Monday, December 20, 1944
7:31 P.M.
The teenage Dark Lord was propped halfway up, his head tilted to the right so she could only see the left side of his attractive, well-defined, but unhealthily pale face. He was sleeping, and any traces of worry lines around his forehead, the corners of his eyes, and his mouth were momentarily gone. His house sweater was rumpled, a far cry from his usually impeccably dressed self.
She felt like she hadn't seen him in ages. Ever since their deep discussion the day after Hogsmeade, she and he had hardly spoken, minus the generalities needed to keep the school and the Holiday Soiree planning running smoothly.
Tom's Infirmary visits, though, had become something of a regularity. Hermione had decided that Tom actually saw more of the place than even Harry had. Hermione, on the other hand, didn't want to be in there any longer than she had to be. The Hospital Wing contained to many tragic memories.
"Tom," she whispered softly. When he didn't respond, his breathing still slow and steady, Hermione reached out with her uninjured hand and gently shook his warm shoulder. "Hey. Sleeping beauty. Wake up."
Even in his sleep, Tom Riddle stiffened at the contact, and a beat passed. Finally, her Head counterpart tiredly cracked open one eye, squinting in the Hospital Wing's relatively dim evening torchlight until his guarded gaze landed on her own tired face.
"Good morning, sunshine," she managed to quip cheekily, forcing herself to smile while trying to push both her conversation with Calulaga Malfoy and the unremittingly burning feeling of her hand from her mind.
A slight, genuine smile did break out on her lips for half a second. Tom visibly relaxed and actually let out a tiny groan, closing his eye again and shoving his dark head farther into the pillow like an obstinate six year old. "Wha tie's'it?" he mumbled, his voice still thick with sleep.
Hermione translated his question into an answer. "Seven thirty at night."
Tom's eyes snapped open. "No."
"Yes, actually." Hermione attempted another grin, but failed miserably, as the pounding in her hand had spread to her brain like a potent drug. It was fogging up most of her happy senses, her motor skills, and her hearing: the only sound echoing in her head was a loud drum. She was almost beginning to regret she had even punched Calugala Malfoy in the first place.
Almost.
The petite brunette felt no better when Tom—the most observant person on the planet—took a quick, assessing survey of what he could see of her from the waist up. He lingered on her no doubt ashen face, pale even for her tanned skin. She shifted uneasily under his gaze, but she was still caught completely off guard at the speed of his perceptiveness when he muttered a second later, "What's wrong, Nefertari?"
Hermione's eyebrows shot up, both staggered and impressed, and she automatically, defensively protested, "Nothing's wrong!"
The too-smart-for-his-own-good prat merely raised his eyebrows in a similar fashion, as if to say 'Uh-huh, right.'
"Well..." the brunette rephrased, absently twisting her loose curls into a ponytail with one hand a tucking the wavy mess under the collar of her robes. "I was thinking about how you just missed the last and best Silviarius project meeting that we've ever had..."
Like she had pushed a button, Tom's stormy eyes clouded over. "Yeah?" he asked, his voice emerging unexpectedly apathetic— unexpected because he had loosened up around her a lot, or, at least, a lot for Tom Riddle. He never constantly masked his feelings anymore, unless the occasional time came up when he really didn't want her to know what he was thinking. Like now, apparently. He turned his head to get a better view of her. "What was so wonderful about it?"
Hermione casually lounged back in her chair, pretending to actually consider his question while making sure she kept one stretched-out robe sleeve well over her bloodied fist. "Well.... I suppose the fact that I survived meeting up with Malfoy every other day for a month and a half, but I think I enjoyed punching him in the face a tad bit more."
Hermione didn't know what kind of reaction she expected from Tom, but instead of hi-fiving her like Harry or Ron would most definitely have done, Tom's stormy eyes only blanched at her, irritatingly unreadable. More like a complete lack of reaction.
"You punched Calugala Malfoy?" he asked, a tinge of disbelief in the question. When the smirk on Hermione's face only grew wider and she nodded, he continued, his confusion evident, "Why?"
"Oh, don't know, really..." Hermione gazed up at the white ceiling and shrugged indistinctly, immediately wishing she hadn't as another intense shock that nearly brought tears to her eyes shot through her right hand.
Setting her jaw stubbornly and forcing the pain from her mind, she began to whistle innocently. "I mean, who would ever want to physically attack such a smart, sweet boy..." She stopped whistling, tilted her head back down, and looked back at Tom. She was not surprised to see a Draco-like smirk on his face.
"You do realize he's going to hate you forever now," he said matter-of-factly, still studying her as if trying to figure out exactly what had caused the usually understanding Head Girl to suddenly resort to assault and sarcasm.
Hermione decided that she might as well be brutally honest, and she rolled her eyes. "Excuse me while I go cry," she said sardonically.
Her unapologetic disclosure about hitting Malfoy had clearly awakened Tom fully, and his gray eyes turned devious. "Nefertari, Nefertari," he tisked in a tone that Hermione would have classified as teasing had it not been Tom Riddle who was using it, "And here you told me that you have the incredible and somewhat rare ability, to enjoy yourself most anywhere, at most any time, with most any person, in most any situation."
It took Hermione's pounding head more a moment to recall their discussion during the carriage ride to Hogsmeade three weeks prior. When she did, she started at Tom's incredible, seemingly effortless capacity for recollection. "I'm not even going to ask how you remembered that whole thing verbatim."
"The first step to wisdom is silence, the second is listening," he threw out carelessly, that same smirk on his face, but his eyes, strangely, seemed absolutely serious.
For that brief moment, he sounded so unexpectedly much like Dumbledore that Hermione grinned. She decided to stick with her assumption that Tom and Malfoy didn't like each other simply, because she'd be happier if that was indeed the case. "Well, I'd have a great time with Malfoy if I sent a silencing spell at the prick the second he showed up. He's so much more likeable when he doesn't open his mouth, don't you think?"
Tom actually smiled, his eyes laughing at her, a rare but welcome occurrence that never failed to catch Hermione off guard. The transformation of his features had him looking like an entirely different person altogether and was nothing short of unbelievable — the genuine light in his eyes, the touch of rosy color on his pale cheeks, the charismatic but hesitant flash of white.
In other words, his smile was nothing like Calugala Malfoy's smile earlier that evening.
Hermione couldn't help but stare at Tom, all wounded sensation from her injured hand flying from her body as quickly as Harry could dive for the Snitch. Almost simultaneously, as if he had felt her steady gaze on him, the smile froze on Tom's face, and his eyes narrowed at her questioningly. Luckily, her motor senses chose that moment to take control of the situation, and a ruthless jab of electricity was sent through her right arm.
Woozily, Hermione shook the cobwebs from her head and blinked. She did not just look at him like a star-stuck adolescent.
Without wasting another second, she hastily added, "Although, I did a lot more damage than I expected to, and the little monster got exactly what he deserved.... I think I broke my hand."
To complete Hermione's mortification, her last six words emerged as a whimper. She concentrated on not flushing the color of Ginny's hair. Maybe he wouldn't notice. Maybe he'd think that it was from the pain.
"That would explain why you're acting like a bloody lunatic," Tom muttered, more for his own benefit than hers. He immediately heaved himself to a sitting position, his mussed bed hair haphazardly strewn to one side of his face.
To Hermione's immense relief, her latter prediction proved to be correct, because he noted wryly, "I know the very prospect of talking to me seems to thrill you more than most, Nefertari, but shouldn't you have had Madam Lamberdeau take a look at it before you rushed over here?"
In spite of the unrelenting throbbing in her hand and the sarcasm in Tom's last comment, a smirk jumped to Hermione's face.
"Thanks for that brilliant observation, Mr. Riddle, but I couldn't have because she's not here. She had to take a run to help out a certain Slytherin who recently 'took a bludger to the face for the good of the building.'"
"I'm sure that took him a while to think up." Tom mirrored her smirk and impatiently straightened his sweater. He motioned for her to hold out her covered-up hand. "Nefertari, let's see it, then," he muttered gruffly. "Can't have you dying on my watch."
Hermione's heart began to thud heavily, much like her hand and her head had already been doing for the past half hour. He wanted to see it? Like she was about to believe that the Heir of Slytherin had any substantial healing skills.
Suddenly, a rather disconcerting image of Lord Voldemort in a standard Mediwizard uniform flashed through her mind, and it took Hermione all she had to not to burst out laughing. Honestly, she had never really believed that pain was like a drug... until now.
Hermione vacillated for only another second, though, before the brutal throbbing in both her hand and temples overwhelmed her. She reluctantly surrendered her injured hand, "Mess it up more, and you'll die on my watch."
Tom took her hand, and Hermione sucked in a hiss of air as an electric shock ran up her arm that Hermione credited only to bruised nerves. Tom continued to proceed cautiously, balancing her fingers in his palm with more gentleness than she had ever expected from him.
"Good Merlin, Nefertari, you must have got him good," he said in a low, appraising voice as he lightly turned her hand over in his, no doubt observing the dried blood on it that Hermione had been too preoccupied to clean up.
"It felt good at the time," she muttered defensively, subconsciously thankful he hadn't pursued the issue of why she had punched Malfoy in the first place.
"Oh, I don't doubt that." Tom smiled slightly again— not the same full smile that had graced his dark features before, but Hermione would take anything she could get— and he reached back under his pillow, emerging with his wand. Hermione stiffened up the moment she saw it, sending a skeptical look in his direction.
He caught the look and smirked. "It's my turn to ask now, Nefertari. Don't you trust me?"
Hermione's doubtful expression promptly hardened into a glare, but she nodded lightly, not quite sure why her response was what it was.
Yes...she trusted Tom.
She grumpily wrinkled her nose at him as he chuckled under his breath and trained the wand on her mangled hand. The painful throbbing in her entire body sped up frenetically, her chest tightening excruciatingly as if a pump had just squeezed all the air from it. In spite of herself, she recoiled, her hand trying to tug itself away from him as if it had a life of its own.
She was up against a Head Boy as stubborn as she was, though, and Tom obstinately held on to her wrist. "Nefertari, hold still, will you, do you want me to miss?" he asked nonchalantly, though the underlying threat to his words was clearly evident.
Hermione froze, her stomach solidifying into a bundle of nerves. She apprehensively watched as the Heir of Slytherin took in a calm breath and slowly released it. He was obviously going to do the spell nonverbally. Before she knew it, a soft emerald light simultaneously flowed from his wand.
It was a green flash, and memories of the Killing Curse had Hermione panicked. But, thankfully, this emerald glow was not the Avada Kedavra's instantaneous kiss of death. It was as bright as a real fire, and equally as hot.
She gasped loudly—in both relief that she hadn't died and in pain at the additional burst of scorching heat—and instinctively jerked away again, the abused hand feeling like it had just been dunked in a pot of scalding water.
Tom quickly glanced over at her, and Hermione was shocked to find a surprisingly large depth of concern in his gray eyes.
In a heartbeat, though, he blinked, his momentary lapse in his emotional mask vanishing. He diligently returned his gaze to her wounded hand. Reaching his long arm across the void between his bed and her chair and retrieving her thoroughly unenthusiastic hand, he murmured mildly, "Come back, Nefertari, this'll hurt far less than it will in the long run, and it's a lot faster than anything Lamberdeau'll give you. If it gets really bad, hold on to the bed frame."
He retrained his wand on her bloodied fingers and continued the spell as if he had never stopped in the first place. Hermione knew what to expect, and she bit her lip. The fire like sensation returned, and she felt like screaming. She shut her eyes tightly as her left hand blindly searched around to grab the bed frame Riddle was talking about. Instead, in panic, she tightly grabbed on to some knit material, tightly scrunching it up. She tried to keep all sounds from leaving her mouth, but it was impossible. Whimpers and sharp intakes of breath filled the Hospital Wing.
Then suddenly it stoped.
Like a veil was swept from before her eyes, Hermione immediately felt her senses clear. She felt the green glow disappear into thin air, and her eyes shot open. She saw the bruised swelling, splattered blood, and throbbing all go away at once.
Tom's cold hand lingered on hers for a good half minute after the emerald haze faded into oblivion, before he shook his head slightly and loosened his grip, dropping his wand into his lap. "That's it, Nefertari; you've made it out alive. Congratulations. Oh and, by the way, you are still holding on quite tightly to my sweater. I didn't know that in Egypt 'wood' and 'sweater' meant the same thing. "
Hermione felt her face flush as she looked at her left hand. It was pressed against the Head Boys stomach, holding on roughly to his Slytherin House Sweater. She murmured a quick apology, quickly removing her hand and letting it rest nimbly on her lap.
Before she became even more flustered, Hermione pulled back her mended hand and proceeded to critically inspect the smooth, unbroken skin. With a quick glance at Tom's expectant face, she pushed on random knuckles with her left hand, feeling for some kind of tinge that would indicate a lack of healing. None came. "What was that?"
Tom shrugged. "Something I made up."
"You made that up?" Hermione echoed incredulously. She promptly stopped her examination of her extraordinarily repaired fingers and arched her right eyebrow in impressed astonishment. "That was... that was amazing, Tom!"
The praise seemed to neither bolster nor deflate the Heir of Slytherin's ego. Instead, he blatantly appraised her for a moment as though he was trying to decide whether to tell her something or not. Hermione figured she'd been approved when he began in a low voice, "I broke my arm a few years ago, when I was in the orphanage. Whatever the Muggles did for it, it hurt like hell for weeks. Didn't even heal properly until Madam L fixed it when I came back to Hogwarts."
He absently picked up his wand and began to ravel and unravel the crisp white bed sheets around it. "After that, I decided that I should at least have some kind of a back up in case another time came when I was stuck without a bone-healing potion."
But...making up spells of that caliber could take years!
Hermione had never met anyone who took the time to sit down and invent healing charms for their own amusement. She had always wanted to try it, but she had never seemed to be able to find the time.
"Merlin, I wish I knew that one." Hermione shifted in the stiff-backed Hospital Wing chair, her back already sore. She grinned dryly as she remembered how many times Harry, Ron, Ginny, and Draco had to lounge about the Hospital Wing waiting for a Quiddich injury to heal up. "I have a few friends who break bones like it was the latest fad."
Tom modestly shrugged again, as if he didn't quite seem to grasp how big of a deal his ability was, and glanced away, staring blankly at his hands. "I can show it to you sometime, if you want. You shouldn't have any problems with it."
"Really?" Hermione asked, faintly surprised that Tom Riddle would offer to lend someone a hand. "You'd do that? I mean..." She hesitated, flexing the fingers on her healed hand like she was playing the piano.
Hermione shook her head and smiled. "Thanks. For the offer and for my hand, I mean."
There was a long pause in which Tom seemed knocked a bit off-kilter, and then he said awkwardly, too quickly, "You're welcome." He posed it as neither a statement nor a question, but...as more of an unintelligible phrase he had randomly strung together. It seemed that he was rather surprised that two words such as those had exited his mouth in such a context.
Another silence, filled the otherwise empty Hospital Wing, broken only by the occasional blast of artic wind that rattled the windowpanes. Both Head Boy and Girl sat so close to each other, yet so far away, each lost in their own thoughts. Hermione suddenly remembered the reason she had come in the first place. "Listen, Tom, we need to talk about tomorrow."
Tom glanced back at her inquisitively, and for a considerably lengthy time. He seemed to draw a complete blank...until Hermione jumped to her feet, gracefully lifted her arms like she was holding on to an invisible partner, and elegantly glided in a mock-waltz.
"Merlin, that's right," Tom suddenly said, sounding as startled as she imagined he could ever be. He swiftly jolted in recollection, holding a hand up to his mouth and coughing. "The bloody Soiree is tomorrow."
Hermione smiled slightly, immediately dropping her arms and plopping back into the irritatingly hard hospital chair. The overwhelmed expression that blasted across Tom's face was one that she was all too familiar with. "Don't worry about it, that's how everybody else feels, too."
Hermione could almost see the wheel's of Tom's mind turning behind his stormy gray eyes as he thoughtfully furrowed his brows. She couldn't help but mutely respect how calm he was remaining, what with the knowledge that that blasted Soiree was in less than twenty four hours.
"Nefertari, can you double-check the catering order with the house-elves? I was supposed to cover that yesterday, but I..." Tom abruptly halted his onslaught. He seemed to decide that she could probably fill in the rest of the sentence for herself, and he briskly continued, "And that blasted Mediwitch still refuses to let me out of here early; did you find someone to fill in my place for decorating tomorrow? Have you talked to Dippet about the music yet?"
"I already found replacements during lunch today, Draco, Ron, and Lavender—see, you're so good I needed three people to replace you," Tom's lips twitched upward slightly at that, "And I talked to Dippet ten minutes before curfew last night. Maybe he does have a reason to despise me," Hermione answered efficiently, finding it easier to answer all of his rapid-fire questions at once.
"Tom, everything's just fine. I'm mostly sticking to what we finalized before you had to go back in here," Hermione said as she gestured at the surrounding Hospital Wing, "so you shouldn't have too many surprises when Madam L gives you Infirmary leave for the Soiree. Honestly, it's going to be amazing. I don't doubt it."
"The only time it'll be amazing, Nefertari, is when the clock strikes midnight and the damn thing's finally over," Tom noted flatly, his eyes distant as they stared off into the darkening Infirmary.
"Party pooper," Hermione teased, but a relieved grin jumped to her face just thinking about the moment she would collapse into her Head Girl bed tomorrow night. Her smile faded as quickly as it came, and she hesitated over how she should go about saying what she needed to say.
Finally, she worked up the nerve to quietly add, "And Tom, you know that's not what I meant... about tomorrow."
Hermione had anticipated the subdued silence that greeted her last words... but she had also anticipated that he would answer her, eventually.
He did. "What about tomorrow, then?" he asked neutrally, his tone tremendously blasé as he shifted his piercing gaze toward her. Hermione could detect a hint of wariness in his tired voice, his back noticeably stiffer than it had been seconds before.
Her pulse speeding up again, Hermione studied the Slytherin before her, sighing heavily. She was hopelessly torn, there was no other word for it. Her entire heart was being mercilessly wrenched in two by whichever fates found this situation entertaining, and there was very little she could do to stop it.
It wasn't that she loved Tom Riddle...
No, what she felt was still a far cry from that, but she didn't dislike him, either. Not enough to see him die on her account, anyway.
This Tom Riddle, the one she knew right now, the only Tom Riddle she had ever known, had never given her any reason to feel that strongly against him. And what he would do in the future... Well, his future was no longer set in stone, the Anima Curse had proved that much to her.
On the other severed side of her heart, however, Hermione knew that everyone else would practically kill her if she said what she wanted to say about Tom. Oh, she could hear what they would say: "Mione, he's Tom Riddle for Merlin's sake!" as if that explained everything, but it didn't explain everything. In fact, the only thing it did explain was that Tom Riddle had been fated to be surrounded by people who didn't try to understand him.
This time in 1944 was as much a part of her life as it was any of her friends, Hermione decided resolutely. They had promised that they wouldn't interfere in how she dealt with Tom Riddle; she had all the liberties to make of it what she wanted. If that included wanting to try and clean her slate, she would try her hardest to clean her slate.
Determinedly, Hermione met Tom's questioning eyes, and the words tumbled from her mouth in a jumbled rush. "Tom, I want you to listen to me, alright? If you don't feel up to it tomorrow night—going to the Soiree with me, I mean—I don't want you to even get out of this bed. I can cover for you, I can find ten people who can give the professors a tour, but you don't have to do this."
It occured to her that her voice had steadily begun to raise a few notches in desperation, and she quickly reigned it in as she finished with a professional,
"There are other ways."
Tom nodded to himself, apparently able to make sense of her stream of consciousness, and then glanced sidelong at her, saying almost roughly, "Is that your way of getting out of this, Nefertari? Because if it is, you could've just come straight out and asked." She was surprised to see that his eyes were flickering blood red.
"No!" Caught off guard, Hermione's mouth flopped open - she definitely had not expected him to respond to her escape offering like that. Fleetingly, she wondered why he had immediately jumped to that assumption. "No, it's not... I..." Her throat went dry. "That's not it, I promise you I'm just—"
Yes
Out of nowhere, the word suddenly surged through her mind like an electrical current. Her mind was telling her to tell him to go away, tell him that she hates him, tell him anything that would cause him to stop liking her.
Wait...What? She wasn't making any sense, what was she thinking? She didn't want to make him hate her... did she? Hermione was frustrated with her own confused indecisiveness and acutely aware of his cold stare silently burning into the side of her head. She felt a prickle of hot emotion behind her eyes, but she stubbornly pushed the sensation away.
What is wrong with her tonight?
Hermione plunged ahead, seeing as it was too late to go back. "I'm just afraid... that you'll go like you went to Hogsmeade and...and end up getting worse." Her voice lowered a notch. With her stomach twisting embarrassedly for reasons yet unknown to her and her eyes shimmering seriously, she whispered, "And I don't want that. Tom, I can't have you getting worse. I just cant bear you...I can't bear you getting hurt."
Instantly, Tom's indecipherable gray gaze froze, and he stared at her in an entirely different manner than he had been seconds before. His eyebrows raised very slightly as if he couldn't quite comprehend what she had just said.
Hermione wished she knew what was going through his enigmatic, unreachable mind... until he suddenly turned away from her as a jagged cough ripped through him. Then she did know what was going through his mind as he went into an Anima attack more violent than even the one she had seen in his bedroom the morning after Hogsmeade. His shoulders hunched over as he dropped his wand and tightly clutched an arm about his stomach...
For the love of God, not this! Not now!
Hermione thought helplessly, feeling like collapsing to the floor and crying herself to an exhausted but blissful state of unconsciousness. She hopped up from her chair so quickly that the blasted thing flipped over with an unceremonious bang, but she hardly noticed.
Stumbling backwards until her back ran in to the next bed over, she couldn't help but be briefly hypnotized as the curse unfolded in all its atrocious glory.
Urgently, Hermione threw a frantic glance over her shoulder at Madam L's distant office door, knowing it was empty. With the harsh sound of Tom's cruelly relentless coughing ringing in her ears, the brunette swung her gaze in an even greater arc so she could see the Infirmary entrance, hoping against all hope that Madam L would walk right in... any second now... any second...
She didn't.
Honestly, the Mediwitch had been gone for ages, why wasn't she back in her Hospital Wing where she belonged, where someone needed her?
Shoving herself off the vacant hospital bed behind her, Hermione crouched at Tom's bedside, desperately searching for any potion on his relatively empty counter that might be able to help him. To her horror, she felt the same emotion she had felt when she saw her dead parents: that feeling of frustrated, utter powerlessness... knowing what was wrong with him but not being able to do anything that might help him.
In a cracking voice loud enough for him to hear over his immobilizing cough, she shouted, "Tom! What do you want me to do?"
Weakly, the Slytherin's right hand left his fixed grip on his stomach, and his head still turned away toward the wall, he fumbled blindly for something on his bedside table. He had to be going for the only items on it: a pile of cloth handkerchiefs in the far corner.
Without delay, Hermione snatched one up and pressed it into his outstretched hand. "Here!"
Without a word or even a glance of acknowledgement, Tom grabbed the kerchief and held it against his mouth, his eyes squeezed shut in pain, each powerful cough wracking ruthlessly through his body. It was a scene that had become eerily familiar to Hermione. She hovered anxiously nearby, and she could only pray that it wouldn't carry on much longer.
Wait.
She could only pray... or could she do more than that?
After hesitating for only a heartbeat, Hermione scooted next to Tom on the edge of the hospital bed, and lightly rested her left hand on his doubled-over, sweater-clad back.
Tom immediately stiffened, but made no effort to push her away, and she soothingly began to rub her hand in circles over the warm, knitted material, feeling each of his coughs erupt beneath her fingertips.
"Breathe, Tom...breathe...That's it, good boy," she murmured softly as his attack almost instantaneously began to lessen. Still massaging his back in a light, circular motion, she reached over with her right hand and lightly smoothed his sweaty yet exorbitantly neat, soft locks of dark hair back from the side of his bowed head. Hermione repeated in a relieved whisper, "Good boy, Tom...good boy..."
The entire rhythmical-ness of it all seemed to calm Tom somewhat. He continued to gasp in deep, ragged gulps of air like he was drowning with no hope of rescue, but the coughing had stopped. After what seemed to Hermione like ages, he straightened up, still struggling to catch his breath. His complexion which was already Ashen, now appeared drained to a definite peaky pallor. Finally, he pulled the cloth away from his mouth, and the bottom fell out of Hermione's stomach when she saw that half of the handkerchief was no longer white.
Frozen in time, she stared, horrified, at the dark red blood soaking into the stiff fabric before Tom hastily crumpled it up into a ball.
Hermione, though, stopped rubbing his back and snatched the handkerchief from his hand before he could throw it away. "My God, Tom, do you see this? Do you?" She waved it in front of his face like a war-torn flag, just in case he hadn't. "There is no way I'm letting you come tomorrow, not like this! Oh god, Tom! It's not saf—"
"Nefertari!" Tom interrupted forcefully, having regained his breath enough to enter the fray, his usually smooth, harmonic voice now hoarse from the coughing. She was sitting right next to him, so close that her shoulder would occasionally brush against the side of his arm. "I'm going."
It took Hermione everything that she had, everything, to not gape at Tom Riddle in astonishment. She was stunned, unable to believe that he was going to go through with this even though she had given him a chance to get out of it.
"But you'll hurt yourself," she finally said delicately, speaking the truth, numbly returning the bloody, balled-up handkerchief.
Wordlessly, Tom accepted little orb of material and stared down at it. Sagging wearily, he glanced back up at her, and this time Hermione saw a new emotion on his face: Determination.
"I'm going," he repeated dully, his voice a level softer than it had been earlier. And when his eyes met hers once more, there was a muted passion in those stormy gray pools that Hermione had never seen before.
Merlin, he really was serious about this.
Abruptly, Hermione made a noise under her breath, about to voice another strong disagreement, but Tom cut her off again.
"Nefertari, please don't," he whispered in a somber yet fervent tone, three little words that carried more emotion than Hermione had ever heard pass his lips. He drew in a shuddery breath, shaking his head heavily, "I've had little or no control over what's happened in so much of my life..."
His hoarse voice was abnormally strained, almost pleading. "Once, just this once... let me make my own decisions."
A moment of silence ensued, in which Hermione attempted to grasp the meaning behind Tom's words. She suddenly realized that he was no longer just referring to whether or not he could go to the Holiday Soiree.
The Anima Curse's course, and Tom Riddle's fate, was no longer simply in her hands. Tom had just told her that. It was no longer her place to be guilty about what was happening to him, because she had tried. She had given him an opportunity to say no to the dance, to avoid her at all costs so his little infatuation could pass and the Curse could die down.
But...he had just chosen to turn down that chance.
Though it didn't exactly make her feel any better, what happened to him from this moment on was as much his doing as it was hers. Tom Riddle was obviously insane. Honestly, did he want to die, did he really?
Suddenly, a memory flashed before Hermione's eyes. A flashback of something her father had told her after he and her mother had had a fierce battle of sorts over where to take Hermione on her sixth birthday. She still remembered her own naive voice asking, "How on earth did you and mummy ever get married, daddy?"
Thinking back on it, Hermione couldn't help but smile to herself at the childlike innocence of the question, but her smile faded rapidly when she recalled his answer.
***
"Well, sweetheart, you do know what they say about love, don't you?"
Hermione giggled and shook her head in a 'no.'
"You don't!" Her father gasped in mock exaggeration. "That simply won't do, that won't do at all! I can't have my beautiful, brilliant little girl left in the dark on one of life's greatest secrets, can I?"
From her perch on his shoulders, she eagerly lowered her tiny, curly head as her father whispered confidentially, "Love can make you do crazy things, sweetheart."
Hermione giggled again, taking a playful swipe at his unprotected head. "Awwww, daddy, that's only in story books!"
He laughed, plucking her off his shoulders before young Hermione could do any serious damage...
***
But now, for the first time in her life... Hermione believed that her father might, just might have been right.
Tearing herself from her reverie, she surreptitiously checked Tom's face once more out of the corner of her eye, just to be sure. She saw that the rugged edge of determination had not vanished from the Heir of Slytherin's features, but, rather, had strengthened.
Tom must have seen Hermione's gaze refocus and re-land on him, because he added, his voice still gravelly from the Anima attack, "And Nefertari?"
It was painfully obvious to her how ill he really did look. His ashen face had not regained any coloring at all, and his cheekbones were more pronounced than usual.
Over the past few weeks, Hermione had even developed the ability to be able to tell when the Anima Curse had given him an exceedingly rough day. This was because he would enter the Common Room at night more slowly, less like the vigorous, agile teenager that he used to be and more like a world-weary old man.
Carefully, Tom balanced his wand on his palm and studied it as if it was the latest scientific breakthrough. He tore his face from her evaluating eyes as if he knew what she was thinking. Running his long fingers over the ridged handle and smooth overlay, he mumbled quietly, "It'd be far easier on you from here on in if you just stopped worrying about me."
Hermione's heart sank. She knew then that there would be no arguing with him.
So she stopped trying. The Soiree that had once been an annoying school party, was now one of her greatest fears.
A/N: This chapter took three days and all my brain power to write. It is on the longer side (6,000 words!) Next chapter will be Hermione getting ready for the Soiree which will again be a shorter chapter. Thank you again for all the support. See you next chapter 😉
xxxCassi