Chapter Text
“So,” Ginny said at brunch on Sunday, stirring her mimosa a shade too casually with a neon pink straw. “Riddle’s back.”
Hermione sighed. Brunch was supposed to be intentional friend time, or something like that since they were all out of school now and no longer spent all day, every day together. Mostly, it was an excuse to day-drink and gossip and had occasionally been a trap for quarter-life-crisis interventions.
Like when Tom disappeared on Hermione right after graduation and she’d spent the next six weeks looking for any information on where he might have gone and why. The tipping point had been when she cornered Draco Malfoy in Flourish & Blotts and threatened to break his nose a second time if he didn’t tell her what he knew right then and there.
This had led to The Intervention, capitalized. Because even after that lapse in control and dignity, Hermione had believed her only mistake was not going after Abraxas instead since he had been closer to Tom.
(“Am I crazy?” Hermione had asked Harry one night about a week after The Intervention, when she’d moved past the ‘denial’ stage of grief and straight into eating pints of butter-pecan ice cream in her pajamas. “I feel fucking crazy.”
“You’re not,” Harry said, wrapping his arms around her. She leaned into it, resting her head against his shoulder tiredly, having already cried herself into numbness. “You might need a shower though.”
That had set them both off into a giggle fit for a few moments. But when it quieted again—
“Sometimes,” Hermione had whispered. “Sometimes I think I must have imagined it. I keep going over all my memories, wondering if I read too much into it, if I wanted him to care more than he did, or—”
“No,” Harry cut her off, squeezing tighter as if that could hold her together. “No. Don’t do that to yourself. Riddle was mad about you; anyone could see it. We all thought—fuck. I mean, Slughorn was practically planning your wedding. You didn’t imagine it Hermione.”)
The point was that Hermione should have fucking known this was going to come up. The wizarding community in the UK was small. Nothing stayed a secret for long.
Harry’s fork clattered to his plate.
“He’s what?” Ron said, instantly outraged. “What gives him the fucking right—”
“I know.”
The table stilled as everyone turned to look at her, their faces a mix of disbelief and caution and concern all at once. She took a deep breath.
“I…I saw him.” She didn’t think telling them he’d had her followed by his lackeys would go over well. “We talked. Briefly.”
“Oh honey.” Ginny’s voice was quiet and soft and pitying in a way that grated.
Three years ago, Hermione would have deserved that pity because she had been an utter disaster then, little more than the wreckage left behind in the wake of Tom’s storm. But since then she’d built a life for herself. She had her own flat with nice furniture that matched and a view overlooking the Thames. She had a job as an Unspeakable that she loved (because after her interview at the Department for Magical Creatures where she’d originally wanted to work, she’d realized bureaucracy was going to make real change impossible there).
She didn’t even hole up in her flat or spend too many hours at work like they’d all worried over. Her responsibility to feed Crookshanks made sure she always came home at a reasonable hour, and then there was dinner at the Burrow on Wednesdays and Sunday brunch with her friends, and going to watch Ginny’s quidditch matches when they were nearby. Once a month, Hermione had tea with McGonagall, and she kept up a regular correspondence with Viktor.
She even went to muggle yoga classes sometimes, for fuck’s sake. She had a life, hobbies, friends. So what if she wasn’t seeing someone, turning down dates when she was asked? She’d never been one to go out of her way to make time for people. Everyone who was in her life had forced their way in and made a home there.
“How was it?” Harry asked eventually, gentle.
“Is he still alive?” Ron asked much less tactfully.
For now, she thought, some of that anger rising back up to the surface. She shoved it down. If she thought too much about how Tom had talked to her—the smug, arrogant, unfeeling bastard—she was going to light the table on fire by accident.
“It was civil,” she said shortly. “He’s accepted a position at the Ministry, so we may see each other around.”
And he’s asked me to join his secret cult, she didn’t say.
They eyed her warily anyway, and she was sick of it.
“Alright, what?” she asked, throwing her hands up. “I know you’ve all got something to say, so out with it.”
Harry—his Gryffindor courage would be the death of him—spoke first.
“We’re just concerned,” he said slowly, choosing his words with care. “When Riddle disappeared, it was…”
Awful. Catastrophic. Devastating. Terrifying to see you like that, Hermione. Any of those would have worked.
Instead, Harry shook his head. Regrouped.
“The way he hurt you—” Harry reached across the small table to grip her hands, bright green eyes meeting hers fiercely “—is unforgivable. And seeing him again must have been difficult. We just want to make sure you’re okay, and that you know we’ve got your back.”
It was a nice sentiment, the kind that got tears prickling at the corner of her eyes.
“I’ve been doing a lot of flying over the countryside lately,” Ginny said. “Lots of places to hide a body. Or we could just reducto him until there’s nothing left.”
“Ginny,” Hermione chastised with a swat, though it was more out of habit than anything else. Besides, what she was aiming for would be worse in a way.
One day, when Tom Riddle hit rock bottom—when all his delusions of grandeur were ripped out from underneath him, his ambitions crushed, his presumed infallibility disproven—he would look up and find that Hermione had been the one to put him there.
(“Nice,” a sixth-year Tom Riddle had once told her, all but sneering the word, “is useless. It’s a boring word for boring people who have nothing else going for them.”
It had been a relief because Hermione had never been particularly nice. She was always the smart girl, the know-it-all. Clever and bossy and competitive.
Vengeful.
I like that you’re not nice, is what he’d really been saying.
She would make him regret that.)
“I have no intention of forgiving Tom,” she said, and some of the tension left the table. “But I’m an adult. I can be civil to my ex since we work in the same building.”
“He doesn’t bloody deserve it,” Ron said, one more token grumble before the conversation moved on.
Hermione wasn’t stupid. She knew that the smart thing would be to do as she’d told her friends: be polite to Riddle in a professional capacity and have nothing else to do with him at all. Move on. Occupy the life she’d built for herself and leave Tom Riddle in the past where he belonged.
Release the hurt and the heartache and the confusion. Stop letting the memories of him taint her life.
God, if he had never come back to England, she would’ve let it go.
Too late for that now.