Chapter Text
It is two years before Tom sees her again: almost the longest she has spent away from him in all the time he has known her. He thinks about her often—he hesitates to say obsessively—and wonders where she is and what she’s doing. Despite countless offers, he declines any female company that isn’t strictly business-related.
He’s working at Borgin and Burke’s, and living in a dingy little flat off Knockturn Alley, which is the best he can afford without relying upon the charity of his followers (a low to which he refuses to stoop). There was general shock and horror when he accepted a position as a shop boy, particularly when most of his professors had earmarked him as the next (and youngster ever) Minister, but Tom has his own reasons. At Borgin and Burke’s, he has the opportunity to handle all sorts of interesting artefacts that pass over the counter every day. He cultivates relationships with wealthy, influential people who never pause to suspect that a humble shop boy will ever pose a threat, and at the back of his mind, he is constantly looking for items worthy of becoming Horcruxes. Tom thinks he’d feel it, if something were to happen to one of his Horcruxes, so he believes that the diary is still safe and undamaged. The ring, of course, he knows is safe: he wears it all the time.
It is the thirty-first of July, an unremarkable summer date, and the weather is unexceptional. It’s late in the evening, and Tom is in his flat. He’s been reading a particularly shady Dark Arts volume, borrowed from the shop, and is halfway through a Firewhiskey. While he’s not generally one for drinking, the book is sinister enough to emanate cold, the way that dark books and objects often do, and the heat of the whiskey keeps that at bay. He doesn’t really mind the cold—is too well-versed in the Dark Arts to be properly bothered by it—but such things can, if allowed to settle, leave a residue. That residue, in turn, can make it difficult to properly charm clients. Even if they don’t know precisely what the problem is, they can sense that something is amiss, and draw all their unwitting protective measures more closely about themselves. It makes them tighter with their money, less susceptible to charm, more suspicious, and less likely to part with their objects, so Tom avoids it wherever possible.
He has just closed the book, finished with it for the evening, when he sees her sitting on his sofa. She has her silver rope with her again. It’s been years since he’s seen it, but he knows it’s grown substantially longer. It extends all the way from one wrist to the other, winding up her arms and curving around the nape of her neck. The rope seems to emit a soft, silvery light of its own, and he can just see the faint luminescence playing across her skin. She has a small, ornate set of scissors in one hand, and they have the same sort of ominous energy as the tape measure she had carried once before. He wonders if her project is something to do with sewing. Whatever it is, he’s fairly certain it’s at least half (and possibly entirely) dark. More proof of the fact that she is perfect for him.
“You were gone a long time.” it’s not much of a greeting, but it’s a weight that has pressed on his mind constantly for almost two years.
“I was working on my-”
“Your project, I know.” Tom tries to tamp down his resentment. “Why are you here?” he hasn’t done anything particularly terrible that might have summoned her, it’s not his birthday, and they’ve no bargain in place that requires her presence, so he’s curious.
“I wanted to be with you.” she says, and the words have the quality of a confession. Tom’s heart skips a beat. He reaches for the Firewhiskey and summons a second tumbler, pouring her a drink and sliding it across the table. She conjures a phial from nowhere, and her expression is positively wicked as she holds it up in front of him.
“Care for a little something extra?”
“No, thank you.” Tom hasn’t made it this far by being stupidly careless. While she’s never attempted to harm him, he’s not going to just drink whatever is in that phial, particularly not when he can feel the cool, disturbing energy emanating from her scissors. He senses that he needs his wits about him. She empties the phial into her Firewhiskey with a shrug, pouting, and Tom chuckles lowly.
“I’ve finished.” she tells him, and he is momentarily confused. She hasn’t even tasted the Firewhiskey, let alone finished it. “My project.” she elaborates, and Tom’s heartrate speeds up just a fraction.
“Congratulations.” he says huskily, suddenly breathless in the face of the possibilities. Does this mean that there’s nothing to call her away? “I’m pleased for you.”
“No, you’re not.” she whispers. “Or at any rate, you’re only pleased for me insofar as you’re pleased for yourself. You’re pleased to think that now, after all this time, there’s nothing to distract me from you.”
Tom won’t insult her by pretending that she’s wrong. “Can you stay, then?”
“I plan to stay with you for the rest of your life, Tom Riddle.” Tom swallows painfully, every tiny facet of his being suddenly incandescent. For years, it’s all he’s wanted: immortality, with her at his side.
“Will you?”
“Ask me nicely.” she says, like she did on the Astronomy tower almost half a decade earlier.
“I can’t.” he sounds almost sorrowful. “I don’t know your name.”
She has unwound her silver cord from her arms, and is twirling one end of it idly while she spins the scissors in her other hand.
“Atropos.”
The hairs on the back of Tom’s neck prickle, but he shrugs off the sensation. She has always enjoyed trying to menace him with her curious little pseudonyms. If she wants Atropos, she can have it—provided she is his, forever, he doesn’t really care.
“The Fate who cuts the thread of life.” he observes quietly. “Ironic, don’t you think, given that we’ll never die?”
“Care to test that theory, Tom?” she asks, and before Tom can move to stop her, she pulls her silvery rope taut across the blade of her scissors, and cuts.
Atropos falls to her knees before him, all the colour bleeding from her face. She only just manages to place her Firewhiskey on the carpet before collapsing to her hands and knees. Tom flings himself after her, dropping to his knees beside her and reaching for her desperately. A terrible pain lances through his chest, knocking the breath out of him, and he wonders if this is love, and if that’s why it hurts so badly.
“Why?” he cradles her in his arms, curling around the agonizing pangs in his own chest as he tries to support her. She clasps his left hand with desperate, wild-eyed energy.
“Retribution, Tom.” the words are quiet, but laced with vicious elation. “I wanted you to suffer, the way that your father suffered, the way that Myrtle suffered, the way that Harry suffered.”
“So you’ve killed yourself to punish me?” Tom is incredulous. It is so far beyond the realms of anything that he could have imagined that he can scarcely comprehend it, and he doesn’t even know who Harry is. Her hand drops from his—she must be too weak to hold it up—and her head lolls against his shoulder. She makes a faint, choking sound, and he realises, belatedly, that she’s laughing. Searing agony laces through his arms and legs, and he buckles beneath her slight weight, slumping to the floor.
“I should have been dead years ago, Tom.” she whispers, gazing into his eyes. “It’s been so hard. I’ve only been able to avoid him,” he understands instinctively that she means Death, “using his own cloak of invisibility.”
“I can save you.” the offer is impulsive—he’ll be flat out saving himself, Horcrux or no—but he cannot stand the thought of losing her.
“You have.” she chokes out. “You’re my Horcrux, Tom. You’ve kept me tethered here, all these years. I can’t exist independent of you.”
“Then why are you dying?” he is weeping, he notices, but the pain is so comprehensive and all-consuming that he can’t pinpoint the exact source of his tears.
“That wasn’t my thread, Tom. It was yours.”
Tom’s vision is hazy, and it’s a struggle to focus on her beautiful, familiar face. “What?” he asks, his increasingly sluggish mind trying to put the pieces together.
“Memories, Tom. When we die, what’s left of us but memories? I wove them all together, but they still weren’t you, so I took your hair, and then your blood, and then your semen, but it still wasn’t enough. Not until I added the soul fragment. Getting it out of that diary nearly killed me.”
Cold is creeping up Tom’s limbs, making his hands numb, but he remembers his ring. This body might die, but he will live. He still has the ring. He will come back. He thinks he ought to take it off, to fling it across the room, out of harm’s way, but when his watery vision fixes on his hand, the ring is gone.
“My ring?” his voice is breathless and weak.
“Basilisk venom.” with what remains of her strength, she indicates her abandoned Firewhiskey. Tom can just see that the surface is boiling frantically. “Very,” her breath shudders fiercely, “effective against Horcruxes.”
Tom has no choice but to allow her body to slide to the floor. He no longer has the strength to support her weight. Even so, as she lies in his arms, he feels that she belongs there.
“Who are you?” it’s one of few thoughts that hold together in his increasingly disjointed mind. He senses, in a deep, terrible way, that it’s over. This is beyond his power to fix. She has been playing him from the very beginning—this fiendish, extraordinary creature—and she has won.
Her eyelids flutter, the gold of her irises strobed by the black fringe of her lashes, but she manages to meet his gaze. “I gave you so many chances, Tom,” tears trickle from her beautiful amber eyes, “I wanted you to be better. I warned you.”
He wants to tell her that he knows, that he remembers every time he’s seen her, every word she’s ever said, but he’s too far gone. “Who are you?” he asks again, forcing the words out with a tongue that doesn’t want to move. It is the question that has defined their history, and he wants the answer more than ever. They are side by side on the floor, now. His arm is still under her, and their faces are turned to one another, the tips of their noses only inches apart. Her lips move slightly, as if she’s struggling with the word. She tries again, and he can just make it out.
“Hermione.” she says, and it fits her, somehow. It’s almost funny that, after all her goddess monikers, her true name is something both classical and unusual. “Tom!” she gasps his name, and he can see terror in her face, but also the light of achievement. She came to destroy him, and she is pleased to have succeeded, even though her tears make it obvious that she derives no real happiness from his fate. He twitches beneath her—one of few movements he’s capable of making—and she rolls fractionally towards him. Her eyes fall closed and do not reopen.
Tom has just enough life left in him to shift forward and press his unfeeling lips to hers. Their tears mingle on her skin and roll slowly to the carpet. Tom’s throes of torment have lapsed into a numb, frozen nothingness, and he wonders whether there will be anything after, and whether she will be there.
“Hermione.” he whispers, and he, too, is gone.