#unsphere

“Tom Riddle was a liar and, like all liars, he loved stories.”

This is such a very lovely comment I’m sure people will think I sent it to myself.

I am not planning to write more fanfic after unsphere because I want to write original stuff instead - but that doesn’t mean I won’t of course.

Thank you again this really was such a nice comment. 🥰🥰🥰

“And then he was kissing her again, and it was far far far far better than any champagne. Heady and sharp and it cut straight through her, sending her mind spinning into orbit, and perhaps tomorrow she'd blame the champagne as she'd blamed adrenaline days earlier, but right now she melted against him, and there was nothing - nothing - but Tom.”

In the room’s golden light Tom’s eyes were shining, navy-dark as the sky after sunset in his beautiful face. It was younger than she’d ever seen it before, and yet so familiar it cut through her with an ecstatic stab. She held his gaze.

This was her world, now.

“I suppose you have endless questions.”

He nodded. She waited.

“You knew,” he said after a moment. “All that time, and you knew everything. You are a fine liar, Hermione Dearborn. Hermione Granger Dearborn.”

He said Granger like it was a mystery. Like it burned his tongue to say it.

read chapter fifty-four here

Hermione had spent many grim nights in odd places over the years. She thought, as she sat in her dark cell, that the five days she'd spent in a Muggle prison in what the muggles now called Mali had been the worst.

She had been caught off-guard in a sudden crackdown on magic. She had been capable of escaping both the raid and the prison itself (having had the presence of mind to shove her wand in her hair like an ornament), but in doing so she'd have confirmed she was a witch and that would have cemented the death of the witchdoctor she'd been staying with, so she had stayed, crammed into a cage with ten other women. One had been pregnant, in the early stages. The stench of vomit had been a permanent feature. So had the heat and the smell of unwashed bodies, including her own. And the rats. The mind could not remember pain, but it could remember rats. Eventually she'd slipped off during a rather conveniently timed attack by rebels from the north.

That had been her full experience of jails up unto the point her best friend flung her into a holding cell in Azkaban, with the wind not so much whistling in off the North Sea as trying to flay off her skin, and told her, still icy with shock and rage, to stay put.

She estimated she'd been in the cell for about seventeen minutes when the wall revealed a door, and then the door opened to reveal Harry (the ice had melted and been boiled to apoplectic in the short interim) and the Senior Undersecretary for the Minister for Magic.