Author's Note: A birthday story for Cara, who requested angst and Hermione/Tom. Be careful what you wish for...

The Girl With the Golden Watch

Tom opened his eyes to the darkness. Somewhere close by, a child whimpered in his sleep. Another boy snored so loudly that Tom was surprised that anyone else could sleep through the racket. He tried to roll over and shut his eyes, but no matter what he did, he could not sleep. A strange sensation, almost like static electricity, danced across his skin, making it prickle and spark with sensation. Tom's eyes were wide and he looked around. He knew what this meant. It was the feeling he always got before...something...happened. The something was always different each time, and it was fickle in showing up. Sometimes, when he thought nobody was looking, he would do all manner of odd things to force it to happen. He'd run in circles. Bang his head against the wall. Once, he even threw himself fully-clothed into the dirty river. But each time, nothing had happened.

Now, though…

He slowly crept out of his bunk bed, which was less of a bed and more of an unsafe amalgamation of boards and rusty nails that had been shaped into a bunk bed-like-object. The mattress was so thin that he could feel the knots of wood underneath it, and the threadbare blanket he'd been given was little comfort. He was wearing his clothing over his pyjamas to keep out the cold. His boots were upside down to keep anyone from putting anything inside. He quietly laced them up and snuck from the room.

Tom considered himself fairly intelligent for a boy of ten. He knew all of his multiplication tables and he was familiar with the lazy orphanage staff. Sure, they threatened them all with a beating if they got out of bed after lights out, but Tom knew that if he didn't break anything, they wouldn't care one whit. In fact, sometimes he wondered if they would even care if he left the orphanage for good.

'One less mouth to feed, is all,' he thought to himself.

Tom knew that he'd been dealt a poor hand in life, thanks to the meager offerings that the orphanage had given him after his mother had died in childbirth. Tom knew she'd been ugly; that much had been discussed in front of his face. But there was no information about who she was or where his family might be. As far as the world was concerned, he was nothing—nobody.

It was, then, with a hint of nihilistic glee that he carefully turned the knob to the front of the orphanage and slid through the gap in the doorway out onto the front porch.

The orphanage was located on the outskirts of the city. There was a graveyard across the street, and an abandoned lot next to it. The river ran under a little bridge that led out into the wild and untamed countryside. The hairs on his arms stood up straight and he shivered, but it was not with the cold. It was then that he saw it. A light had parted the clouds and he saw something moving slowly down in the darkness. He ran across the street and through the graveyard gate without thinking. Death did not bother him, after all. The dead were gone forever. He'd watched a kitten drown in the river and seen the life leave the eyes of the old dog that the orphanage's mistress owned. There was no distress in Tom's heart when it came to the death of other creatures. In fact, the only death that bothered him was the thought of his own. But he was still a boy with plenty of time on his hands, and he found that rarely ever thought about his own mortality, which was just as well.

As he wove around headstones and climbed around a hill to avoid a marble mausoleum, he realized that there was something larger underneath the light.

It was a body.

No—a girl.

As he climbed to the top of the mausoleum, he watched as she came down from above him, her small frame and bushy brown hair floating weightless as the light above her began to dim. It was as though small particles were lifting up into the sky and disappearing one at a time. Tom grabbed her in a mock-bridal carry, wondering at how weightless she seemed to be. Then, suddenly, the golden light disappeared, leaving him to carry the full weight of the girl. He collapsed under her body, as she was at least a few years older than he was and considerably heavier than anything he was used to carrying.

She was still unconscious when he finally extricated himself, using all the choice swears he'd learned from the older boys. He very nearly rolled off the ceiling of the mausoleum, and rolled the girl over onto her back next to him. In the darkness, it was hard to see much, but he could tell that she was wearing something golden around her neck. It glowed softly and burned to the touch. Her clothing was odd, too, and appeared to be stained by something cold and wet. Tom frowned and began to wonder how he was going to get himself out of this mess. There was no way he was going to stay on the cold marble roof of a mausoleum until sunrise. They needed to get back to the orphanage.

"Wake up," he said, shaking her gently.

She groaned but didn't stir. He tried blowing in her ear to irritate her, but that only made her grimace. Finally, he considered kissing her, like the prince in Sleeping Beauty, but then he thought better of it. After all, it was possible that she had some sort of illness and Tom was a fairly germophobic boy.

Finally, he'd had enough.

"Wake up!" he hissed in her face and shaking her roughly, and her eyes snapped open. She rolled into a crouched position, her eyes hard as she began to pull something out of her pocket. Then, her eyes went wide and she began to flail as her leg slipped off the side of the flat roof. Tom grabbed her hand, germs be damned.

"Sorry," he said, after he pulled her back onto the roof. "We should probably get down from here."

They carefully made their way to the ground and began to walk back to the graveyard gates.

"Where am I?" she asked, her eyes wide and bewildered. She touched her finger to the golden object on her chest, and flinched as she touched the hot metal.

"What is it?" he asked, full of wonder. He was fairly certain that it was important.

"It's...er...kind of like a watch," she said evasively.

"Ah," Tom replied. "Who are you?"

"I'm Hermione," she said, "Who are you?"

"Tom," he replied. "You look young. Older than me, obviously, but young. Where are you from? How did you do that? Are you an orphan?"

"Be serious, I—" A strangely distraught look appeared on Hermione's face, which was made more extreme in the shadowy streetlight. "—yes. I suppose I am all alone."

"Come on, then." Tom hopped down off the curb and started across the deserted street.

"Where?" Hermione asked.

"To the orphanage, of course," Tom replied. "It's rotten, of course, but it's better than sleeping on the streets."

"Oh...oh yes, yes of course," she replied somewhat spacily. Tom found his eyes had grown heavy as well. They were both obviously exhausted.

He showed her the way to the girls' dormitory, grabbing a faded gray dress from the wash bin on the way there and instructing her to throw her odd, soiled clothing into the rubbish bin, and then crawled back to his bed and forced himself to get under the threadbare blanket once more. The orphanage staff would sort things out in the morning.

The last thing he thought before he succumbed to exhaustion was that he needed to ask her about the golden watch when she woke up in the morning. Because what he'd witnessed— the floating girl, the light— it felt like something special, like magic.

Real magic.

When Tom was five years old, the orphanage had gone to a church event, which was free. Though the children did not have any pocket money to play any of the games or buy any of the snacks at the bake sale stall, there had been a free children's magician who'd entertained all of the children.

That is, all of the children except for Tom. His keen eye had caught the man stuffing the rabbit in the top hat. A corner of scarf stuck out of the man's sleeve. It was embarrassing. Tom had been so frustrated by the end, of being denied the little prizes that the other children with parents were able to play to win or the pieces of cake they stuffed into their greedy little mouths and the pitying looks they'd all received when they'd taken lunch from the charity line, that he began to feel a strange sense of pressure behind his eyes, almost like a headache. His eyes were scrunched closed, so he didn't see it when it happened, but he heard a sound like a roar of wind and the gasps of the children quickly turned to screams. When Tom had opened his eyes, he beheld the magician running around with his top hat (and some of his hair) on fire. He finally put it out by jumping head-first in a nearby fountain, but he'd burnt a giant patch of his scalp and required immediate medical attention.

The other children had been upset, but Tom stayed somewhat further off from the others and stared at himself in the reflection of the pond, wondering if he had somehow made it happen.

And, if so, how he could more easily do it again.

When Tom woke the next morning, it was cold, and the meager warmth of the blanket did little to keep him from shivering. He stared at the mismatched wooden planks of the bunk above him and thought about her. This girl...she was older than he was, but not by much, yet her eyes seemed older still. This was not unusual for those who grew up on the streets or in the poorhouses, but she'd not come from any of these places. She'd come from the sky. If he had not been there, even he would not have believed it, but that was the truth. There was something about her, though, that made him suspect that she had something to do with the odd things that happened around him, and he needed to find out the truth.

She was not in the breakfast hall that morning. He knew that she wouldn't be, for despite the lack of involved adults at the orphanage there would still be plenty of questions about where she'd come from, but it still made him wonder momentarily if she'd simply been a dream.

She appeared at the door of their one-room classroom with one of the matrons during the late morning lesson. She was wearing another dress this time; a voluminous blue thing with a white collar.

"This is Hermione, children," announced Sister Margaret. "She will be staying with us from now on."

Hermione stood at the front of the class, her hair plaited back in a bushy braid, and stared at the floor.

"Sit over there by the window, girl," the Sister said, pointing to one of the empty desks that the other children avoided on account of how much colder it was next to the thin-paned glass.

Hermione went, her shoulders stooped as though she was trying to make herself smaller.

Tom itched to join her, but he knew that he couldn't make it obvious. He didn't have many friends at the orphanage. There were plenty of children who had been harmed by his "tricks," so most were scared of him, but they hated him too. Tom was sure that they would exploit any weaknesses that they could.

It wasn't until they went out for recess in the freezing gray yard that he finally caught her eye. She nodded almost imperceptibly and went behind one of the small sheds in the yard. Tom checked around to make sure that he was not being followed, and then joined her.

"So, then." He faced her, trying his best to look casual.

"You're Tom...Tom Riddle, right?" She was still looking at the ground.

"Do I know you?" He thought back. There was no reason that he'd have told her his last name. "Did you...come here for me?"

"I...I had to," she replied, looking up finally. Her eyes were filled with unshed tears. "You...you're the only one who can stop him, but he killed you and...and...then he broke my Time-Turner when I tried to go back and now I'm stuck here!"

Tom stared at her in shock. What was she going on about?

"I...you're…" She stepped forward and grasped his hands. "I was trying to get to you back when you were a teenager at Hogwarts, but then...the Time-Turner must have been unstable and now I'm here."

"I'm only ten years old. I've never heard of a time...whotsit. Or Hog-thingie. I've never met you before. What, exactly, are you on about?" Tom replied, exasperated.

Hermione pulled the necklace out from under her collar and showed him the center part. There was a gap in the middle where it appeared something had recently been attached inside.

"This is a Time-Turner. When Dumbledore— he's the headmaster, but he took over illegally— when he shattered it with his wand, I was sent back here. At least I think. I mean, the books I've read on the subject theorize that you can't actually travel this far back in time with one of these, which might mean that it's not true time travel but instead a sort of parallel universe Apparation. But then, I suppose—"

"OK, STOP!" Tom said firmly. "I have no idea what you're talking about. I mean, I know that weird things happen around me sometimes, but…"

"You know what it is."

He frowned. "No. You say it."

"It's magic, Tom. I'm a witch"

Tom's eyes widened for a moment, but then he glared at her. "Prove it."

"I can't do magic outside of school. There's a Trace."

"Well, if you're afraid to show me anything then I understand." Tom tried to look bored instead of disappointed. He'd seen her float down from the sky. Perhaps that should have been enough for him. But he wanted to know more. He wanted someone to say it to him.

That he had magic.

"There is a way to do it, but we'd have to go out into a wild space like the woods where it won't be easy to get caught." Hermione gave him a look as though daring him to back down.

"Fine. We'll go tonight after the adults are asleep." Tom wasn't afraid of the graveyard at night, so why would he be afraid of the woods?

Hermione sighed. "Fine."

Tom wanted to ask her more, but they were interrupted by the Sister ringing the bell to call them back into class.

Sneaking out of the orphanage was second nature for Tom, but Hermione was new, and the girl's dorms were right next to where the nuns slept. Hermione must have been versed in sneaking around, though, for she met Tom at the front gates not long after he arrived.

Tom had a torch, which they shared on their walk in the dark. As they walked over the bridge towards the forest, Hermione told Tom about a magical school called Hogwarts, where children with magic could go to school starting at age eleven. She'd started at Hogwarts thinking that it was a magical place, only to find out that the Headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, was trying to twist and experiment on his students to turn them into his followers. She'd been given the Time-Turner in her first year, which she'd initially thought was due to her willingness to please and overachiever nature, but by her second year, she'd overused it so much in taking extra classes and doing secret dangerous "extra credit" missions for the Headmaster, (the most recent of which where she'd nearly lost her arm to a manticore) that she's aged nearly a year more than she should have been.

Her friend Harry had been turned into a Living Doll that Albus was slowly transferring his own soul and power into in a bid to stay young forever. And her friend Ron…she couldn't bear to tell Tom what had happened to him, but from the five minutes of sniffing and wiping away tears that Hermione desperately tried to hide from him, Tom assumed that it was horrifying.

Hermione had turned to Tom, a Ministry official who was rumored to be the head of the Order of Ophiuchus— a fringe organization of magic users that was secretly trying to uncover the hidden house of horrors that Hogwarts had become. Unfortunately, due to a Silencing potion that all students were forced to take in their pumpkin juice at Hogwarts, they were unable to tell their parents or officials of the true nature of Dumbledore's crimes. With the help of a rogue Potions master at the school who was secretly on Tom's side, Hermione had begun to neutralize the Silencing potion's effects and was able to successfully give information to Tom that could finally bring Dumbledore and his madness down.

However, Hermione had tried to save Harry, her only friend, and that had been her undoing. Dumbledore had taken control of the boy and forced him to nearly choke the life out of her. Luckily, Dumbledore forgot about the Time-Turner, and Harry fought Dumbledore's control long enough for Hermione to catch her breath and begin twisting it. Tom had shown up to try to stop the madness and ran in front of Hermione in an attempt to shield her, only to be murdered on the spot by Dumbledore right in front of Hermione's eyes. His blood splattered all over the front of her black robes. Then, Dumbledore had set his wand upon her and blasted the Time-Turner. Hermione had lost consciousness until Tom had awoken her.

"If I've truly gone back in time and come to you, then maybe...maybe we can stop all of it from happening," Hermione said thoughtfully as they finally reached the tree line. It was creepy in the darkness, but they stepped further off the path and into the trees until they were hidden from the road.

And then...Tom saw Hermione's wand and watched her light the tip and he knew she wasn't lying. She transfigured a stick into a footstool and a leaf into a butterfly. She cast a floating charm on a small stone and then sent it flying against a tree.

Magic was real.

"How would you like a turn?" She said, smiling at him in a way that made him swallow thickly.

That smile...magic...

Tom's heart quickened with the knowledge of it, and he knew that he would do anything at all to help her.

In the months to follow, they would sneak out every night to talk about what must be done to stop Dumbledore and his horrific plans from coming to pass. Hermione was only in her second year, but her knowledge base was significant, even though she didn't have access to any of her books. She even taught him how to use her wand, though it didn't feel right in his hand, and she warned him that using it might exhaust him due to his young age. They only had little less than a year before he would receive his Hogwarts letter, and they needed to be ready. Neither he nor Hermione were certain what would happen when it came time for her to be born, but they considered the threat of Dumbledore to be worse than the potential consequences of Hermione's travel back in time.

His own magical strengths seemed to be largely in reading minds and obscuring his own thoughts. Even before he learned about Legilimency and Occlumency, he had been able to "feel" what other children's feelings about him were, or known where something hidden by a bully was located.

"That's a lucky break," Hermione said to him, later, after he'd repeated back all of the images she'd put in her head correctly. "If you can read his mind without him catching you, you can find his weakness. And if he can't read yours, then he'll never know that you know the truth."

For the first time in his life, Tom felt part of something bigger than himself.

In hindsight, Tom should have known that it wouldn't last. His life had been a series of tragedies starting off with his birth. But after a few months, it felt as though he'd never been without Hermione. She was a big sister and a friend, and her laughter was infectious. Tom's stone-cold heart began to thaw, especially with the knowledge that he was special. He had magic, and he had a purpose. One day, he would be a great man working towards a great cause.

It happened on a field trip that summer. There was a cave near the surf at low tide and some of the kids had gone to explore. Hermione was just ahead of him when two of the boys said something nasty and pushed her. She lost her balance, then slipped and fell with a cry of surprise, hitting her head with a sickening crack. Nobody saw the jagged rock until after. She'd gone horribly still, then, and blood began to well from her head, staining the wet sand a horrible colour. Tom tried to wake her. Desperate, he pulled her wand from the hidden pocket in her sleeve and tried to cast Ennervate on her, as she'd showed him before. She'd gone so cold so quickly, and he'd screamed for someone, anyone to go for help, but all of them stood there frozen like idiots. She'd opened her eyes one last time, and a soft breath escaped her lips, and that was all.

She was gone.

The scream of rage and fury that escaped Tom's cherubic lips was such that other the children quaked in fear. He pointed the wand at them, not knowing the words, but knowing the feeling that he wanted them to feel- fear and horror and pain, so much pain that it threatened to burst him from the inside.

And the children contorted on the ground before him screaming and crying out until Tom collapsed upon the corpse of his best friend and knew no more.

Tom was thankful for the Obliviate spell. The children forgot what they had done, but not their terror and horror of Tom. The adults, too, were easy to confuse with spells before they'd even left the beach. None of them deserved to remember Hermione. His Hermione.

He placed her high in the cave where the water did not reach, crossed her arms over her chest, and placed a Stasis spell on her body. He did not know how long it would last— a spell cast by a ten year old with no real formal training in magic— but he knew how much magic seemed to depend on the depth of his desire, and he willed it to hold with every bit of desire that he had.

After, when Professor Dumbledore (he was not yet Headmaster, Tom thought gleefully) came to see him, Tom did his best to play the perfect angel. He feigned having no knowledge about magic, all the while hiding the wand that had been hers in his sleeve. He often ran his fingers up and down the familiar length of it, feeling the grooves and lines of it until he fell asleep.

Each year he would return to the cave and re-cast the Stasis charm, though he was not sure if it was his magic or her mishap with the Time-Turner that made it so. Her body remained as it had been in life, and he swore to find a way to bring her back to him. Later, when he was newly seventeen, he created his first inferi from the waterlogged corpse of a drowned drunkard, then scrapped it when he realized just what he had created. It was far too monstrous a fate for her. She deserved the best.

She deserved everything.

It infuriated him to know that there were so many children at Hogwarts that were just like those brats that had caused her death. Ever the chameleon, Tom had played into the Slytherin pure-blooded rhetoric, but he didn't believe a word of it. There were plenty of rich little shits who called themselves superior because they were from wizarding families.

But Tom knew the truth. He knew, now, that it wasn't just Dumbledore that was corrupted. It was everything in the magical world. Hermione had told him of a future where the Ministry and Hogwarts stifled innovation and fostered ineptitude while also experimenting on people for their own pet projects.

Well, not on his watch. Tom would destroy this mockery of a Wizarding World and remake it better, kinder, more worthy. A Wizarding World that Hermione would grow up in unscathed and whole, even though this timeline's version of her would probably never know the sacrifice she'd made if he had anything to say about it.

And maybe, just maybe, he'd finally find a way to bring her back so that she could see everything he'd done just for her.

"Hmm," he mused, turning the page of an ancient book he'd borrowed from the Restricted area of the library. "Master of Death, hmmm? It's a stupid fairytale, but I keep seeing these Hallows being referenced regularly. But surely, I would need more power to cheat Death himself and bring her back."

He opened another book to a passage he'd held with a bookmark.

"Horcruxes hide the soul," he mused, "Perhaps it could work. A magical number, like the number three or seven would probably strengthen my hold on this mortal plane, even in the face of summoning Death itself."

He yawned and packed up his books, smiling as he imagined how proud Hermione would be of him for all of his hard work.

It was settled, then. He'd ask Professor Slughorn about it in the morning.