleed it out.

The image of the basilisk’s eyes flared behind her lids.

Slitted. Ancient. Patient.

“STOP LOOKING AT ME—”

She screamed so loud it broke something in her throat.

And then she was sobbing again.

Deep, ugly sobs that made her whole body shake.

She curled in tighter.

Her breath hitched and stuck.

Her voice frayed to nothing but whispers:

“…not him. Not like him. I won’t be. I won’t— I won’t—”

She was curled on the stone, knees drawn to her chest, nails red and raw, the scent of copper thick on her tongue. Her throat was hoarse from screaming. Her skin throbbed with scratches— welts carved by her own hand, her own refusal to forget.

The room had gone still.

Her echoes had died.

No more voices. No more Harry, no more Ron, no more writhing, whispering shadows. No more laughter behind her eyes. Just her heartbeat, slow and punishing. Just the cold.

She tried to breathe.

Tried again.

And then—

A sound. Not outside. Inside.

A word.

Horcruxes.

It came small. A whisper.

She latched onto it.

Horcruxes…

Like a lifeline. Like a rope in the dark. She mouthed it again, lips split.

Horcruxes.

She couldn’t remember anything else, her mind a cracked plate struggling to hold anything steady.

But she clung to it anyway.

Her hands trembled against the stone.

And for a long time, that was all she was.

A girl.

In a room made for survival.

Clutching the shape of her purpose like a weapon with no edge.

Chapter Text

The stone was cold against her cheek.

Hermione blinked. Once. Twice. The world swam— edges ghosted, breath rattling shallow in her chest. Something sticky clung to her hands. Her mouth tasted of iron and bile.

She didn’t move

Didn’t speak.

Didn’t dare.

Silence swallowed everything. The Room was hollow now, emptied of its violent storm. No more visions. No screams echoing from the walls, no snake-eyes in the mirror. Just her. Crumpled on the floor like a broken marionette. Shaking.

Blood had dried on her thighs. Her arms. Under her nails.

She remembered pieces, small flickers, things that her mind dredged up unbidden. A laugh that wasn’t hers. A scream that was.

The memory clawed its way up her throat— snapping teeth, twisted limbs, Harry’s face, Ron’s hands— and she gagged. Swallowed it back down, pressed her forehead to the floor and breathed.

One inhale.

One exhale.

One more.

Her voice rasped in her skull: Stupid girl, you almost shattered. You can’t afford that. You’re supposed to be better than this.

A sob tried to escape. She bit it back.

No more crying.

Her knees ached. Her shoulders throbbed. Every joint felt misplaced.

The mirror across the room was cracked in two— right down the middle. Her reflection looked back, split and silent. One-half of her face was calm. The other ruined.

“You’re not…” she whispered, but the sentence collapsed before it reached shape.

How long had she been here?

An hour? A day?

Would anyone have noticed if she hadn’t come back? If she hadn’t gone to class?

You don’t belong here.

You’re going to die here.

And no one will mourn you.

Her fingers dug into the stone until her nails tore open again. That sharp sting anchored her.

“I am here,” she whispered, hoarse. “I am here.”

She sat up slowly, limbs trembling, ribs aching. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and stared down at the ruined fabric, at her shaking hands. Red under her nails. Red across her knuckles. Ink, maybe. Blood, probably. Memory, definitely.

There was a word scratched faintly into her skin— she couldn’t remember writing it.

Horcruxes.

A laugh bubbled up from her throat— dry, cracked, hysterical. She clamped a hand over her mouth.

No. Enough.

“You’re not finished,” she said aloud, voice trembling. “You’re not done. Get up.”

She didn’t want to move.

Didn’t see the point.

What was the point, really?

No one was looking for her. No one would miss her. If she stayed here, if her body slumped again and never rose, would the Room even care? Would it open its doors for someone else one day and reveal her bones on the floor?

Would they know what she’d tried to do?

Would they care?

She thought about sinking into the stone. Letting the weight of magic and failure and time press down until she disappeared.

She could stay. She could sleep. She could unravel quietly, like a frayed thread finally giving out.

And for a long, endless minute, she considered it.

But—

There was still something.

Not strength. That was long gone. Not hope, either.

Just… something sharp. Brittle. Ugly.

A thread, thin and taut and mean.

She pictured his face. Cold and cruel and unbothered. She pictured him winning— living to become everything she was sent back to prevent.

And something snapped.

Not loudly. Not with fire.

Just a whisper in her throat. Cracked and soft.

“Not yet.”

That was all.

But it was enough.

“Not yet,” she whispered again, under her breath. Over and over like a mantra, or a prayer, or a curse.

Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.

It didn’t feel like strength.

It felt like spite.

“Not yet,” she whispered, one last time.

And the Room heard her.

Not with thunder. Not with warmth. There was no sweeping music, no golden light. Just the sound of old stone shifting— slow, reluctant. Like even the castle doubted her, but moved anyway.

The darkness didn’t lift, not really. But something softened. Somewhere in the shadows, a single lantern guttered to life, its flame small and steady.

Hermione flinched at the sudden glow.

Then turned.

A basin had appeared. Bronze. Ancient. Water shimmered inside, still and silver. A towel lay folded beside it. Fresh clothes, too— pressed, precise, the school robes she hadn’t worn in days. Clean underthings. Stockings. A hairbrush. Bandages. A small tin of healing balm. A salve for spellburn.

A mirror had grown from the stone.

Unbroken.

She stared at it.

The Room hadn’t healed her, but it had offered her the tools.

Her body still ached. Her bones still felt borrowed, her skin too tight, too raw. But she moved anyway— to the basin, to the mirror. Her reflection made her breath catch. Red-rimmed eyes. Dirt-smeared cheekbones. Blood at the corner of her mouth. Her hair a wild, snarled halo around her face.

She looked like a creature, not a girl.

She dipped trembling fingers into the basin. The water was cold. Bracing. She didn’t flinch. She scrubbed her face until her skin burned, scraped dirt from under her nails, picked dried blood from her cuticles.

Then she pulled off the torn remnants of her blouse. Wiped her thighs clean, revealing the faded ghost of the word she had carved into them.

She didn’t cry.

Not anymore.

Her wand was still warm from where it had slept beside her on the stone.

She raised it to her mouth first, whispered a charm to soften her cracked lips. Another for the cut on her cheek. The scratches. The ache in her shoulders. The bruises down her ribs. Every healing spell landed like a knock at a locked door— barely working, the magic dull and thick. Enough, it was enough.

Then her hand brushed against the ring on her finger.

The glamour still held. The illusion of smooth gold over something far uglier. She should take it off, let her skin breathe. Tend to whatever lay beneath.

But she couldn’t look at it. Not yet.

Instead, she twisted the ring gently— adjusted it so it didn’t dig into the bruised skin.

She rinsed her mouth. Brushed her teeth slowly, carefully, like it meant something. Brushed her hair next— every tug felt like penance. By the time her hair lay over her shoulders— puffed with frizz but no longer snarled— her muscles burned, but she didn’t stop.

She dressed in silence. The robe felt too crisp, the collar too starched, but it was something. A version of herself she could wear again.

“I’m here,” she said, voice soft but steeled. “I’m—“

Her words died as a flicker of movement bloomed in the corners of her vision, a curl of scorched parchment settled on the basin’s edge. Too crisp at the corners. Still smoking faintly.

Hermione froze.

The room stilled with her.

No footsteps. No sounds. Just the soft scratch of a message that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

She stared at it. It didn’t move. Didn’t speak. But she knew.

Not conjured by the Room, not a trick of the mind.

Real.

Her hands were steady when she picked it up.

Black ink, scorched edges. Five words:

The forest. Tonight. No wand.

That was all.

Her stomach turned.

The Room didn’t react. It didn’t darken or quake or echo with warnings. It simply watched her— as much as a room could, as if it knew she wouldn’t run.

Of course she wouldn’t run.

She didn’t ask how it got there. She didn’t ask who had sent it. She already knew.

The Knights.

She read it again— and again. As if there might be more hidden between the lines, as if the paper might breathe if she held it long enough. She folded the parchment, tucked it into her sleeve.

No wand, she sneered mentally. How quaint, they thought her an idiot. Or soft. Or obedient. Let them.

Her eyes caught the handle of the ornate hairbrush.

"Mutatio subtilis," she whispered. "Ligamentum Formare." 

The wood shifted— slowly at first, groaning like it didn’t want to obey. Then it yielded. The handle stretched, thinned, coiled back into itself like ribbon. The bristles sank into the surface and vanished. What remained was leather. Supple, dark, and fitted with a hidden sheath. The kind of holster you had to strap on with both hands. The kind that clung tight to your thigh and never slipped, not even when running.

She held it up, tested the weight, the seams. It wasn’t beautiful, it didn’t need to be, it was clever.

Good.

She pulled up her skirt, and stepped into the holster. Drew the strap up her leg and buckled it high, above the muscle. It bit into her skin.

Perfect.

She slid her wand inside, let her skirt drop. The fit was snug, invisible beneath her robe.

Let them search her sleeves, her pockets, her boots.

They wouldn’t find it.

She ran a hand down the holster’s curve, just once, like sealing a secret. Then she stood straighter.

When she stood before the mirror this time, she didn’t look better, she looked ready.

•

She descended into the Forbidden Forest like she was sinking into water— thick, cold, and quiet. The castle disappeared behind her with shocking ease, its warm torchlight swallowed whole by the trees. What remained was the press of shadows. The sound of her own breath. The stretch of path ahead, veiled in fog and laced with frost.

Fog clung to the underbrush like rot. Low-hanging branches snagged at her robes, skeletal and brittle in the moonlight. Each step stirred the forest floor— leaves crackled, twigs splintered, soil shifted. Too loud. Too human. The night was watching her. She could feel it in her bones.

You shouldn’t be afraid. You chose this.

The trees leaned in like sentries. Their limbs hung crooked, as though they were whispering to one another about the trespasser among them. Hermione kept walking, faster than she needed to, one hand brushing the wand holstered to her thigh— the one she’d fashioned herself, her own secret defiance. The holster was warm beneath her robes. A pulse. A reminder.

The path wound tightly between the trees. It shouldn’t have been visible, not at night, not this deep into the forest— but it glimmered faintly, like something had marked it for her. Or her alone. A trick of the light, perhaps. Or something worse.

To her left: animal tracks, half-frozen in the soil. To her right: a fallen tree, split clean down the middle, the bark charred black. Something had burned through here— and not cleanly. The air tasted like old fire. Like something had died in it.

A branch cracked in the distance.

She stilled. Waited.

Nothing followed. No voices. No movement.

She started walking again.

But fear is a luxury. You’ve earned it.

The wind picked up, threading through the trees in thin, high whistles. It sounded almost like words. Not English. Not human. Just the forest, exhaling.

She kept her eyes ahead. Focused on her footing. The deeper she went, the less the path resembled anything manmade. Now it was only instinct— her own or someone else’s— pulling her forward through the twisting dark.

Another hundred steps. Another breath. Her legs ached.

A second branch snapped, closer.

She turned, fast. Nothing. Nothing.

Her wand hand twitched.

She didn’t cast anything.

Didn’t speak.

Didn’t run.

She simply walked.

Walked through the silence, through the fog, through the clawing dark. Walked past the tree with the bloodied claw marks. Past the scorched grass, the felled stone, the place where the air turned metallic in her throat.

Walked until the path no longer twisted— until it opened.

Until the trees gave way.

And the clearing waited for her like a held breath.

You’ve bled for this. Walk.

The clearing opened up like a wound.

It was wide, ringed with thorn-thick trees, their branches warped inward as if even the forest was afraid of what lay inside. The ground had been scorched in a perfect circle— blackened earth, no snow, no frost, nothing alive. In the centre stood seven figures.

Waiting.

Their faces were masked.

Not illusion or glamour— no, far worse. These were real masks, hand-carved and brutal in their simplicity. Bone-white. Hollow-eyed. The kind of white that looked ancient, like something dredged from beneath the earth and scrubbed clean of identity. They were not beautiful. They were not theatrical. They were symbols. Worn like ritual, like armour, like threat.

Each Knight stood equidistant from the next, forming a perfect circle around the centre— a geometry of menace. Their postures were statuesque, motionless, as though they had been standing there long before she’d arrived and would remain long after she left. The clearing was theirs. The night was theirs. The silence bowed to them.

And in the centre, at the eye of their storm—

Tom Riddle.

Unmasked.

Of course he was.

He stood tall, poised, barefaced beneath the silver-blue light. No need to hide. No need to disguise. His beauty was almost startling in contrast to the faceless horror that surrounded him, but it made him more terrifying, not less. He was the kind of beautiful that didn’t belong in a world with masks like those— sharp, refined, untouched by the rot that seemed to stain the ground beneath their boots.

They flanked him like spectres. Seven figures, uniform in stillness, wrapped in the same long black robes that blended with the shadows. Their masks turned toward her in unison, in silence. No names. No voices. Just blank bone faces staring her down.

Hermione could not tell who was who. That was the point.

The masks weren’t just meant to intimidate. They were meant to erase. No friends. No allies. Just roles to be played. Identities to be discarded. The ritual of belonging meant you ceased to be anything else.

Tom alone kept his face.

He didn’t need anonymity.

He was the one they followed.

He was the only name that mattered.

Of course.

Hermione did not move forward.

Her breath stilled in her chest. Her hands were sweating, even in the cold. The wand holstered to her thigh suddenly felt like a joke— childish, naïve. She remembered every word of the parchment. Come unarmed. The holster was hidden. They wouldn’t find it. But still— still, the threat of its existence pulsed like a sin beneath her robes.

What if this was a trap?

What if they’d known all along that she wasn’t who she claimed to be?

What if this was punishment for bleeding in front of them?

What if they made her kneel?

Her stomach twisted violently. Her mouth was dry.

You wanted this, she reminded herself. You wanted in. You bled for this. You don’t get to be afraid now.

But fear didn’t listen to reason. It scraped at her ribs, coiled tight in her lungs. Not panic— Hermione didn’t panic. But dread, yes. Heavy and crawling and old.

They would humiliate her. That much was obvious. They would find the deepest vein and dig their claws in. They would look at her like she didn’t belong— because she didn’t. They would smell the future on her skin, the fracture in her magic, the blood in her bones.

She stepped into the clearing.

And the circle closed behind her.

The Knights of Walpurgis didn’t speak. They didn’t even move.

Then, Tom raised one pale hand.

And she knew:

This was not an invitation.

It was a judgement.

And she was already on trial.

Tom didn’t speak at first.

He let the silence press in, let it crawl beneath her skin. The Knights didn’t move. The trees didn’t move. Time itself seemed to hush and wait.

Then—

“You do not belong here.”

His voice was smooth. Low. Unhurried. Like he was reciting a truth so obvious, it hardly bore repeating.

“You were not raised in these halls. You were not chosen. And yet, here you stand.”

He stepped forward, slow and precise, boots soundless against the earth. The Knights made no gesture to stop him. This was his court, and they were its silent jury.

“I’ve seen your kind before. Clever. Cunning. Full of convictions you do not understand. You walk through fire thinking it cannot burn you— only to scream when it does. And scream, you did.”

He smiled without mirth. “Don’t worry. They all do, in the end.”

He circled her. Not like a predator— like a scholar studying an object under glass. Dissecting.

“You came here thinking you had the right. That your pain makes you dangerous. That grief is power. But grief…” He paused, eyes gleaming. “Grief is noise. Power is silence.”

“You want something. All of you do. But the difference between you and us—” his gaze swept over the masked Knights, then landed on her again “—is that we are not afraid to admit it. We are not ashamed to claw for it. We are not fools enough to dress hunger in the rags of righteousness.”

He tilted his head.

“So tell me, strangeling: What makes you think you deserve to stand among us?”

Her pulse jumped.

“And more importantly— what will you sacrifice to stay?”

She said nothing.

What could she say?

The silence tightened. Around her throat. Around her ribs. Around the flickering, failing parts of her that wanted to run.

Tom Riddle stepped forward from the circle. The others did not move. Their bone-white masks caught the moonlight like the faces of ghosts— or executioners.

But he was barefaced. And worse: calm.

His voice carried like a blade drawn slow.

“There are no accidents within this forest. No spectators. No charity.”

He turned slightly, as if addressing the others, but his eyes never left Hermione.

“You stand before us not because of merit, nor invitation, but audacity. You’ve entered a space not meant for you— one built by blood, bound by oath and protected by silence. We don’t ask why you’re here. We already know the answer.”

A flicker of something unreadable passed through his eyes. Then it vanished.

“What we demand is proof.”

He withdrew the vial with a flourish— casual, yet deliberate— and held it aloft like it meant something more than just liquid in glass.

“This is not a poison. Though it may feel like one.”

The masked Knights didn’t speak, but their stillness was thunderous.

“It is not a confession. Confession implies guilt. And guilt is weakness.”

He took one step closer. The space between them vanished.

“This is a stripping-away. A reckoning. A truth laid bare— with no performance, no veil, no mask. You may lie to professors. To friends. To yourself. But not to us.”

His voice dropped lower, almost fond. Almost cruel.

“You will answer. And we will listen. And if you are found unworthy, you will not be asked to leave. You will be removed.”

The vial shifted in his fingers.

“You may choose to walk away. Now. Before you drink.”

A beat.

He tilted his head slightly.

“But we both know you won’t.”

He extended the Veritaserum to her, like an offering to a god. Or a sacrificial lamb.

“Drink, Hermione Dufort. Show us what lies beneath.”

She didn’t move. Not at first.

The vial glinted in his hand, catching the moonlight the same way the masks did. Pale. Unfeeling. Cold.

Her stomach turned.

Not from fear— not just fear— but from the rawness of it all. The pageantry. The perfect circle of masked monsters watching her with quiet judgement, like wolves waiting to see if the lamb would step forward willingly. Her heartbeat felt too loud. Too human.

You could still walk away.

But she didn’t.

Because of course he was right. Of course she wouldn’t.

She wasn’t here for dignity. Or mercy. Or survival. She was here for something meaner than that. She was here for war.

Her legs moved before her mind caught up— slow, deliberate, the way a condemned woman might walk to the gallows.

She took the vial from him.

Her fingers brushed his.

They were warm.

She hated that.

For a moment, she looked down into the swirling silver within the glass. It looked harmless. Like water.

Her throat tightened.

This is it. This is where it all comes apart. The threads you stitched together— the lies, the name, the careful silences. You don’t get to hide anymore. It all burns now.

Her reflection stared back at her from the vial’s curve: pale, drawn, eyes ringed with the ghosts of sleepless nights. The girl beneath the mask.

You’re going to tell them everything.

But her fingers stayed steady.

Good. Let them hear it. Let them choke on it.

She tilted her head back, and drank.

It was bitter.

Not the sharp, stinging kind of bitter, but something subtler— slow, spreading, like rot beneath floorboards. Like old paper curling in fire. It coated her tongue in metal and something too clean, too clinical. Like antiseptic. Like poison in a pretty bottle.

It shouldn’t have had a taste. Veritaserum was meant to be clean, clinical— like a scalpel.

But this wasn’t that.

She swallowed.

Then again.

The second time was harder. Her throat resisted like it knew what was coming.

At first, nothing.

Just the wind shifting.

A mask tilting.

Tom’s eyes on her— unreadable, inescapable.

Then it began.

It wasn’t pain, not exactly. More like unspooling. Like something sharp and invisible hooking itself behind her ribs and tugging. Tugging. Tugging.

Her breath hitched.

She blinked hard. Once. Twice.

And suddenly her skin felt wrong. Too tight. Her clothes heavy. Her heart too loud. There was heat in her cheeks and behind her eyes— not the blush of shame, but the creeping heat of exposure.

It was like being peeled open.

The Veritaserum didn’t ask for permission. It didn’t root gently. It dug. Through memories, through instincts, through secrets pressed into the bones. She could feel it combing through her, mapping the cracks.

There’s no hiding now.

The next breath she took burned.

She pressed her hands against her sides like she could hold herself together by force alone. But already, the silence had shifted. The Knights could feel it— the way the air had thickened, the way her mask had slipped. The ritual had begun.

She kept her chin high.

But her mouth had already gone dry.

They would ask. She would answer.

And whatever she said— whatever truth this wretched serum dragged from her gut— would brand her forever.

A step forward.

Just one— soft, deliberate, but it cracked like thunder in the stillness.

She couldn’t see his face. None of them. Just the flash of a black boot, the drape of his robe brushing dead leaves, and the way his bone-white mask caught the moonlight: blank, round-eyed, leering without expression. It glowed faintly in the dark, and something about that sickly pallor made her stomach turn.

He was massive, standing taller than the others. Broader too, maybe. Confident in a way that suggested he thought he could make her flinch.

He wasn’t wrong.

Hermione’s breath caught as he raised his hand— slow, languid, taunting— and tipped his head in mock civility.

Then the voice.

It slithered through the mask like smoke through a keyhole. Greasy, smug, thick with the kind of leer you could hear even without seeing the smile.

“Well,” he purred. “Tell me, Dufort. Do you taste as clever as you speak?”

The silence that followed was immediate— and brutal.

Not even the leaves rustled.

Some of the masks turned toward him, the gesture almost imperceptible. Someone half-laughed. Then stopped, quick and sharp, as if Tom had looked their way. Hermione couldn’t tell.

Her spine locked. Her stomach flipped.

The question coiled around her like a whip, and the Veritaserum surged beneath her skin— hot, sick, urgent.

She wanted to lie.

Merlin, she wanted to lie.

But the words were already clawing their way up.

And she knew— whatever answer came out of her mouth, it wouldn’t be hers.

It would be the truth, or something like it.

Her lips parted.

Not because she wanted them to— not because she had some clever retort primed, some venomous barb that would reduce him to ash— but because the serum demanded it.

The truth burned behind her teeth.

“No,” she said, voice dry as parchment. “I taste like blood and bile and all the things I’ve had to swallow to survive.”

The words hung in the air like smoke.

Not sensual. Not sultry. Just revolting.

Disgust carved its way down her throat as she said it— not for what she’d revealed, but for the question itself. For him. For the lewd, oily gleam of his tone, the cowardice of asking it behind a mask. It dripped with pathetic bravado, the kind that needed an audience to exist.

She let the silence stretch— made it sour and scalding.

And then, very quietly, she added, “But please. Find out for yourself. I bite.”

Something in the circle shifted. A ripple. Someone exhaled through their nose— almost a laugh. Almost.

Her pulse fluttered.

Why did I say that?

The words had tasted like copper and freedom. She shouldn’t have said it— she knew that— but something molten and quiet in her chest purred at the audacity.

The answer wasn’t panic, not quite. But it wasn’t nothing, either. It sat somewhere low and liquid in her belly.

She blinked once. The forest tilted, just slightly.

Her thoughts weren’t racing. They were… gliding. Clean, cruel. The truths came easier than they should have. And somewhere, quiet and far-off— like a voice at the end of a long tunnel— reason stirred:

He’s brewed this himself.

He’s altered it.

He’s lowering my inhibitions.

A sick, twisted part of her was almost flattered by it.

That small flicker of logic trembled once, like a match in the dark— then was drowned in silence.

The realisation didn’t spark fear— not immediately. Just a dull, slow understanding.

Of course he did.

Of course he wanted to see her stripped to bone. Not just her answers, but how she wore them. How her tongue curled around sharpness. How much venom she had left. And though her stomach turned, though her skin crawled with the weight of so many gazes, Hermione Granger— no, Dufort— lifted her chin like a guillotine had never touched her neck.

Let them ask more.

She’d bleed the truth into their hands— and still make them fear holding it.

Another step forward. Slower than the first. More precise.

This one didn’t leer.

He didn’t need to.

His silence was scalpel-sharp— the kind of person who could peel you open with a single sentence and never raise his voice.

When he spoke, his voice was smooth. Measured.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve done,” he asked, “that no one knows about?”

The Veritaserum struck like a hook behind her clavicle.

The question hung in the air like the sword of Damocles.

What’s the worst thing you’ve done that no one knows about?

The serum sunk deeper now, threading its cold fingers through her ribs. Her thoughts unspooled like yarn— slow, heavy, inescapable. The faces came first. Ron. Harry. Hagrid. All of them, gone. Nothing left but ruin.

She remembered the smell of smoke, the splintered bones in the runic circle, the unbearable stillness of a world without them.

She remembered standing in it.

And smiling.

“I stood in the rubble of everything I loved,” she said, voice low and level, “and I smiled. Because it meant I could start hunting.”

A hush fell over them.

Somewhere behind one of the masks, someone muttered a curse. Another shifted, uneasy. None of them spoke.

Tom Riddle did not move.

Hermione lifted her chin. The fire in her chest wasn’t pride. It was something colder— older.

She met the shadows and said nothing else.

The next figure stepped forward.

His voice was soft. Too soft. The kind that masqueraded as kindness but held something colder underneath— like he was studying her as a curiosity.

“Do you believe evil is born,” he asked, “or made?”

It wasn’t the question that disturbed her. It was the way he said it. Measured. Curious. Sincere. As if he wasn’t asking her, really, but asking the world. As if the answer mattered in some abstract way— and yet deeply personal.

Hermione’s stomach turned.

The Veritaserum surged again— not like a wave, like a crowbar under her sternum. It didn’t drag the truth from her. It simply made her incapable of lying to herself.

Her mind wandered back to the war. To Harry, trembling in the tent. To Bellatrix, bound, laughing in the cellar. To Draco Malfoy with blood on his hands and his eyes blown wide with horror. She thought of the boy who broke under pressure, and the girl who never had a chance to be kind.

She thought of Tom Riddle, and all the hands that had failed to stop him before he became a god.

And then she thought of herself.

What she had done. What she had become.

“I think it’s taught,” she said. Her voice didn’t tremble. “Pain teaches it. So does power. So do people who believe they’re doing good.”

She paused. Her mouth felt dry, her tongue heavy.

“And once you’ve learned it… it’s hard to forget.”

The figure said nothing.

But she didn’t mistake the faint nod. Not of approval. But of recognition. As if he already knew the answer— and had only wanted to see if she’d say it aloud.

The fourth stepped forward with a swagger in his stance and venom in his posture.

She couldn’t see his face, but she didn’t need to. His sneer lived in his shoulders, the way he folded his arms, the tilt of his chin. He hated her— not with the cool, analytical disdain of the others, but with something more personal. Resentful. Territorial.

The voice came low and biting.

“Who did you fuck to get this invitation?”

The word landed like a slap. Crude and calculated— meant to humiliate. The silence that followed wasn’t surprised; it was expectant. No one gasped. No one scolded him. This was the point of the game.

Hermione felt her skin crawl.

The Veritaserum made her breath catch in her throat, but she clamped down on the urge to retch. There was a heat behind her eyes— not from shame, but rage. Not because the question hurt, but because it was so predictable. Because it had always been like this.

Because to men like him, women like her— loud, clever, defiant— had to have gotten their power by spreading their legs.

Her voice was steel.

“No one,” she said.

Simple. Unshaking.

She hadn’t meant to say more. She hadn’t planned it. But her tongue felt loosened, hot with truth, and her pulse was thrumming too loud to silence.

Something in her wanted to bite.

And then, almost as an afterthought, her lip curled.

“But if I had,” she added, “the cunt would have begged.”

A ripple went through the circle. Not quite laughter. But something shifted. A few of the masked faces turned subtly toward each other. One pair of shoulders stiffened.

The boy didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. She could feel his loathing through the mask. It washed over her like a fever.

But Hermione stayed still. Unbowed.

The next one stepped forward slowly. Graceful, almost theatrical. She could tell from the way his hands moved— smooth, deliberate— that he was the type who played people like instruments.

His voice was velvet over glass. Polished, confident, just short of warm.

“If it meant saving someone you loved…” he drawled, “would you betray us?”

No menace. No accusation. Just curiosity— which somehow made it worse.

Hermione’s stomach twisted.

The Veritaserum stirred the truth from deep within her, even as she tried to hold it back. She thought of Harry. Of Ron. Of Ginny, and George, and Neville. Of the ones she had already lost. Of how many times she had already chosen the mission over mercy. How many she had let die.

She wanted to say no. That she was loyal. That she could be trusted.

But the truth, raw and bitter, pressed its way up through her throat.

“…Yes,” she said quietly.

Another silence.

This one was heavier.

She didn’t look at Tom. She didn’t need to. She could feel him watching her— weighing, dissecting, cataloguing.

“But I wouldn’t lose sleep over it,” she added, sharper now. “Not anymore.”

The Manipulator inclined his head, just slightly. As if pleased.

Or amused.

She hadn’t noticed the next one until he spoke. No grand entrance. No predatory poise.

Just a soft, almost apologetic step forward— and a voice that barely carried.

“Why do you flinch when you’re praised?”

Hermione’s breath caught.

The others shifted subtly, surprised. This one was different. There was no venom in it. No attempt to unnerve or wound. Just… observation. Precision.

She blinked, slow.

Of all the things she expected under Veritaserum, this— this was the one that almost cracked her.

Her jaw tightened. She glanced down. Her hands, she realised, were curled into fists again.

The masks were silent. Even Tom was still. Her pulse thundered in her ears.

“Because it doesn’t belong to me,” she said finally.

Her voice came out flat. Brittle. Truth scraped raw.

“It never did.”

She tried to laugh. It cracked halfway through.

“They say clever like it’s a virtue. Brave like it’s a badge. But it’s not praise, not really. It’s expectation. A performance. And I was good at it— Merlin, I was so good at it.”

Stop talking, a voice deep inside hissed. But it was too far away. Too slow.

She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t help it.

The words came anyway. Too many, too fast.

Her throat burned with the heat of them.

“But the second I slipped— when I got tired, or messy, or human— it all turned to disgust. Like they were waiting for me to fail, just so they could say see? She was never that special to begin with.”

Her eyes lifted, defiant.

“I flinch because it’s not praise. It’s the first step before the punishment.”

She smiled then, but it wasn’t kind. It wasn’t sane.

“I know what I am. And it’s not someone, something, worth applauding.”

The boy who’d asked the question stepped back without a word.

And the silence that followed was full of something like shame. But it didn’t belong to her.

The next question came so suddenly that it startled her.

“Would you kneel? Right now. In front of him.”

She blinked.

It wasn’t a question, not really. More like a dare. The voice was slick with something ugly— devotion sharpened into cruelty. This was someone used to doing the dirty work. Someone like Bellatrix.

Hermione didn’t look at Tom. She could feel him, though— just a few paces off, still and silent. Like a blade unsheathed.

She swallowed once. Her throat ached.

Would she kneel?

She remembered what it felt like to kneel once before. Bloodied knees on marble floors. Not here— not yet— but in another war, another life. She’d begged a curse to stop tearing someone apart. She couldn’t remember who, now. Only that it hadn’t worked.

Kneeling hadn’t saved anyone.

And still, her body remembered the shape. Her pride shrieked against it. But she wasn’t a fool; she also remembered strategy. Remembered what it meant to lose one battle to win the war. Submission as misdirection. A bowed head could hide a knife.

She spoke carefully.

“If it got me closer to what I want,” she said, “then yes.”

Her gaze flicked to Tom then— just for a heartbeat.

“I’d kneel. Smile, even. Make you all believe I belonged on my knees.”

The silence was palpable.

“But I wouldn’t stay there.”

She looked back to the masked Knight who’d asked.

“And I promise, you’d regret ever asking.”

Something passed between them— not fear, but a kind of stunned stillness. Like they’d looked too long at something feral, and it had looked back. A stillness fell over the clearing, thick and reverent. The seventh Knight stepped back, his mask blank and bloodless in the moonlight. Hermione’s mouth was dry. Her throat burned. Her heart was hammering somewhere behind her ribs like it wanted out.

Tom Riddle stepped forward.

No mask.

No smile.

Only the kind of quiet that made your skin crawl. The kind that made a girl forget she’d ever been safe.

He didn’t pace. He didn’t circle her like the others had. He simply stood, hands clasped neatly behind his back, and tilted his head.

“Miss Dufort,” he said, voice soft as snowfall. “One question remains.”

She didn’t respond.

The Veritaserum sat like glass in her throat, sharp and gleaming. She could feel it coiled inside her, tugging at the truth like string through a needle. Waiting.

Tom’s eyes were steady. “What are you most afraid I’ll find in you?”

A bark of laughter forced its way up her throat and she, the logical part of her, fought not to clap her hand over her mouth.

Because it was such a perfect question, wasn’t it? Elegant. Sharp. Not what are you hiding?— but what are you afraid I’ll see?

Not what have you done?— but who are you, underneath?

She stood very still. The wind had died. The trees no longer whispered.

What was she afraid he’d find?

Not the time travel. Not the Horcrux mission. Not even her name.

She was afraid—

She was afraid he’d find the parts of her that liked it here. That liked this game, this mask, this war.

She was afraid he’d find the girl who was tired of being good. Who had buried friends and futures and still found herself alive, teeth bared. Who would destroy anything— anyone— if it meant the world would remember her as a blade, not a martyr.

That there was something in her that understood him.

And worse— something in her that he might understand back.

Her answer came quiet, brittle.

“…Myself.”

And then she bowed her head.

A ripple passed through the circle. One of them scoffed—low, disbelieving. Another muttered something cruel beneath his mask. Someone else snorted in derision.

None of it mattered.

Tom raised his hand.

The noise ceased like a snuffed flame.

“Leave us,” he said. Quiet. Uninterested. Not a command— a conclusion.

There was no protest. No hesitation. Just obedience, smooth as silk. One by one, the masked figures turned. Their cloaks stirred the dead leaves as they slipped back into the woods without a sound, like shadows returning to the dark.

And then it was just them.

Tom stood at the centre of the clearing, unmoving, unmasked. Every line of his posture was deliberate— not relaxed, not tense, just… composed. Like he’d already done the maths on every outcome and found none of them threatening. The darkness curled behind him, and yet he stood brighter than it. Sharper than it.

She couldn’t breathe right.

The Veritaserum hadn’t worn off— no, it still clung to her thoughts like cobwebs laced with wine, loosening her caution, tugging truths from deep within her.

He took a step toward her.

Then another.

And another.

Until he was so close she could see the faint pulse at his throat. The imperfection at the edge of his brow. The downy dark lashes that shadowed his unblinking gaze. The skin beneath his eyes wasn’t flawless. No— it was hollowed, ever so slightly, like he hadn’t slept properly in years.

She could see every pore.

And that was the worst of it.

Because under the drug-dulled haze, under the residual ache of her trembling hands and her cracked lips and the word on her thigh, her traitorous mind whispered: He’s so beautiful.

Not in the soft way. Not in the safe way. Not a boy-beauty, not something warm or loveable. He was sickeningly beautiful. Inhumanly poised. Made to be worshipped, feared, obeyed. As if some ancient thing had carved a perfect face and then filled it with decay.

It made her ill. It made her furious.

His eyes caught hers again.

Something fragile buckled inside her.

“You’re…” she blinked, the word spilling out before she could stop it, “you’re beautiful.”

Her voice didn’t sound like her own.

Not soft. Not flirtatious. Just… unguarded. Like a window left open during a storm.

He tilted his head.

“Is that what you think?”

“No,” she breathed. Her pulse thudded against her throat. “It’s what I see.”

He didn’t smile. He didn’t gloat. Instead, he leaned in. Just slightly. Just enough that she could smell the faint hint of clove on his robes, and that sharp metallic edge of potion-brewer’s hands.

And then, with terrible precision, he reached out and brushed a strand of hair from her face.

It wasn’t gentle.

It wasn’t cruel.

It was… measured.

A scientist handling a specimen. A boy inspecting a secret.

Her breath caught.

Not because of the touch.

Because of what it didn’t feel like.

Not lust. Not pity. Not anything human.

Just curiosity.

And under the thick fog of Veritaserum, part of her whispered: You deserve this.

“You lied. Valiantly, as well as is possible under Veritaserum.” he said. His voice was soft, almost gentle.

“You lied,” he repeated, “but not to me.”

She didn’t speak. Couldn’t.

“You hate yourself,” he said. “That’s what separates us. You think it means you still have something left to lose.”

He tilted his head, studied her— and she couldn’t even look away. Couldn’t blink.

“You would burn the world,” he murmured. “I used to think I was alone in that.”

Her breath caught.

That was it, wasn’t it?

The serum pulled the truth up like bile.

“I don’t want to be good,” she whispered. “I just want to win.”

A flicker passed across his face. Not approval. Not surprise. Something colder.

He stepped back— not far, but enough to make her lungs work again.

“This wasn’t a test of loyalty,” he said. “That comes later.”

He didn’t need to threaten her. He didn’t need to explain. He just turned, and the forest swallowed him.

She stood alone. Every part of her shaking.

Not from the cold. Not from fear. From recognition.

From the raw, feral understanding of what he was— and the rotted mirror of what that made her.

You would burn the world.

And the voice in her head answered, unbidden:

Maybe you already did.

Chapter Text

The forest did not breathe.

Branches hung still as bones, and the wind, if it existed at all, refused to touch her. Every step Hermione took was too loud and too wet— shoes sinking into leaves slick with rot. The night had weight to it now, like something watching, like something holding its breath. She didn’t look back. She didn’t have to.

The meeting clung to her skin like sweat that wouldn’t dry. Her bones ached. Her mouth tasted of ash and iron.

And somewhere inside her— far too deep to blame on potion— she was still speaking.

Not out loud. No. The Veritaserum had bled its way back into her silence. Now, it just echoed. Looped. Truths she hadn’t known she carried, dragging fingernails along the walls of her mind.

“I taste like blood and bile and all the things I’ve had to swallow to survive.”

She clenched her jaw. Her teeth ached. She hadn’t meant it. Hadn’t wanted it. But it had come from somewhere. Some part of her had believed it— still did. And that was the most unsettling thing of all: how easy it had become to speak in cruelty. To wear honesty like a knife.

The castle lights flickered in the distance, blurred through the trees like something seen underwater. Her steps grew slower as she reached the treeline. Her legs ached, but she didn’t stop. She couldn’t afford to. If she sat, she’d shatter.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve done that no one knows about?”

She grimaced. That question had nestled somewhere deep in her ribs. Not because of the answer, but because she hadn’t had to dig for it.

She’d smiled in the ruins.

That wasn’t a metaphor. She had smiled— wild, frenzied. It hadn’t felt good. It hadn’t felt like triumph. It had felt true.

It had felt like becoming something.

Her fingers twitched against her robes.

You are not what he is. You are not.

But that felt thinner now, didn’t it?

Because the truth wasn’t that she was nothing like Tom Riddle.

The truth was that she was afraid she was too much like him.

And the worst part— the part still slinking its way through her bloodstream— was that it hadn’t all been horror. Not in the clearing. Not even when he touched her. When the others turned and left her alone with him, she should have run.

Instead, she’d breathed him in.

And she had said—

Her stomach lurched.

She had said, “You’re beautiful.”

The memory burned behind her eyes, red and shameful.

She hadn’t meant to say it. It wasn’t admiration. It wasn’t attraction. It was observation. Like naming a storm or a fire— something terrible and massive and magnificent. Something that would not blink before it ended you.

He didn’t even smile.

He didn’t even react.

And that was the worst part, wasn’t it? That she had spoken from some raw, blistered place inside herself, and he’d only tilted his head.

Curious.

Clinical.

Like she was a puzzle with one corner misaligned.

Hermione stepped out of the woods. The castle loomed ahead, its windows glowing like watchful eyes. The silence of the grounds was somehow more suffocating than the forest had been. She crossed the grass with mechanical steps, each one sinking just slightly too far into the earth, like the world didn’t quite trust her to return.

You lied, he’d told her. But not to me.

That sentence hadn’t left her since.

Because he was right.

She had lied to herself.

She didn’t want to be good. Not really. Not anymore. She wanted to win. She wanted to walk away from this graveyard of a war with something left in her hands. Some proof that she had survived it all, and it had meant something. That she hadn’t bled and broken just to be forgotten.

She didn’t know when it had happened— this shift from righteousness to retribution. Maybe when her boys died. Maybe before. But she felt it now, like a heartbeat separate from her own.

The castle doors opened with a groan, and the air inside was colder than it should have been. The torches didn’t flicker properly. She blinked up at the stone archways— at the familiar corridor— and for a moment, it all looked like a set.

Like something built to mimic home.

She made it halfway down the corridor before her knees nearly buckled.

It wasn’t the potion. Not anymore. It was the weight of knowing too much— of seeing too clearly. The question echoed again, sickeningly elegant:

“What are you most afraid I’ll find in you?”

And her answer— simple, brutal, unshakeable— still bloomed like poison behind her ribs.

“…Myself.”

She reached a pillar and leaned against it. Closed her eyes. Tried to breathe.

The truth was not a torch. It was a scalpel.

And she had let it cut too deep.

She should’ve rejected the invitation. Should’ve laughed in their masked faces and turned on her heel.

She should’ve worked in silence. Observed from the margins.

Measured his footsteps, his rituals, his madness— all from the safety of distance.

She didn’t need to stand in the clearing like a lamb waiting for slaughter. Didn’t need to taste his voice, his gaze, the way he looked at her like she wasn’t prey, but a puzzle. She didn’t need to get close to slit his throat when she could’ve hurled the dagger from afar. 

But no. She’d stepped forward. And now the blood was on her hands— and it was her own.

She peeled herself off the pillar like shedding a second skin.

The hallway stretched before her in uneasy stillness. Too quiet. As though the stone itself had swallowed its breath. Paintings hung in perfect alignment, but none moved. No shifting, no sighing frames. No drowsy portraits muttering about curfews or badges or house points.

They were all… still.

Watching.

Or avoiding.

Hermione took a step. The light felt wrong. The shadows gathered in places they shouldn’t. One torch flared too bright as she passed— another guttered entirely. And the air was colder than it should have been, for a castle thick with heat and hearths.

There were no footsteps but hers.

No wind.

But she could feel something.

Something behind her.

She turned once— twice. Nothing.

Only the mirrors.

There was one at the end of the hall. Long. Gilded. Gaudy. The kind students passed a hundred times a day without looking.

But now— now, Hermione couldn’t stop.

Her reflection stood where it always did. Same robes. Same mass of dark curls. Her eyes were hers. But—

But they weren’t.

There was something behind them.

Not someone.

Something.

A flicker.

A second expression. Too faint to name. As if the mirror caught a version of her that lagged half a heartbeat behind. Her lips didn’t quite close at the same time. Her shoulder moved too late. Her gaze…

Her gaze wasn’t looking back.

It was looking past her.

Hermione stepped closer. The air was thick here. Humming. It buzzed against her teeth like static.

Then, very softly—

The mirror breathed.

Just once.

She staggered back.

The corridor twisted— briefly, impossibly— and snapped still again.

And when she looked up, someone else was there.

Not in the mirror.

In the hallway.

Watching her.

Silent.

Still.

White.

She stood at the end of the hall.

Or perhaps she hadn’t arrived at all— perhaps she’d always been there. Waiting.

The girl from the Slytherin table. The girl from the hearth. 

She couldn’t help but notice those eyes again, how impossibly wrong they were. 

Not merely pale. Not grey or silver or ice.

They had no pigment at all.

Not blank. Not blind.

Just… voided. Like something deep below the lake had spat out.

Hermione stopped walking.

Her throat closed.

The white girl tilted her head, very slightly, like she was studying something. And then she stepped forward.

Her footsteps didn’t make a sound.

But when she spoke, it was worse.

The voice scraped through the air like a death rattle— deep, low, rasped raw at the edges. Not masculine. Not feminine. Just broken. As if she’d forgotten how to speak and only recently remembered.

“Have you looked at your hands yet?”

“Sometimes it starts there,” She rasped. “The rot. In the fingers. You’ll scratch and scratch and it won’t come off. That’s how you know it’s yours.”

Her voice cracked— not with emotion, but with age, like timber splitting under frost. Like something that had once been a voice, but forgot how.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hermione said, but her fingers ached at her sides.

The girl turned her head. Just slightly. Like she was listening to something Hermione couldn’t hear.

“I’ve seen what happens when a name isn’t enough to hold you together.”

She took a step forward. Soundless. Impossible.

“If you like how this feels,” she said, voice like gravel soaked in smoke, “you’ll lose more than your name.”

Hermione flinched.

Not from the words.

From the voice.

It was wrong in the bones, in the breath, in the seams of the world. Like a dead thing crawling up from beneath the floorboards— not fast, not loud, just inevitable. Slow nails scratching through rot. Wooden slats groaning. The air souring before you even hear it. It didn’t belong here. It didn’t belong anywhere. It echoed from inside her own skull, like it had never used lungs to form itself at all. 

It wasn’t spoken so much as unearthed.

She couldn’t reply.

Couldn’t speak.

The girl took one more step.

The torches behind her dimmed.

She tried to find her wand. Forgot where it was.

Hermione forced a breath in. “Who are you?”

No answer.

Only that tilt of the head again. Birdlike. Off. Not predatory— worse than predatory. Curious.

Like a thing from far below the waterline, seeing a swimmer for the first time.

The girl didn’t blink.

“I won’t stop you,” she uttered, her voice like gravel. “But I’ll ask you once.”

She leaned forward. Her eyes— those awful, blank eyes— stared into Hermione’s, and for a moment, Hermione couldn’t breathe.

Up close, it was worse.

She had no scent. No warmth. No breath that stirred the air between them. Nothing. Just stillness. Like a wax figure sculpted with inhuman precision and left too close to the fire— flawless, and wrong. Not like Tom, no, Tom’s beauty was constructed— all sharp lines and surgical control, sculpted like he’d willed it into existence. But this… this wasn’t manmade. So perfect it terrified her. As if the world had made a mistake in allowing it to walk.

“Is that what you want to become?” she asked.

The castle hummed around them.

Hermione felt the truth sting the back of her tongue. Felt the ghost of Veritaserum still bleeding in her thoughts.

The girl didn’t wait for an answer.

She turned, cloak billowing slightly behind her, and walked back into the dark.

No sound.

No echo.

As though she had never been there at all.

Only a sharp, rasping whisper lingered behind her like smoke in Hermione’s skull:

If you like how this feels… you’ll lose more than your name.

She didn’t move for a long time.

Just stood there. Half-lit. Half-alive.

The corridor felt wider now. Gutted. Like whatever presence had occupied it— whatever she was— had taken something with her when she left. Sound, maybe. Or breath.

She wasn’t shaking. Not exactly. The tremble lived deeper than that— under her ribs, in the marrow, coiling like smoke in a sealed bottle.

The torchlight wavered against the stone. The air was normal again. Heavy with castle dust and cold. But her ears rang. Her spine prickled. She turned her hands over once, then again, then again.

Have you looked at your hands yet?

The words slithered back through her like a snake through tall grass.

Rot in the fingers.

She flexed them.

They looked fine. Pale, maybe. Still scraped from the forest branches. Still trembling.

But fine.

Right?

She didn’t know how long she stood there. One minute. Five. A year. It all existed in the same suspended stretch of time where logic and memory couldn’t quite stitch themselves together.

And then the corridor shifted.

Not physically. But perceptibly. The wrongness had left. The tension loosened, like the castle had breathed out.

And just like that, her limbs unlocked.

She moved.

Fast. Not running, but not far from it. Her shoes hit the flagstones hard, echoing too loud. Her breath was tight. Her heartbeat too high in her throat. She kept walking, faster now, through the halls, past familiar portraits and alcoves and suits of armour she didn’t look at. She wasn’t going back to her dorm. Not yet. Not with the white-haired girl’s voice still stuck in her chest like a splinter. Not with the ghost of the Veritaserum truth still licking her gums.

She needed answers.

She needed to name what had just happened.

And if she couldn’t— if she couldn’t figure out what that girl was—

Then she’d find something else to blame.

Her footsteps took her somewhere safe. Somewhere clean.

The library.

And even as the doors creaked open, and the warmth of musty parchment wrapped around her like wool, Hermione Granger— no, Dufort— knew that the feeling in her hands wasn’t gone.

It was just waiting.

She moved on instinct. Familiar rows. Familiar shadows. The lanterns hadn’t been lit yet, but the sconces hummed faintly with stored magic, just enough to keep her from slipping entirely into the dark.

Her fingers didn’t tremble. They should have.

The Veritaserum still hadn’t burned off completely— she could feel it in the base of her skull, trailing through her blood like smoke. It loosened things. Made her mind skip. Images came out of order: The girl’s eyes. The rasp of her voice. Tom’s hand brushing her hair. The scent of cloves. The word myself burning like a sigil behind her ribs.

No.

Focus.

She sat at her usual table. Back corner. Fourth row from the Restricted Section. The chair scraped loudly as she pulled it out, too loudly. The echo clattered off the rafters like a dropped wand.

She opened a register. Then another. Then another.

Seventh Years. Sixth Years. Fifth Years. Female students. Albino students. No matches. Not even a surname. No white-haired girls in the last decade, except a passing mention of a Beauxbatons transfer who’d left in tears. Not her.

She tried a different angle.

Magical pigment disorders— nothing. 

Oculocutaneous anomalies in wandbearers— six pages of dragon pox, one case of veela blood dilution, and a diagram of skin leaching from cursed parchment.

Still no name.

Her quill scratched out synonyms, cross-references, everything she could think of. White-haired. Pale-skinned. Eyes like chalk. She ran her finger down the spine of Physiomagical Rarities of the Bloodline and paused— something old and thick and cruel pulsed in the binding. She pulled it down anyway. The page on death-touched birthmarks crumbled at her breath.

She coughed once. It echoed.

The hours fell apart.

She didn’t notice when the lamps flickered to life around her, or when Madam Vireo glided past once, then again, then stopped entirely, watching, then vanished. She didn’t eat. Didn’t blink, not properly. The fire in the grate was long dead.

When she looked up next, the tall windows along the eastern wall had begun to frost with light. That strange, unfinished grey of not-night, not-morning.

Her eyes burned.

The table in front of her was a disaster. Ten books open. A small pile of closed ones to her left, rejected. The tip of her quill had snapped from overuse and been replaced twice. Notes scrawled and underlined and circled and crossed out.

Not one mention. Not one clue.

Who the fuck was she?

Hermione stood suddenly, chair clattering backwards. The noise startled even her.

She walked to the glass. Not to see the grounds. Not even to think. She just needed not to be inside her own head.

And there— caught in the reflection, for just a moment— she saw herself.

Saw her own face.

And behind her, one of the shadows moved.

No footsteps. No breath.

She spun— nothing.

The room was empty. Silent. Still.

But the feeling was back. That pressure behind the ribs. That strange dislocation in her spine, like she was being read from the outside in.

She turned back to the glass.

And her reflection blinked a half-second too late.

Hermione flinched.

No one had noticed.

Except—

From behind a nearby shelf, a boy brushed past. A Ravenclaw. Didn’t look at her. Didn’t say a word. But he moved too fast. Didn’t meet her eyes.

She sat back down.

Hands shaking now.

She tried again. A final search. Ancient families with chalk-white heirs. Bloodline afflictions. Ritual magic gone wrong. Forbidden transformations.

Still. Still. Still.

Nothing.

No name. No record. No one like her.

Except—

Another note, between the pages. Not tucked. Placed.

Like it had grown there.

She picked it up.

No greeting. No threat. No flourish.

Just five words, in jagged, cold handwriting:

Do you like how it feels?

Her heart stopped. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Just for one second— one single, seizing beat— her chest locked and her throat closed and her body forgot how to be alive.

And then she was breathing again.

Shallow. 

Burned.

She folded the note slowly. Deliberately. As if speed would anger it. 

And tucked it into her robes.

She left the library just after dawn.

Didn’t even notice her legs were moving until the heavy doors swung shut behind her, their hinges letting out a sound like a sigh. A groan. Or a warning.

The castle corridors were still cold with night. Not fully awake. There was no usual chatter of morning— just a thin fog of silence stretching through the stone, like it had settled there to rest.

Hermione walked like she was underwater. Like something thick had crept into her blood and slowed her from the inside.

The Veritaserum was bleeding out now. She could feel it. The aftertaste clung to her mouth— bitter, metallic, like licked knives and dried wine. And her thoughts, once so clear in their unravelling, had begun to splinter again.

Fragments.

You’re beautiful.

It’s what I see.

You lied. Not to me.

You hate yourself.

You would burn the world.

Her body ached, but it wasn’t pain. It was friction. Like her mind and her skin were misaligned. Like she was wearing herself wrong.

Around the corner, two students passed by. First Years, maybe. Eyes wide with sleep. One of them glanced at her and quickly looked away.

Hermione caught her reflection in a window as she walked— grey under the torchlight, eyes too wide, skin pale with whatever rotted thing had sunk beneath it last night.

She looked like she’d been seen.

Like someone had opened her up. Taken notes. And left her stitched closed, still breathing, still smiling.

She didn’t remember smiling.

The Slytherin common room wasn’t far. But every step toward it felt heavier. As if the castle wanted her to walk slower. As if it didn’t want the truth of her returning to its walls so soon.

She kept walking anyway.

Because if she stopped— if she thought too long— she’d feel the truth of it all still clinging to her spine like a second shadow.

The lie wasn’t what she told them.

The lie was what she nearly believed.

The common room was already lit when she arrived.

Not bright. Not warm. But the fire in the green-flickering hearth had been stirred into a low burn, and a handful of students lingered in the watery glow of it— some reading, some half-asleep with tea cupped in their hands.

A few candles guttered on the tables, casting long fingers of shadow across the stone floor. Outside the windows, the lake hung heavy and unmoving, dark with early morning gloom.

Hermione stepped inside and let the wall seal behind her.

A boy brushed past her on his way out. Tall, older— Seventh Year, maybe. His robes neat, collar sharp, no trace of exhaustion in his step. But as he passed, he dipped his head. Just slightly. A nod.

Her heart skipped.

Not in recognition, not exactly. But the angle of it— its smoothness, its ease— unsettled her. Like it was an echo from somewhere else. From somewhere colder.

Was he one of them? No mask. No voice to match.

But that nod had weight.

She didn’t turn to follow him. Just kept walking, her limbs still trembling faintly from the comedown. Every step was effort. Like her body hadn’t decided what it was yet— girl or ghost.

She took a seat near the edge of the hearth, in one of the high-backed leather chairs with green trim and brass claws. The flames painted shifting light across her knees. Her fingers curled in her lap.

The pale girl’s face flickered behind her eyes.

She tried to reconstruct it— every line, every detail. But it blurred. Her skin had been white, but not delicate. Stark. Her eyes had no iris, only the faint gleam of silver— unlit, uncanny. Her hair fell loose to her hips like silk spun from snow.

But it was her voice. That was the thing. The voice had scraped against the world.

Hermione felt her hands tighten.

“If you like how this feels…”

A few students laughed quietly near the fireplace. Normal. Human. And yet the sound didn’t reach her ears quite right— muted, distorted. Like the castle was still filtering her perception, feeding her only pieces.

She looked up.

Across the room sat one of the older Slytherin girls— lean, elegant, with dark green robes folded sharp at the cuffs. She wasn’t watching Hermione, not directly, but there was something still in the way she sat. Something cool and alert.

Hermione rarely spoke to the other girls. She didn’t need to. Didn’t want to. It kept her safer, cleaner.

But she broke her own rule.

Softly, but clear enough to cut through the common room hum, she asked:

“Do you know a girl with white hair? Pale skin. Colourless eyes.”

The older girl didn’t look at her right away. She finished her page, turned it, and only then glanced up.

A beat of silence stretched between them.

Then, with a voice too calm to be indifferent, she said, “There are a lot of strange things in this castle, Dufort. You’re one of them.”

Hermione didn’t blink.

Another girl nearby— one with braid-wrapped hair and eyes too sharp to be tired— closed her book with a soft snap and added, “Some people don’t belong here. Not really.” She tapped a fingernail against her mug. “They just… haunt it.”

Hermione’s throat felt dry.

The girl with the braids tilted her head, brow furrowing. She opened her mouth, as if about to say something more.

“Z—” she started.

Then stopped.

Her lips stayed parted. Her gaze drifted unfocused for a second— like something had been yanked from her tongue mid-syllable.

Hermione straightened.

But the girl only blinked once. Shook her head, as if dismissing the glitch.

“Forget it,” she muttered. “Doesn’t matter.”

The first girl turned back to her book. “Don’t go looking for her,” she said, without looking up. “It’s a waste of time.”

Hermione didn’t respond.

Because time— Hermione knew better than anyone— was never truly wasted.

And neither were ghosts.

“You’ll lose more than your name,” The girl had said.

But hadn’t she already?

She wasn’t Hermione Granger here. She wasn’t even sure she was Dufort. The name stuck like wax in her mouth. Her wand sparked wrong. Her reflection lingered. She’d lied under Veritaserum and still told the truth. What are you most afraid I’ll find in you?

Myself.

The forest hadn’t let her lie. And neither had he. Tom Riddle, with his perfect corpse-face and pulse like a metronome, had stripped her down without touching her. He hadn’t hurt her. He hadn’t needed to. 

She hated him for it. She hated that when he looked at her, he wasn’t trying to destroy her— he was cataloguing her. Like something rare. Or something rotten.

And worst of all— some part of her wanted to be seen like that.

You hate yourself, he’d said. That’s what separates us. 

But what if it didn’t?

What if the only thing separating them was a matter of timing? A few broken bones. A childhood. A war. A name. A thousand choices made in heat and guilt and grief. Maybe he was the ruin made flesh— and maybe she was just the ruin in waiting.

The thought turned her stomach. And still, she didn’t look away from it.

She needed to understand. Not just him— but the shape of what he became. Where he sharpened. Where he split. Where the rot began. And she knew exactly where that was. 

She wanted to stand in the dirt where he’d stood. She wanted to see the place where the name “Riddle” had died. She wanted to peel back the boards and press her palm to the floor and feel what he left behind. 

Just to see. Just to know. Just to compare.

Are you better than him? the serum had asked.

She didn’t know anymore. 

But she knew where to start looking.

Chapter Text

She skipped class.

Again.

It was a small rebellion— barely a rebellion at all— but it still lodged in her ribs like a splinter. Her schedule had always been sacred: colour-coded timetables, assignments done two weeks early, notes rewritten until her knuckles cramped. Skipping class should’ve felt like a victory. It should’ve tasted like freedom.

It didn’t.

It tasted like rot. Like something in her had been dislodged.

The corridors were quieter now. Most students were buried in Arithmancy or Ancient Runes, their quills scratching dutifully behind classroom doors. Hermione walked past them with her wand tucked close and her Disillusionment Charm flickering just beneath her skin. Every step echoed. Every window she passed felt like a mirror.

She didn’t need the lesson on ancestral rune-binding. She could’ve taught it.

Instead, she headed toward the edge of the grounds, toward the place where the air grew thinner and the trees thickened.

This wasn’t strategy.

This was hunger.

She needed to see it. Needed to feel it.

The manor where he murdered his father, his grandparents. 

The shack where he buried the piece of his soul.

She didn’t know what she expected to find— maybe nothing. Maybe ruin. Maybe answers.

But her feet kept moving. The weight of her robes felt wrong today, heavy in the hem like they’d been soaked in something ancient. Something buried. Something bleeding.

She paused once— at the top of the hill, just before the forest swallowed the path. Her hand tightened around her wand.

She could still turn back.

She could go to class, raise her hand, take notes.

She could pretend.

But pretending didn’t suit her anymore.

She didn’t go far at first. Just far enough that the castle vanished behind her, swallowed by fog and frost, its spires dissolving like memory. The trees thickened. The air thinned.

Her pace slowed near the treeline— measured now, deliberate. She could feel the threshold before she crossed it: a faint pressure at the base of her skull, the way the light seemed to hold its breath.

The wards.

The ancient framework of Hogwarts’ magic curved here, unseen but undeniable. It didn’t bar her passage. But it watched.

She stepped through.

And something behind her unlatched.

Out here, her magic felt louder.

The Disillusionment Charm shimmered across her skin, glass-slick and clinging. With a whispered Finite, it broke— peeling off like oil from water, the forest swallowing the last of her camouflage.

She took a breath, cold and thin. Then raised her wand again. 

“Textum Muta, Persona Occulta.”

The fabric resisted. Always did, with spells that rewrote identity instead of appearance. But it obeyed, eventually.

Her school robes pinched at the seams, cinched in. The wool dulled from rich, institutional black to a muted, wartime grey. A scalloped collar unfurled. The hem climbed just past her knee. The transformation settled into a tailored A-line skirt, nipped waist, modest blouse, and an ash-grey trench. Everything about it whispered rationed cloth, utility fashion, and quiet invisibility. A girl who could vanish into any 1940s street.

Even her boots lost their polish.

She conjured a knitted beret and pinned back her curls. A final flick concealed her wand inside the trench’s inner lining.

No crest. No wand. No uniform.

Just the dull, spectral fashion of a Muggle world that didn’t know her name.

She stepped into the shadows and disapparated. 

•

CRACK. 

A narrow alley behind a butcher’s shop, flanked by stacked crates and the sour sting of salt and meat. Her boots struck the cobbles with a sound that didn’t belong to her. For a moment, she didn’t move— only listened. The flutter of a newspaper in the gutter. The soft bleat of a lamb from somewhere behind a stone wall. The sharp laugh of a child on the wind, already fading.

Hermione adjusted the collar of her trench and stepped out into Little Hangleton.

The village was small, self-contained. Cobblestones stitched the streets together, and slate roofs hunched low against the sky like secrets keeping warm. The war had passed through this place, but not loudly— its signs were quieter than London’s broken glass and ration lines. Here, the buildings wore their age with quiet defiance. Gas lamps lined the roads like watchful sentries. Bicycles leaned against garden gates. Laundry hung in stiff white lines, unmoved by breeze.

She passed the post office, the pub, a greengrocer with onions braided in the window. A man tipped his hat at her— habit, not kindness. She smiled, barely.

Her feet moved, but her mind traced different maps.

Somewhere here— behind one of these quiet doors— Tom Riddle had killed his father. And his father’s parents. A clean, clinical purge. No wand left behind. No memory to hold. Just three corpses slumped in their chairs, their tea still warm.

Her stomach turned. Not from disgust— no, it was colder than that. Analytical. A bone-deep understanding of the kind of monster who didn’t need rage to kill. Just efficiency.

She paused outside the baker’s and, on a whim, stepped inside.

The woman behind the counter barely looked up. Hermione pointed at the first thing she saw— a sugared currant bun wrapped in paper. Coins exchanged. No words spoken.

Back outside, she ate without tasting.

Crumbs clung to her fingers as she walked, eyes skimming every face, every window. Children played in the mud with tin toys. An old man smoked on a bench, watching the road like it might try to deceive him. Two women carried buckets between them, gossiping in clipped, muffled tones.

They lived like nothing haunted this place.

But Hermione could feel it. The quiet wrongness. The soft bruise in the air where something had once been torn out. The space where Tom had walked, spoken, killed— and left no footprint.

She edged towards the old man, his cigarette burning low between two calloused fingers. His coat was too thin for the weather, the buttons misaligned. Smoke curled around his ears as he watched her approach with the indifference of someone who’d seen every kind of girl and never been surprised.

Hermione slowed her pace.

“Do you mind?” she asked, nodding to the cigarette.

He squinted up at her, then wordlessly tapped another from the battered case in his lap. She stepped close, took it, leaned in to light it off his— an intimacy so brief it didn’t have time to become strange.

She inhaled, held it like she’d done it a thousand times, let the smoke sting her throat.

“Cheers,” she said.

He grunted. “Not from here.”

“No,” she replied. “Just passing through.”

“Family?” he asked.

She nodded, vaguely. “Of a sort.”

They sat in silence for a moment. The cigarette dulled some edge in her chest. The village was quiet— no cars that she could see, just the shuffle of a dog somewhere and the distant clang of the church bell.

She tilted her head toward the slope beyond the houses. Toward the dark silhouette just visible through the trees.

“That the old manor?”

His eyes followed hers. He didn’t answer right away.

“Riddle House,” he said finally. “What’s left of it.”

“Riddle?”

“Old family. Rich. Proper snobs. Place used to be full of servants. Gardeners. But they all left after—” He stopped. Frowned. “Well. Place has been empty a while.”

She let him stew.

“After what?” she asked softly.

He squinted at her. “Thought you were family.”

She exhaled, smoke rising like a shield. “Not close. More curious than anything. My Aunt never talked about them.”

He looked at her again, longer this time. “Strange girl, you are.”

“So I’ve been told.”

He sniffed. “They say the veteran killed ’em. The caretaker. Bryce. Old Bill took him in, but—” another grunt, “—he was let off. No cause of death. No proof. No nothing.”

Hermione’s pulse flickered.

“No proof?” she asked.

“They just… dropped, the three of them. Like puppets with the strings cut. Richest house in the village and they died without a mark. Whole place cursed, if you ask me.”

“Do you know where the caretaker lives?” she asked, finishing the cigarette and stamping it beneath her heel.

The man gave her a long, slow look. “Aye. Still keeps the grounds. Bit off in the head now, shell-shock I reckon. But he’s there.”

She smiled— thin, polite.

“I’ll mind myself.”

And then she turned, trench coat flaring in the wind, and made for the manor like a girl returning to something she’d never actually seen— just dreamed of, all teeth and ruin.

Hermione kept her hands in her coat pockets. The cold worked its way into her joints, not harshly, but insistently, like it wanted to be remembered.

A girl on a bicycle passed her without glancing up. A dog barked behind a rusted gate and then went quiet. Someone hung laundry in a garden behind ivy-covered walls, white sheets snapping like flags in a wind that hadn’t yet reached her.

She tried to blend in. A polite nod here. A smile there. But the people looked past her, not through her— past her, like she didn’t quite register.

The pastry bag crinkled in her hand. She tore a corner of the flaky crust, chewed slowly, eyes on the path ahead. The sweetness didn’t sit right. Everything here was just slightly wrong.

Little Hangleton didn’t feel cursed.

It felt paused.

Like something had once screamed— loud and terrible— and now every blade of grass was holding its breath.

She passed the chapel. Its doors were closed, its stained glass dulled by grime. An old war memorial stood beside it, the names carved in stone faded by time. She scanned them anyway. None familiar. None Riddle.

A gate creaked in the distance. A kettle whistled. Crows circled overhead like they were searching for a body no one had bothered to bury.

Hermione turned onto the lane that led out of the village, toward the hill. Toward the manor.

The closer she got, the quieter the world became. No birdsong. No breeze. Just her boots on the gravel path and the soft rustle of her coat. Even the air felt… heavier.

She paused at the base of the hill. Let the pastry fall, barely touched, into a bin rusting beside a crumbling wall. Licked the sugar from her fingers.

She would find Frank Bryce.

And then she would climb higher— toward the hollow in the woods where something fouler than death had taken root.

But first, she breathed.

In.

Out.

The path steepened.

Hermione’s boots crunched over frost-stiff grass as the incline narrowed. Shrubs tangled along the hill’s edge, brambles woven with dead leaves and little bones— bird, maybe. Rabbit. The kind of careless violence that came from nature or boys with too much time.

The manor crested into view.

It was grand once. You could see it in the bones: the symmetry of its windows, the soft slope of the roofline, the wrought iron gate now leaning off its hinge. Its stone was the colour of wet ash. The door, though repainted, still held the outline of something that had been carved— worn away by time or intent.

There were no wards. No protections she could sense.

But that didn’t reassure her.

The house wasn’t warded because it didn’t need to be.

Death clung to the threshold. Not as ghosts, not as spellwork— just residue. Like soot on the skin after a fire.

She approached slowly. No movement inside. Curtains drawn. A garden left to rot, despite the trimmed hedge line and swept front step. Someone maintained it, still. But no one lived here. Not really.

Her eyes traced the upper windows. A bedroom once. A nursery, maybe.

No, not a nursery. Tom Riddle had never lived here. 

She reached out— touched the rusting gate. It squealed under her fingers and didn’t budge.

A thin trail of smoke curled from somewhere to the right.

Hermione followed it.

Off the main path, just down the hill’s bend, nestled among hedges and knotted trees, sat a gardener’s cottage. Stone walls, moss on the roof, a shutter cracked just enough to show life within. Smoke rose from the chimney in slow, steady coils.

She stepped lightly.

Up close, the garden was well-tended. Cabbage rows, herbs in pots, a few stubborn stalks of winter leek. A wheelbarrow leaned against the side wall, half-filled with wet soil. Someone lived here. Still worked. Still kept the old house clean.

A sound from within— creaking floorboards. The scrape of a chair.

Hermione stilled.

She stepped to the threshold.

And knocked. Once.

Then again.

The door opened an inch. It didn’t open further. But it hadn’t closed, either.

Hermione stood very still.

Wind pressed past her shoulders, catching the hem of her trench, and carrying with it the faintest scent of tobacco and damp wool. Inside the cottage, the light was golden— dim, warped slightly by thick old glass and soot-blackened beams. It felt warmer than it had any right to be. Lived-in.

There was a kettle somewhere, whistling low. Not loud enough to be urgent. Just… ongoing. Like someone had left it too long and forgotten.

The floorboards groaned again.

She leaned in, carefully. Just enough to glance through the narrow gap.

A pair of muddy boots by the hearth. A coat slung over the back of a chair. A half-finished newspaper folded with military precision on a small oak table— beside it, a ceramic mug still steaming faintly. Everything smelled faintly of iron and peat. The way country homes always did. But there was something else beneath it. Something still.

No movement.

Her fingers brushed her wand’s handle inside her trench. Not drawing it. Not yet.

The room beyond the door was all corners and shadows. An old clock ticked from the mantle. On the far wall, above a chipped shelf of china dogs, hung a photograph— three people. Blurred with age, but she could make out the high-collared dress of the woman. A young man beside her. A boy at their feet, one arm caught mid-motion.

The frame tilted ever so slightly to the left.

She could hear her own breathing now. Louder than she liked.

She took a step back. Not in retreat— just anchoring herself.

This place had known violence.

Not the kind that screamed. The kind that happened silently, and left a stain no one could wash out.

The kettle fell silent.

For a moment, nothing.

Then a voice. Croaky. Dry as winter leaves.

“Haven’t had a letter in twenty years and I don’t fancy starting now. Off you trot.”

The door began to shut.

Hermione caught it with her palm— lightly. Not a shove. Just a hinge paused mid-swing.

“I’m not delivering anything,” she said. “I just have a question.”

The man gave her a look. Not suspicious. Worse— tired. As if the weight of being seen, once again, by a stranger with questions had thickened his bones.

He scratched the side of his nose. “’Course you do. You lot always do.”

“You lot?”

“The nosy ones. Students. Journalists. Ghost-hunters. Had a woman from Leeds once swear blind it was vampires. Brought a cross and everything.”

“I’m not from Leeds.”

“You’re not a local either. Coat’s too fine. Boots too clean.” His eyes flicked to her beret, the pinned curls. “London, then?”

“Near enough.”

The wind picked up behind her, tugging at her coat. The hills loomed like folded arms.

“…It’s about the manor, isn’t it?” he said.

Hermione didn’t blink. “Yes.”

His face stayed flat. “I don’t talk about that.”

“I know.”

She waited.

Something about the quietness of her tone— about the lack of pleading or explanation— made him still.

At last, he huffed. Stepped back from the door.

“You can come in. But I don’t make tea for strangers, and I don’t repeat myself.”

“Understood.”

She stepped over the threshold.

Nothing had changed since the door opened. The interior was as she’d catalogued it in that single, trained glance: cracked linoleum, a stove that hadn’t been cleaned since Chamberlain resigned, lace curtains yellowed to the colour of old teeth. A clock ticked above the hearth— offbeat, arrhythmic.

The smell was sour with age. Tobacco. Damp wool. Something fainter underneath, like rust or long-dead weeds.

“Mind your feet,” the man muttered, settling into a creaking armchair. “The rug’s not for show, it’s hiding the floorboards.”

Hermione’s boots clicked once on tile, then hushed into threadbare carpet. She didn’t sit.

He didn’t offer.

“So,” he said, propping one elbow on the armrest, “go on then. Ask your question.”

Hermione looked at him properly now. Not the greying hair or the wartime jacket, but the eyes— sharp, still. Not shell-shocked. Not even close. He’d been waiting for this conversation, even if he wouldn’t admit it.

“Did you know them?” she asked. “The Riddles.”

He let out a low scoff. “Course I did. Everyone did.”

He reached for a chipped ashtray and tapped the rim without a cigarette.

“Old money. Rotten blood. Thought they were better than the war and better than the village. Never spoke to anyone who didn’t shine their shoes or scrub their floors.”

“And their son?”

Frank Bryce shifted in his chair. The clock ticked, steady as a heartbeat, the only sound in the room.

“…Which one?”

Hermione tilted her head. “There was only one. Wasn’t there?”

The stillness deepened, uneasy.

Then— very softly— he said, “Not theirs. Looked mighty similar to their son, though.”

Her breath hitched.

He stared at her like she’d stepped onto a landmine.

“He came last summer. Pale boy. Black hair. Never blinked, not once. Looked at you like he was reading your bones.”

He rubbed a hand over his chin, jaw working like he hadn’t said this out loud in decades. Hermione knew though, it had only been months. 

“Tom Riddle said he’d been hoodwinked. Went round telling folk some tramp girl down the lane drugged him or cursed him. Said she tricked him into marriage, into bed. Left her, quick as he could. Ugly business. No one talked about it much after.”

Hermione’s throat tightened.

“The boy looked just like him,” the man went on. “Too much to be coincidence. Same nose. Same mouth. But sharper. Like someone’d carved all the softness out of him.”

He shook his head.

“Reckon he was theirs all the same. Riddle blood— just not the kind they wanted.”

Hermione didn’t move.

The air in the cabin felt thinner all of a sudden— close, metallic. Her skin prickled under her coat.

Not theirs.

She’d read the file. She knew the name— Merope Gaunt— knew how it ended, how it always ended. But hearing it like this, from a man fresh out of a war with more ghosts than medals, with a cigarette he never lit and silence still drying on his tongue… it made it real. Immediate. Like the story hadn’t unfolded in some distant, yellowed archive— like it was still unfolding. Like the ghosts hadn’t just haunted the shack, but the whole bloody village.

She swallowed. The taste in her mouth was coppery. Like something old and iron.

So he’d come back. To the manor. To the muggles who had washed their hands of him. Maybe to see it. Maybe to hate it. Maybe to erase it.

And he’d killed them.

She wasn’t supposed to feel it, but the chill that crawled up her spine wasn’t fear.

It was understanding.

The kind that sat low and ugly in the gut.

Because what did she expect? That he’d be some monstrous invention, a product of cruelty and misfortune? No. He wasn’t made.

He was born like this.

Born hollow, born wrong. Born from a potion that robbed him of the one thing that made a soul stick— love. Not forged, not broken, not twisted.

Just empty.

Her hand flexed on the hem of her skirt. She didn’t dare ask more.

Not yet.

Frank Bryce rubbed his jaw.

“Didn’t knock. Just walked up to the house like it was his. They didn’t know what to make of him. Not for long, anyway.”

He tapped the empty ashtray again.

Hermione didn’t speak.

“They say lightning don’t strike twice, but it did that week. First, the boy showed up. Then they all turned up dead. Same night.”

“Was he seen again?”

“No,” the man said, then amended— “Not by anyone who kept their tongue. Just whispers.”

Hermione finally sat.

“He killed them,” she said.

It wasn’t a question.

He didn’t correct her.

Just reached into his pocket and, with fingers worn to callus, pulled out a crumpled packet of cigarettes. Lit one with a match.

“I don’t care if he did,” he said, voice steady. “Whatever he was, he wasn’t wrong. He looked at them like they were a mistake he’d come to fix.”

He exhaled. The smoke curled toward the stained ceiling.

“Only thing he ever did that made sense.”

She didn’t dare ask more.

But she didn’t leave, either.

Frank leaned back. Studied her the way people do when they’re trying to decide whether you’re a threat or just nosy. His hand hovered once more over the ashtray— no cigarette ash to justify it. Just the motion. Habitual. Nervous.

“You ain’t police,” he muttered finally. “And you’re too young to be a reporter. So why d’you care?”

Hermione offered a smile she didn’t feel. Soft. Apologetic. Something borrowed from another girl, in another life.

“I like history,” she said.

Frank snorted.

“Well,” he said, “that house is history now.”

And then, more quietly, “Good riddance.”

She left him with a nod, murmured thanks trailing from her lips like smoke. The cottage door clicked shut behind her with the finality of a book closing— one chapter done, another yawning open in silence.

The sun had risen fully now, but the village still held a dawn-stiff chill. She crossed the green, boots damp with dew, breath fogging as she went. The streets, once quaint in their quiet, now felt brittle. Too clean. Too painted. Like a stage dressed to hide something rotten beneath the floorboards.

She followed the hill’s curve without hurry. No wand drawn, no plan. Just the weight of names— Riddle, Gaunt— pulling her forward like gravity.

The manor came into view slow and deliberate, framed by hedgerows and climbing fog. She'd had glimpses of it, photos, files, Dumbledore’s memories— her dreams. But standing before it now, seeing it in person...

It looked wrong in the daylight.

Wrong in the way corpses looked wrong in clothes.

The windows were intact. The lawn half-kept. The stone facade solid, even stately. But it was empty. Not abandoned— emptied. Like something had wrung the soul out of it and left the skin behind.

Her footsteps crunched on the gravel drive as she moved toward the entrance, pausing only when the door rose before her in full: wide, grand, shut.

She didn’t try to open it.

She didn’t need to.

The weight of what happened here hung thick in the air— metallic and quiet. No dark magic. No lingering spell. Just… residue.

She let it settle over her like ash. Let it bite the back of her throat. Let herself feel it.

This was where he’d killed them. All three. Father. Grandfather. Grandmother.

This was his Genesis.

He’d shed the Riddle name like snakeskin— sloughed it off, buried it, burned it. Wiped the bloodline clean as if it had never housed him at all. And in its place, he’d written something new. Not a name, but a warning.

Voldemort.

Something cold clicked into place beneath her ribs:

She had never wanted to see the inside.

She wanted to see the aftermath.

She moved closer.

Not to the door— she wouldn’t touch it— but to the window, just beside the entrance. The glass was clean, the curtains shut. Still, she imagined the room behind it. Carpeted. Ornate. A grandfather clock ticking with English self-importance. She imagined the smell— mahogany wax, pipe smoke, and wealth.

She imagined him.

Sixteen. Standing in this doorway with his uncle's wand already raised. No cloak, no theatrics. Just a boy-shaped blade honed to a point.

Did he knock?

Did he smile?

Did he say anything at all?

She pressed her fingers to the stone frame, as if the memory might pass into her palm. As if the moment had left a scorch mark. Her stomach turned at the thought— at the idea of him standing here, alone, sharp-eyed, that voice like cut velvet saying—

“Hello, Father.”

Had he let them speak? Let them sputter and grovel, demand explanations that would never come?

Or had he been silent?

Silent the whole time— just watching. Not out of cruelty. Not out of anger. Just… because.

Because he didn’t care to hear them.

Because their screams didn’t register.

She thought about the spell he might have used. Avada Kedavra, yes, likely. But before that? Before the killing? Did he restrain them? Did he savour it?

No.

Not him.

He didn’t need drama.

He was surgical. Brutal in his precision. He wouldn’t waste breath on monologues. He wouldn’t taunt.

He would simply erase.

Not rage. Not revenge. Removal.

It made her shiver. Not just from the cold, but from the closeness. From how easily she could see it.

How easily she could imagine standing where he had stood.

She pulled her hand back from the stone. It left no mark. No sign she’d ever been there.

No one would have heard them die. The manor sat too far from the village. And no one would have come looking. The Riddles didn’t have friends— just servants and secrets.

She looked up at the house one last time.

It didn’t look haunted.

It looked hollow.

As if it had been built only to die.

She didn’t walk away immediately.

Instead, she found a low stone wall at the edge of the Riddle property— half-swallowed by ivy, brittle with age— and lowered herself onto it with care. The air hung heavy, still wet with morning fog. Not a single bird called.

She pulled her coat tighter, but it didn’t help. The chill wasn’t in the air anymore. It was inside her.

She watched the manor from across the narrow drive, its grand silhouette softened by distance. A monument to the wrong kind of legacy. Death didn’t cling to the walls— it had sunk in. It had marinated. It had nested.

This wasn’t grief.

Grief left echoes. Grief loved the living.

This— this was abandonment.

She looked down at her hands. Still shaking. Still wrong. The pale girl’s warning rang through her again, like a bone-deep toll: If you like how this feels…

She didn’t. Not really. But she understood it. The stillness after violence. The reverberation of power.

She swallowed hard and pressed her palms to her knees, grounding herself. Tried to remember who she was, who she had been. The girl who read books under her duvet by wandlight. The girl who braided her hair so tight it hurt. The girl who said no to every easy path because it wasn’t right.

Would she sit here?

No.

She’d already left her behind.

And the worst part was… she wasn’t sure she wanted her back.

Her eyes flicked again to the manor. To the silent windows, the too-clean threshold, the absence of ghosts.

Tom Riddle had come here and ended a bloodline. Not as punishment. Not to reclaim anything.

But to sever it.

To prove something.

She wasn’t here to prove anything. Not to anyone else.

But maybe— maybe— she was here to prove it to herself.

She stood. The stone wall creaked beneath her as she rose. Her boots sank slightly into the softened earth, the same path he would’ve walked all those months ago.

She didn’t look back.

Only forward.

To where the trees began to thicken. To where the path narrowed. To the shack.

To where the rot still lived.

•

The trees closed in.

The path thinned to a thread of mud and root. Branches arched above like knotted fingers, blotting out the sky. She followed what wasn’t a trail so much as a memory— half-mapped by instinct, half-pulled by something old and hateful pressing at the edges of her thoughts.

The Gaunt Shack sat at the edge of rot and wilderness, where no birds sang and the soil smelled like blood.

It was worse than she’d imagined.

No grandeur. No dignity. Just a crumpled husk of a hut, crouched in a clearing like a thing that knew it ought to be dead but hadn’t quite stopped breathing. Slats of rotted wood barely held the walls. A broken chimney leaned like a snapped neck. The windows were empty. Watching.

She thought of the manor.

And then of this.

Two houses. Two halves of him.

One, tall-gated and muggle— rich with pride and polish and nothing beneath. The other, pureblooded and ancient, but reduced to ruin. No magic in the walls. Just rot. Just spite. The Riddle estate had been too proud to acknowledge him; the Gaunt shack too broken to care.

But he came from both.

One gave him his name.

The other gave him his curse.

She stepped closer.

Her stomach turned.

The air here had a texture. Thick. Rotten. It clung to her skin like milk gone sour. Her breath caught in her throat, and her magic— that taut, steady hum beneath her ribs— recoiled.

She raised her wand, and her fingers cramped around it. A shudder ran through her arm. Then her legs. Then her spine.

She pressed forward anyway.

A few more feet. Just enough to glimpse inside. Just enough to—

Her knees buckled.

The ground swung sideways. Cold mud caught her palms, and bile surged up the back of her throat.

She retched, once. Twice. The world blurred and burned and doubled. Her heart thudded like it was trying to escape her chest, and her ears rang with the shriek of magic gone wrong.

She didn’t need to see it to know: the ring was inside.

Something in the shack pulsed. Not sound. Not light. Just… pressure. Awareness. A slow, ancient loathing. Like she was a splinter working its way toward the surface of some great, diseased thing, and it wanted her out.

She crawled back. Fingers slipping in wet leaves. The ground sucked at her heels. Her head throbbed with pressure— her own magic, trying to root her, trying to run.

“Fuck you,” she rasped.

The shack did not respond.

It didn’t need to.

It had made itself clear.

She slumped against the tree, chest heaving.

This wasn’t like before.

When she’d worn the locket round her neck, cramped in the tent with snow piling outside and silence gnawing at their edges— that had been bearable. Unpleasant, yes. It had whispered. It had needled. It made her thoughts sour and her patience short. But she could take it off. She could breathe.

This wasn’t that.

This wasn’t something she could brush off or rationalise or will away.

This was not a whisper. It was a presence.

The ring— whatever was left of it— wasn’t passive. It didn’t slither inside her thoughts.

It watched her.

It knew her.

She forced herself to her feet with a wince, wiping her mouth with the back of her sleeve. Her throat burned. Her vision stuttered. But still, she looked at that rotted little shack.

Hermione stepped closer, wand in hand, and closed her eyes.

“Velum Exsolvo.”

The clearing pulsed. Thin strands of enchantment surfaced, lit faintly red— latticed through the air like a spider’s web spun in warblood. It wasn’t just protection. It was possession. Every line of it whispered: Mine.

She braced herself and prodded the nearest rune with a twitch of her wand.

The reaction was instant.

Something struck. Not a sound. Not a flare. Just force— pure, visceral, ancient— slamming into her chest and flinging her backwards like a doll. Her spine hit ground, as did her wand. Her vision white-flashed.

She choked, coughed, and rolled over onto all fours.

And then it came.

The wards uncoiled— rising from the ground like smoke, like tendrils of memory, of grief, of death. They seized her. Not physically, but deeper. Her magic twisted in her lungs. Her heart seized up.

Her own blood turned traitor.

She bit her lip to stop the scream that scraped its way up her oesophagus.

The pain wasn’t sharp— it was old. Like her bones were remembering something they’d never lived.

And beneath all of it— recognition.

Not her name. Not her face. But the crack in her. The rot. The unfinished ruin of her soul that mirrored its own.

It wanted her gone.

No— more than that.

It wanted her unmade.

She reached for her wand with shaking fingers, barely gripping it. Her eyes swam. Her mouth filled with salt and copper.

This wasn’t a barrier to be disarmed. This wasn’t some clever layered enchantment to be outwitted.

It was a threshold.

A demand.

You want what’s inside? Then leave something behind.

Her breath hitched.

She didn’t know what the price would be. But she knew, with total certainty, that there would be one.

To cross that boundary— to rip the Horcrux from its resting place— she’d have to give something. And not something small.

Not just blood. Not just pain.

Something permanent.

Her palms scraped bark as she dragged herself to the base of a tree. She slipped once— caught herself. Her legs trembled beneath her, barely holding. When she finally pushed upright, the ground tilted, and she almost went down again, but her boots held. Just barely. Her heartbeat hammered like a forge behind her ribs.

She stumbled back from the threshold, half-blind with nausea, her palm slick with blood where the earth had bitten her. The air buzzed— no, crackled— like a curse half-spoken, like a mouth still open in a scream. Magic hung heavy and choking, thick as rot.

Her shoulder throbbed. Her wand, clenched too tight, jittered in her fingers like it wanted to flee too.

The shack loomed behind her, still and malignant. 

Watching.

She hadn’t expected it to fight.

Not like that.

She sank to her knees just beyond the treeline, chest heaving, bile burning in her throat. The wind bit through her coat, but it wasn’t the cold that made her shake.

She should’ve run the moment it screamed.

She should’ve—

But no.

No, she thought.

Not yet.

Her blood still rang with the cost. The curse had sunk too deep to brush off. The shack’s wards had teeth. And if she wanted to tear through them, she’d have to give something in turn.

She touched her side, winced.

Not yet.

But she would return.

She had to.

Hermione turned her head and looked back— once. Just once. The shack stood unchanged. Quiet. As though it hadn’t just tried to kill her.

The ring was in there. She was sure of it. 

Waiting. Watching. Rotting.

And next time, she would not crawl away.

She rose to her feet, trembling, scraped dirt from her knees, and limped back toward the trees.

It had seen her now. Marked her. Measured her.

But that went both ways.

She’d be back.

And she’d bury it.

For good.

Chapter Text

The world knit itself wrong when she reappeared.

Not that it was loud about it— Hogwarts stood as it always had, sloping roofs in the distance, turrets dusted by clouds, the lake catching spears of afternoon light like nothing had ever shifted. But the moment her boots struck the damp earth outside the wards, she felt it: something inside her didn’t quite come back.

Her hand still stung. Her temple throbbed.

She walked.

Each step back toward the castle dragged her closer to normalcy, to the shell she wore when she wasn’t peeling back layers of his past. But it clung to her. That place. That shack. That magic— feral and coiled and half-alive.

Her thumb brushed over her bleeding palm. “Emendo.”

The cut closed, but the ache lingered. Another flick of her wand lifted the dried blood from her temple. She ran a charm beneath her fingernails, scrubbing the soil from her skin until it no longer looked like she’d clawed her way out of something ancient.

She passed a thicket and paused— just long enough to catch her reflection in the curve of a half-frozen puddle.

She didn’t look like someone who’d seen it.

The shack.

She transfigured her trench back to school robes— black wool blooming at her collar, pleats smoothing into place, the Slytherin crest reasserting itself over her heart like a brand. The beret vanished. Her posture returned.

But the hum in her bones didn’t fade.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the enchantments. Not protective— repellent. Like the ring knew her. Knew what she was. And hated her for it.

She catalogued what she knew as she walked: Blood-magic? Certainly. Ancient, too. Layered. She’d felt at least three separate spells twist against her intrusion— maybe more. There’d been something under the floor, hadn’t there? And the air— choked with something unsaid.

What could cut through magic like that?

A ritual? A counter-charm? The name of the caster?

She came up short.

Not because she didn’t know enough.

But because he had meant it to.

The Gaunt shack hadn’t just been warded. It had been designed. Like a trap waiting to snap shut around the wrong set of fingerprints. It would take more than power to break it.

It would take permission.

Or a sacrifice.

Her hand curled at her side.

She kept walking.

The lunch bell rang just as she entered the castle.

Its clang echoed high across the stone rafters, familiar and mundane, but it hit her like a slap. The warmth of the Entrance Hall rose around her— braziers lit, chatter bleeding from the Great Hall— but Hermione didn’t stop walking. Her stomach coiled in protest at the smell of roasted parsnips and carved beef, but it wasn’t hunger. Not really. It was the echo of nausea, memory-tight and rooted in her throat.

She didn’t slow.

The corridors were fuller now— students drifting toward food and fire— but none looked twice at her. Not even when she passed them with her eyes still ringed in exhaustion and her sleeves slightly damp. Her Disillusionment might’ve faded, but she hadn’t yet returned to herself. Not properly. She still felt half-threaded through something unspeakable.

So she kept walking. Past the echo of footfalls and the pull of warm light. Down through the narrowing halls where the walls bled cooler and the air grew damper, old stone gobbling up the noise of midday.

The dungeons swallowed her like a secret. She passed through the common room entrance with a muttered word, the wall shivering open to reveal green glass and flickering firelight.

Students were curled in chairs or hunched over parchment, murmuring lowly over their plates and notes. The scent of charred toast lingered from breakfast. One of the older girls flicked her gaze up and let it linger— just a beat too long— before whispering something to the girl beside her.

“Back from hexing corpses, Dufort?” she drawled, just loud enough to carry.

Hermione didn’t flinch. She turned her head slightly, just enough for the firelight to catch the glint in her eyes.

“Why?” she said. “Missing your granny?”

A few snickers cracked the quiet.

The girl blinked— sharp cheekbones twitching— then went silent.

Hermione walked on. Cool, precise. Like she hadn’t meant a word of it. Like she always meant every word.

The Slytherin dorms yawned cool and empty. She slipped inside without a word and leaned briefly against the door, exhaling through her nose like it might steady her.

It didn’t.

Her satchel lay by her bed. Neat, where she’d left it. Too neat, she thought. Too untouched. Like it didn’t know who she was now. She knelt to grab it and caught sight of herself in the mirror above her desk— cheeks pale, eyes rimmed with grey, hair pinned back too tightly.

She blinked. Once. Then looked away.

No one had noticed she’d gone.

And if they had… no one had followed.

She pulled the satchel’s strap over her shoulder and turned sharply on her heel.

Back through the common room. Eyes followed her— a few narrowed, a few heavy-lidded with idle interest.

Just as she reached the far archway, someone muttered under their breath:

“Bitch.”

Hermione didn’t stop. Just let her lip curl in a whisper of disdain.

Back down the dungeon corridor. Back up toward the classroom levels.

Every step sounded too loud.

Her thoughts spun as she walked— unwanted, unspooling: What had he said to them? His father. His grandparents. Did he speak at all before killing them? Or was silence enough?

He’d erased the name Riddle from his life like a knife through parchment. Burned the blood out of his story. She’d seen where it ended. That crumpled husk of a home. That trap dressed as memory.

And still, she wanted to understand it.

She wanted to stand in the dark corners where he had stood, where he had turned himself into something unholy. Not to admire it. But to trace the shape of it. To know it well enough to undo it.

She reached the door to Transfiguration.

Paused.

Lifted her chin.

And stepped inside.

The chessboards were already laid out when she entered the room.

Each desk bore a standard wizarding set: black pieces, white pieces, charm-engraved pawns with transfiguration-sensitive cores. They looked like toys from afar— dusty, inert. But the moment the door swung shut behind her, Hermione felt it. The spellwork humming through them. Old. Subtle. Purposeful.

Professor Dumbledore stood near the front of the room with his hands lightly clasped, his half-moon spectacles glinting in the morning light. He didn’t greet them. Just watched, eyes flickering across the room as students found their seats.

When the bell tolled, he spoke.

“Today,” he said, “you will not be transfiguring form. You will be transfiguring thought.”

Quills stilled.

“Each of you has been assigned a pawn. Your task is to enchant it— not simply to move— but to think. To strategise. To act in accordance with the board. With your opponent.”

Someone scoffed. Probably one of the boys in the back row.

Dumbledore didn’t so much as blink.

“You may choose what kind of mind you give it,” he continued, “but know this— your pawn will remember its first choice. And it will repeat that choice every game thereafter.”

That got their attention.

“In essence: you will enchant instinct. The beginnings of identity. A single behavioural pattern born of a single game.”

He moved his wand gently. The pieces on his demonstration board stirred.

“This lesson, as with most, is about consequence.”

He smiled faintly.

“Begin.”

Hermione’s fingers hovered over her pawn.

Her thoughts were still half in the forest. In the shack. In the rot beneath her nails. She could still feel the ring’s presence like a bruise under the skin. Still hear the pale girl’s voice in the base of her skull.

But here— here was a problem she could solve.

Her wand made a slow arc above the pawn. She murmured the enchantment under her breath:

“Prismata Mentem.”

A flicker. A thrum. The pawn shivered in place. 

She placed it on the board.

A king. Two bishops. Knights on either flank. An opposing line of white.

Think, she told it silently. Show me what you are.

At first, nothing.

Then the pawn tilted, twisted— and drove forward in a lurching diagonal that slammed directly into a white knight.

Then— it veered diagonally and struck down its own bishop.

A crack echoed.

Wood splintered. The bishop fell apart like bone under pressure. The pawn remained motionless, poised above the wreckage. It tilted slightly, crown raised, as if it awaited the next command.

The Ravenclaw student at the next desk gasped.

Hermione stared.

It’s not malfunctioning, she realised. It’s adapting. It’s… choosing. Not like a child. Like something older. Like something already hunting.

It had made a choice.

The best possible move.

A sacrifice. Clean. Precise. Efficient.

One perfect strike ahead.

She felt the weight of eyes on her.

Two boys across the room had stopped their own enchantments entirely. One had a scar curling under his collar like something half-healed and ugly; the other looked like he’d grown up on a diet of smirks and venom.

Tom Riddle hadn’t turned. His back was straight. His head perfectly aligned with the front of the class. Still.

Too still.

The thin boy didn’t even bother to lower his voice. “Careful. That thing’s got more life than she does.”

His friend smirked, lazily steering his own pawn into a suicidal gambit. “Does it bite, Dufort? Or do you?”

The Knights, she thought, with a strange tug in her chest. Their masks are off now. 

Hermione didn’t respond, she didn’t even look up. She flicked her wand, silencing her pawn mid-lunge. Its little limbs jerked, halted, then retracted in something almost like shame.

The boys snorted— though one of them shifted uncomfortably when her pawn crept back to its square and turned towards him, quiet as a cat beneath a crib.

Dumbledore’s footsteps approached her desk. Unhurried. Measured.

His gaze lingered on her board. The piece had stilled, but not before it had watched. He said nothing of it— at first.

“Miss Dufort,” he said, softly enough that only she heard, “you’ve taken a rather… unconventional approach.”

Hermione didn’t look up. “It worked.”

“A fair point. But magic is not only about outcome. Sometimes, it is about intention.”

Her jaw tightened.

He continued, gently, “The piece moved as though it had been summoned, not guided.”

“It was,” she said.

Another silence. Then, “I see.”

His voice didn’t sharpen, but something behind it did. A thread of steel, glinting behind the velvet.

“Do let me know,” he said, “if your studies begin to take you places your professors haven’t assigned.”

That made her look at him.

He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

“Transfiguration is a precise art. Too much force and even simple movements may shatter what was meant to shift.”

He turned then, robes whispering like closing pages.

She sat still for a moment longer, the pawn pressed under her thumb.

And she didn’t realise she was holding her breath until it hurt.

The class ended in a hush of scraping chairs and muttered complaints. Dumbledore dismissed them with a nod, already halfway through Vanishing the chessboard he’d conjured at the front of the room.

Hermione didn’t move.

She waited until most of the students had filed out— until only the faintest echo of footsteps lingered in the corridor— before collecting her satchel. Her hands were steadier now, though her thoughts weren’t. She tucked her wand into the crook of her arm, closed her textbook.

And paused.

There, between the pages— a folded scrap of parchment.

She frowned. She hadn’t seen it before. Hadn’t felt it when she opened the book.

But now, it sat nestled like it had always belonged there.

She peeled it open.

There was no greeting. No signature. Just two words, scorched at the edges like they’d burned themselves into the page:

Clearing. Dusk. 

She should’ve been shocked. She wasn’t. 

The parchment dissolved between her fingers.

Hermione stared at the empty space where it had been. Not surprised. Not really.

She slid her book into her satchel, adjusted her collar, and stood.

Of course they’d be watching. Of course they’d be waiting.

She stepped out of the classroom.

And this time, she didn’t look back.

•

The trees split like teeth as she stepped into the clearing.

It looked different in daylight— or maybe it was her. No masks this time. No soft enchantments or potion-laced questions. Just bare faces, school robes, and a silence that rippled like wind across steel.

The Knights of Walpurgis stood in a loose ring, spaced far enough apart to suggest civility, close enough for blood to stain. Seven of them. All eyes turned.

Hermione didn’t pause.

She moved like smoke, chin high, satchel over her shoulder, the hem of her cloak whispering against the grass. Her heartbeat was steady. Her fingers— curled once around her wand— were not.

The hulking blond was the first to smile.

“Well,” he drawled, pale hair gleaming like a crown, “the lamb returns.”

The thin one, from Transfiguration, gave a soft, eager laugh. Another looked disappointed she hadn’t bled on the way in.

She didn’t speak. Not yet.

Tom Riddle was already there, of course— standing at the edge of the ring, hands clasped behind his back, his eyes unreadable.

She didn’t look at him either.

Not yet.

Tom lifted a hand and motioned to the Knights. 

“They are Malfoy. Rosier. Mulciber. Dolohov. Nott. Avery. Lestrange.”

He spoke without inflexion. As if naming the bones of a dead thing. As if they weren’t people, only pieces.

Hermione watched them stir— the slow roll of shoulders, the drag of eyes. None bowed. None introduced themselves. They stood like they’d already won something.

Malfoy was the first to move. The biggest of them all— pale-haired and sharp-shouldered— with the kind of aristocratic boredom that curdled into cruelty when left too long in the sun. He didn’t bother to meet her eyes. Just tilted his head, like she was a mystery someone else would solve for him.

Next, Rosier. Dark-haired, with that glossy, agitated edge that clung to boys who loved the sound of their own cruelty. His smile was too sharp. Too knowing. He looked like he’d enjoy watching her bleed, but only if it meant an audience could see his face when she did.

Mulciber barely moved. A grunt of a boy. Built like the bottom of a brawl. His fingers flexed like he couldn’t wait to be told what to break. She doubted he’d think twice about it. Or once.

Dolohov was quieter. Buzzed hair, heavy-lidded eyes, a hand resting loosely near his wand. Thoughtful. Detached. More calculating than the rest. She didn’t trust him— because he didn’t feel the need to perform.

Nott stood still. Unmoving, unblinking. There was a stillness to him that wasn’t passive, but precise— like a held breath, or a hunter waiting in tall grass. His eyes were pale and hooded, not cruel but curious, like he was already halfway through dissecting her and hadn’t yet decided whether she was worth the trouble. He looked younger than the rest, but something about him felt older. Out of step. Off-tempo. The kind of boy who never raised his voice because he never needed to. 

He smiled at her then. Not unkindly. It was small and tight, as if he knew something the others didn’t. As if he saw her. Not just the new girl or the curiosity of the week— but something else. He unnerved her more than any of them.

Avery was the other from Transfiguration, the one with the scar. He didn’t look impressed. Or interested. Just vaguely annoyed she’d walked into his day.

And Lestrange—

Lestrange grinned like a wound. His limbs were all sharp angles like he’d been starved, his eyes too wide, too glassy. There was something unmoored in him— something loose. She knew instantly: he’d be the one who took it too far. Who didn’t stop when told. The one who laughed when you begged.

All that inbreeding must’ve shaken a few screws loose, she thought.

Hermione exhaled through her nose. The names anchored in her chest like blades pressed flat. Not enough to break skin. Not yet.

Tom glanced at her. Cold, unreadable.

“Pick one,” he said.

Hermione’s eyes swept the circle.

Seven of them. Maskless now, each more real and loathsome than they’d been in the dark. She felt them watching her— waiting. Measuring. Like hounds scenting blood.

Pick one? Her stomach coiled tight.

For what? A game? A show? A test? No, not a game. It’s a stage. And he’s giving me the opening line.

Her eyes narrowed.

A duel, then. Obvious. I’m the anomaly, the intruder— he wants them to see what I’m worth. Or how quickly I break.

She didn’t speak.

Instead, she let the silence stretch— head tilted, shoulders relaxed, like she had all the time in the world. She catalogued them in quiet pieces: the tallest one— Malfoy, surely— leaning like the whole thing bored him; the one with the scar, Avery, whose eyes flicked from her wand to her hands to her throat; Nott, the quietest, unreadable and unmoved.

Let them stew in the quiet. Let them think she was nervous.

She wasn’t.

She was calculating.

And that was when Lestrange laughed.

“Go on,” he said, voice dripping venom. “Pick someone soft. Don’t worry—” he tilted his head, thin and feral “—we’ll still clap when you bleed.”

Definitely a duel.

She tossed her satchel to the side. 

Her eyes flicked to him, slow and surgical.

Then she smiled.

Not warm. Not kind.

The kind of smile a knife would wear.

“I think,” she said, “you’ll do.”

For a beat, no one spoke.

Even the wind quieted.

Lestrange’s smirk twitched. Just slightly. Like something had landed wrong in his throat.

Across the circle, Malfoy let out a low whistle. “Brave,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Or stupid.”

“Both,” muttered Avery, scratching at the edge of his scar.

Rosier looked delighted. He tilted his head at her like she was a new act at a theatre— one he hadn’t expected to enjoy but now wouldn’t dare look away from.

Mulciber grunted, unimpressed. Dolohov said nothing, but Hermione felt his gaze settle heavier than the rest. Watching. Judging. Filing her away.

Only Nott remained still. Hands folded, eyes half-lidded, expression unreadable.

Tom hadn’t moved.

He stood just behind the line of them, half-shadowed, expression unreadable. But his gaze— Hermione could feel it like a blade pressed up close, intimate, against the soft skin of her stomach.

She didn’t flinch.

Didn’t blink.

And finally— finally— he said, with the faintest nod toward Lestrange:

“Step forward.”

Lestrange stepped forward with a kind of slouching grace, like he didn’t care whether he was walking to a duel or a dance. She was reminded of a hyena. 

He didn’t draw his wand yet. Just looked at her— really looked at her— with a gaze so unbothered it almost stung. Like she wasn’t a threat, just an inconvenience. A smudge on the floor he’d yet to scuff out with his heel.

His boots crunched the grass.

He tilted his head, something cruel curling at the edge of his mouth. “Don’t worry,” he said, voice syrup-thick with mockery. “I’ll try not to bruise your pretty little throat. Too much.”

A few of the Knights snorted.

Hermione said nothing.

She let the silence bloom— let it stretch into discomfort. Let it pull taut between them like a tripwire no one wanted to admit was there.

Her wand twitched in her sleeve.

Lestrange grinned wider. “Nothing to say now? Thought your tongue was sharper than that.”

Still, she didn’t answer.

Her eyes never left his. Not once.

The air in the clearing seemed to thicken, slow. Even the trees held their breath.

And then—

Tom’s voice, soft and unamused, “That’s enough.”

Lestrange’s grin flickered. Just barely. But it was enough.

He turned back toward her, slower this time.

Drew his wand.

The silence was absolute.

And then, Tom stepped forward.

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

“If you think this is a game,” he said, gaze fixed somewhere far beyond them, “you’ve misunderstood what it means to be here.”

His tone was all blade, no fire.

“No points will be awarded. No professors will intervene. This is not school. This is selection.”

Selection. A word that meant more than they realised— trial, culling, survival.

“One of you has something to prove,” he added, glancing once at Hermione. “The rest of you— will learn something.”

He let the silence stretch thin and sharp.

Then, “Ground rules,” he said, almost lazily. “No killing curses. No permanent disfigurement from the neck up.”

A beat.

“Everything else is permitted.”

A flick of his eyes toward Lestrange.

“If you break the rules,” Tom said, quiet as snowfall, “I’ll make what’s left of you wish you hadn’t.”

Silence closed again. Final. Awful.

He looked to Lestrange, then to Hermione.

“Begin.”

She didn’t move.

Not yet.

Lestrange paced a slow half-circle, wand lazily at his side. Waiting for her to crack. To flinch. To prove she didn’t belong here.

But Hermione only watched him. Still. Measured.

Calculating.

She could hex his kneecaps first. He had a slight weakness in his left stance. Then go for the wand— disorient, disarm, end it clean.

But clean wasn’t the language they spoke here. Not in this clearing. Not in front of Tom.

She exhaled once through her nose.

No— humiliation was the only currency that mattered.

So let him strike first.

Let him make the mistake.

Let her answer in a way that made him remember it.

Forever.

He lifted his wand.

“Frangere.”

The curse hit her square in the ribs. Something gave— sharp, wet, wrong— and her knees hit the ground.

Fuck— 

The air left her lungs in a sharp gasp. Something cracked deeper than bone. Her magic flared in response— wild, unstable, a pulse of heat in her sternum like it wanted to fight back on its own. A few boys barked laughter. It echoed, brief and ugly.

But she didn’t scream.

Didn’t cry out.

She waited.

Let them laugh. Let them get loud before you go quiet.

The pain flared, then settled— low and snarling in her chest. She let it sink in. Let it root. Let them all watch her suffer.

And then— she smiled.

It wasn’t a grin. It wasn’t manic. It was something colder. Cruel.

Calculated.

She rose slowly, like the pain didn’t matter. Like it was nothing. Like she’d expected it. Invited it.

Magic shimmered around her spine— skewed, flickering at the edges like a mirror warping in heat. Not protection. Instinct.

Across the circle, Lestrange’s wand twitched.

“Oh,” she said softly, her voice frayed but steady. “Was that it?”

Break him. Don’t win— break him.

She didn’t want to beat him. She wanted to ruin him.

Humiliate him.

Let the others see his best spell break on her skin like sleet on stone.

Let them see what she could take.

Let them wonder what she could do.

Lestrange didn’t answer.

His wand was still raised, but something in his grip had changed. She saw it. So did the others. The weight of it. The hesitation.

There it is. The shift. You’ve taken something from him already.

Hermione tilted her head.

She didn’t fire back.

Didn’t flinch.

Didn’t move at all.

She stood there— slightly hunched, one arm cradled low across her ribs, blood in her mouth and a smile curling at the edges of it. Daring him. Daring all of them.

Go on, then. Try again. See what happens.

The wind shifted.

The trees swayed. Leaves rustled. No one spoke.

Tom said nothing.

And that silence— the kind that should’ve been safety, stillness— was heavy. Wrong. It buzzed like a wire between her teeth.

Hermione let it stretch.

Let it dwell.

She could cast. She could retaliate. She could end it in two movements flat. But no. Not yet.

Not until Lestrange twitched. Not until he broke first.

She was bleeding, barely standing— but it was his fingers that slipped on the wand.

And when she finally took a breath and stepped forward, it wasn’t as a girl defending herself.

It was as an executioner drawing near.

Lestrange’s fingers twitched.

Too fast.

Too desperate.

“Mucus Ad Nauseam!” he barked, the spell cracking from his wand like spit. Juvenile. Crude. Designed not to maim, but to embarrass.

A gout of sickly green light shot toward her.

She didn’t blink.

Didn’t raise her wand.

She simply stepped aside.

The hex missed her by inches, slamming into the dirt with a wet, pathetic squelch.

It was humiliating.

For him.

And she wanted it that way.

Hermione turned her gaze back to him—slowly, deliberately— and tilted her wand as though considering whether to bother using it at all. Like she was weighing whether he was even worth the magic.

The smirk she gave him wasn’t kind. It wasn’t earned. It was pure desecration.

Lestrange’s face burned red. His knuckles were white on his wand.

Someone behind him laughed— short, sharp, merciless.

She tilted her head, just enough to be mocking.

“Missed me,” she said lightly.

A few of the Knights let out sharp breaths. Not quite laughter— more the sound of something drawing blood.

Lestrange’s jaw clenched. His wand rose again, quicker this time, but—

Hermione lifted hers first.

“Phantasmare.”

It wasn’t a curse. Not exactly. More like a conjuration of the mind— half-illusion, half-memory. The kind that reached inside the ribs and curled its fingers around the spine.

Lestrange froze.

The spell didn’t rise cleanly. It crawled up from the dirt like it had been waiting there— called not by wand, but by something fouler beneath her skin. 

It was black-robed and wrong, with no face— just a mirror where the head should be. It tilted toward him, slow and slinking, and whatever he saw in it made the blood drain from his face.

The clearing was silent. Breathless.

Hermione’s wand stayed raised, her expression bored.

“Well?” she said. “Get rid of it.”

His hand shook when he lifted his wand. Not enough to make a sound. But she saw it. Everyone saw it.

“Evanesco,” he muttered.

The creature dissolved into air.

But not before it tilted its mirrored head once more— reflecting Lestrange’s own wide eyes back at him.

He took a step back. Just one. Then steadied himself, jaw tight. His face had gone blotchy— flushed with rage, humiliated, eyes gleaming mean. He gripped his wand like it might steady him, like he could claw back the ground he’d just lost.

He didn’t.

“Flagrare Verax!” he spat, wand slashing the air.

Fire coiled outward in a twisting arc— too fast, too hot— shaped into a serpent with a flickering, skeletal jaw. Its mouth yawned open midair, heading straight for her.

Hermione didn’t so much as blink.

She raised her wand with an almost lazy flick. “Contego Tenebrae.”

The serpent collided with her shield— a dense, smoke-black curve of shadow— and was snuffed instantly. No flash. No dramatic recoil. Just quiet annihilation. The spell hadn’t even brushed her hair.

She tilted her head. Eyes cool. Bored.

Lestrange’s jaw twitched. His wand trembled at his side.

He looked furious. Flushed and cornered, like a schoolboy caught out in front of a crowd. He opened his mouth— but didn’t speak. Didn’t trust his voice. Not with the hush of the forest. Not with the way she was looking at him.

The Knights behind him weren’t laughing.

They were watching.

Some amused.

Some uneasy.

All silent.

Lestrange’s composure snapped like sinew torn from bone.

No incantation this time— just motion, wild and jagged, his wand slashing the air as if it could tear reality open.

A jagged bolt of Virulenta seared from his wandtip— acid-green, corrosive, meant to melt skin from bone.

She caught it just in time— her shield flared green-black on impact, sparking with veins of silver. The backlash stung her arm, but she didn’t flinch, not even as her magic howled, a living thing inside of her.

Lestrange snarled.

“Frangentem!”

“Lacero!”

“Sanguis Elide!”

Spells meant to rupture. To flay. To force blood from places it had no business leaving. Each one darker than the last, scraped from the bottom of some half-forbidden tome.

The clearing convulsed with heat and colour. One curse split a tree at the base. Another screamed as it hit her shield, a wailing sound like steel dragged across a chalkboard.

Hermione moved like shadow and wind.

Fluid. Calculated. Her shields shifted in hue— glinting gold, then green, then a deep obsidian. 

Hold. Let him tire himself out. Waste every last drop of hatred.

She didn’t try to overpower him. Not yet. She let him throw everything he had.

Let him sink.

And Lestrange sank— deeper into rage, deeper into humiliation. His lips curled back, his hair damp with sweat. He looked rabid.

Something in it unnerved her. The way he moved— frenzied, unthinking— like he’d stopped caring about the duel and just wanted to hurt. A flicker of fear twisted low in her stomach. But she smothered it. Buried it deep beneath the marrow.

His wand shivered in his grip.

And she— still untouched— watched him like he was already finished. Expression flat. Eyes like glass. Letting him believe she felt nothing at all.

She sidestepped another curse with the grace of someone bored by violence. Her shield flickered, caught the edge of a slicing hex, and shimmered back to stillness— but it pulsed once, strangely, as if her magic had overcorrected.

Easy. Control it. You’re not here to reveal. You’re here to endure.

Lestrange spat something guttural— he didn’t even try Latin this time. Just rage and wandfire.

She deflected it with a lazy flick.

The clearing tensed. A few of the others stirred— Malfoy raised a brow. Dolohov’s mouth twitched. Nott blinked, intrigued.

She conjured a sound behind him— soft footsteps, the hiss of something breathing. He spun.

Nothing.

When he turned back, her wand was already raised. She didn’t cast. She waited.

Let him sweat. Let him wonder.

He was trembling.

And it showed.

She gave him a smile like a guillotine.

She waited until his rage burned white-hot— until his curses lost precision, until he was all bark and no bite.

Then she moved.

No flourish. No fanfare.

Just a quiet incantation spoken like a secret:

"Inverso Folliculum." 

It hit him dead centre.

A sharp pop!

And then—

Gasps.

Lestrange froze. His hands shot to his head.

His bald head.

Every strand of hair— gone. Eyelashes, brows, even the fine fuzz on his arms. Clean as bone.

A beat of silence.

Then someone choked back a laugh.

Hermione stood still, wand lowered, utterly unimpressed.

Her magic buzzed under her skin now— too loud, too fast.

Focus. Control it. Don't let them see what it’s doing to you.

But it didn’t want control.

It wanted carnage.

Lestrange turned crimson. His wand hand trembled.

“You—”

His pride had cracked. Now it splintered.

“Cruci—”

She moved—

Too late.

The curse struck her shoulder like a white-hot brand. Agony detonated down her side, sharp and searing, nerve-deep.

She screamed.

Not a cry— a ragged, animal sound, torn from her throat as her vision went white. Her knees hit the ground with a crack. One hand braced hard on the earth, the other clenched so tight around her wand her knuckles blanched.

And her magic—

It lashed.

Not in protection— in fury.

No no no no—

Control. Control it. 

The ground trembled under her hand. The grass smoked. Something ancient snarled just beneath her skin. Not a spell. Not a name. Just magic— feral and cracked and half-wild with grief.

Her breath came in shallow gasps. Sweat prickled at her hairline. The taste of iron bloomed in her mouth— bitten tongue, or something worse.

But she didn’t drop her wand.

She didn’t look away.

Lestrange laughed low, mean. “Look at you,” he sneered. “Your mother ever scream like that when she spread her legs for the Mudblood who sired you? Bet she begged. Bet she cried. Bet you will too.”

Her gaze lifted.

Flat. Final.

She rose with quiet fury, blood soaking through her sleeve.

"Pavimenta Carnis." 

The curse was old. Forgotten. Something dark and foul torn from a corner of a book not even the Restricted Section remembered.

The clearing shifted.

Wind didn’t blow— it bent. The ground beneath Lestrange pulsed, then opened beneath him like a mouth. No fire. No claws. Just pressure. Crushing, intimate pressure. The earth wanted him. The earth remembered.

He was yanked downward— not far, not deep. But enough. Enough to make his knees collapse. His palms slapped dirt. His spine arched with the wrong kind of reverence.

Her magic surged with it. Like something starved given its first taste of blood.

And it was hungry.

Lestrange dropped, fully— face-first. Something pinned him. Invisible, weightless, but suffocating. A force like hands pressing down on the softest parts of him.

The magic clung to the dirt like rot. It pulsed like something half-alive. The air stank faintly of ozone and burnt iron— far too much for a single spell.

His wand skittered out of reach.

His mouth opened to curse— but gasped. Choked. Eyes bulging. 

Hermione walked toward him, wand still raised but not trembling. Her face was unreadable.

She let the spell hold a moment longer, pressed her shoe into the side of his face and tutted. 

“You should learn Latin,” she murmured. “That one doesn’t fade.”

Lestrange’s eyes flew wide— he could feel it now. The magic. Like a handprint. Branded into his shoulder blades. He could scream if he wanted. If he dared.

She stepped back.

Let the spell lift— just enough to let him breathe again.

He collapsed properly now, coughing into the soil, scrabbling for his wand with hands that didn’t quite stop shaking.

Hermione didn’t help him.

Didn’t even speak.

She just turned, slow and deliberate, the blood still wet on her sleeve.

And smiled.

Just barely.

Something ancient.

She didn’t stay to watch them scatter.

Didn’t wait to hear Lestrange stumble to his feet or Malfoy sneer something clever to dull the sting. Didn’t even glance back at Tom.

Her wand was still drawn.

She swiped her satchel and walked past them like smoke, not sparing a look. Her blood still sang. Her magic crackled under her skin, feral and elated, half-wild with the taste of it.

Victory.

No. Not victory. Domination.

She’d made him bleed. She’d seen the flash of panic in his eyes— just for a moment, just enough. And the others? They hadn’t seen a girl. They’d seen something else. Something worse.

Good.

She hoped they were afraid.

She hoped they dreamed of her tonight.

You’re not one of them, she told herself. You’re just surviving them.

But her magic disagreed.

It thrummed, greedy and wild, licking the air like flame.

Hatred curled tight in her gut. Not cold and calculating like usual, but hot and alive. She hated Lestrange’s grin, and Malfoy’s drawl, and the way Rosier leaned forward like he was watching a puppet dance. She hated the lot of them. Their smugness. Their lineage. Their little club of masks and monsters.

She hated that part of her fit in.

And still— she smiled.

Because for the first time in weeks, her heartbeat was hers again. Loud. Steady.

And it didn’t sound like fear.

It sounded like fire.

But even fire, unchecked, devours the things it was meant to warm.

Her wand hand twitched once— small, involuntary.

The curse still buzzed under her skin. Her magic still pressed outward, like it wanted more.

This isn’t control, she thought, and the thought didn’t calm her. This is something else.

Each step forward bled something out of her— pain, yes, but also heat, light, pressure. Her magic thrummed at the base of her spine, not calm, not contained. It writhed.

It wanted.

The leaves crackled underfoot, but not with sound— with energy. Static hissed in her bones. Her wand, still in her grip, twitched again, pulsing faintly as if it, too, were trying to cast without her permission.

She exhaled. Inhaled. Felt it claw at her ribs from the inside.

You’re fine. You won. You’re walking. That’s all that matters.

But her magic disagreed.

It kept reaching. Kept snarling.

Her fingers twitched as she passed a tree, and its bark peeled back in a thin strip without her meaning to. She paused. Watched the exposed trunk shiver in the aftermath.

Stop. Stop it. Her own thoughts were harsh now. Not frightened. Furious. You are not unravelling. You are not—

A branch above her cracked.

She didn’t flinch. Just turned her head slowly.

The forest watched.

Every leaf. Every shadow. Even the dark seemed to shift when she moved. As if it knew her now. Claimed her.

The adrenaline hadn’t faded.

Not really.

She’d hurt him. Humiliated him. She’d kept her cover intact— maybe. Maybe not. She’d stood there soaked in blood, her own spell dragging Lestrange to the dirt like a thing possessed, and she’d wanted them all to see.

And they had.

You were supposed to survive quietly.

But that was gone now.

She’d made a choice.

And now— now her magic was growing teeth.

Another breath. Another step. She clenched her wand harder.

There was still blood on her robes. Still heat beneath her skin. Her magic writhed again, angry that it was being caged.

She pressed a palm to her chest, like she could hold herself still from the outside.

You can’t keep doing this. Not like this.

Still, she didn’t stop walking.

She couldn’t.

Not until the trees swallowed her again— and the clearing, and the blood, and the boy gasping in the dirt behind her.

Only then, alone in the dark, did she let her hand shake.

Just once.

Then she gritted her teeth, and kept going.

Because she couldn’t afford to fall apart.

Not yet.

Chapter Text

TOM RIDDLE

He did not walk with them.

He trailed in front, untouched by the noise— that shrill, human need to mythologise what had just occurred. Laughter. Boasting. Sputtered rewrites of the truth. Their voices rose and fell like dying birds.

Insects, all of them.

Their minds chittered with primitive wiring— hierarchy, cruelty, hunger for dominance. He let them believe they had teeth. Let them call themselves Knights.

They were tools. Extensions. Flesh puppets with barely enough awareness to mimic loyalty.

He would kill any one of them without hesitation if utility demanded it. Likely wouldn’t notice the silence.

But she— Dufort— was not noise.

She was anomaly.

His mind catalogued her dispassionately.

Not with curiosity. Not with interest. With necessity.

Because something about her didn’t fit.

Her magic was wrong. Misaligned. Not dark, not Light. Not possessed of power in the way the others fetishised it. It was unstable. Reactive. Primitive and elegant in equal measure— like something reassembled from memory. Like something rebuilt from ash.

Not cast. Not conjured.

Exhaled.

He had miscalculated.

Not entirely— there was dark magic threaded through her, unmistakable as smoke clinging to cloth. But it wasn’t the root. No, that would be too easy. Too human.

There was something else.

A fault line.

Not born of ambition, nor of malice— but of loss. 

Severe enough to rewire magical architecture.

Not sentimental. Not expressive. Just structural.

Her magic bore the signature of damage sustained, then maladaptively repaired.

Not weeping grief— that was irrelevant. What remained in her was the residue of collapse: a system that had shattered and reformed with incorrect alignment, like a bone reset without care. Jagged. Inexact. Functional, but volatile.

That volatility explained the surges. The static. The unpredictability.

Dark magic was part of it, yes. But not the source.

The root cause was deeper. Non-magical in origin.

He didn’t like it.

Not because it frightened him— fear was a human thing, and he’d never harboured such debilitations— but because it meant the pattern no longer held.

And when patterns failed, control wavered.

That shield— the one she used against Lestrange’s serpent. Not a textbook casting. Not taught. Too dense. Too ancient. It ate the spell.

Not absorbed. Consumed.

That mattered.

He filed the moment away alongside a hundred others— the hex that burned wrong, the silent retaliations, the moment her magic blistered the air without moving her lips.

It was a malfunction. A hairline crack.

A window.

Lestrange, of course, had ruined it— as expected. Of all his followers, Lestrange was the most rabid, the most erratic. Not useful. Just violent. A hammer without a hand to wield it. His mind ran on fractured pathways, lit by the kind of static that passed for pleasure in creatures too stunted to reason.

Tom had allowed him to remain in the circle not for strength, but for pressure— a predictable predator to reveal weakness in others. There was utility in that. In entropy used sparingly. In letting a blunt instrument swing wild to see who flinched.

He’d done exactly that.

But the spectacle itself bored him.

Violence— unshaped, unmeasured— was tedious. A child’s tantrum rendered in blood. It achieved nothing of value. It taught nothing. It left behind only noise.

He did not revel in chaos. He dissected it. Precision was power. Not volume. Not gore. Violence, in his hands, was a means of study. An incision. A diagnostic tool. Not an end in itself.

Lestrange never understood that.

None of them did.

To strike in fury was to admit the world could move you. And Tom did not move. He did not scream. He did not crave the sound of breaking bones or the wail of someone made lesser.

He already knew they were lesser.

What use, then, was proof?

He required only observation. Patterns. Data.

Dufort’s reaction to the Cruciatus had been perfect. 

Not in her scream.

He didn’t care that she screamed.

But he noted it.

Because it meant something— about tolerance. Pain threshold. Nerve response. The magic’s retaliation pattern.

Not in her restraint, either. 

In the aftermath.

She didn’t cast. Her magic reacted. A backlash, like the nervous system of something deeply wounded.

That sort of reaction didn’t come from pride. Or fear. It came from history.

And history was leverage.

He kept walking.

The forest thinned. The castle rose like a shadow ahead.

The others were still laughing behind him. Malfoy slapping Lestrange on the back. Nott with that feline curiosity in his eyes. Dolohov silent, but watching. Always watching.

It didn’t matter.

They were reflections of each other. Slight variations in upbringing. Rotations of the same archetype. No singularity. Shades of grey. Nonentities.

But her?

Dufort was singular.

She hadn’t smiled when she cast that final curse. No flourish. No panic. No pleasure. Just clean execution. She hadn’t checked the crowd for approval. She hadn’t flinched.

And she hadn’t looked at him.

That, he noted.

That more than anything.

She hadn’t checked his reaction. Not once.

That made her either foolish or very dangerous.

He didn’t care which. Both would serve.

He catalogued the spells again in his mind— Phantasmare, Contego Tenebrae, the humiliation hex that altered follicular patterns with surgical precision, and finally, Pavimenta Carnis— so old it barely existed in literature. He’d seen it once. A marginalia note in blood-flecked ink, beside a description of psychic imprints made permanent through ritual. It wasn’t meant for duelling.

It was meant for branding.

The curse pressed memory into skin. It lingered. It shaped posture. Rewired sensation.

He doubted Lestrange understood what had been done to him. But he would. Eventually. His dreams would become tactile. Shame wouldn’t leave the body.

That was why Tom was interested.

Not because she had bested a Knight. Not because she screamed and stood again.

Because she had reached for something true— without hesitation. Without shame.

Without fear of being seen.

That level of resolve wasn’t ambition.

It was ideology.

And ideology could be owned.

His pace slowed as the castle gates rose before him, black and unfeeling.

He would not bring her closer. Not yet.

He would observe. Let her think the ordeal passed. Let her believe she’d been weighed and found acceptable.

In truth, the dissection had only begun.

He would find the root of her decay— the fracture in her spellwork, the strange bloom of power that curled not from control, but from collapse. She was not powerful.

She was poisoned.

And poisons could be studied.

Extracted.

Repurposed.

He didn’t want her.

No, that would imply desire.

He wanted to know her.

Because only through knowledge could he master her. And only through mastery could he determine what use she might have.

He wondered if she would burn easily.

He hoped not.

Fire, after all, made the best crucibles.

And he was going to put her through the fire.

She would go to bed tonight, bruised and aching, and think she’d won.

She hadn’t.

Not yet.

Because he hadn’t stripped her down to blood and belief.

He hadn’t seen the core of her yet.

But he would.

He always did.

And when he did— when she snapped or shattered or sang with whatever vile little magic boiled in her chest— he’d know.

He’d know if she was a threat.

Or a weapon.

Or a mirror.

He hoped it was the latter.

Because then he could break her the way he planned to break everything else.

Not loudly.

Not cruelly.

Quietly.

Clinically.

With the precision of a man conducting an autopsy on the world.

Chapter Text

She woke with the taste of ash in her mouth.

Pain sang down her left side, dull and bright at once, like glass ground beneath skin. Her ribcage screamed when she shifted. Something in her back twinged. The sheets clung to her— sweat, maybe blood, maybe both. For a moment she stayed still, watching the ceiling of the Slytherin dorm flicker with pale green light. Watching it breathe.

The duel hadn’t killed her.

But it had left a mark.

She’d healed what she could, sometime in the early hours. With her wand gripped too tight, jaw locked against the pain, she’d peeled the bloodied shirt from her skin and closed the worst of the gash along her ribs. The spell had stuttered, reluctant, her magic crawling over the torn flesh like it didn’t trust itself. She remembered how it had knitted, imperfect and pink, a line of raw new skin puckered at the edges. Functional. Nothing more.

The scorched laceration on her forearm— deep, angry, blistering— had taken longer. She’d layered charms: cooling first, then a balm she barely remembered learning. The wound had hissed under her palm. It still ached now, bandaged and hidden beneath her sleeve.

And the Cruciatus…

There was nothing to do about that.

She hadn’t even tried.

The pain still shimmered beneath her bones. Phantom fire. Her joints felt hollowed. Her back had spasmed twice while she cast, sharp and sudden, like a violin string snapping from within.

No spell could reach it.

So she hadn’t bothered.

She’d healed what she could. Then she’d washed the blood and dirt from her hands, lay back down, and stared at the ceiling until sleep dragged her under like a tide.

She sat up slowly, spine stiff, bones creaking like floorboards in winter. Her wand throbbed faintly where it rested beneath her pillow— attuned to her unease, or perhaps causing it. She didn’t know anymore. The two were beginning to blur.

She peeled back the covers. The scar where Lestrange’s curse had hit her square in the ribs pulsed with fever heat— the skin glossy, pink and twisted. Angry. Her fingers hovered above it, not quite touching. She was collecting them now, these marks. Quiet little monuments to every mistake. Every time she wasn’t fast enough, smart enough. It wasn’t something to be proud of. Just evidence. Just failure.

She stared for a moment longer. Then pulled her uniform on over the damage.

The dorm was empty. She liked it that way. Silence wrapped around her like a second skin— tighter than her glamour charms, quieter than pain. Her boots echoed on stone as she left, trailing the scent of magic barely-held.

Each step toward the Great Hall felt louder than it should. Too sharp. Too clean. Like she was being followed by something just out of sight— not footsteps, not shadows, but magic. Her own magic. Wrong-footed. Wrong-formed.

She could feel it pricking under her skin, twitching in the air around her like static— impatient, erratic. No longer answering. No longer obeying. It didn’t hum, not anymore.

It howled.

You’re slipping, she thought. Get it under control.

The Great Hall loomed up before her, golden with morning light. She paused on the threshold for the smallest breath. Composure. Control. Re-entry.

She moved toward the Slytherin table with the same posture she always wore— shoulders straight, chin slightly lifted, hands still in detachment. But she felt the shift as soon as she stepped into view.

The Knights looked up.

Lestrange wasn’t there. Neither was Tom— most likely prefect duties.

But the rest of them were— Malfoy, Rosier, Dolohov, Nott, Avery, Mulciber— and they turned toward her like metal drawn to lodestone. No one spoke. No nods. Just a quiet scrutiny that pressed against her skin like damp cloth.

They’re watching to see if you’re bleeding, she thought. Don’t give them the satisfaction.

She sat farther down the table. Not too far. Not close enough to invite anything.

The Slytherin girls were watching, too— the ones who’d never spoken to her before, the ones whose eyes narrowed now with something almost like wariness.

Hermione reached for toast with a hand that barely shook. Buttered it with precision. Bit down. Swallowed.

You won, she told herself. You’re still standing.

But that wasn’t what mattered, was it?

Not here.

What mattered was what they’d seen. That Lestrange hadn’t finished her. That she’d stayed on her feet when others might have folded. That her magic— wild, rotting, rabid— hadn’t turned on her entirely. Yet.

She could feel it even now, pulsing under her skin, writhing in coils she couldn’t untangle. Her forearm burned like a mark. Her ribs ached when she breathed too deep.

Her wand, tucked beneath her sleeve, twitched once.

She pressed her elbow in against her side to still it.

And didn’t look up.

The scrape of cutlery was the only sound. A few First Years laughed at the far end of the table. Somewhere, a spoon clinked against the rim of a goblet.

But down at this end, it was quieter. Sharper.

Malfoy moved first.

He didn’t say a word. Just lifted his slice of toast— slathered thick with raspberry jam— and raised it in her direction like a toast. Casual. Careless. Almost elegant.

The jam bled down the crust like something arterial.

Hermione didn’t blink.

She tore off a piece of her own toast and chewed. Slowly. Deliberately. Her gaze didn’t shift toward him— not even once— but she knew he was watching for a flinch. A tell. A tremor in her hands.

She gave him none.

Rosier murmured something behind his hand. Nott let out a single snort of breath, like he’d been holding in a laugh too long. Dolohov didn’t speak, but his eyes lingered— not in malice, not in amusement— just in thought.

None of them mentioned the duel.

They didn’t have to.

The silence was heavier than words.

She reached for her goblet. Her fingers curled around the stem— steady enough. Steady enough to pass.

But inside?

She was burning.

You shouldn’t have let them see you like that, she thought. You should’ve ended it faster. Cleaner. Without your rot showing.

Her magic stirred at the thought, as if insulted by her shame.

And across the table, Malfoy smiled— small, satisfied, and cruel— before sinking his teeth into the jam-drenched toast.

Avery had bumped her shoulder on the way in. Not enough to be called a shove— just enough to feel deliberate. He hadn’t looked back. He and Lestrange were chummy, more so than the rest. She wondered where he was. Licking his wounds likely, and Avery had been to visit she suspected. She hadn’t asked though. She wouldn’t.

But the others were watching her differently now. Like she’d done something obscene. Like she’d taken a knife to the wrong throat, and smiled while she did it.

A bruise was forming along her side. She could feel it bloom when she reached for anything, when she twisted too quickly, when she breathed too deeply. She said nothing. Didn’t wince.

You asked for this, she thought. You asked to be let in. This is what it costs.

She caught Dolohov looking again. Not taunting. Assessing. The way one might study the edge of a blade— not to admire it, but to decide what it could cut through.

There was always one in a group like that— quiet, deliberate, watching even when others performed. A reader of patterns. She’d seen them before. Not the ones who carried out orders. The ones who decided where the knife should go.

What was he doing among brutes like Lestrange and Avery?

She didn’t hold his gaze long. Just long enough to let him know she saw it.

The toast sat heavy in her gut. The goblet of pumpkin juice tasted like copper on her tongue. Her magic pulsed faintly— just under her skin— like a fever she couldn’t sweat out. Wrong. Wild. Still thrumming with the memory of the night before.

Hermione doubted any of her housemates had asked what had happened in the forest.

They didn’t need to.

The truth had already curdled in the air, thick and unspoken. Not a single one of them looked surprised to see her alive— bruised, burnt, bone-weary— but no one offered pity, either.

They knew. All of them.

And they were watching. Not for answers. But for aftermath.

Waiting to see how she walked. How she held her wand. Whether she sat down slowly. Whether she flinched. Whether she would speak of it at all— or stay silent and let the silence fester.

They weren’t curious.

They were taking stock.

Weighing her.

Malfoy finished his toast. Licked a fleck of jam from his thumb.

“Sloppy spellwork, Dufort,” he said mildly, as he stood. “Try not to bleed too much next time.”

She didn’t reply.

But her fingers curled just slightly around her fork.

She imagined driving it through his hand.

Instead, she smiled. Small. Painless. Inoffensive.

And made him wonder what it meant.

•

It began as a whisper in her spine.

Not a voice. Not words. Just a tilt— a sense— as though her body had begun leaning without permission, as though some hidden current had shifted beneath the stone floors of the castle and taken her with it.

She ignored it.

By the second class, it was worse.

Her wand hand trembled once mid-spell. Enough that the charm sparked sideways, catching a boy’s sleeve— a minor scald, nothing serious, but it earned her a glance from Professor Viridian and a muttered “watch it” from her partner.

It’s nothing, she told herself. Just the aftershock. Just the duel still unwinding in your blood.

But the air felt thick. Sweet, almost— like something rotting beneath the floorboards. Not visible. Not obvious. But present. And patient.

She had sat through Arithmancy with her fists balled in her lap. She hadn’t written a single equation. The numbers on the board just blurred into serpents, and her head pounded too much to concentrate.

By dinner, she couldn’t eat.

The castle was wrong. Every corridor seemed angled differently— every stair moved faster. The torches flared too bright. Her own skin hummed with something she couldn’t place— not pain, exactly. But pressure.

And always, always— the pull.

Not toward the common room. Not toward the dungeons.

But north.

Down past the greenhouses. Past the boathouse. Toward the lake.

She didn’t go.

Not yet.

She forced her steps toward the dungeons instead— steps that felt not quite her own, like walking on the deck of a ship moments before the swell. One foot in front of the other. One breath after the next. Just enough to appear normal.

The Slytherin common room was all green glass and low voices. Someone had spelled a fire into the hearth, but it gave no warmth. It crackled like bones.

Hermione took her usual chair near the back, in shadow. No one greeted her. They never did.

Avery glanced up once from where he sat with Rosier, his lip curled into something faintly amused. Not surprise. Not worry. Just observation.

They’re watching you now.

She looked away.

Someone was playing a game of wizard chess near the centre— the soft clack of bloodstone pieces against the board set her teeth on edge. A girl she didn’t know by name was laughing too loud at something Malfoy said. The whole room felt like it was thrumming with something. Residue. Aftershock. Or maybe that was just her.

Her skin itched.

She lasted twenty minutes.

The walls were too close. The voices too sharp. Her magic— whatever was left of it— pulled tight across her ribs like thread pulled too taut. One wrong move and she’d tear open. She felt it. She knew it.

Upstairs. Her dormitory.

The climb was slow.

The sconces flickered behind her as she moved, one by one— like they were bowing out. Her steps echoed too loud on the stone.

By the time she reached her bed, she was shaking.

Not visibly. Not quite. But inside— everything shook.

She lay down fully clothed, back to the door, and stared at the wall.

Tried to sleep.

Tried to breathe.

Tried not to notice how her wand vibrated faintly where it lay beneath her pillow, like it too had felt the pull.

Like something still called.

Sleep didn’t come.

It hovered at the edges— a promise, a lie— and then slipped just out of reach every time she closed her eyes.

She shifted once, twice. Rolled over. Adjusted the pillow. Her side still ached where the curse had hit, deep in the meat of her side. A sharp little echo beneath the skin. A reminder.

Eventually, she gave up.

Her limbs felt stiff as she sat up. Her fingers were clumsy at the buttons of her uniform, but she managed. Changed into pyjamas with slow, mechanical movements. Soft cotton, loose. The comfort of routine— dressing for bed, as if sleep were something she could summon like a charm.

Then she crossed the room, barefoot, and lit a candle with a flick of her wand.

The flame sputtered once before holding.

She chose the book at random from her bedside stack— Ancient Runes and the Invocation of Name— and returned to her bed, curling against the wall with the candle beside her.

She read.

Or tried to.

Her eyes moved across the page, but the words slid off her mind like oil on water. Her concentration was shot— cracked, like a mirror fractured just beneath the surface. Every few lines, she had to blink and start again.

But she kept reading. She always kept reading.

Because the silence was worse.

Because the candlelight was soft and steady and real.

Because her hands still trembled, and this— this was something she could control.

But somewhere beyond the pages, beyond the flicker of the flame—

Whatever it was, it still called.

The door creaked open.

Low voices, laughter muffled by stone and late-hour softness. Her dormmates— the other sixth-year girls— filtered in, shedding shoes and robes, shaking out their hair, slipping into silks and lace.

Hermione didn’t look up.

She didn’t need to.

She felt their glances skim over her like cold water. No words were exchanged. They never were.

She was the shadow in the corner. The quiet thing.

Best left alone.

Still— Hermione marked her place in Ancient Runes and the Invocation of Name, slid it beneath the mattress, and reached instead for a slimmer volume from her bedside.

She tucked her legs up, spine against the cool stone wall, and pretended not to notice the sound of whispered hair spells, a perfume bottle clinking against a vanity, a sigh followed by a snort of laughter.

Eventually, the lights dimmed. Curtains drawn. One by one, the others slipped behind velvet and fell into sleep.

Hermione didn’t move.

Her candle burned low.

The new book hung limp in her hands, unread.

Because still— still— that thing beneath her skin kept thrumming.

And somewhere far beneath the castle, something ancient was waiting.

The flame guttered low, licking shadows across the ceiling.

Hermione sat curled beneath her blanket, the book forgotten in her lap. Her eyes traced the wax pooling at the base of the candle, the way it bled slowly down the brass holder— molten and pale.

That was when it began.

A pressure. Low. Dull.

Behind the ribs, just beneath the skin.

Not pain. Not yet. Just… pull.

Like a thread inside her had been caught. Tugged.

Her fingers twitched. She shifted, adjusting the blanket— but it didn’t help. The pull sharpened. The hollowness beneath her sternum began to ache.

It wasn’t hunger. Wasn’t fear.

It was a summons.

No words. No whisper. Nothing spoken aloud.

Just a compulsion curling slow and sure in her gut, as if something buried in the stone had opened one ancient eye and… noticed.

She breathed in through her nose. Held it.

No. Not now.

She wasn’t going anywhere.

Hermione set the book aside, blew out the candle. The darkness was instant— cloaking, close. Her breath sounded louder now. She swung her legs down from the bed, bare feet pressing into cold stone.

The ache didn’t fade.

She padded to the foot of her bed, drew her curtains shut. Sat there in the blackness, trying not to think. Trying not to feel the gravity pulling at her bones.

Her wand vibrated once in her palm.

She gripped it tighter.

She stayed like that for a long time.

Wrapped in silence, pressed tight against the curtains, wand clutched hard in one hand. The castle creaked and breathed around her. Somewhere below, the lake moaned against the stone.

And still, the pull remained.

Not stronger. Just steadier. Tireless.

Like breath. Like a heartbeat. Like tide.

She dropped her wand, dragged her hands through her hair, yanked the tie loose. Tried to focus on the residual ache from the Cruciatus, the stiffness in her side. The sting of bruises blooming down her arm. Real things. Tangible.

But the feeling crept deeper.

Beneath thought. Beneath will.

It wasn’t a voice. It didn’t speak. It simply was. Old and low and patient, humming through the marrow.

Come.

Come.

She clenched her jaw. No.

But the word held less weight than it had minutes before. Like her refusal was being… unravelled. Quietly. Softly. Thread by thread.

She paced. Once. Twice. Stared at the bookshelf in the corner like it might pin her in place.

It didn’t.

By the time she reached for her wand again, her hands were steady. That scared her more than anything.

She didn’t even remember choosing to move. Just one breath— then the next— and she was already padding across the flagstones. Already easing open the dormitory door. Already stepping out into the chilled hush of the corridor beyond.

No thoughts. No questions.

Icy stone under her bare feet. Wind slinking down the back of her neck, her pyjamas billowing around her. Her wand pulsed in her palm like a second heartbeat.

Hermione stopped halfway down the path that led to the lake, breath misting in the October chill.

She hadn’t chosen to walk here.

She hadn’t meant to.

But the pull— subtle, primal— tugged at her ribs like a fishhook. Not Confundus, not Imperius. Something older. Something quieter. A call meant only for her.

The grass dampened beneath her soles. The trees thinned.

Ahead, the Black Lake gleamed like a slit throat— dark, depthless, still.

And waiting.

She should’ve turned back. She didn’t.

Hermione moved as though through a dream— steps slow, deliberate, the smell of wet stone and iron thick in her nose. Her magic bristled under her skin, sharp-edged and volatile. It hated this path. Hated being led.

But it followed.

And then—

A shape.

Sat on the bank like she’d always belonged there. Like the lake had grown her.

Bone-white. Silent.

She didn’t look up as Hermione approached. Didn’t move. Her hands were folded in her lap, unmoving, like a statue carved from frost.

Hermione stopped a few paces away.

Neither spoke.

The moon carved lines into the pale girl’s face. White lashes, eyes like pearls. She looked too young and too ancient all at once, like a figurine sculpted from old magic and silence.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” the girl said finally. Voice low, gravelly. Rough with disuse.

“I didn’t mean to,” Hermione answered.

“I didn’t summon you.”

“I know.”

The girl turned her head— barely. Her eyes didn’t blink.

“There’s a thrum to the lake tonight,” she rasped. “When it wakes, something always follows.”

Hermione said nothing. The water lapped at the shore.

“You’re rotting,” she said after a while, like a whisper through grit. 

Hermione didn’t flinch.

“I know.”

“It’s not just the magic.”

“No.”

The quiet sharpened.

“I’ve seen you,” she murmured. “Not in prophecy. Not in tea leaves or stars. From somewhere older than that.”

Hermione’s throat tightened. She kept her gaze fixed on the lake, unmoving.

“You don’t sit right in the world,” the girl went on, voice low. “Like something was unmade to make room for you. And whatever tore to let you in— still bleeds.”

Hermione swallowed. Her wand throbbed once in her hand. “Then why haven’t you told anyone?”

“I don’t owe them anything.”

“Do you owe me?”

“No,” the girl said quietly. “But I’m not their creature. And neither are you.”

Another silence. The wind scraped across the water.

Her gaze was steady. “You’re thinking about him.”

Hermione said nothing.

“You should be. He’s watching.”

“I know.”

“You’ve seen what he does to things he doesn’t understand.”

“I understand him.”

“No,” the girl said, voice like stone breaking. “You mirror him. That’s not the same.”

Something cold and furious bloomed in Hermione’s chest. Not fear. Not quite. But the recognition of someone who’d once been warned, and hadn’t listened.

She didn’t answer. Instead— she sat beside her.

And when the moon rose higher, and the lake stopped whispering, they didn’t leave right away.

The stone beneath Hermione was cold, but she didn’t move. Across from her, the pale girl sat like a statue misplaced in the dark. The folds of her green and silver robe fell too perfectly. Her posture was too still. She looked like she was waiting for something to end.

“You don’t sleep,” Hermione said.

She didn’t blink. “No. Neither do you.”

Hermione’s thumb drifted absently over her knuckles. Her whole body ached— Lestrange’s Cruciatus still singing in her bones like it had been tattooed there.

“You said there’s rot in me,” she murmured. “You saw it?”

“I did.” The gravel in her voice caught at the end of each word. “It’s not where you think.”

Hermione stared at her. “Who are you?”

She didn’t answer.

“What year are you in?”

Nothing.

Then: “It will all come in time.”

Hermione’s brow twitched. “That’s not an answer.”

“No,” the girl said like smoke. “But it’s the truth.”

Then, without a word, she leaned forward.

Slow. Intentional. Not invasive, but not gentle either.

Her hand moved— not for Hermione’s face, not for her wrist— but for the ring on her finger. The simple golden band. The one no one noticed, enchanted to draw all eyes away. A glamour built to hide what lay beneath: the scars, the burn of magic turned wrong. The decay she didn’t want seen.

Her fingers hovered over it. Brushed against the band. A fraction more pressure and it would slide off.

Hermione caught her wrist.

“Don’t,” she said. Quiet. But firm.

The girl stilled.

Their eyes locked— light on dark, both of them still as death. The girl’s fingers drifted from the ring. She didn’t pull back immediately. Her gaze lingered, like she was reading something beneath Hermione’s skin.

Then she said, almost absently, “I’ve been watching him since he was eleven.”

Hermione stilled.

The girl sat straighter, but not stiff. Composed— like a priestess naming a god.

“The others were taken with him early. The charm. The cleverness. That kind of brilliance doesn’t often come from boys with no name.” She tilted her head slightly. “But brilliance wasn’t the first thing I noticed.”

Hermione’s voice was quiet. “What was?”

“The stillness,” she murmured. “Even at eleven, there was something… cold. He never flinched. Never laughed. He watched people like puzzles that solved themselves slower than he wanted them to. I thought he might grow out of it. That it was just… orphaned quiet. But it wasn’t.”

She folded her hands. They looked bone-pale in the dark.

“It was already too late. Even then.”

Hermione didn’t respond.

“He doesn’t want power the way others do,” the girl continued. “Not for gold. Not for girls. Not for revenge. He wants it the way some people want to eat. Or breathe. There’s no narrative behind it. No tragedy. Just… need.”

Hermione’s heart ticked harder in her ribs.

“And the worst thing?” came her voice, low and coarse, like something that had been buried too long. “He doesn’t lie. Not really. He never says he’s good. He never says he won’t hurt you. That’s what makes them follow him. That’s what makes them stay. He gives them nothing and they starve for it.” 

Hermione’s throat felt dry. “You sound like you admire him.”

“I don’t,” the girl said, almost bored. “But I see him. I always have.”

Her colourless eyes slid back to Hermione’s face.

Hermione’s brow furrowed. “If you’ve seen all this— if you’ve known— why haven’t you done anything?”

A beat. Then another.

The girl’s eyes didn’t flinch. They were ancient in a face still young.

She didn’t speak so much as exhale the words— sand and shadow. “Do you think I haven’t tried? There are rules. Not all of them written.”

Hermione frowned. “You’re afraid.”

“No,” she said, not sharply— but finally. “I’m bound.”

“To what?”

The girl looked away. Her eyes followed the trembling reeds at the lake’s edge, the way the light fractured across the surface like cracked glass.

“To things older than this school. Older than him.” she said it like fact, not fantasy. “There are debts I owe. Vows I didn’t make, but inherited. And some of us aren’t given choices. We’re just handed legacies. Anchors. Curses.”

She looked back at Hermione.

“But I can choose this.”

Hermione didn’t speak.

“I can choose to aid you.”

She felt the girl’s hand brush against hers again— gentle this time. A whisper of contact. Then her fingers drifted once more toward the ring on Hermione’s finger, slow, as though touching a relic.

She stopped just short.

Her voice lowered. “You wear this like a shield.”

Hermione’s voice was hoarse. “It is.”

“What would happen,” she asked, “if I took it off?”

Hermione didn’t speak for a moment. Her gaze dropped— not to the girl, but to her own hand. The ring. The illusion it held.

She’d masked the ruin— the twisted weave of spellwork, decay, and scar— but she still felt it. Always. Like a phantom limb, like something festering beneath silk.

Her voice, when it came, was almost too quiet.

“You’d see me.”

A pause stretched. Long enough to say more— long enough to explain. But she didn’t.

Because it was ugly.

Because she didn’t want to see it either.

The girl didn’t move.

She didn’t touch the ring.

Hermione drew her hand back, quietly. Her body thrummed like a struck chord.

Then the girl reached out again— this time not to her hand, but gently, with the backs of her fingers, she touched Hermione’s brow. A whisper of contact. A gesture so careful it bordered on reverence.

“I see you already,” she breathed, voice like a prayer. 

Then she stood, robes whispering over the stone, and left Hermione alone by the lake— haunted, burning, and seen.

Chapter Text

The Great Hall had never looked so alive.

Pumpkins the size of cauldrons floated high above the enchanted ceiling, lit from within by flickering fire. Some were carved, faces twisted into leers, others simply glowing— orange and incandescent like swollen moons. Hundreds of candles hovered between them, dripping wax onto nothing. Gossamer threads of enchanted cobwebs stretched between the rafters like veins. A ghost waltzed slowly through the centre of the hall, trailing frost in his wake.

The long tables groaned with offerings: charred lamb rubbed in rosemary, dark loaves of bread glittering with salt, goblets of spiced cider that steamed and shimmered. Beef and ale stew, bubbling in miniature cauldrons. Treacle glazed sausages. Roast duck. Things she couldn’t name.

It was all too much. Too vivid. The colours too rich, the scents too sharp. Even the laughter seemed artificial— forced through too-white teeth.

Magic pulsed through the room like a living thing. The enchantments that once made the castle feel safe now felt performative. Gaudy. Like makeup on a corpse. Something about the whole scene was wrong in its abundance. It was a celebration over a battlefield— a carnival before collapse.

The Gryffindors were loud. The Ravenclaws graceful. The Hufflepuffs glowed.

And Slytherin— 

Slytherin sat like a kingdom apart. Cold, composed, calculating. Their table was quiet. Too quiet.

That was where she sat now. Among them. Not with them.

And he was near.

Tom Riddle had taken his usual place at the far end of the table. Surrounded, but somehow untouched. Not speaking. Not smiling. Watching.

His hands were folded. His posture elegant, perfect. A candle hovered above his head, its flame oddly still.

She hadn’t looked at him.

Not directly. Not since the forest.

Not since he’d asked her that final question.

What are you most afraid I’ll find in you?

Now, her gaze hovered just above her plate. Still. Perfect. Porcelain. As if the act of looking would set something off. As if he’d know.

But she felt him. A weight on the edge of her mind.

Her magic bristled under her skin— not as a warning, but like an itch. A pulse that didn’t match the beat of her heart. Something old. Splintering.

Across the table, the Knights sat like a pantheon. Seven. Six if you didn’t count her. She didn’t. Not now, not ever. 

They were statues pretending to be students.

Lestrange’s place still sat empty.

Abraxas Malfoy was sipping from a silver goblet, half-smiling as if everything he tasted was blood. Dolohov leaned back, dark eyes flicking across the room— calculating. Rosier whispered something to Avery, who didn’t laugh. Just scratched at the scar across his neck and looked her way instead.

Their eyes slid off her like oil.

Her magic pulsed again— hot this time. Like it wanted to be seen.

She blinked hard. Ground her nails into her palms under the table.

Don’t crack.

A fork clattered somewhere down the table— just loud enough to break her train of thought. A few people laughed. Someone conjured a winged bat from a gravy boat. It soared overhead before bursting into smoke.

It was so festive she wanted to scream.

Then— just for a second— the candles above her flickered out.

Not all of them. Just the ones above her plate. A pocket of dark.

No one else seemed to notice.

When the light flared back, Tom Riddle was still looking at her.

His face was unreadable. Still and unbothered, like the eye of a storm.

She didn’t flinch.

But she could feel her magic start to respond— not with resistance, but with something slicker. Softer. Almost like it wanted to meet his. To speak back.

Stop it, she hissed inside her skull. Not here. Not now.

Tom blinked once.

And in that moment, she realised he wasn’t just watching her. He was cataloguing her. Marking the shifts. Her stillness. Her breathing. The tremor in her wand hand. The slight flicker in her glamour.

As if he was measuring decay in real-time. As if her unravelling was a puzzle he intended to solve.

She looked away.

Not because she was afraid. But because she felt something— like heat pooling behind her eyes. Like the first twitch of magic fraying loose from its threads.

She dug her nails deeper into her palms.

Not here.

Her gaze drifted upward, past floating jack-o’-lanterns and flitting candlelight, and landed on the far end of the table. The Seventh Years.

And there— just past the glint of goblets and the rise of robes— she saw her.

The pale girl.

Bone-white skin. Hair like frost in moonlight, braided long down her back tonight— not loose, not wild, but bound. It made her look older. Sharper. Almost ceremonial.

Somehow, she looked even more beautiful tonight, in the glow of the jack-o’-lanterns. She was stunning in a way that felt deliberate. Sculptural. Like something carved from snow and forgotten gods— not meant to walk among the rest of them. Not meant to eat or laugh or blink.

She did none of those things.

She simply sat apart from the noise and flickering light, unspeaking. Uneating. Still as ice, poised as a blade.

Not looking at Hermione.

Looking at him.

That same steady, carved-stone stillness— but not like awe. Not even like fear.

Like calculation.

And in the flicker of a candle between them, Hermione felt it. Not recognition. Not yet.

But alignment.

For a moment, the space between them pulsed— invisible, but taut. As if some old thread had been quietly plucked.

The girl didn’t blink. Didn’t shift. Just watched Tom Riddle like she’d watched him for years.

Like she knew.

Hermione’s stomach twisted. 

Not with fear.

With the sense that something had already begun.

Hermione turned her gaze away and reached for the platter of roasted squash, spooning it onto her plate with slow, mechanical precision. Her fingers felt distant. The scent of cinnamon and cloves curled in the air, but it barely registered. She added potatoes. A sliver of meat. A ladle of steaming gravy. Automatic. Measured. Like the act of eating could anchor her in place.

Then— an instinct. A flicker.

She looked back.

The pale girl was watching her.

Not cruelly. Not with challenge, or suspicion. It wasn’t even really curiosity. It was something quieter. Older. Like the silence between pages. Like a hand held out in warning… or in faith.

Their eyes held for a breath too long.

Then someone laughed behind her, the sound splitting the air like a knife, and the moment broke.

Hermione didn’t flinch. But something in her bristled— like being seen when she wasn’t ready to be. As if that gaze had slipped beneath her skin and settled beside the rot.

She wanted to look away. She didn’t.

What do you want from me? she wondered.

But the girl’s expression didn’t shift. Didn’t blink.

And Hermione, stomach tight, turned back to her plate— no hungrier than before.

The feast roared around her— students laughing, candles flickering high above, a choir of spectral voices humming through the rafters. Platters clattered down the long tables, spilling roasted meats and sugared apples, and somewhere a cauldron belched lavender smoke for effect.

Hermione didn’t move.

She hated Halloween.

Had always hated it.

Not because of the theatrics— the ghosts, the pumpkins, the sickly-sweet nostalgia. But because it made the past loud again. Unbearably loud.

First Year.

The bathroom. The cracked porcelain. The tears she hadn’t meant anyone to see. She remembered curling into herself on the tile floor, robes damp with salt and shame. She remembered the weight of silence after she’d fled from cruel words she could pretend didn’t matter.

And she remembered the thud.

Heavy. Final.

The troll.

And then— Harry. Ron.

Idiots. Brave, reckless idiots.

Charging in when no one else would. Inexperienced, nearly hopeless, and yet there.

It hadn’t been a moment of triumph. It had been chaos, clumsiness, adrenaline. But it had cemented something. Not just friendship. Something deeper. Bone-deep.

They’d saved her life before they ever knew who she truly was.

And now—

Now, she was in a place where they didn’t exist. Where their names were ashes in her throat.

Hermione blinked once, steadying herself.

The hall was too warm. The noise too sharp. Her plate untouched. Her skin didn’t feel like hers.

She poured herself pumpkin juice with a steady hand. It tasted like dust.

The warmth left her.

Not suddenly. Not all at once. But subtly, like a draft slinking beneath a locked door.

The flickering candles above dimmed, just a hair. Shadows lengthened. The chatter around her blurred into a low, distorted murmur— like sound warping underwater.

Hermione blinked.

Across the table, no one seemed to notice. Mulciber was tearing into lamb with his teeth. Avery muttered something crass. The feast carried on, untouched.

But something tilted.

The sky above the enchanted ceiling bled grey for a second— not storm-cloud grey, not smoke— but ash. Soft, falling ash, like a memory trying to crawl its way back into reality.

She turned her head.

And for a breathless instant, the candles above were no longer floating.

They were dripping.

Not wax.

Blood.

Down, down, onto the white tablecloth in front of her— scarlet pooling around her goblet, blooming through linen like ink in water.

Hermione didn’t scream. Didn’t flinch.

She blinked once. Twice.

And everything was back.

The sky was a starless October blue. The candles flickered warmly. Her plate was clean.

No blood. No ash.

Just warmth and noise and roasted meat.

Her hands trembled.

Not from fear.

From recognition.

Magic wasn’t just fraying. It was hallucinating. And her body didn’t know the difference anymore.

“Rough night, Dufort?” The voice slid in like a knife behind the ribs— casual, sweetly venomous. “Or do you always twitch when someone breathes too loud?”

Hermione turned her head slowly.

She didn’t know the girl’s name. Not really.

But she thought it might be Selwyn, Alda maybe. 

Something old and stiff and pureblooded, like dust on a silver crest. Didn’t matter. She was that sort of girl. 

All dark curls and smirking lips, reclining with the lazy confidence of someone who’d never had to beg for attention— just unzip something and pout. The girls beside her giggled behind their hands, sharp with the kind of laughter that reeked of perfume, midnight corridors, and favours paid in broom closets.

Hermione didn’t rise to it. She chewed her bread slowly. Swallowed.

Then— calm, measured, almost bored:

“You know what the difference is between us, Alda?”

A pause. A few eyes turned. The table stilled.

Hermione dabbed her mouth with her napkin, folded it, and looked her dead in the eyes.

“When I fall apart, I don’t do it in someone else’s bed.”

Alda went still.

The silence split open— sharp, bright.

And then—

Tom Riddle laughed.

It wasn’t right. Not for this hall, not for this moment, not for any human expression of humour. It came low and clean, like steel dragged over stone.

A sound built with precision— not joy. Not cruelty. Confirmation.

It didn’t match his face.

Didn’t reach his eyes.

Didn’t belong in the world.

Hermione didn’t look at him.

Alda Selwyn’s mouth pressed thin. Whatever retort had curled on her tongue withered there, unsaid. She glanced away first.

Hermione didn’t bother to smirk.

She put down her cutlery with slow precision.

The pumpkin light above them shimmered, casting flickering gold across polished plates and barely touched food. Somewhere down the table, a goblet clinked too hard against wood.

Then the hush fell— slow and total.

Headmaster Dippet had risen, his pale hands braced on either side of his chair, robes catching the candlelight like old parchment.

The feast, for a moment, seemed to still.

“Another year,” he began, voice creaking like the wood of his lectern. “Another All Hallows’ Eve. May we remember that even in darkness, there is tradition. May we find warmth in flame, and courage in what it takes to keep it burning.”

A few polite claps. A first-year sniffled. The candles above flickered. From down the table, someone scoffed— not loud, but deliberate.

“Samhain,” muttered a voice Hermione didn’t quite recognise— one of the Seventh Years, all rings and aristocratic boredom. “Butchering the name doesn’t make it less pagan. Hogwarts lights a few pumpkins and calls it tradition. We used to honour the dead. Now we just serve treacle tart.”

A few low chuckles followed. Another voice— Malfoy, probably— added, “They hollow out history like they do the gourds.”

Hermione didn’t turn her head. She just kept her eyes on her plate and felt the old itch behind her ribs— the one that came whenever someone mistook mockery for intellect.

With a sweep of silver, the mains vanished— and desserts appeared.

Cakes shaped like skulls. Pies steaming with cinnamon. Floating confections that bled raspberry when pierced.

She reached for a tart. The crust crumbled beneath her fingers.

It tasted of nutmeg and sugar and something far away. Something safe. For a moment— one bite, no more— she let it sit on her tongue.

Her body hated the sweetness. Her magic snarled at it.

But she swallowed it down anyway.

Across the Hall, forks scraped against empty plates. Candles guttered in their floating places, the wax pooling low. Laughter rose in pockets— thin, distant—and then began to fade, one thread at a time.

Students stood. Chairs scraped. The swell of bodies grew restless.

By the time Hermione set her fork aside, the feast was ending. Just crumbs and gravy stains and the heavy hush of too much left unsaid.

Hermione made no move to leave— until a shadow fell beside her.

Dolohov. Quiet, watchful. His presence more cut than footstep.

“They’re convening,” he said. No preamble. No question.

She didn’t look at him yet. Just wiped her mouth and stood.

“Now?”

“Always on Samhain.”

A beat.

“Coming?”

She didn’t say yes. But she walked with him anyway.

Their footsteps echoed down the corridor, weaving past chatter and torchlight. She noticed how easily he fell in beside her. Like it wasn’t strange. Like they’d done this before.

He didn’t leer. Didn’t bait her like Avery. Just walked.

And in the quiet that followed— low, torchlit, human— she thought something she hated:

She didn’t actually mind Dolohov.

Even though, decades from now, his name would echo in screams. Even though his son’s curse would drop her to the ground without leaving a mark— no blood, no gash, just magic that burned through the inside of her like acid. Even though she’d spent a week barely breathing, ribs splintered from the inside out, potions lined up like sentries on her bedside table.

Even though she should know better.

They walked in silence for a time.

Not companionable. Not awkward. Just quiet.

The stone corridors grew colder the deeper they went, their steps echoing through the bowels of the castle. Torchlight flickered against damp walls, casting long shadows that stretched and warped.

Dolohov adjusted his collar.

“You held your own.”

Hermione didn’t answer right away.

“Lestrange still hasn’t healed right.” He glanced at her, eyes like dull brass.

Her lip curled. “Pity he didn’t leave in pieces.”

Dolohov gave a quiet huff of air. Not quite a laugh. “He thought you’d cry.”

“I still might,” she said flatly. “Just not for the reasons he wants.”

He paused for a moment, something unreadable flashing across his features. 

Then he said, “The last girl who tried to fight back couldn’t walk for a week. She was too proud to scream, too.”

Hermione turned her head slightly. “And what happened to her?”

“She left. Went back to Beauxbatons.” His tone didn’t change. “Didn’t say a word. Took the train at term’s end and never returned.”

Hermione didn’t blink. “That won’t be me.”

“No,” he said, as if it were fact. “You’re still sharp. Even bleeding.”

They rounded a corner, the corridor narrowing, colder now. Wet stone. Rusted sconces. Abandoned.

Dolohov stopped.

“You can still leave, you know. Before you're initiated fully.”

Hermione’s hand brushed the ring on her finger. “Would you?”

Dolohov’s mouth twitched— not quite a smile. “No. But then, I was born in the dark.”

She pushed open the door.

“I wasn’t,” she murmured. “But I’ll die in it if I have to.”

•

Only six of them tonight.

No masks. No names. Just chairs pulled into a loose, deliberate circle— like a séance, or a sentencing. The room was bare save for a single iron sconce, its flame low and twitching. Shadows moved like ribs around them.

She stepped inside and something shifted.

The light. The air. Her sense of self.

It smelled of damp stone, scorched parchment, and old iron— like something long-dead had been dragged back to speak.

No one acknowledged her entrance. They didn’t have to. They’d all known she’d come.

Avery leaned back in his chair, a flicker of a grin twitching at his mouth. Rosier had his elbows on the table and he twirled his wand between his fingers like he wanted to see what it could make bleed. Nott’s stare was unreadable. Dolohov glanced at her— not cruel, not kind. Just a nod, before taking his seat. Malfoy looked the most bored, as if this were an opera he’d seen one too many times.

There was a chair left open between Nott and Rosier.

Not a welcome. A decision.

Hermione moved toward it. She didn’t sit. Her pulse felt like static in her bones.

And then—

The door groaned.

Footsteps. Precise. Measured.

Tom Riddle entered without urgency, without flourish. He didn’t need either. The air recoiled all the same.

He moved to the edge of the circle and stood, hands clasped loosely behind his back, robes brushing his ankles like a shadow that could think.

Hermione wondered, vaguely, if he had learnt to fly unassisted yet. 

He didn’t speak. Not yet.

But the silence did.

It bowed. And broke. And belonged to him.

Hermione sat.

Not carefully, not slowly— but like one might in a dream where gravity felt wrong. Her knees didn’t quite align with her sense of balance. The chair was too cold.

Tom Riddle didn’t look at her.

He looked past her, through her, at the space she had just displaced— as though the air still hadn’t recovered from her arrival.

Then, softly:

“Let’s begin.”

No gesture. No flair. Just words pressed into the room like a knife to the throat.

The others straightened. The circle held.

Riddle let the silence stretch— let it pull taut like string around a throat.

Then:

“Blood,” he said, as if beginning a lecture. Or a eulogy.

“Inherited. Spilt. Forgotten. That’s what we’ll discuss tonight.”

His gaze swept the room— slow, slicing.

“I’d like to hear what each of you believes.”

Avery swallowed.

Malfoy blinked, bored.

Rosier smiled.

Hermione said nothing.

Not yet.

Riddle’s eyes flicked across the group.

Malfoy went first.

Of course he did.

He reclined lazily in his chair, one arm slung over the back, his other hand flicking at a bit of lint like it had offended him.

“Bloodlines are scripture,” he said. “No bastard ever built an empire. Not without being put down like a dog before the next one rose.”

Rosier let out a low hum of agreement.

Malfoy smiled faintly. Not at anyone. Just to himself.

“It’s not about superiority,” he added, “it’s about certainty. If the roots are rotted, the tree falls. We just make sure it lands where we want it.”

Hermione kept her expression blank.

But her stomach turned.

He said it like law. Like prophecy.

Like something he’d heard from his father at four years old and carved into his heart by sixteen.

Rosier leaned forward next.

He was the kind who liked the sound of his own voice. Hermione reigned in her sneer. 

“Mudbloods breed like rats,” he said cheerfully, “and they’re as clever, too— which is to say, only when it comes to wriggling through gutters. Give them a wand, and they’ll use it to light their own arse on fire.”

A few of the others snorted.

Rosier grinned wider. “I don’t mind the smell of burning vermin, but I’d rather not be in the room for it.”

Mulciber cracked his knuckles. Loud. Like he wanted the sound to carry.

“Don’t get the fuss,” he said. “If it were me, I’d keep the Mudbloods in cages. Let ’em out when we need something to hex.”

He leaned back in his chair, arms spread over the seat like a throne.

“Useful, in a way,” he grunted, nodding to Rosier. “Like rats you can aim at.”

No one responded. Not even to scoff.

But Hermione felt the weight of it. The air pressed tighter. The magic in her bones rippled, uncoiling— slow, angry. Her hands stayed still in her lap.

But she felt it again. The rot under her skin. The quiet, seething wrongness that grew louder the longer she sat here.

They didn’t even believe they were cruel.

They believed they were right.

Dolohov spoke next.

And his voice— unlike the others— was calm. Not smiling. Not mocking. Just low and almost thoughtful.

“I don’t believe in purging for purity.” He chose his next words with care. “I believe in pruning.”

The others turned toward him slightly. Not because it was shocking— but because it wasn’t.

Dolohov’s eyes were half-lidded, unreadable. “Blood’s a weapon. You don’t throw it away. You sharpen it. You keep the parts that cut. Cull the ones that don’t.”

Nott inclined his head, the gesture one of thoughtful agreement. 

Hermione felt something curdle in her.

There was no rage in his tone. No malice. Just quiet curation.

Like a farmer deciding which piglet to drown first.

She looked down at her hands. Her pale fingers. The faint shimmer of the glamour ring.

She had known they were dangerous.

She hadn’t known how hollow they were.

Like dressing corpses in silk.

Avery spoke after.

“I just want a world where I can walk down the street without wondering if some mongrel was raised in a cupboard.” He said it with a smirk. “That’s all.”

Hermione didn’t move.

She didn’t speak.

But in her mind, she began building a list.

A ledger.

An inventory of filth.

One by one.

Just like he had asked.

He hadn’t spoken. Not yet. Just sat, and listened. 

He’d let them run their fat mouths— let them smear blood across the air and call it legacy. Let them echo each other in louder, fouler circles like vultures orbiting their own shadows.

And then—

“Dufort."

Her name slid from his mouth like a curse, not a greeting. 

She looked up.

Tom Riddle did not smile. He never did. Not in earnest. But his face arranged itself into something adjacent— sharp, deliberate.

“What do you believe?” he asked, soft as silk. “About blood.”

The others stilled.

The question hovered.

Weighted.

Hermione met his gaze, and for a moment she thought about lying. Thought about saying something measured, careful— something they’d expect.

But her magic coiled tight in her chest, and her mouth was already moving.

“I believe bloodlines rot the longer you keep them.”

She made a show of inspecting her ragged fingernails.

“And you lot reek.”

No one spoke.

Not yet.

Abraxas’ jaw ticked. Avery let out a slow breath through his nose, like a man trying not to bare his teeth.

Dolohov only watched her.

Tom?

Tom tilted his head.

Almost imperceptibly.

“And you think decay makes you clean?” he asked.

Her mouth felt dry.

But she didn’t falter.

“No.”

They glanced at one another.

“But I’d rather bleed out than be pickled in vinegar and called preserved.”

The silence snapped.

Malfoy let out a short bark of laughter, mean and mirthless.

Rosier raised an eyebrow, mildly impressed.

But it was Tom who held the silence in his hands like a noose.

He looked at her. Not with anger. Not with derision.

With interest.

With cold, dissecting curiosity.

Like a boy poking a dead bird with a stick.

Then, after a moment—

“Fair,” he murmured.

And the meeting continued.

But Hermione could feel it.

Something had shifted.

Not in her favour.

Not in theirs.

Just— shifted.

And in the pit of her stomach, something cracked.

Malfoy was still speaking. “Empires fall when the undeserving get a voice. Rome burned. Constantinople. The Ministry will too. We all know it.”

Avery grinned. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? The new architects.”

“You think you’re architects?” Hermione said, tone mild.

They all looked at her.

She didn’t blink.

“You’re nothing but demolition. Destruction is easy. It’s loud. It flatters egos. But it changes nothing. Real power reshapes the world— not just sets it on fire and calls the smoke victory.”

Silence.

Then a soft, deliberate voice—

“And what would you build, Dufort?”

Tom.

She turned to him. Slowly.

His face was still, unreadable, all marble and venom. His hands rested on the table, perfectly still. But there was something behind his eyes— that interest again. That cold, surgical attention that made her feel flayed.

Hermione said nothing.

She didn’t know.

Or rather, she did— but not in a way she could speak aloud. What she would build wasn’t meant for anyone else’s hands.

“I wonder,” Tom murmured. “If you’d even know what to do with a clean slate. Or if you’d claw at the ashes, looking for something to hate.”

The boys chuckled.

It wasn’t funny.

But it was cruel, and that was close enough.

Rosier leaned in. “Tell me, Dufort. If you had the Ministry in your hands— if you could shape it from the bones up— who would you leave out?”

“Whose wand would you snap first?” Malfoy added.

Hermione’s stomach turned. She felt it shift upward in her throat like bile. The rot of their laughter, the reek of old spells in a closed room. She tasted iron.

She looked at them, each in turn— Malfoy, Rosier, Avery, Nott, Mulciber, Dolohov— the shining sons of old houses, pedigreed and poisonous. All of them so sure the world belonged to them, simply because it always had.

Then she turned to Tom.

“I’d start with the ones who think blood grants them a right to rule.”

The silence sharpened.

Rosier’s smile twitched.

“Be careful,” he said softly. “That sounds dangerously like treason.”

Hermione’s voice was low, measured. “Only if the current regime deserves loyalty.”

Dolohov’s brow rose. Nott let out a breath like a hiss of steam. Avery laughed— once, quick and hollow.

Tom just watched her.

Still. Unmoving. Utterly silent.

His gaze felt like a knife tip pressed just beneath her chin. Testing. Measuring. Waiting.

Hermione met it without flinching.

And then she smiled.

Just slightly.

Just enough.

“And for the record,” she added, tone frost-sharp, “I wouldn’t snap their wands.”

Her smile grew wider now, showing far too many teeth. 

“I’d let them keep them. Let them watch the world turn without them. Powerless.”

There it was— the crack under the conversation. The sharp breath someone drew and held. The dark gleam in Tom’s eye, nearly imperceptible.

Then, again— like a dropped match in oil—

Tom laughed.

Not loud.

Not long.

Just once.

A sound that didn’t match his face. A sound that didn’t belong in any room with lights on. Low, knowing, cold.

The boys stilled.

And for a second— just one— Hermione felt it.

The axis shift.

Something ugly and electric settling over her shoulders.

Not approval.

Not welcome.

But something colder.

Recognition.

Just as Hermione reached for the edge of her chair, Tom’s voice halted her.

“One last thing,” he said. Smooth. Quiet.

The others stilled like dogs scenting blood.

He didn’t look at them.

Only her.

“What blood would you spill first?”

A pause.

“If no one stopped you. No witnesses. No cost.”

The room held its breath. Then:

“A Mudblood who mocked you?” Malfoy offered, grinning.

“Or a half-blood who didn’t grovel enough?” Rosier added.

“Or maybe—” Dolohov, voice like silk over oil, “a pureblood girl who still looks at you like dirt under her shoe?”

They laughed at that— knowing, satisfied. They’d all heard Alda Selwyn at the feast, knew how Slytherin’s populace regarded her. 

Something curdled in Hermione’s gut.

It wasn’t the question.

It was how easily the answers came.

She thought of Lavender’s perfume. Parvati’s laughter. Ginny’s scribbled notes. All of it long gone. A world burned behind her.

And in its place— this.

This table. This air. These animals.

Her voice was a thread pulled taut: “None of you would understand.”

Tom’s eyes gleamed.

“Try me.”

Hermione looked at him.

Really looked.

“I’d spill the blood of the boy who asked.”

The silence was not shocked.

It was sated.

Like they’d all known it would come to this.

Like they’d been waiting for it.

None of them moved.

Not even to blink.

Tom didn’t smile. Not quite. But something in him shifted— like a blade tipping toward flesh.

The others looked at her like wolves look at a runt that bites back.

Malfoy’s tongue ran over his teeth.

Rosier leaned forward, elbows on knees, delighted.

Dolohov’s brows lifted. And then— he nodded. Once. Like she’d passed some kind of test. Nott said nothing, a small frown forming at his lips. 

But it was Avery who broke the silence, his voice a purr: “Well. Someone’s finally speaking the language.”

Hermione didn’t flinch.

She didn’t blink.

She sat in the silence.

Let it crawl over her.

Let them think she meant it.

Let them believe she was like them.

Even as her stomach churned. Even as something behind her ribs pulled tight with grief.

Because she wasn’t lying.

She meant it.

And that’s what made her sick.

Tom stood.

The sound was soft— robes shifting, a chair pushed back— but it cut through the chamber like a guillotine.

No parting speech. No commands. Just presence. Inevitable, surgical.

The Knights rose as one.

Even Dolohov. Even Malfoy.

They didn’t bow, not quite, but the deference was unmistakable— like soldiers standing for a general they’d never call “sir,” but would die for nonetheless.

Hermione rose last.

Tom’s eyes passed over her once. No expression. No approval. Just… computation. The kind of gaze that mapped you like a battlefield.

Then he turned and left. Not a single word.

Rosier followed, grinning like a man who’d just witnessed a public execution. Avery lingered a second too long, then muttered something crude under his breath and slithered away. Nott glanced back, the frown still clear on his face. Mulciber cracked his neck and lumbered after them.

Malfoy strolled out, faintly humming some tune or another.

Only Dolohov remained.

He didn’t look at her. Didn’t speak.

Just waited, patient and still, until she moved to follow.

And Hermione— body tight, mouth bitter— let her feet carry her out. Past the torches. Past the stone.

Up and away.

The air outside cut through her like a blade. Grass slick beneath her shoes. Her breath came too loud in the hush of the grounds.

By the time she reached the back wall of Greenhouse Three, her knees buckled.

She hit the dirt hard— palms scraping against stone and moss, elbows jarring in their sockets. Her breath caught high in her throat. And then—

Her body heaved.

Once. Violently.

Blood spilt from her mouth— hot, metallic, viscous. It hit the ground in a thick splatter, steaming against the cold soil. It clung to the moss, the roots, the faint glow of fungus like something alive.

She gagged again, a dry, brutal motion that cracked through her ribs.

Another wave surged up. More blood. Darker this time. It tore out of her like it didn’t belong to her body at all. Like it was magic, made flesh and foul.

Her stomach twisted.

Everything burned— her throat, her chest, her raw lungs dragging for air between each retch. She couldn’t breathe right. Couldn’t cry. Couldn’t think.

Just pain.

Sharp and animal.

This wasn’t backlash. This wasn’t overuse. This was something else.

Her hands clawed at the ground, nails filled with dirt. Her spine bowed, shoulders hunched. Her hair plastered itself to her face in damp strands. Tears streaked down without her noticing.

She vomited again— violent and shuddering— until her whole body trembled with it.

There was nothing left inside her. But still, the spasms came. Still, her magic flared hot and rotten beneath her skin, curling under her ribs like it wanted out.

Her mouth filled with copper. Her vision blurred.

She couldn’t stop shaking.

When it finally ebbed— when the worst of it passed and her stomach curled into a whimpering knot— she stayed where she was. Crumpled. Trembling. Jaw slack, lips stained red.

The cold earth pressed up against her cheek.

She could feel her heartbeat in her gums.

She didn’t move. Not for a long time.

The blood soaked deeper into the soil behind the greenhouse.

She didn’t cry.

But something in her cracked.

Not a scream. Not a sob.

Just the quiet knowledge that she wouldn’t come back from this.

Chapter Text

The wind shifted.

Not sharply. Just enough to lift the hair from her face. Just enough to carry the smell of earth and iron and something fainter— woodsmoke, maybe, or the faint sweetness of damp leaves.

Hermione’s breath dragged ragged through her nose. Her cheek was numb where it touched the ground. She still hadn’t moved.

Behind the greenhouse, the world had gone quiet.

Then— footsteps.

She didn’t tense. Didn’t reach for her wand. If someone had come to find her, let them look. Let them see.

The steps halted a few feet away. Heavy ones. Hesitant.

She held her breath. 

Then a voice— low, rough, edged with uncertainty.

“Er. D’yeh need help?”

Hermione didn’t lift her head. She blinked once, slow, into the dirt. Her throat burned too much to speak.

The voice tried again.

“It’s jus’— it’s cold out. An’ yeh bleedin’.”

Now she looked. Not up— just sideways, enough to glimpse worn leather boots and the heavy hem of a coat too big for any student. Her eyes tracked up. A lantern hung loosely from one hand, light flickering over a broad figure, half-shadowed.

He was huge. Framed in moonlight like something half-carved from the trees. Hair wild. The suggestion of a beard, already at fifteen. But the expression beneath it—

Hesitant.

Kind.

Hagrid.

She swallowed once. The taste of blood coated her tongue.

“Go away,” she rasped.

He didn’t.

Didn’t move closer either. Just stood there, swaying slightly. Watching her like she might bolt.

“Didn’t mean ter bother yeh,” he said after a moment, softer. “Saw someone come round here. Thought maybe— well. Thought someone was hurt.”

She said nothing.

Hagrid shifted. Lowered the lantern a little.

“I’ve got tea in the hut,” he said. “Warm. Don’t have to talk. Don’t even have to sit. Jus’… thought yeh might want somethin’ gentle.”

She laughed then. Or tried to. It came out wrong— wet, bitter. The kind of sound that scraped up from the ribs, not the throat.

Gentle.

The word felt foreign.

She turned her face back into the dirt.

“I’m fine.”

Hagrid paused. Then— quietly— he bent down. Not to touch her. Not to reach. Just to set something near her hand.

A folded handkerchief. Huge. Clean. Still warm from his coat pocket.

“If yeh change yer mind,” he said, standing again, “I’ll leave the door open.”

And with that, he turned.

The lantern bobbed gently with his stride as he walked away, boots crunching on the frost-touched ground.

Hermione didn’t reach for the handkerchief.

Not yet.

But she did lift her head.

And she watched the light drift toward the edge of the trees— until it disappeared.

The silence returned when he left. Not quite the same silence, though. This one breathed.

Hermione stayed crumpled in the dirt. Her body hummed with residual pain, each pulse a dull throb behind her eyes, each breath a slow scald. The cold had seeped through her uniform and into her skin. She didn’t shiver. Just lay there, slack and strange and stinking of bile.

Her mind drifted.

Not upward. Not forward. Down. In.

There’d been a time when she used to call herself brave.

Not out loud, of course. Not arrogantly. But she’d believed in it— in what they’d all done. In the shape of her own name when someone said it with pride. She’d thought she understood what it meant to be strong. To choose the fight, even if it hurt.

But this—

This wasn’t that.

This was rot.

This was something festering under her fingernails, behind her eyes, in the knots of her spine. Her magic didn’t just sputter— it curdled. It foamed beneath her ribs like it wanted to claw its way out.

And her body— Merlin, her body. It didn’t even feel like hers anymore.

She curled tighter on the ground.

Harry would’ve said something stupid and kind. Told her it would pass. That they’d find a way. That it was worth it.

Ron would’ve tried to make her laugh. Offered some shit excuse for a joke, and elbowed her just hard enough to make her scowl. It would’ve worked.

But they weren’t here.

They weren’t ever going to be here again.

And even if they were— they wouldn’t recognise her.

Her stomach clenched again, dry and bruised. Nothing came up. Just acid. Just air. Just the sharp, sour taste of everything she was trying to swallow.

Slowly, her fingers twitched against the soil.

The handkerchief was still there. Still warm, somehow. Like it remembered the shape of someone kind.

She didn’t reach for it.

Not yet.

But she looked at it.

And that was enough to make her ache in a new, unfamiliar way— not pain. Not nausea. Something worse.

A part of her still wanted to be comforted.

And that— that was the most terrifying thing of all.

She began to move. 

Not all at once— just a twitch of her fingers, a breath through her nose. Her joints ached as she pushed up from the dirt, legs unsteady, spine curled like a dying branch. The cold bit deeper now that she’d stopped shaking. Her stomach gave one last twist, as if warning her: You’re not done.

She didn’t care. She pocketed his handkerchief.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve, smearing blood and spit across her cheek. She didn’t check the mess. Didn’t look back at the stain in the soil. She just stumbled forward— breaking, half-bent, smelling of bile and magic gone sour.

The walk was short. She’d thought, more than once, of following that familiar path— when she was lonely, sad. Missing her past. That shamed her, too

It was a stupid hope, a childish thing, but— he’d offered tea.

And her body ached for something warm. Her mind ached for a place to sit down and not be watched. Not questioned. Not known.

Just for a second.

She hated herself for it— this trembling, pitiful desire to be soothed like a child. To have someone hand her a cup and not ask what she’d done. Not demand answers. Just let her sit.

She’d buried that part of herself ages ago. The part that wanted kindness. That wanted safety. That wanted someone to see her as more than a weapon with a girl’s face.

But it stirred now.

Soft and anaemic and desperate.

And it followed her all the way to the door of his hut.

She paused there.

Swallowed hard.

Her knuckles hovered over the wood, just shy of knocking.

She hadn’t thought of it in years— not really. Not like this. But now, in the thick of it, her brain conjured it clean and sharp:

Second year. The slur curling from Malfoy’s lips. The sting of it. The stunned silence. And Hagrid— big, clumsy Hagrid— leaning beside her in his armchair like it wasn’t beneath him. Like she wasn’t dirty. Like she wasn’t less.

He’d taken her hand.

Gently. Like it might break.

Told her some people were too full of piss and nonsense to see worth if it hit them in the face.

That memory hit harder now than it had then.

Because she hadn’t cried that day, hadn’t let the tears fall, refused to let it mark her. 

And she wasn’t crying now.

But the lump in her throat felt the same.

Like something trying to claw its way out.

Maybe she’d hoped he’d still be that kind.

Maybe she was foolish for thinking time hadn’t changed him too. That he’d still offer her a place to sit and something warm to hold and no questions, no tests, no violence tucked in the spaces between his words.

She knocked.

Not loud.

Just enough.

Please open. Please don’t ask. Please let me be nothing for a while.

She knocked again.

Softer this time.

Because hope was a fragile thing, and hers had already been cracked.

The door creaked open.

Only a little. Just enough for one wary beetle black eye to appear behind it.

Hermione flinched at the light that spilt out— warm, amber, firelit. It painted her sickly. Her skin waxen, her eyes ringed in grey.

The eye blinked.

Then the door opened a little wider.

Hagrid stared at her.

Not unkindly. Not cruelly. Just… confused.

She couldn’t blame him. She looked half-dead.

“Er,” he said, voice thick with caution. “Y’alright there?”

Hermione said nothing.

She couldn’t. Not without splintering.

Hagrid squinted closer. “You’re— Slytherin, aren’t yeh?”

The silence pushed down on her. 

Then, quietly, she nodded.

That made him pause. Really pause.

His gaze flicked down to her muddy shoes, the blood on her sleeve, the trembling in her hands. She didn’t try to hide it.

Another silence.

Then— slow, slow— he pulled the door open all the way.

“Teas on,” he said.

Like it was an offering. A soft one.

Hermione swallowed. Her throat burned. “…Please.”

He stepped aside.

And she stepped in.

The warmth hit her like a wall.

It smelled of damp earth and ash, of something stewing over fire. Smoke coiled in the rafters. A kettle hissed. The hearth crackled low.

Hermione stepped in slow, as if afraid the floor might vanish under her. Her limbs lagged behind her mind— slow, syrup-thick— and her knees didn’t quite trust her weight. She hovered near the doorway, dripping blood and breath and things she couldn’t name.

Hagrid didn’t speak.

He didn’t ask what happened.

He just moved— a clatter of mugs, the hollow rattle of a tin, the low whistle of steam. Everything about him was loud: his boots, his size, the scrape of chair legs against the stone. But his silence was soft, so soft. 

He placed a chipped teacup on the table. Poured gently.

The liquid was brown, herbal, faintly sweet.

Hermione took the cup with both hands. Trembling fingers. A few drops sloshed over the rim.

Hagrid didn’t mention it.

He sat across from her with a mug the size of a bucket, but didn’t drink. Just let her sit there. Shaking. Breathing. Bleeding into warmth she didn’t think she deserved.

Her first sip burned.

Her second steadied.

She didn’t look up. Couldn’t. The silence between them held, fragile and kind.

It was the first place all night that didn’t feel like a stage.

She kept her gaze fixed on the tea.

Let the steam sting her eyes instead of tears.

It was awful tea— some haphazard mix of thyme and something sweeter— but she drank it like lifeblood. Let it settle in her ribs. Let it soothe the rot.

Her hands wouldn’t stop trembling. Even when she pressed them flat to the mug, even when she tried to anchor them to the warmth— they shook. She hated that. Hated being seen like this. But Hagrid didn’t flinch. Didn’t ask. Didn’t hover.

He just… stayed.

Don’ yeh think on it Hermione, not for one minute.

The words had burrowed under her ribs. All this time, they’d stayed.

She stared into her cup now and felt them echo.

And something cracked again— not as violently this time. Not jagged. Just a slow, exhausted splitting of a girl held too tightly together for too long.

Her shoulders sank. Her grip eased.

And in the warmth of the fire, for the first time in days, months, Hermione let herself be still.

He hadn’t asked her name.

She wondered if he knew it. Wondered if he looked at her face and thought close enough to a memory that didn’t quite match, wasn’t quite his just yet. 

But he didn’t say a word. Just poured himself a cup, sat in the creaky chair beside her, and stared into the fire like he’d been waiting to do it all day.

Hermione didn’t speak either. She kept sipping. Let the heat steady her. Her body still ached— ribs sore, throat raw— but it was background now. Distant.

There was something healing in the silence. Not the kind that patched wounds, but the kind that said: You’re safe enough to be broken here.

It made her feel worse, somehow.

Like she might cry.

She blinked hard. Gripped the mug tighter.

Hagrid cleared his throat.

“Last year,” he said, not looking at her, “I found a Thestral colt out past the forest line. Tiny thing, barely more’n bones. Couldn’t walk right. Wings all wrong.”

Hermione looked up, surprised by the softness in his voice.

“I brought ‘im back here,” he said. “Fed ‘im warm milk an’ liver. Sat up every night to keep ‘im breathin’. Most folk wouldn’t’ve bothered, seein’ what he was. But he had eyes on ‘im — big an’ dark an’… patient.”

He smiled faintly. “Didn’t ask fer nothin’. Jus’ waited.”

Hermione swallowed.

“What happened to him?” she asked, voice hoarse.

“Grew up.” Hagrid leaned back in his chair. “Flew higher than any o’ the others. Still comes by now an’ then, if I call.”

The words hung there— a story, but not a lesson. No neat ending. No moral pressed into her hand.

Just kindness, offered like tea.

Hermione stared into the fire. Thought about birds. Thought about patience. Thought about how good hands could still build things, even when the world didn’t ask them to.

The fire popped softly. Hagrid didn’t say anything more.

Hermione looked down at her cup. The tea had gone lukewarm, but she still held it like a tether. Her fingers were no longer trembling, but they felt far away— like they belonged to someone else.

Her gaze drifted to the corner of the room, where a blanket-draped crate shuddered slightly.

She cleared her throat. “What’s in there?”

Hagrid didn’t look up. “Somethin’ small,” he said. “Wounded. Nothin’ dangerous.”

She waited.

He sighed, then rose— lumbered over, pushed the blanket back.

And Hermione stilled.

It was a creature she didn’t know the name of. All bones and eyes and velvet black skin, curled tight into itself like it was trying to vanish. Its flank rose in short, shuddering breaths. One leg was bandaged— poorly, but gently— and its head jerked toward the light, blinking wide, yellow eyes.

She leaned forward. Slowly.

“She’s beautiful,” she murmured.

Hagrid nodded once. “Aye. Most wouldn’t see it.”

Hermione didn’t reply.

Her eyes stayed on the creature. It didn’t move, but it didn’t shrink from her, either. Just blinked, slow and wet and watchful, like it recognized something in her that the rest of the world didn’t.

And maybe it did.

Her voice, when it came, was low. “She’s scared.”

“Course she is.”

“She doesn’t trust you.”

“Doesn’t have to.”

There was a long silence.

And then, almost too quietly: “But you’re still helping her.”

Hagrid met her eyes. There was no sentimentality in his gaze. Just simple, weather-worn truth.

“‘Cause she’s hurtin’.”

Something stung behind her ribs. Hermione looked back down at her tea, eyes blurring again, but she didn’t cry.

She couldn’t. She didn’t know how to anymore.

Instead, she said nothing. Just held the cup tighter. Let the warmth burn her palms.

And somewhere, in the soft ticking of the fire and the rustling of blankets and wings, she remembered a boy with glasses, holding out a chocolate frog. A redhead yelling her name down a corridor. A hand grabbing hers, after a slur that had split her open like a hex.

She’d thought she’d buried it. All of it.

But it rose now, quiet and uninvited.

Not Harry, not Ron— just the weight of them. The space they’d left behind.

She closed her eyes.

Hagrid didn’t speak.

Didn’t ask.

Just poured her a second cup of tea.

She didn’t reach for the second cup.

Not right away.

Her fingers had gone slack around the first, and now the heat was gone from it. She set it down gently on the scarred wood of the table. It wobbled slightly, the saucer clinking— a soft sound, but enough to make her flinch.

Hagrid busied himself with something at the counter. She could hear the scrape of a spoon in a pot, the low grunt of the kettle being shifted. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t need to. The room was steeped in that quiet kind of care— the kind that didn’t ask questions. The kind that just was.

Hermione swallowed.

Her throat still tasted like iron.

The creature in the corner let out a thin, mewling sound— almost like a breath caught wrong in the chest. She turned toward it again. It was watching her. Its yellow eyes glowed faintly in the firelight, half-lidded but alert.

Her voice came small. “Will she live?”

Hagrid shrugged one massive shoulder. “Dunno yet. Might. If she wants to.”

She looked at him.

Something in his words stuck.

If she wants to.

Hermione didn’t say what she was thinking— that she wasn’t sure she did. That her body was already deciding for her, rotting from the inside out. That every breath felt like a lie her magic hadn’t caught up to yet.

Instead, she asked, “What is she?”

“Dunno tha’ either. Not really. Bit o’ a crossbreed, maybe. Found ‘er tangled in a brush, out by the forest’s edge. Someone didn’t want ‘er found.”

Hermione nodded slowly.

Of course they didn’t.

“Sometimes,” Hagrid added after a moment, “things jus’ come broken. Doesn’t mean they don’t deserve mendin’.”

That cracked something in her.

Not loud. Not sharp. Just a hairline fracture, running deep.

She blinked hard.

It didn’t help.

The fire snapped again. The light was soft. The room smelled like pine smoke and damp fur and earth. It smelled alive.

And she—

She felt so far away from it all. Like she’d stepped through the wrong side of the glass and nothing had quite followed her.

She didn’t belong here. Not in this room, not in this time, not in this skin that pulsed too hot and magic that moaned like it wanted to be undone.

But he hadn’t asked.

And that, maybe, was why she was still here.

Still sitting. Still silent.

Still holding the warmth in her palms like it was the only real thing left.

“Thank you,” she said finally. Barely louder than the fire.

Hagrid didn’t smile.

He just nodded. “No need.”

Hermione exhaled through her nose. A sound like surrender.

She didn’t stay much longer.

But when she rose to leave, she paused at the door. Looked back at the creature— still breathing, still broken.

And at Hagrid.

His hands were enormous. His fingers stained from dirt and sap. But they moved with impossible care as he tucked the blanket back over the crate.

She thought: He would’ve saved the bird.

And then she stepped out into the cold.

The night had deepened while she was inside. The sky hung heavy and close, thick with clouds that smothered the moon. She could hear the wind threading through the treetops beyond the castle walls, low and restless. It tugged at her robes.

Hermione didn’t pull them tighter.

She walked slowly.

The warmth of Hagrid’s hut clung to her skin like memory, but it didn’t follow her. Not really. It stayed in the cracks of the floorboards, in the quiet patience of his hands. In the way he hadn’t looked at her with pity— only concern, gentle and solid as stone.

Her shoes scraped against the path. Damp leaves, packed mud.

The greenhouse loomed again as she passed it. She didn’t stop. Didn’t look at the patch of earth behind it, dark and stained. She knew what was there. She could still taste it. Still feel the ragged tremor in her lungs.

Her magic had quieted now.

Not gone. Just sleeping. Like an animal that had gnawed itself sick and was curled into the corner of her ribs to lick its wounds.

She didn’t know what would happen when it woke.

She reached the castle steps and hesitated.

Up there, behind ancient stone and torchlight, were the same voices. The same whispers. The same brittle, smiling mouths that asked questions to watch her squirm.

And somewhere among them—

Him.

His laugh still echoed in her chest like a bruise.

Hermione closed her eyes.

She should have felt stronger, after all this. Hagrid’s kindness. The tea. The warmth. The reminder that not every hand reached to harm.

But instead—

She felt lonelier.

Because now she remembered what comfort felt like. And how rare it was.

And that made returning to the cold all the more unbearable.

She squared her shoulders anyway. Pressed her palms flat against the wood of the doors. Pushed.

The castle swallowed her whole.

And didn’t notice.

Chapter Text

The day had dragged on.

Lessons bled into one another— defence, then potions, then something she couldn’t even remember. Her mind had felt stuffed with wool, her body strung tight, like some invisible thread had been tugged taut from the inside. The castle had watched her all day, or maybe she had just imagined it. The glances. The whispers. The slow, knowing curl of someone’s mouth as she passed.

Earlier that day, before the sun had begun its slow descent, before the day had passed in a haze of repetition, Hermione had made a quiet detour.

She slipped down the hidden stairwell behind the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy, past trick steps and echoing portraits, until she reached the portrait of the bowl of fruit. A careful tickle under the pear’s stem made it giggle and swing open, revealing the warmth of the Hogwarts kitchens.

The air smelled of caramel and roast vegetables, cinnamon and yeast. The house-elves bustled with their usual quiet cheer, darting between trays of freshly baked bread and steaming pies. When they noticed her, a few paused— surprised, but polite.

“Excuse me,” she said, voice soft. “Would it be possible to have some fudge? Just a small parcel, if that’s alright.”

They didn’t ask why. They never did. Within moments, one had returned with a neat paper-wrapped square tied with twine.

Back in her dormitory, she wrapped it again— this time in his handkerchief she’d pressed flat with a charm, the fabric soft and slightly faded. She slipped a note inside, folded small and sharp as a secret:

Thank you for tea.

— Hermione

She didn’t send it by owl. She handed it to a passing first year with a Slytherin badge and a galleon’s worth of incentive.

“Leave it at the front of Hagrid’s hut,” she said. “Top step. Don’t knock.”

He nodded.

And that was that.

She’d eaten her usual toast at breakfast, but hadn’t eaten lunch.

Didn’t trust herself to.

Now, the sun had slanted low, staining the corridors amber. Shadows stretched long across the stone floors as the castle tilted toward evening. She had walked the halls alone. Dragged her feet. Still, dinner had arrived.

The evening light poured in low and gold through the tall windows of the Great Hall, casting long bars across the flagstones. Outside, frost clung to the grass. Inside, it was warm with chatter, firelight, and the low clatter of cutlery. Someone laughed too loud. A group of Ravenclaws murmured over shepherd’s pie. The usual noise. The usual ritual.

Hermione stepped through the great doors.

Every instinct told her not to.

But she did anyway.

Head high, shoulders back, robes fastidious.

Her usual seat was halfway down the Hall. She took slow, measured steps.

No one looked.

Then everyone did.

Not all at once, not overt. Just— subtle shifts. Heads tilting, eyes flicking sideways, whispers clipped just before she passed. A thread pulled taut through the room. Something unspoken in the air. She didn’t know what it was, but she knew who.

Her gaze flicked up.

There.

Lestrange. Back at the table. Reclining like a predator fat on something he hadn’t earned. Freshly restored hair slicked back, smirk wide, a goblet raised in mock salute.

She didn’t blink.

Didn’t look away.

Her stomach coiled. Not with fear. With knowing. The kind that lived deep in your ribs— the kind that whispered: he’s planned this - all of it.

She reached for her seat.

The bench was cold under her fingers, polished smooth by generations of students. Her movements were precise. Measured. She sat, back straight, as though posture alone might keep her untouched.

All around her, the Hall swelled and surged with noise— but it no longer felt like background. It felt curated. Like a room pretending to be a room. Too many eyes. Too much silence between words.

The bite of pumpkin lingered in the air. Steaks of various sizes smoked gently on platters. Somewhere to her left, a girl was whispering behind her hand.

Hermione didn’t look.

Her plate was empty.

She reached for a spoon— slowly, like movement might keep her anchored— and served herself stew she wouldn’t eat. Her magic, rotted and snarling under her skin, flexed wrong at the contact. The silver felt heavier than it should.

Across the Hall, Lestrange was laughing.

Not loudly.

Not at all obviously.

Just a low, whetted chuckle shared between him and Rosier. Avery leaned in, smirking behind his hand. Nott and Malfoy spoke in hushed tones. Dolohov tapped his fingers against the rim of his plate. Even Mulciber looked alert, like a dog catching the scent of a fight.

The pale girl wasn’t there.

Hermione didn’t let herself wonder where she was. Not now. Not while whatever this was pressed in like a weight behind her eyes.

She took a sip of pumpkin juice. Swallowed carefully. Felt something wrong scrape the inside of her throat.

And still, she didn’t look.

Not at Lestrange. Not at the boys watching. Not at the girl two seats down who bit her lip like she was holding back a grin.

Instead, she looked forward. Still. Waiting.

The knot in her stomach turned to fire.

She knew the rhythm of cruelty. It always paused like this before it struck.

She swirled the thick liquid around the bowl.

One slow rotation. Another.

She didn’t eat it.

The stew congealed gently on the spoon, steam curling up in lazy tendrils, unnoticed. Unwanted. She held it suspended mid-air— unmoving— like a charm she didn’t quite trust to cast.

Around her, the chatter blurred into something else.

A girl at the Ravenclaw table snorted loudly at a joke. Plates clattered. Someone dropped a goblet. A fork scraped the edge of a bench—

—and Hermione flinched.

Only a twitch. Barely visible. But Lestrange caught it. She knew he did.

She didn’t have to see him to know he’d seen her.

Her eyes stayed on her plate.

His voice came low and deliberate, weaving through the noise like poison in a well.

“Looks like someone’s nervous.”

It wasn’t aimed at her.

Not directly.

But the table stilled. Not abruptly— just enough. Just the way sound warps before a storm.

Rosier gave a quiet laugh. Not a real one. Thin. Filmy.

Hermione lowered her spoon to the side of the bowl.

She reached for her water goblet next, fingers steady by sheer force of will.

Silver met her lips.

Water hit her tongue.

And then—

Nothing.

The taste was gone.

Her tongue felt… wrong. Her skin tightened.

Not pain. Not yet. Just pressure.

Like her body was noticing something her mind hadn’t caught up to yet.

And then the silence began to spread.

Like oil.

Someone two seats down stopped talking mid-sentence. Someone else blinked slowly. Lestrange wasn’t laughing anymore. He was watching her, mouth slanted in something that wasn’t quite a smile.

Avery looked at her goblet.

Then back at her.

And Hermione—

Hermione did not look down.

Not yet.

She knew. She felt it. 

Lestrange had cursed the water. 

Her body. Her clothes. Her skin.

Something was wrong.

The kind of wrong that doesn’t make noise at first. The kind of wrong that creeps in like rot.

And still— still— she didn’t move.

Because once she moved, it would begin.

Once she moved—

The spell, whatever it was, would start.

She heard a whisper.

Not a voice.