Waterlogged: Meta Archive
Mar. 1st, 2021 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoFor Waterlogged (Tom/Hermione, Tom/Nott Sr.)
Originally posted chapter-by-chapter on tumblr.
Meta posts do not exist for chapters 13, 15, and 17.
Oh dear. I’ve prewritten so many scenes for this that I figured I might as well start posting, even if it takes me a decent amount of time between chapters.
If you followed my posts about my previous tomione, You Should Know, you might be familiar with my meta-thoughts-below-the-fold posts about each chapter. Since this is the first chapter, I’m going to use this space to say a whole bunch of things about why I’m interested in this story.
First up: age gaps. Tom’s almost always older, which is understandable given canon, but he’s a man and a power-mad narcissist so the age gap can really make his dynamic with Hermione just a bit too predictably domineering for me. What if Hermione’s the older one? What if they meet at a time when her relative age actually matters? No shenanigans on this—Hermione’s six years older than Tom and we’re going to feel the way that affects them as he grows up.
Second item: I put Hermione in Slytherin. People probably have all sorts of feelings about her proper house affiliation, but for this version of the character, it’s where she belongs. She’s way more interesting in Slytherin both because she gives Tom a role model for a Muggle-raised person surviving in the house and because it will absolutely shape her personality and goals.
I’ve said elsewhere that I don’t always love Hermione as a character. I, er, might be planning to write a Hermione that I find unlikeable. In my defense, she’ll definitely be interesting! I just don’t know, at this point, if this will end as a romance in the way that YSK so clearly did. One thing is certain, though: the resolution of this story will fall on Tom’s shoulders. Hermione is older and living her life independently of him. I’m planning, for now, to tell the story entirely from his perspective so that Hermione, hopefully, feels like the remote older woman that she is to him.
I’m a big fan of making HP-verse AUs really AU, so look ahead for moments where we sidestep the canon HP plot events. I’m also thinking of writing Nott Senior as Tom’s same-age friend in this. The role typically goes to Abraxas, but I’ve done Abby twice now, and it would be fun to see how Nott plays the role. (I have a *huge* soft spot for fanon Theo Nott, so this is my chance to do something with the family. Theo, if only you were older!)
If you’ve read this far, thanks so much! I hope you enjoy the fic.
Poor Tom. I’m hardly the first person to suggest that he’d have been considered a Muggleborn, but it had to be done. The kid’s got to learn about blood prejudice through lived experience.
So when I conceived of this story, I thought it would be interesting to have Hermione as the prototype for Tom Riddle’s Hogwarts experience, the person from whom he learns how to fit in. However, there is no way Tom would trust her (or anyone) enough to just ask her for help, and even when he does, he’s not going to start trusting her blindly. I don’t think this Hermione courts his trust—why should she? She’s already Head Girl, and the smartest kid in school, and much older than him, and in her mind, those would all be reason enough for a random first-year to listen to her. She’s totally exasperated and unamused by this weird, stand-offish child that won’t just come talk to her, already.
His safety is the only thing that can really break him. I imagine Tom researches furiously to catch up with, and eventually exceed, his pureblood peers’ use of magic, but there’s just not enough time for him to get that done in his very first term. Sleep would be really hard to come by with constant pranks and bullying in his dorm room, and that’s why it’s lack of sleep that breaks down Tom’s barriers and gets him to listen to Hermione.
I’ve never published anything with a child Tom before this. It’s an interesting and difficult challenge, tbh. I don’t want him to sound too sophisticated, but I’m also not totally sure how a child of that age talks. I’m more comfortable with writing childish behavior, so please look forward to more petulance and pouting.
Little rabbit, baby bunny: not names one typically associates with Tom Riddle, eh?
This nickname was one of the first details I established for this story. When I began writing the fic, I started with the scene wherein Hermione reads Tom The Velveteen Rabbit in order to get him to fall asleep, and “little rabbit” quickly followed.
I love nicknames, pet names, taunts, etc. Naming is so important. Names we choose for ourselves tell others about us (I am Lord Voldemort), but names that other people choose for us say something about us, too. In my Tom/Severus fic, Two Halves are Not a Whole, Severus has been outed as the victim of a werewolf near-miss and his school peers refer to him as “Wolf bait.” It takes agency away from him at the same time it acknowledges his traumatic experience, and in that story, he despises it. (That Tom, by the by, doesn’t understand that until it’s spelled out for him, and like all of his peers, uses the nickname for Severus occasionally, to the point that it’s the first name that comes to mind when they bump into each other at the start of the story.)
So why use little rabbit? I want to explicitly neuter this Tom. Hermione is older, already a legal adult when she meets him, and no matter how self-important Tom is in his own mind, he’s no more threatening or, truly, important to her than a plush rabbit in a children’s story. And this affects him, he reacts to it, but Hermione’s presence is implicitly conditional on how well Tom is willing to fit into the space in her life that she has allocated for this child-sized charity project. When he acquiesces to the nickname, he stuffs himself back into that space. She’s his only companion or source of affection in his entire life; why wouldn’t he?
I love when Tom Riddle steals things. He should never stop being a compulsive thief/collector of treasures. Hell, I can even see Lord Voldemort swiping shit out of the Avery manor or what-have-you during Death Eater meetings.
So I’ve positioned this AU very specifically such that Hermione is older than Tom but is a native of this time period. I want her to think of Tom as a child, and especially during her time as Head Girl, as a part of her job duties. She cares for him because he is a first-year struggling to adapt to the system, which is totally expected and reasonable for a Muggle-raised child. She helps him adjust to the school and their house, but when he starts to become too invested in Hermione, specifically, rather than the coping techniques and the knowledge she shares with him, she starts to pull back and create distance. She’s not adopting this child. She’s a fucking teenager with her own life.
And in the same vein, since she’s a slightly-older contemporary of Tom, neither she nor anyone else in the story knows about the canon future for this child. There’s no threat of Lord Voldemort to stop, because that hasn’t happened yet for anyone. Tom is just a maladjusted kid. And without the character having to bear that burden, he gets to be and do other things with so much less hand-wringing over the what-ifs.
Reader thoughts on this story are fun. Based on the comments I’ve seen so far, people aren’t guessing what I’ve got planned, which is exciting. It seems like there’s an expectation that Hermione would be invested in this boy, but I’ve never really seen her as the nurturing sort. She’s a Slytherin girl in this go around, so be on the lookout for her more striving and ambitious qualities, rather than affectionate mentorship for its own sake.
I gave Tom a friend in this chapter, Nott Sr. (in this fic, I’ve gone with the common fandom name Thoros, which is fine. His dad’s name is Cantankerus. It could have been worse.)
I really like the idea of exploring what friendship could mean to Tom. He doesn’t have friends in canon, just a gang of followers, and most fanfic makes Abraxas Malfoy his friend, if anything (see: my other two Tom Riddle-centric fics; I am not immune). I thought it might be fun to use a different character, one whose family is less well-established in canon than the Malfoys. I don’t know that Tom knows what a healthy friendship is. One year of Hermione serving as his protector/mentor isn’t enough to teach him what’s normal, if that had even been her focus, and it had not been. I’m taken by the concept of touch. Maybe it’s just that my partner recently played Death Stranding, maybe it’s the fact that it’s very cold outside right now, but I couldn’t escape the image of the Wool’s children huddling together at night. Combine that with Hermione allowing Tom to sleep in her room for safety, and that leads us to Tom and Thoros as platonic bedfellows. The idea of safety and security and comfort and trust is wrapped up with sleep in Tom’s head.
Also, Hermione is back! Way sooner than anyone would have thought. What’s she been doing? What does she think about Tom now? What place is there for him in her life, or her in his?
Hermione is beginning to show her hand to the reader. We’re still a long way off from any sort of payoff for her goals, but I think you can start to guess how she’s thinking about her future from the conversations in this chapter.
I’ll take this space to talk about Hermione as she exists so far in this story, since I get the sense that her character is pretty open-ended to a lot of readers, based on comments. One question that’s been coming up so far is whether she knows something about Tom when he’s still a first-year, and if that influences her choice to offer him protection. To be clear: no, Hermione is no seer, no time-traveler, and has absolutely no advanced information about either the future broadly or Tom specifically.
Rather, she’s a Muggleborn student who fought her way up the Slytherin ladder so that by seventh year, when she meets Tom, she’s earned privilege and respect against all odds. When she sees another (apparent) Muggleborn child sorted into her house, it’s sheer empathy that moves her to help him out; when he starts to become clingy later that year, it’s her own self-interest that causes her to put distance between them.
Now that she’s back, she’s realizing that Tom has grown into a useful and interesting person in his own right. He has good connections with the next generation of pureblood leaders, he’s smart and well-respected, perhaps even beyond her own reputation as a student, and he trusts her uniquely. Now he’s also the heir to a Sacred 28 family? It’s a fucking jackpot.
It is positively criminal that there’s not more fanfic featuring Riddle Sr. with Tom “Daddy Issues” Riddle Jr. There’s some good shit out there (see: this incredible one-shot by limeta, master of writing Tom Riddle), but not enough. We let him die without comment, fodder for a horcrux that’s implicitly assumed to be necessary for Junior’s story.
Fuck all that! Give me a Senior who has to face his trauma through this awful, messy brat and his magic worship. Give me a Junior who so desperately wants to be seen as ferociously independent that he snarls and spits whenever his father passes the salt at dinner. I am forcing these two cats together because there’s so much potential in their relationship. Tom is at the prime angry teen boy age, all ready to punch some walls, and Senior embodies that wonderful resignation of a man in his mid-30s. I love writing them together, they will get many more scenes in this fic, all because I don’t have my fill of them with just my Tom/Severus fic alone.
I’ve also got another Nott interaction in this chapter, a nice long one where Tom gets to confide in his friend and talk through his tricky feelings. This friendship makes me giddy. There’s something so earnest about their touching. When I was a teen, around Tom’s age, my friends and I were constantly touching: pressed together, knee to shoulder, on a couch, or fussing with each others’ hair, hugging, holding hands, linking arms, etc. I was rewatching Netflix’s Daredevil, Season 1, the other night, and there’s a scene where Wilson Fisk touches his friend’s hair, just behind his ear, in this incredibly tender gesture of affection. The two are both middle-aged men, it reads as platonic, and by all reason, that touch shouldn’t be in the show, but it is and their friendship is all that much deeper for its inclusion. Nott and Tom cuddle. They are both only children, with strained relationships with their fathers, and just awkward enough at school for the other boys to not really like either of them. They’re each others’ comfort, and I will write them holding each other until the end.
Finally, there’s some Hermione in this chapter, but man, what a shit. I’ve said before that I don’t love her character in... most depictions, and that holds for this story. I just couldn’t help myself but to have her insert her morals/goals/ideals into Tom’s life and force father and son together because it’s what she thinks is best for them. Also, Tom being financially secure benefits her way more than the version of Tom who becomes a shop clerk or a secretary at the Ministry and has to work a 40-hour week.
Ah, Tom Riddle Senior. I adore you.
This chapter continues the trend of Hermione being... not really into Tom, not really, not in the way he wants, and yet her influence and the choices she’s made for him helping make is life immeasurably better. It’s an uncomfortable tension: Tom should have the right to make his own choices about things like “do I want to be in contact with my father?,” but he would have chosen wrong (as evidenced by canon). Senior is a solid guy. Not perfect, but he’s committed to providing a safe home for his son, and showing him some kind of acceptance—even when it’s difficult for him to offer it!—which, again, might be motivated primarily by his concern over Hermione’s role in his son’s life. The web of entanglements here is... messy.
I really love the interaction with the aurors at the end. I cannot imagine Tom ever coming around to his father without being forced, and I think it’s valuable for these external forces pushing them together to come from someone other than Hermione. I mean... Tom and Tom are living together for the summer, clearly there will be other points of potential connection. Tom taking an almost possessive stance toward his father makes sense. Tom using this as an opportunity to flex his power for the first time makes sense. He’s a more sentimental character than canon Riddle, but he’s not suddenly immune from loving his power and protecting his things.
Something I’m resisting very strongly in this story is the version of Hermione that falls for Tom almost against her will, because he’s hot and smart and an interesting companion. This woman does not give Tom an inch. I think the age gap is an essential part of that, but alone, it’s not enough. Cutting out Tom’s aggression was definitely also necessary. His resentment toward her is growing, but hopefully y’all see that seed of affection she planted in him back at age 11, because it’s just kept growing and this unhealthy push and pull between them will just keep Tom coming back over and over again. I suppose this is a bit of a role reversal from standard tomione.
Also, Nott. That’s it, that’s the comment, I love Nott.
Hm! I think this depends a *lot* on who you’re asking about, re: suspicions.
Why is Tom Riddle Sr. suspicious of Hermione? He was raped and kidnapped by a witch, he’s spent years getting over that trauma, and then a mysterious witch shows up in his life again and forces him to change how he’s living by adopting his son. Even if he doesn’t know or have affection for the boy at first, he’s going to empathize with the possibility that Junior is being taken advantage of, and he’s going to want to keep an eye on whether that appears to be happening.
Why is Thoros suspicious? Well, from his perspective, one of his yearmates was extremely close with her and only her for an entire year, spent the year after she left essentially isolating himself, and didn’t begin to relate to his peers until third year. That’s really unusual behavior, even for a Muggleborn student. I don’t think Thoros and the boys suspect Hermione of sexual misconduct—though it’s a valid reading, considering she was sheltering him in her private room—but even just having a general sense of Hermione and Tom’s relationship being weird results in some suspicion. As of the current chapter, I view Thoros as thinking of Hermione as a bit of a social climber but not generally threatening. Especially if they know she helped him claim his title, that would be good evidence that she’s clinging to her mentorship role for her own benefit, more than what she can offer Tom.
Why is Tom Riddle Jr. suspicious of Hermione? She’s kind of a shit mentor, but despite that, she wants to keep him around. She’s really, really helped him in major ways (protecting him in first year, helping him claim his title, reconnecting him with his father), but she’s also molding him in her own image and Tom’s not stupid. He knows she’s self-serving, and that isn’t inherently a problem for him, except when her self-interest is too obvious.
Thoros and Tom are not viewed as anything other than friends. Close friends, sure, but they’re not dating. They’ve only been affectionate in private settings so far in this story.
Ah—I won’t comment on the future between Tom and Hermione, because, well, that’s for y’all to read when it comes out!
Thanks for the question, anon! I hope you’ve been enjoying the story so far.
It’s an eventful chapter! Hoo boy. Daddy conversations, hot Thor smut, and all of seventh year gone. We’re really moving.
This chapter is the first half of what I consider a major turning point for the story: Tom graduates from Hogwarts and moves on to his post-school life, leaving him and Hermione on equal terms for the first time in their relationship. From here on out, Hermione will not be an actual authority in Tom’s life. Their relationship might still be unbalanced, but she doesn’t have actual authority over him. If anything, as Lord Gaunt, he has more power—though not in a direct, career progression sense, it would be implicit societal worth.
I view this Tom as somebody who has been focused on growing up and becoming an adult his entire life. Lots of versions of Tom really slow down and spend time on the final year, when he’s Head Boy, because that is the pinnacle of his official power, at least until he starts up his terrorist organization in the 1970s. (That’s so sad, btw. I play with how fucking depressing that is in You Should Know, because, really? He does essentially nothing of note with his life for nearly 30 years.) Here, though, he’s known for a couple of years that he has something much bigger than Head Boy coming to him when he graduates, so Head Boy is just a CV booster. He’s happy to do it—and I’m happy to contribute further to my headcanon that Tom Riddle hugged crying firsties—but it’s a victory lap to celebrate that his childhood is ending, not a space for him to try out true power.
Also, how fucking soft is this child. He hugs his father! In Two Halves, Tom does more explicit processing of what it means for him to be the product of rape, and for his father to be a survivor of sexual assault, but he’s younger in this fic and I imagine he’d mostly want the reassurance that his dad doesn’t hold his mother’s actions against him. Tom has had a year or so by this point to start letting go of his image of his mother as his most important family member, and he had a mentoring female figure in the shape of Hermione, so I don’t think he would be as focused on her/what her violation means for him as he would on his relationship with his father, which is still new and delicate.
Finally, our lovely Thor. You asked for it (and by that I mean people repeatedly commented that Thoros was clearly into Tom), so I wrote it. Quite honestly, Thoros was supposed to be just a friend to Tom, but y’all read so much into his touches that he took on this role. What I really wanted to do was ensure that Tom had a positive first sexual experience. I need him to know that sex can be fun and safe, and Thoros was happy to step into that role for him. They’re so sweet.
I’ll say it here just to have a record of my thoughts: I do not view Thoros as being in love with Tom. I think he’s attracted to Tom, but I also think of Thor as not particularly romantically-inclined. Could that change, long-term, with effort on Tom’s part? Yes. Does Thor automatically want to date Tom just because they’ve slept together? No. This isn’t meant as angsty—quite the opposite, see the note about positive first sexual experiences above—and Thoros is likely just quietly thrilled to end his Hogwarts years on a bang (pardon the pun).
Up next, in Chapter 10: Hermione re-enters the picture.
Oooof.
This chapter makes me very uncomfortable, especially the sex. I don’t think that’s the only possible reaction—I think Tom, for one, is fairly satisfied to finally consummate this relationship—but I’d be dishonest to say that my own read of this sex is anything other than discomfited. Those of you following along with my director’s cut commentary now know why I insisted that Thoros introduce Tom to safe, happy sex last chapter.
Let’s chat about Hermione. There’s a couple of directions that her character tends to take in Tomione fic (not exhaustive; go read some goddamned one-shots with nutty plots):
I suppose if You Should Know was my take on an empathetic Hermione (who neither reforms nor mourns him, just learns to live with the fact that he murdered people), then Waterlogged is my take on a bad bitch Hermione. Except… this bad bitch Hermione meets Tom when he’s a kid and not remotely evil, just traumatized. And normally, it would be an empathetic Hermione who interacts with young Tom, because that’s the natural fit, yeah? The caring girl nurtures the sad boy. Bad bitch Hermione is the equal and opposite of the dangerous, feral Tom/Voldemort.
When I thought about reversing that assumption, it made me unhappy but it was also interesting, so I wrote this story. What if Hermione was the driven, ruthless, self-righteous person that she needs to be in many darker stories in order to survive, but she had none of that pressure, none of those threats, actually necessitating that behavior? She’s still been exposed to the wizarding world’s prejudices against Muggleborns, which could easily induce her determination to start a revolution, no Voldemort necessary.
It’s a position that, typically, Tom gets to occupy. Tom gets to be ruthless in pursuit of his goals, gets to be really quite dismissive of Hermione and her needs, gets to have sex focused on his own pleasure. He’s not that, this time. He’s not emotionally distant and unaffected by how Hermione interacts with him. It’s really unpleasant, but it makes me think about and question ship tropes.
We’re getting into the meat of this relationship, the parts of Tom/Hermione that inspired the fic title. They’re something waterlogged, bloated and misshapen and unpleasant to the touch, and even if you managed to dry it back out again, it would be warped beyond recognition.
It’s infuriating to me in the way that nearly all relationships in your late teens/early 20s are infuriating, this mess of codependence where two people stagnate together because moving forward would involve risks and that’s impossible to contemplate at an age when so much in life is changing, and you feel compelled to hang on to whatever stability you can find, even if it’s not good stability. Negative values are constants just as much as positive values, y’know? (Forgive me bringing it back to computer science; I am programmed for one thing.)
This is where sticking with Tom’s POV gets itchy. There’s a temptation to flip over to Hermione and give some due to her thoughts, let her emotions and conflicts breathe so that we get to see her in a more sympathetic light. Even if Tom isn’t cursing her or upset with her—and pretty clearly, he’s not, not long-term, not in a serious way—when I read this, I see her as somewhat villainous. And she must not be, she must have feelings about the whole situation that are more complicated than “fuck that guy,” but this is Tom’s story and so: does it really matter? If she’s not vocalizing those feelings, if she keeps him at arm’s length, what does it matter what type of fondness she has for him, if she likes how he smiles, if she thinks he’s irresistible when he moans, whatever.
Switching their typical ship roles is like wearing a jacket where the shoulders are too small. It’s uncomfortable when you move. It doesn’t bend naturally. You want to take it off and put on something familiar, something that fits better, but I think—at least, it works like this for me—I’ll never not notice how shoulders fit again after that experience. every future jacket will be evaluated for the fit of the shoulders, and maybe I’ll realize that some past jackets didn’t fit as well as I’d thought, just not as badly as this one. Is this metaphor too drawn-out?
I had wanted to talk more about the politics in my writeup for this post, to close out. I’m really proud of Hermione’s ideas, here, and I think she’s fucking on target. The wizarding world is nuts and should be ripped apart, brick by brick, and reforged into something more sensible, and there’s no way to do that without getting at least metaphorically violent.
However.
I posted this chapter yesterday morning, and then I turned on the news and watched extremists storm the American Capitol building and suddenly, writing a fic that even vaguely touched on politics made me feel a little ill. The scene where she talks about education reform was written back in October, it’s actually one of the first things that I wrote for this fic, and now I feel like I should be meditating on what I’m covering a little bit more before diving further in. I have one more chapter already written, and I might post just that before taking some space. I’m not totally sure. I just... Hermione, in this story, is meant to be very ideologically radical in a way that is both extremely progressive and also, sometimes, self-aggrandizing. She’s high on her own passion, and it’s meant to occasionally hurt others. That’s the story. I’m not sure how to tell that respectfully in this moment.
I did some background reading before taking on Marius Black in this chapter. What would a Sacred 28 squib be like? There’s a decent number of one-shot fics that investigate the Black family’s disowned members, because there are a lot of them and it’s an interesting question. I settled on something that’s not quite those versions of the character—I don’t need Marius to be a sympathetic sad man, really, we have Tom for that—but I want to highlight that there’s this open and engaging question, which many other people have also tried to answer, about just what happens to these squib children after age 11.
Marius was born into privilege. The Blacks are a hard family, that’s clear from canon, but I don’t feel the need to extrapolate that into physical abuse and filicide. More reasonably, imo, Marius’ parents would find him a place to stay, like with their own disgraced sibling, so that he could be close by but also they wouldn’t have to worry about hiding him in his room whenever a guest comes over. Is that fucked up? Yes. However, it’s a totally different dynamic than “kill the squib,” and it allows for the possibility that, in his adulthood, Marius might have relationships with his family members. Why not keep up a (strained, infrequent) correspondence with his mother? Maybe, given the family’s wealth, he gets a monthly stipend or he had some gold set aside to support him. There’s plenty of historical precedent for doing similar with bastard children, and a squib is essentially a bastard child.
I really love the idea that he exists in a no man’s land between Muggledom and the wizarding world. That he would necessarily know Muggles, and would have to live in Muggle London (how would he get back into Diagon after the Leaky closes each evening?), but because he never attended Hogwarts, he doesn’t know any Muggleborn or half-blood witches or wizards personally. If anything, being a squib has made his experience of the wizarding world even more insular and only further cemented his privilege, in this weird, awful way.
And Hermione would despise him for that, necessarily. She likely sees all oppressed people as of a kind, sees the ways that their struggles all stem from the same root issues inherent in pureblood supremacy, but she lacks the cultural nuance to understand the qualitative differences in their experiences. Wizarding culture is something Hermione wears as a mask, but she’s never really integrated it into herself. She doesn’t keep friends. I’d argue that she’s culturally unmoored, having thrown herself into being the Best Witch since her introduction to magic, but she approaches it in an overly competitive and academic way, as though by becoming the strongest or smartest or whatever, she must be accepted, she must belong. And it’s a bit of a poisonous attitude, because then what of the Muggle-raised folks who aren’t actually that talented or smart? They deserve to belong just as much as anyone, they shouldn’t need to excel, we need room for mediocre Muggle-raised people in the wizarding world. So when confronted with a squib whose attitude is “I was supposed to be the top of this dung heap and I am pissed off that not having magic took that away from me,” instead of a more broad-minded condemnation of the way power is used, Hermione loses her shit. Not in front of Marius, of course, but she takes it all out on Tom in some of the unhealthiest sex I have written.
I’m so glad they got to have a bit of a fight in this chapter. It’s a small one, and arguably resolves itself (by sweeping it under the rug with sex), but Tom is 20 now and he’s growing some backbone. He’s less likely to roll over and take it from her. He can say no—maybe only in low-stakes situations for now, but he’s practicing the skill, the precious baby.
Goodness. This has been a long time coming.
If you’ve stayed with me through this fic, through all these chapters and my various author notes and meta posts, you’ve doubtless seen this coming. Tom couldn’t stick around forever, but he also wouldn’t leave easily. He’d already accepted so much, so he was planning to sunk cost fallacy this relationship and wait until Hermione was ready.
I hope it’s clear that Hermione was never going to be ready. What she wanted was fundamentally incompatible with what Tom wanted. She’s got a reasonable desire for a casual but consistent sexual partner with whom she is intellectually compatible. That’s a perfectly fine life goal. Tom wants a—if not a spouse, a life partner. He wants someone who engages him romantically, sexually, and intellectually, and he wants those all to be the same person, and he wants that person to commit to him.
These poor souls. They’re just not a good match.
Writing Tom’s ranting, when he experiences self-discovery at the exact moments he’s laying out all of his grievances, was cathartic... when I did it three months ago. Waiting three months to reach the point in the story where I could finally post it was extremely frustrating, as I know it’s been for some readers, making our way through the breakdown of their relationship. I’m not sure breakdown is even the correct word—they never had a good foundation for a mutually-respectful adult relationship, and so they have been tearing away at each other from the start of this thing.
I went into this story thinking it could still be a romance between these two, despite this fight being one of my earliest pieces of writing, despite the dynamic I knew I was crafting, and for at least... 8? chapters now, I’ve been completely unable to understand that original mindset. It’s probably unfair of me to have dropped this in the Tom/Hermione pairing tag, but it’s still a story about them, even if one that focuses on a version where they aren’t happy together. And hanging in Tom’s POV for this whole damn thing is truly unkind to Hermione, who is just fighting so hard to make the world a better place, and does not owe anyone romantic love or affection, but is nonetheless hurting Tom so badly in the process of working with him. As much as he thinks she’ll learn to love him, she thinks he’ll learn to not need her love, and that’s fucking heartbreaking.
I spent a long time contemplating what was left to achieve in this story, right. It’s about Tom Riddle, and specifically about how one relationship changed and influenced his life’s path. This Tom is doing quite a bit in the wizarding world, but as of two chapters ago, he’s been doing it without Hermione. He made the choice to cut her out back in Ch. 14, and so I had to make a decision about how much of Tom’s life after that ending I wanted to show.
It was a tough call! I really love the secondary characters of Tom Riddle Sr. and Thoros Nott, and I think I could quite happily write a great deal more about them, but I admit—they are not the main pairing of this fic, they are not the characters that most likely brought you in, as a reader, and I don’t want to wear out your patience with my self-indulgence. I can write one-shots or entirely new stories for that, with more straightforward premises that don’t cut out a main character after 50k words of investment.
Ch. 15 was already a bit of a stretch, showing the aftermath of Tom ending his relationship with Hermione through his interactions with the two people closest to him. I think there’s value in that perspective, and I will continue to staunchly insist that Tom is the main character of this fic, with Hermione taking on a role of less centrality despite her importance, but I understand that there’s only so much of that this story can take and still retain the label of Tomione.
And it is a Tomione, I will swear forever, because it is a story about how they orbit around each other and impact each other and are never able to settle into the supportive partnership that the label often implies because they’re just too different to find that common ground. Or, maybe they have found the common ground, but it’s not big enough for both to stand on. Either way, Tom calling it quits is as vital to understanding their dynamic, their relationship with each other, as every kiss, every shared goal, every affectionate moment they’ve ever had.
And Thoros and Tom, well, they fit. They’re kind to each other, they work to provide for the other’s wants and needs, they’re understanding even when it’s tough. I decided to show that in snapshots of their time together spanning over a decade, because though it’s not the focus of this story, and I don’t want to stretch this fic to fit every idea I’ve ever had about these versions of the characters, I think it’s important to understanding Tom to see how the relationship he eventually settles into looks so vastly different from what he shared with Hermione. This is why they never worked together—this was what he wanted the whole time.
Originally posted chapter-by-chapter on tumblr.
Meta posts do not exist for chapters 13, 15, and 17.
Chapter 1
Oh dear. I’ve prewritten so many scenes for this that I figured I might as well start posting, even if it takes me a decent amount of time between chapters.
If you followed my posts about my previous tomione, You Should Know, you might be familiar with my meta-thoughts-below-the-fold posts about each chapter. Since this is the first chapter, I’m going to use this space to say a whole bunch of things about why I’m interested in this story.
First up: age gaps. Tom’s almost always older, which is understandable given canon, but he’s a man and a power-mad narcissist so the age gap can really make his dynamic with Hermione just a bit too predictably domineering for me. What if Hermione’s the older one? What if they meet at a time when her relative age actually matters? No shenanigans on this—Hermione’s six years older than Tom and we’re going to feel the way that affects them as he grows up.
Second item: I put Hermione in Slytherin. People probably have all sorts of feelings about her proper house affiliation, but for this version of the character, it’s where she belongs. She’s way more interesting in Slytherin both because she gives Tom a role model for a Muggle-raised person surviving in the house and because it will absolutely shape her personality and goals.
I’ve said elsewhere that I don’t always love Hermione as a character. I, er, might be planning to write a Hermione that I find unlikeable. In my defense, she’ll definitely be interesting! I just don’t know, at this point, if this will end as a romance in the way that YSK so clearly did. One thing is certain, though: the resolution of this story will fall on Tom’s shoulders. Hermione is older and living her life independently of him. I’m planning, for now, to tell the story entirely from his perspective so that Hermione, hopefully, feels like the remote older woman that she is to him.
I’m a big fan of making HP-verse AUs really AU, so look ahead for moments where we sidestep the canon HP plot events. I’m also thinking of writing Nott Senior as Tom’s same-age friend in this. The role typically goes to Abraxas, but I’ve done Abby twice now, and it would be fun to see how Nott plays the role. (I have a *huge* soft spot for fanon Theo Nott, so this is my chance to do something with the family. Theo, if only you were older!)
If you’ve read this far, thanks so much! I hope you enjoy the fic.
Chapter 2
Poor Tom. I’m hardly the first person to suggest that he’d have been considered a Muggleborn, but it had to be done. The kid’s got to learn about blood prejudice through lived experience.
So when I conceived of this story, I thought it would be interesting to have Hermione as the prototype for Tom Riddle’s Hogwarts experience, the person from whom he learns how to fit in. However, there is no way Tom would trust her (or anyone) enough to just ask her for help, and even when he does, he’s not going to start trusting her blindly. I don’t think this Hermione courts his trust—why should she? She’s already Head Girl, and the smartest kid in school, and much older than him, and in her mind, those would all be reason enough for a random first-year to listen to her. She’s totally exasperated and unamused by this weird, stand-offish child that won’t just come talk to her, already.
His safety is the only thing that can really break him. I imagine Tom researches furiously to catch up with, and eventually exceed, his pureblood peers’ use of magic, but there’s just not enough time for him to get that done in his very first term. Sleep would be really hard to come by with constant pranks and bullying in his dorm room, and that’s why it’s lack of sleep that breaks down Tom’s barriers and gets him to listen to Hermione.
I’ve never published anything with a child Tom before this. It’s an interesting and difficult challenge, tbh. I don’t want him to sound too sophisticated, but I’m also not totally sure how a child of that age talks. I’m more comfortable with writing childish behavior, so please look forward to more petulance and pouting.
Chapter 3
Little rabbit, baby bunny: not names one typically associates with Tom Riddle, eh?
This nickname was one of the first details I established for this story. When I began writing the fic, I started with the scene wherein Hermione reads Tom The Velveteen Rabbit in order to get him to fall asleep, and “little rabbit” quickly followed.
I love nicknames, pet names, taunts, etc. Naming is so important. Names we choose for ourselves tell others about us (I am Lord Voldemort), but names that other people choose for us say something about us, too. In my Tom/Severus fic, Two Halves are Not a Whole, Severus has been outed as the victim of a werewolf near-miss and his school peers refer to him as “Wolf bait.” It takes agency away from him at the same time it acknowledges his traumatic experience, and in that story, he despises it. (That Tom, by the by, doesn’t understand that until it’s spelled out for him, and like all of his peers, uses the nickname for Severus occasionally, to the point that it’s the first name that comes to mind when they bump into each other at the start of the story.)
So why use little rabbit? I want to explicitly neuter this Tom. Hermione is older, already a legal adult when she meets him, and no matter how self-important Tom is in his own mind, he’s no more threatening or, truly, important to her than a plush rabbit in a children’s story. And this affects him, he reacts to it, but Hermione’s presence is implicitly conditional on how well Tom is willing to fit into the space in her life that she has allocated for this child-sized charity project. When he acquiesces to the nickname, he stuffs himself back into that space. She’s his only companion or source of affection in his entire life; why wouldn’t he?
Chapter 4
I love when Tom Riddle steals things. He should never stop being a compulsive thief/collector of treasures. Hell, I can even see Lord Voldemort swiping shit out of the Avery manor or what-have-you during Death Eater meetings.
So I’ve positioned this AU very specifically such that Hermione is older than Tom but is a native of this time period. I want her to think of Tom as a child, and especially during her time as Head Girl, as a part of her job duties. She cares for him because he is a first-year struggling to adapt to the system, which is totally expected and reasonable for a Muggle-raised child. She helps him adjust to the school and their house, but when he starts to become too invested in Hermione, specifically, rather than the coping techniques and the knowledge she shares with him, she starts to pull back and create distance. She’s not adopting this child. She’s a fucking teenager with her own life.
And in the same vein, since she’s a slightly-older contemporary of Tom, neither she nor anyone else in the story knows about the canon future for this child. There’s no threat of Lord Voldemort to stop, because that hasn’t happened yet for anyone. Tom is just a maladjusted kid. And without the character having to bear that burden, he gets to be and do other things with so much less hand-wringing over the what-ifs.
Reader thoughts on this story are fun. Based on the comments I’ve seen so far, people aren’t guessing what I’ve got planned, which is exciting. It seems like there’s an expectation that Hermione would be invested in this boy, but I’ve never really seen her as the nurturing sort. She’s a Slytherin girl in this go around, so be on the lookout for her more striving and ambitious qualities, rather than affectionate mentorship for its own sake.
Chapter 5
I gave Tom a friend in this chapter, Nott Sr. (in this fic, I’ve gone with the common fandom name Thoros, which is fine. His dad’s name is Cantankerus. It could have been worse.)
I really like the idea of exploring what friendship could mean to Tom. He doesn’t have friends in canon, just a gang of followers, and most fanfic makes Abraxas Malfoy his friend, if anything (see: my other two Tom Riddle-centric fics; I am not immune). I thought it might be fun to use a different character, one whose family is less well-established in canon than the Malfoys. I don’t know that Tom knows what a healthy friendship is. One year of Hermione serving as his protector/mentor isn’t enough to teach him what’s normal, if that had even been her focus, and it had not been. I’m taken by the concept of touch. Maybe it’s just that my partner recently played Death Stranding, maybe it’s the fact that it’s very cold outside right now, but I couldn’t escape the image of the Wool’s children huddling together at night. Combine that with Hermione allowing Tom to sleep in her room for safety, and that leads us to Tom and Thoros as platonic bedfellows. The idea of safety and security and comfort and trust is wrapped up with sleep in Tom’s head.
Also, Hermione is back! Way sooner than anyone would have thought. What’s she been doing? What does she think about Tom now? What place is there for him in her life, or her in his?
Chapter 6
Hermione is beginning to show her hand to the reader. We’re still a long way off from any sort of payoff for her goals, but I think you can start to guess how she’s thinking about her future from the conversations in this chapter.
I’ll take this space to talk about Hermione as she exists so far in this story, since I get the sense that her character is pretty open-ended to a lot of readers, based on comments. One question that’s been coming up so far is whether she knows something about Tom when he’s still a first-year, and if that influences her choice to offer him protection. To be clear: no, Hermione is no seer, no time-traveler, and has absolutely no advanced information about either the future broadly or Tom specifically.
Rather, she’s a Muggleborn student who fought her way up the Slytherin ladder so that by seventh year, when she meets Tom, she’s earned privilege and respect against all odds. When she sees another (apparent) Muggleborn child sorted into her house, it’s sheer empathy that moves her to help him out; when he starts to become clingy later that year, it’s her own self-interest that causes her to put distance between them.
Now that she’s back, she’s realizing that Tom has grown into a useful and interesting person in his own right. He has good connections with the next generation of pureblood leaders, he’s smart and well-respected, perhaps even beyond her own reputation as a student, and he trusts her uniquely. Now he’s also the heir to a Sacred 28 family? It’s a fucking jackpot.
Chapter 7
It is positively criminal that there’s not more fanfic featuring Riddle Sr. with Tom “Daddy Issues” Riddle Jr. There’s some good shit out there (see: this incredible one-shot by limeta, master of writing Tom Riddle), but not enough. We let him die without comment, fodder for a horcrux that’s implicitly assumed to be necessary for Junior’s story.
Fuck all that! Give me a Senior who has to face his trauma through this awful, messy brat and his magic worship. Give me a Junior who so desperately wants to be seen as ferociously independent that he snarls and spits whenever his father passes the salt at dinner. I am forcing these two cats together because there’s so much potential in their relationship. Tom is at the prime angry teen boy age, all ready to punch some walls, and Senior embodies that wonderful resignation of a man in his mid-30s. I love writing them together, they will get many more scenes in this fic, all because I don’t have my fill of them with just my Tom/Severus fic alone.
I’ve also got another Nott interaction in this chapter, a nice long one where Tom gets to confide in his friend and talk through his tricky feelings. This friendship makes me giddy. There’s something so earnest about their touching. When I was a teen, around Tom’s age, my friends and I were constantly touching: pressed together, knee to shoulder, on a couch, or fussing with each others’ hair, hugging, holding hands, linking arms, etc. I was rewatching Netflix’s Daredevil, Season 1, the other night, and there’s a scene where Wilson Fisk touches his friend’s hair, just behind his ear, in this incredibly tender gesture of affection. The two are both middle-aged men, it reads as platonic, and by all reason, that touch shouldn’t be in the show, but it is and their friendship is all that much deeper for its inclusion. Nott and Tom cuddle. They are both only children, with strained relationships with their fathers, and just awkward enough at school for the other boys to not really like either of them. They’re each others’ comfort, and I will write them holding each other until the end.
Finally, there’s some Hermione in this chapter, but man, what a shit. I’ve said before that I don’t love her character in... most depictions, and that holds for this story. I just couldn’t help myself but to have her insert her morals/goals/ideals into Tom’s life and force father and son together because it’s what she thinks is best for them. Also, Tom being financially secure benefits her way more than the version of Tom who becomes a shop clerk or a secretary at the Ministry and has to work a 40-hour week.
Chapter 8
Ah, Tom Riddle Senior. I adore you.
This chapter continues the trend of Hermione being... not really into Tom, not really, not in the way he wants, and yet her influence and the choices she’s made for him helping make is life immeasurably better. It’s an uncomfortable tension: Tom should have the right to make his own choices about things like “do I want to be in contact with my father?,” but he would have chosen wrong (as evidenced by canon). Senior is a solid guy. Not perfect, but he’s committed to providing a safe home for his son, and showing him some kind of acceptance—even when it’s difficult for him to offer it!—which, again, might be motivated primarily by his concern over Hermione’s role in his son’s life. The web of entanglements here is... messy.
I really love the interaction with the aurors at the end. I cannot imagine Tom ever coming around to his father without being forced, and I think it’s valuable for these external forces pushing them together to come from someone other than Hermione. I mean... Tom and Tom are living together for the summer, clearly there will be other points of potential connection. Tom taking an almost possessive stance toward his father makes sense. Tom using this as an opportunity to flex his power for the first time makes sense. He’s a more sentimental character than canon Riddle, but he’s not suddenly immune from loving his power and protecting his things.
Something I’m resisting very strongly in this story is the version of Hermione that falls for Tom almost against her will, because he’s hot and smart and an interesting companion. This woman does not give Tom an inch. I think the age gap is an essential part of that, but alone, it’s not enough. Cutting out Tom’s aggression was definitely also necessary. His resentment toward her is growing, but hopefully y’all see that seed of affection she planted in him back at age 11, because it’s just kept growing and this unhealthy push and pull between them will just keep Tom coming back over and over again. I suppose this is a bit of a role reversal from standard tomione.
Also, Nott. That’s it, that’s the comment, I love Nott.
Anon Ask
Why is everyone so suspicious of Hermione? She's not that much older than Tom. Do the other students think Tom is dating Thoros? It's obvious that Thoros has the hots for Tom. But, Tom is too focused on Hermione to really care about how it looks. Will Tom be disappointed when he does finally get to openly court Hermione?
Hm! I think this depends a *lot* on who you’re asking about, re: suspicions.
Why is Tom Riddle Sr. suspicious of Hermione? He was raped and kidnapped by a witch, he’s spent years getting over that trauma, and then a mysterious witch shows up in his life again and forces him to change how he’s living by adopting his son. Even if he doesn’t know or have affection for the boy at first, he’s going to empathize with the possibility that Junior is being taken advantage of, and he’s going to want to keep an eye on whether that appears to be happening.
Why is Thoros suspicious? Well, from his perspective, one of his yearmates was extremely close with her and only her for an entire year, spent the year after she left essentially isolating himself, and didn’t begin to relate to his peers until third year. That’s really unusual behavior, even for a Muggleborn student. I don’t think Thoros and the boys suspect Hermione of sexual misconduct—though it’s a valid reading, considering she was sheltering him in her private room—but even just having a general sense of Hermione and Tom’s relationship being weird results in some suspicion. As of the current chapter, I view Thoros as thinking of Hermione as a bit of a social climber but not generally threatening. Especially if they know she helped him claim his title, that would be good evidence that she’s clinging to her mentorship role for her own benefit, more than what she can offer Tom.
Why is Tom Riddle Jr. suspicious of Hermione? She’s kind of a shit mentor, but despite that, she wants to keep him around. She’s really, really helped him in major ways (protecting him in first year, helping him claim his title, reconnecting him with his father), but she’s also molding him in her own image and Tom’s not stupid. He knows she’s self-serving, and that isn’t inherently a problem for him, except when her self-interest is too obvious.
Thoros and Tom are not viewed as anything other than friends. Close friends, sure, but they’re not dating. They’ve only been affectionate in private settings so far in this story.
Ah—I won’t comment on the future between Tom and Hermione, because, well, that’s for y’all to read when it comes out!
Thanks for the question, anon! I hope you’ve been enjoying the story so far.
Chapter 9
It’s an eventful chapter! Hoo boy. Daddy conversations, hot Thor smut, and all of seventh year gone. We’re really moving.
This chapter is the first half of what I consider a major turning point for the story: Tom graduates from Hogwarts and moves on to his post-school life, leaving him and Hermione on equal terms for the first time in their relationship. From here on out, Hermione will not be an actual authority in Tom’s life. Their relationship might still be unbalanced, but she doesn’t have actual authority over him. If anything, as Lord Gaunt, he has more power—though not in a direct, career progression sense, it would be implicit societal worth.
I view this Tom as somebody who has been focused on growing up and becoming an adult his entire life. Lots of versions of Tom really slow down and spend time on the final year, when he’s Head Boy, because that is the pinnacle of his official power, at least until he starts up his terrorist organization in the 1970s. (That’s so sad, btw. I play with how fucking depressing that is in You Should Know, because, really? He does essentially nothing of note with his life for nearly 30 years.) Here, though, he’s known for a couple of years that he has something much bigger than Head Boy coming to him when he graduates, so Head Boy is just a CV booster. He’s happy to do it—and I’m happy to contribute further to my headcanon that Tom Riddle hugged crying firsties—but it’s a victory lap to celebrate that his childhood is ending, not a space for him to try out true power.
Also, how fucking soft is this child. He hugs his father! In Two Halves, Tom does more explicit processing of what it means for him to be the product of rape, and for his father to be a survivor of sexual assault, but he’s younger in this fic and I imagine he’d mostly want the reassurance that his dad doesn’t hold his mother’s actions against him. Tom has had a year or so by this point to start letting go of his image of his mother as his most important family member, and he had a mentoring female figure in the shape of Hermione, so I don’t think he would be as focused on her/what her violation means for him as he would on his relationship with his father, which is still new and delicate.
Finally, our lovely Thor. You asked for it (and by that I mean people repeatedly commented that Thoros was clearly into Tom), so I wrote it. Quite honestly, Thoros was supposed to be just a friend to Tom, but y’all read so much into his touches that he took on this role. What I really wanted to do was ensure that Tom had a positive first sexual experience. I need him to know that sex can be fun and safe, and Thoros was happy to step into that role for him. They’re so sweet.
I’ll say it here just to have a record of my thoughts: I do not view Thoros as being in love with Tom. I think he’s attracted to Tom, but I also think of Thor as not particularly romantically-inclined. Could that change, long-term, with effort on Tom’s part? Yes. Does Thor automatically want to date Tom just because they’ve slept together? No. This isn’t meant as angsty—quite the opposite, see the note about positive first sexual experiences above—and Thoros is likely just quietly thrilled to end his Hogwarts years on a bang (pardon the pun).
Up next, in Chapter 10: Hermione re-enters the picture.
Chapter 10
Oooof.
This chapter makes me very uncomfortable, especially the sex. I don’t think that’s the only possible reaction—I think Tom, for one, is fairly satisfied to finally consummate this relationship—but I’d be dishonest to say that my own read of this sex is anything other than discomfited. Those of you following along with my director’s cut commentary now know why I insisted that Thoros introduce Tom to safe, happy sex last chapter.
Let’s chat about Hermione. There’s a couple of directions that her character tends to take in Tomione fic (not exhaustive; go read some goddamned one-shots with nutty plots):
- Empathetic, compassionate Hermione who saves Tom from himself or elegantly mourns the eventual death of the man she loved, who could not be saved
- Bad bitch Hermione who reforms Tom through the sheer force of her determination and power, or joins him in his reign, whatever form it takes, or, very occasionally, takes him down
I suppose if You Should Know was my take on an empathetic Hermione (who neither reforms nor mourns him, just learns to live with the fact that he murdered people), then Waterlogged is my take on a bad bitch Hermione. Except… this bad bitch Hermione meets Tom when he’s a kid and not remotely evil, just traumatized. And normally, it would be an empathetic Hermione who interacts with young Tom, because that’s the natural fit, yeah? The caring girl nurtures the sad boy. Bad bitch Hermione is the equal and opposite of the dangerous, feral Tom/Voldemort.
When I thought about reversing that assumption, it made me unhappy but it was also interesting, so I wrote this story. What if Hermione was the driven, ruthless, self-righteous person that she needs to be in many darker stories in order to survive, but she had none of that pressure, none of those threats, actually necessitating that behavior? She’s still been exposed to the wizarding world’s prejudices against Muggleborns, which could easily induce her determination to start a revolution, no Voldemort necessary.
It’s a position that, typically, Tom gets to occupy. Tom gets to be ruthless in pursuit of his goals, gets to be really quite dismissive of Hermione and her needs, gets to have sex focused on his own pleasure. He’s not that, this time. He’s not emotionally distant and unaffected by how Hermione interacts with him. It’s really unpleasant, but it makes me think about and question ship tropes.
Chapter 11
We’re getting into the meat of this relationship, the parts of Tom/Hermione that inspired the fic title. They’re something waterlogged, bloated and misshapen and unpleasant to the touch, and even if you managed to dry it back out again, it would be warped beyond recognition.
It’s infuriating to me in the way that nearly all relationships in your late teens/early 20s are infuriating, this mess of codependence where two people stagnate together because moving forward would involve risks and that’s impossible to contemplate at an age when so much in life is changing, and you feel compelled to hang on to whatever stability you can find, even if it’s not good stability. Negative values are constants just as much as positive values, y’know? (Forgive me bringing it back to computer science; I am programmed for one thing.)
This is where sticking with Tom’s POV gets itchy. There’s a temptation to flip over to Hermione and give some due to her thoughts, let her emotions and conflicts breathe so that we get to see her in a more sympathetic light. Even if Tom isn’t cursing her or upset with her—and pretty clearly, he’s not, not long-term, not in a serious way—when I read this, I see her as somewhat villainous. And she must not be, she must have feelings about the whole situation that are more complicated than “fuck that guy,” but this is Tom’s story and so: does it really matter? If she’s not vocalizing those feelings, if she keeps him at arm’s length, what does it matter what type of fondness she has for him, if she likes how he smiles, if she thinks he’s irresistible when he moans, whatever.
Switching their typical ship roles is like wearing a jacket where the shoulders are too small. It’s uncomfortable when you move. It doesn’t bend naturally. You want to take it off and put on something familiar, something that fits better, but I think—at least, it works like this for me—I’ll never not notice how shoulders fit again after that experience. every future jacket will be evaluated for the fit of the shoulders, and maybe I’ll realize that some past jackets didn’t fit as well as I’d thought, just not as badly as this one. Is this metaphor too drawn-out?
I had wanted to talk more about the politics in my writeup for this post, to close out. I’m really proud of Hermione’s ideas, here, and I think she’s fucking on target. The wizarding world is nuts and should be ripped apart, brick by brick, and reforged into something more sensible, and there’s no way to do that without getting at least metaphorically violent.
However.
I posted this chapter yesterday morning, and then I turned on the news and watched extremists storm the American Capitol building and suddenly, writing a fic that even vaguely touched on politics made me feel a little ill. The scene where she talks about education reform was written back in October, it’s actually one of the first things that I wrote for this fic, and now I feel like I should be meditating on what I’m covering a little bit more before diving further in. I have one more chapter already written, and I might post just that before taking some space. I’m not totally sure. I just... Hermione, in this story, is meant to be very ideologically radical in a way that is both extremely progressive and also, sometimes, self-aggrandizing. She’s high on her own passion, and it’s meant to occasionally hurt others. That’s the story. I’m not sure how to tell that respectfully in this moment.
Chapter 12
I did some background reading before taking on Marius Black in this chapter. What would a Sacred 28 squib be like? There’s a decent number of one-shot fics that investigate the Black family’s disowned members, because there are a lot of them and it’s an interesting question. I settled on something that’s not quite those versions of the character—I don’t need Marius to be a sympathetic sad man, really, we have Tom for that—but I want to highlight that there’s this open and engaging question, which many other people have also tried to answer, about just what happens to these squib children after age 11.
Marius was born into privilege. The Blacks are a hard family, that’s clear from canon, but I don’t feel the need to extrapolate that into physical abuse and filicide. More reasonably, imo, Marius’ parents would find him a place to stay, like with their own disgraced sibling, so that he could be close by but also they wouldn’t have to worry about hiding him in his room whenever a guest comes over. Is that fucked up? Yes. However, it’s a totally different dynamic than “kill the squib,” and it allows for the possibility that, in his adulthood, Marius might have relationships with his family members. Why not keep up a (strained, infrequent) correspondence with his mother? Maybe, given the family’s wealth, he gets a monthly stipend or he had some gold set aside to support him. There’s plenty of historical precedent for doing similar with bastard children, and a squib is essentially a bastard child.
I really love the idea that he exists in a no man’s land between Muggledom and the wizarding world. That he would necessarily know Muggles, and would have to live in Muggle London (how would he get back into Diagon after the Leaky closes each evening?), but because he never attended Hogwarts, he doesn’t know any Muggleborn or half-blood witches or wizards personally. If anything, being a squib has made his experience of the wizarding world even more insular and only further cemented his privilege, in this weird, awful way.
And Hermione would despise him for that, necessarily. She likely sees all oppressed people as of a kind, sees the ways that their struggles all stem from the same root issues inherent in pureblood supremacy, but she lacks the cultural nuance to understand the qualitative differences in their experiences. Wizarding culture is something Hermione wears as a mask, but she’s never really integrated it into herself. She doesn’t keep friends. I’d argue that she’s culturally unmoored, having thrown herself into being the Best Witch since her introduction to magic, but she approaches it in an overly competitive and academic way, as though by becoming the strongest or smartest or whatever, she must be accepted, she must belong. And it’s a bit of a poisonous attitude, because then what of the Muggle-raised folks who aren’t actually that talented or smart? They deserve to belong just as much as anyone, they shouldn’t need to excel, we need room for mediocre Muggle-raised people in the wizarding world. So when confronted with a squib whose attitude is “I was supposed to be the top of this dung heap and I am pissed off that not having magic took that away from me,” instead of a more broad-minded condemnation of the way power is used, Hermione loses her shit. Not in front of Marius, of course, but she takes it all out on Tom in some of the unhealthiest sex I have written.
I’m so glad they got to have a bit of a fight in this chapter. It’s a small one, and arguably resolves itself (by sweeping it under the rug with sex), but Tom is 20 now and he’s growing some backbone. He’s less likely to roll over and take it from her. He can say no—maybe only in low-stakes situations for now, but he’s practicing the skill, the precious baby.
Chapter 14
Goodness. This has been a long time coming.
If you’ve stayed with me through this fic, through all these chapters and my various author notes and meta posts, you’ve doubtless seen this coming. Tom couldn’t stick around forever, but he also wouldn’t leave easily. He’d already accepted so much, so he was planning to sunk cost fallacy this relationship and wait until Hermione was ready.
I hope it’s clear that Hermione was never going to be ready. What she wanted was fundamentally incompatible with what Tom wanted. She’s got a reasonable desire for a casual but consistent sexual partner with whom she is intellectually compatible. That’s a perfectly fine life goal. Tom wants a—if not a spouse, a life partner. He wants someone who engages him romantically, sexually, and intellectually, and he wants those all to be the same person, and he wants that person to commit to him.
These poor souls. They’re just not a good match.
Writing Tom’s ranting, when he experiences self-discovery at the exact moments he’s laying out all of his grievances, was cathartic... when I did it three months ago. Waiting three months to reach the point in the story where I could finally post it was extremely frustrating, as I know it’s been for some readers, making our way through the breakdown of their relationship. I’m not sure breakdown is even the correct word—they never had a good foundation for a mutually-respectful adult relationship, and so they have been tearing away at each other from the start of this thing.
I went into this story thinking it could still be a romance between these two, despite this fight being one of my earliest pieces of writing, despite the dynamic I knew I was crafting, and for at least... 8? chapters now, I’ve been completely unable to understand that original mindset. It’s probably unfair of me to have dropped this in the Tom/Hermione pairing tag, but it’s still a story about them, even if one that focuses on a version where they aren’t happy together. And hanging in Tom’s POV for this whole damn thing is truly unkind to Hermione, who is just fighting so hard to make the world a better place, and does not owe anyone romantic love or affection, but is nonetheless hurting Tom so badly in the process of working with him. As much as he thinks she’ll learn to love him, she thinks he’ll learn to not need her love, and that’s fucking heartbreaking.
Chapter 16
I spent a long time contemplating what was left to achieve in this story, right. It’s about Tom Riddle, and specifically about how one relationship changed and influenced his life’s path. This Tom is doing quite a bit in the wizarding world, but as of two chapters ago, he’s been doing it without Hermione. He made the choice to cut her out back in Ch. 14, and so I had to make a decision about how much of Tom’s life after that ending I wanted to show.
It was a tough call! I really love the secondary characters of Tom Riddle Sr. and Thoros Nott, and I think I could quite happily write a great deal more about them, but I admit—they are not the main pairing of this fic, they are not the characters that most likely brought you in, as a reader, and I don’t want to wear out your patience with my self-indulgence. I can write one-shots or entirely new stories for that, with more straightforward premises that don’t cut out a main character after 50k words of investment.
Ch. 15 was already a bit of a stretch, showing the aftermath of Tom ending his relationship with Hermione through his interactions with the two people closest to him. I think there’s value in that perspective, and I will continue to staunchly insist that Tom is the main character of this fic, with Hermione taking on a role of less centrality despite her importance, but I understand that there’s only so much of that this story can take and still retain the label of Tomione.
And it is a Tomione, I will swear forever, because it is a story about how they orbit around each other and impact each other and are never able to settle into the supportive partnership that the label often implies because they’re just too different to find that common ground. Or, maybe they have found the common ground, but it’s not big enough for both to stand on. Either way, Tom calling it quits is as vital to understanding their dynamic, their relationship with each other, as every kiss, every shared goal, every affectionate moment they’ve ever had.
And Thoros and Tom, well, they fit. They’re kind to each other, they work to provide for the other’s wants and needs, they’re understanding even when it’s tough. I decided to show that in snapshots of their time together spanning over a decade, because though it’s not the focus of this story, and I don’t want to stretch this fic to fit every idea I’ve ever had about these versions of the characters, I think it’s important to understanding Tom to see how the relationship he eventually settles into looks so vastly different from what he shared with Hermione. This is why they never worked together—this was what he wanted the whole time.
