Work Text:
***
For him she was the only one.
Like a sun rising from his horizon she had illuminated his whole world. What was dark had become light. What was nameless was now made speech. There was nobody like her.
Nor would there ever be.
When people spoke of death they spoke of ‘passing on.’ As though death were only a bridge, land at the very edge of the living traversing into foreign lands beyond, beyond, past the edges of one’s vision.
Tom had never been good with death. Each time he had come into contact with it it had carried the breath of the foreign, of betrayal. Had his mother not given her body to it like the whore she was he might have had a very different life. He might have had a family. They might have loved him.
Should have.
Death had been a slap in the face for Tom each time, until he had learned to hit back. He had payed his muggle family a visit at their manor house, and as he’d stared down their twisted and bloodied corpses staining the carpet he had almost thought death could be something more than a hollowed out wound, that it could be beautiful.
Mrs Hermione Riddle. She had dealt out death by his side once, eyes shining dark and glorious. It had made his heart falter, it had made him believe in angels. Together they had been unstoppable on their hunt for the deathly hallows, the legendary artifacts that would grant their possessor complete and utter mastery over death.
Following Hogwarts they had traveled the continent together, the fjords of Norway and the fields of France, and the soundless, impenetrable forests of Germany.
Tracing the journey of the items one by one, tracking down former owners, plying the truth out of them one way or another. Torment and treasure. A criss-crossing map of Europe that whispered, one after the other, tales of betrayal and spilled blood. Brother destroying brother, mother destroying daughter.
Immortality had felt only a snatch of a hand away. It had sat there, right at the tips of their tongues waiting to be spoken out loud.
That was before it had all gone wrong.
It should have been an unremarkable mission. But instead of the easy capture their prey, a former possessor of the resurrection stone, had decided to give chase in the depths of the Albanian forest. Without realizing it they had wandered straight into his trap of dark magic and Tom had had to hold the broken and bloodied body of his wife, life’s blood seeping into the dark Albanian soil as she had taken her last breath.
He had buried her beneath the roots of a yew tree by the banks of a nearby river. With the river gurgling beneath a moonless sky and the leaves of the tree rustling like so many waves breaking upon a rocky beach he had almost believed life after death was possible after all.
It had not taken long to track down the wizard afterward. He had relished his piercing screams as he had delivered curse after curse, binding and contorting his frame into agonizing positions before finally granting him the release of death. It had, however, taken longer to deduce the dying hint from the wizard of the resurrection stone’s final location—‘With a minor wizarding family, descended from the loins of Slytherin himself’—and even longer to realized the Flemish Ghent had transformed, over time, into the Middle English Gaunt.
Five years of searching, roaming the Continent. Five years of sweat and toil and blinding loss and the resurrection stone was exactly where he had left it last, buried beneath the floorboards of the Gaunt shack. He unearthed the cool metal of the ring with his own hands, the piece of his soul still buried in the inset stone glowing warm in recognition.
In order to bring her back, he had to kill a part of himself.
He performed the necessary ritual, his horcrux thrashing and burning his fingers at the betrayal it sensed. But there was no other way.
Bringing her back was impossible—mad.
In the Riddle Manor where he had made a base vials of pensieve memory littered every surface. Her laughter, the blaze of her eyes as she went in for the kill, their hands, clasped together as one as they walked though crowds of people, stretching on like harvest wheat. He visited these memories every night without fail until he did not know what made him more drunk, the whiskey or her.
Bringing her back—
It was the only way for him to live.
***
“Tom?”
It was new moon again, like the night of her death. The wildflowers of the woods almost glowed fluorescent in the dark, their heavy scent hanging in the air like a wool blanket.
Her beauty was, impossible, suspended and breathless as that of a pinned butterfly.
He pivoted upon his heel towards her, taking her in his arms.
“Hermione” he whispered into her cool, pale skin, crushing her mouth against his. She tasted exactly how he remembered, like raspberries and mint and something slightly tart, something that made him want to take her into his very pores.
The wind picked up, rustling through the grasses of the wood, rushing through the trees. The whole world sighing in recognition.
***
On the nightstand stood the resurrection stone, removed now from its ring setting, dark and glimmering in the dim light.
Tom drank in the liquid amber of her eyes; she was perfect, just as he had remembered—even better. While she had been beautiful in life there was now something more to her now that she was returned, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. An unearthly aura, like a waxen sculpture lit up from the inside.
He was ravenous for her.
As though reading his mind, Hermione stripped out of the white dress she wore—the same he had buried her in. Tom had risen out of the covers of the four-poster bed slowly, careful not to startle her, for she was as skittish as a colt.
“Do you want me still?” He whispered there in that close room lit by dozens of flickering candles.
When she nodded he cupped her face in his hands, tracing the curvature of her lips before pressing them against his own.
Their kiss was slow, deliberate, not like the wild clash of tongue and teeth of their teenage years, each sneaking around the other, before the loathing and mistrust had fermented into something more, something deep and intoxicating that could not be ignored.
The kiss soon deepened, their breaths intermingling until they could no longer tell whose lips were whose. Hermione’s hand snaked into his hair and tugged, hard, trying to pull him close to her. Tom tugged at the skirt of her dress, wrapping her leg around him. There was a brief readjustment as he lifted her around his waist, pushing her up against the faded wallpaper. His tongue traced patterns upon hers, relishing her taste.
“Please Tom” she panted as they separated for air. “I need you. Now.”
Tom dipped his fingers beneath the dress into her soaking wet folds as she hurried to remove his pyjama trousers, his cock already hard and straining against the fabric. She took in a sharp breath when she realized he wasn’t wearing any underwear.
He pushed into her in one deft, long movement, grunting with the motion. Hermione gasped at the slick friction between their bodies, wrapping her legs around his waist in order to urge him on.
“You don’t know how long I’ve dreamt of this. How long I’ve dreamt of having you back, love.”
“Tom” she answered, unable to speak much else in the rhythmic motion between their bodies. Her eyelids fluttered shut. “Tom” she uttered again.
“Tell me you missed me, love. Tell me how much you want me.”
Instead she moaned, a long drawn out sound that made him fall into an uneven, deranged rhythm. He could feel himself losing control, and by the growing slickness of her folds he could tell Hermione was close too.
She came with another moan, and the rhythmic convulsions of her cunt soon threw Tom over the edge as well. He spilled himself inside her with a shout.
***
“I already told you. I don’t remember anything.”
Afterward Tom traced the smooth skin of her back, his fingers trailing along her bare spine. Every breath she drew, her presence itself, was a miracle. She was delivered from the dark continent that was death for him, and him alone.
Hermione shifted on the four-poster bed to shift her eyes to him over the curve of her waist. There it was again: that dark aura. As though the very blood in her veins glowed, burned at the touch. A thousand blossoms bloomed in her cheeks. A thousand blossoms he wanted for his own.
“—Nothing except…Darkness. It was cold” and she shivered once, as though the very memory of death still had its clutches upon her.
“I will never let you go again” he promised, and he meant it.
He did not tell her how cold his own days had been without her. Tom had once prided himself on his independence, his capacity to rely on nobody but his own self. But then there she had been in his world, like some kind of fairytale miracle, all tenacity and the barely disguised capacity for breathtaking violence.
It was there: the recognition of one beast for another. For as much as she had attempted to disguise herself in the layers of morality, her back as prim as a parson’s as she made her way down the halls of Hogwarts, there was no denying the hunger about her, he had picked it up like a hound picks up the scent of blood.
“I want…Everything” she had confessed to him once upon the banks of the Hogwarts lake, eyes blazing, tartan skirt ridden up and his seed still drying upon long bare legs that glowed in the rare September sun.
“Yes,” he had whispered, and promised her she would live forever and a day by his side.
When the time came to select an object for a horcrux, she kept returning, again and again, to chess, the muggle kind.
“The queen” she would explain, shadows drifting across her face in the way they were wont to when she was contemplating the extent of her own potential. “It’s the most powerful piece. And it is even more effective in the right hands.”
Except, in a cruel twist of fate, death had been quicker. It had set a trap for her and lain in waiting, delivering her a check-mate before she had even realized what had happened.
Tom rolled the white piece in his hand, the queen piece, the incomplete horcrux, carved to perfection and never to receive the shattered soul of his love, of his wife.
But the game was not over quite yet.
***
She returned every night, when the world was held suspended, drowned in darkness.
He took her by the greenhouse at the edge of the property, bent over and lips buried into the nape of her neck, trying to capture the scent there, reliving memory itself. The cruelty of death had robbed his senses until all he could recall of her was nothing more than a shade, a crude caricature of her silvery voice, the sly, arresting way she held his gaze across a room. But now he inhaled deep, drinking her in, as the flowers of the greenhouse bloomed in sequence, a symphony of colour and fragrance.
Inevitably she would disappear again in the mornings, her feeble corporeality not a match against the vivid sunlight. The Riddle Manor was in disarray, dirty dishes and alcohol bottles littered the kitchen and beyond (in her absence Tom did little but drink) and the east wing was quite literally falling apart, roof caved in and in the process of return to its native rubble.
It did not matter.
All that mattered were those nights wild and frenzied as he took her, his wife, his mate. She was a delectable sight with her hair disheveled and eyes burning bright with desire, her native hunger restored to her once again, twice, three-times over, as though the prospect of death had left her starving for the very essence of life itself.
“I’ve missed this. I’ve missed you” she had uttered, knees still liquid from her orgasm as she had looked up to him with wide eyes.
“Where do you go when you leave me?” He had grasped her by the shoulders, desperate, his voice cracking. He would have waded waist deep in mud had she asked; he would have surrendered himself into a pit of vipers.
But she had only shaken her head, and for the first time he had sensed it in her voice: terror. Terror at the nothing that awaited her every morning, terror at being returned to nothing over and over again before her nightly summons. It was he who held the tether to the world, he whose own tether to the world was nothing more than a few horcruxes, a handful of dust.
He made love to her slowly, carefully, as though afraid she would break, his cock buried deep inside her and the coupling of their bodies as precise as a pair of jigsaw pieces. He relished her liquid mewlings right before she came, the way she clutched at his skin, buried her fingers into his hair, their breaths mixing as one. Tom ignored the hints of coldness that that she left in her wake, the way her touch gave him goosebumps, the nightmares he would be plunged into at daybreak whenever he finally found rest. He saw himself disappearing along with her, shrinking into the space of an atom, and then further, split and split again into parts, his skin, his hair, his eyes, all collapsed down into nothing but a biological ooze, and then gone altogether.
The dreams terrified him, and yet left him hard at the same time. And in the mornings he imagined her grave as he touched himself, imagined how her corpse must now look like beneath all those layers of earth and mud and silence.
Thus life and death intermingled, and they could be together.
***
Chair. Curtains. Dresser. Bed.
Carpet. Lamp. Bed.
There was a crack running the length of the bedroom wall, an ugly lightning strike of a line that disappeared beneath the floorboards.
Tom was looking at her, his lips moving without a sound.
She could feel it: the cold pressing to the edges of her senses, sharp and insistent as shards of ice, stealing her breath, claiming her. The colours of her world tilted, then dulled.
Hermione was beginning to disappear again.
***
It wasn’t working.
He turned the wretched stone over and over in his palm but there was no tell-tale tingling of his senses, no indication that she had returned, no indication that she was even close.
He tried again, more desperate this time, unable to accept she was gone for good. How was it possible? One minute he was in conversation with her, kissing her, making love to her, and the next she had disappeared.
He ignored the niggling thoughts that told him it was he who had corrupted the stone, he who had damaged it beyond repair when he had chosen, unknowingly, to make a horcrux of it. What was a horcrux after all? A stain that could not be washed off. A bloody sheet polluting the breeze.
Without thinking he fired off a dozen spells in the manor library, one after another, until the bookcases crashed into each other, their contents exploding into a flurry of paper and binding. He cursed and slashed until the pages tore and ripped, coming down to the floor like a fine sprinkling of snow.
In the silence of the manor, Tom Riddle finally wept.
***
In my end is my beginning.
Tom Riddle had never prayed before but he uttered the words now, beneath his breath, as he set about his task.
The horcruxes were exactly where he had left them, and he visited one after another, undoing the spellwork that he had painstakingly woven around each. Like the ring, each reacted violently to being destroyed, fighting back against the betrayal with all the magic with which they were imbued.
When it was done he found himself back to the lakeside, where they had first met. First year of Hogwarts and set afire with fantasies of glory, of power and eternal life, he had locked eyes on a freckled little girl skipping stones with a far-off look and known, somehow, that she was the same.
In the cloudless sky an eagle was dipping down, its talons skimming the surface of the lake with animal grace.
Slowly, Tom placed his wand underneath his chin, and as he did so, could almost make out the shade of Hermione before him, her lips pulled up into a tender smile.
For the first time in what felt like years, Tom smiled. It was a new promise, it was everything he had not been able to give her in life.
In my beginning is my end.
A single flash of green and it was done.