Title comes from the following Quote:

"The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong." -CJ Jung

This fic is a time travel, HG-TR pairing. It has been an incessant idea that kept picking at my brain for some time. Tom Riddle is one of my favorite characters in the series, and one that I feel was never fleshed out in a very dynamic way. He was just so flat, so evil, and I honestly am still aggravated by the whole "born as a result of a love potion so cannot experience love" thing. It made sense in a story where he was a side character, but I found myself wanting to do a story where he was a more interesting, dynamic character.

Hermione is another character that seems to have a lot more going on below the surface than we see. For one thing, she has a sort of vicious pragmaticism mixed with a truly unique sense of morality that does not play out as consistently as I'd like in canon. I'm in no way discounting JK Rowling's work, she's the expert after all, but I felt like based on her previous experiences, Hermione could have responded differently to the events in the Deathly Hallows than she did. Add in that in this fic we have an AU where Voldemort wins (sort of,) and we have a very different Hermione.

Precautionary Warnings: This story will explore some mental health conditions, including PTSD and Anti-Social Personality Disorder. *This is not a redemption fic and there are no Mary Sue characters.* Tom may experience a partial redemption, but he is not a lost puppy who just needs the love of a good woman in this story. The relationship between our two characters will likely be intense, consuming, and unhealthy, at least if they were to seek out a mental health professional for an opinion. I will provide an author's note on chapters where it is coming but expect to see all the things that death eaters enjoy, including implicit rape, torture, murderous rampages, and violence for the sake of violence. My stories ALWAYS have a happy ending, but I don't guarantee that happiness for EVERYONE, just the main people.

Forgive me where some of my tropes are showing. Not to worry, I will at least try to keep them to a minimum.

Hermione knew, somewhere within herself, that she was developing an obsession and that it likely wasn't healthy. She could feel some pieces of her brain cracking, others strengthening and hardening, but the one overwhelming yearning that was beginning to fill her existence was the urge to understand exactly what happened, how the world got here, because it just DID... NOT... MAKE... SENSE.

For someone who thrived on logic and rules and the absolute certainty of specific scientific and mathematical laws, the current state of the world was distressing. Disturbing. Infuriating.

It defied logic on a lot of levels. People were supposed to act according to certain key personality flaws and strengths and, okay, she conceded that on occasion a person would deviate from the set of behaviors which they typically followed and, alright, technically the brain continued to grow and change until a person reached complete development at the age of 25 but-

People were people and their hangups and insecurities defined them and it was this fact, this certainty, that made them so incredibly predictable.

It was easy for Hermione to place people firmly in their designated categories based on their psychological makeup. Her parents were Dentists and the magical world largely discounted the whole science of understanding the human mind, but there was an awful lot to be learned in muggle textbooks on abnormal and normal behaviors.

Harry, for example, had avoidant tendencies and had shown rampant signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Ron had some obvious phobias (arachnophobia being the most apparent) and exhibited classic signs of undefined anxiety disorders. Luna Lovegood was schizotypal, Bellatrix Lestrange was histrionic. Malfoy was narcissistic and obsessive-compulsive, Snape was schizoid, Neville was alarmingly normal, and Albus Dumbledore was quite frankly so screwed up he defied diagnosis. These people, for the most part, fit their categories, they fit into pretty little boxes, and that made the world somewhat linear.

Tom Riddle was a textbook case of conduct disorder, followed by the usual Anti-Social Personality Disorder, and his behavior up until a certain point followed the patterns of someone with those designations to an absolute 't.' Then, something changed.

Riddle was never good, he was always a precocious boy with violent tendencies and a striking lack of empathy, but he was not insane. He was cool, calculating, and brilliant, but madness was simply not on the agenda. Sometime between the creation of his second Horcrux and being brought back to life in a cauldron, he had positively lost his mind.

Perhaps it was the fourth or fifth Horcrux, or maybe it was spending 10 years as an incorporeal spirit that did it, but whatever the case may be, Voldemort was barking mad and looking around, Hermione was fairly confident the way things were did not in fact match any of Tom Riddle's earlier, quite a bit saner goals. At least not any she, in all her research, was aware of.

It bothered her. The fact that her entire world had been molded on the back of a brilliant but now entirely insane wizard irked her to absolutely no end. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, Hermione was aware that this was a strange facet to fixate on, but she had been alone for a year and a half now and was quite likely a bit mad herself at this point and she just could not, COULD NOT let it go.

Her entire life was ruined, her world broken, and the man responsible did not even get what it was he wanted.

When the final battle went to shit and everyone around her was dying, dying, dead, she looked around her and realized in a sort of numb appraisal that with Ron's limbs currently spread in multiple corners of a corridor and Harry unlikely to rise from the dead a second time, she was utterly and completely fucked. The invisibility cloak was in her beaded bag and as Voldemort made his speech, the same one AGAIN he had started to begin with before Harry heroically rose up and was promptly put right back down, she slipped further back into the crowd until she could slide the cloak on.

She had been hiding out in the caves above Hogsmeade for six months when she chanced returning to Hogwarts almost just for something to bloody do, and she was confused to find that the school was left exactly as it had fallen. Someone had taken the time to incinerate all the bodies where they lay, and that was all that had changed. It was shocking, she had observed in a detached sort of manner, that a man (Snake-man? Snake-thing?) so concerned with power and knowledge had left the headmaster's many treasures in his office completely untouched, the restricted section to its own devices, and the many hidden rooms of the castle to rot.

Whatever had not been destroyed in the battle was still there, as if time and space had ceased to exist in the place where once the great school stood. She had been studying the books in the library, brewing occasionally using the potion's stores, and generally devoting herself entirely to anything that would keep her brain busy for a year but recently she just could not seem to let go of the fact that Voldemort was by all public accounts (at least according to the papers she stole from Hogsmeade weekly) hiding out somewhere, evidently insanely paranoid that someone else was going to attempt to murder him, and he had forgotten every single long-term plan he ever had in favor of desperately protecting the one: immortality.

So, she mused to herself, the man (or man-like thing) was immortal (barely, what with only Nagini left, but still,) that was one goal made, but what about the other things he had aspired to? Not that she thought it was a bad thing, but muggles even in Britain were still largely unaware of the existence of wizards, and therefore they had certainly not been eliminated as 'a threat to wizardkind' nor brought to heel. Furthermore, Voldemort was nothing more than a scary bedtime story anywhere outside of England, so world domination was out, and god-like status was certainly not achieved if the current lifestyle the Dark Lord was reported to have been living was anything to go by.

It was all so... pointless, then, wasn't it? The asshole had broken the entire system of wizarding England and had accomplished almost absolutely nothing. The rest of Britain was just sweat and blood and weeping while the conquering hero hid in paranoia.

It was a problem, Hermione repeated to herself thoughtfully for the hundredth or so time as she sat in what was left of Severus Snape's old potions classroom and ate her magically multiplied breakfast of rice and beans. It was a problem with no solution as near as she could tell, not if one tried to approach it NOW, and she tried to tamp down on her thoughts as she wondered, wondered, wondered where it had gone wrong.

After rinsing her bowl and storing a single grain of rice and a bean away under stasis to be magically multiplied for lunch, she picked her way through the ruins of the castle and considered the problem at hand. The brash Gryffindor in her demanded she discover a way to find and kill Voldemort herself but really, what would that achieve at this point? IF by some miracle she managed to locate him and IF, on top of that she, as a solitary witch, were able to circumvent his security she would, she admitted, be faced with an entirely barely immortal Lord Voldemort. Hypothetically, Nagini would be with him and mortality could be easily achieved. That assumed, of course, that he had not attempted to split his soul into more Horcruxes, and one could only hope for his sake he had not. But a mortal, mostly soulless Voldemort was a crazed, unbelievably powerful Voldemort and for all her skills and knowledge, she really did not like her chances against him.

Assuming that she was somehow successful, then what exactly? How on earth was that helpful to her? This wasn't some sort of wild pack where she could kill the alpha and be named in his place, this was a world where Death Eaters would thank her very much for removing the only person alive who could leash them at all and then proceed to rape and torture her to death. For her troubles, she would succeed in putting down a rabid animal and affect absolutely nothing.

Hermione ran her hands over the spines of all the books left standing on their shelves as she entered the library, reveling in knowledge at her fingertips. All the cleverness and mastery of all these subjects, magical or otherwise, wasn't going to change her current lot in life though. Her blood placed her in the position of being less valuable than the family pet and in addition, she was presumed dead. She had no power here.

She paused with her foot slightly lifted off the floor, a wicked idea occurring to her that would have made all the people she had ever respected and idolized shudder and recriminate her and scream at the absolute lunacy of such a thought.

If she could figure out when, exactly, one would go to FIX the shitty state of affairs she currently found herself in...

Hermione cocked an eyebrow as she sat down heavily on the floor, brilliant mind whirling as she considered the undoubtedly dire consequences of such a choice. What did she know about time travel? She had read an article, she remembered as she rose to her feet and made her way over to the magazine's section, published by Professor Saul Croker? Cracker? No, that wasn't it.

Croaker, she thought in triumph as she found the magazine in question. He was an Unspeakable in the Department of Mysteries, and he had published a piece discouraging any research into replacing the destroyed time turners from her fifth year. She flipped through the magazine until she found the page she was looking for, reading the offered perspective speculatively.

"As our investigations currently stand, the longest period that may be relived without the possibility of serious harm to the traveller or to time itself is around five hours. We have been able to encase single Hour-Reversal Charms, which are unstable and benefit from containment, in small, enchanted hour-glasses that may be worn around a witch or wizard's neck and revolved according to the number of hours the user wishes to relive...

All attempts to travel back further than a few hours have resulted in catastrophic harm to the witch or wizard involved. It was not realized for many years why time travellers over great distances never survived their journeys. All such experiments have been abandoned since 1899, when Eloise Mintumble became trapped, for a period of five days, in the year 1402. Now we understand that her body had aged five centuries in its return to the present and, irreparably damaged, she died in St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries shortly after we managed to retrieve her. What is more, her five days in the distant past caused great disturbance to the life paths of all those she met, changing the course of their lives so dramatically that no fewer than twenty-five of their descendants vanished in the present, having been 'un-born'.

Finally, there were alarming signs, during the days following Madam Mintumble's recovery, that time itself had been disturbed by such a serious breach of its laws. Tuesday following her reappearance lasted two and a half full days, whereas Thursday shot by in the space of four hours. The Ministry of Magic had a great deal of trouble in covering this up and since that time, the most stringent laws and penalties have been placed around those studying time travel."

Hermione nibbled lightly on her lower lip as she considered the ramifications of going back in time to change things. Ripping time and space asunder had serious consequences, but to whom exactly?

She immediately dismissed any concerns regarding her own potential death, should she undertake such an endeavor. After all, her life was not worth anything at this point anyway and any changes she made would be in the hopes they may impact her future self, not her current self. The issue for the time traveler appeared to occur when they returned to the future in any case and that was not going to be a consideration, as she had no intention of coming back.

As far as any qualms she may have had erasing descendants, the argument that anyone who wasn't a high-level death eater did not want to be alive right now anyway effectively addressed those. Who in their right mind would want their bloodline to be living right this moment unless they were a member of an extremely elite few? Most of the lower level death eaters and their families weren't fairing any better than the average magical British Citizen and their lot was perhaps even worse because, for them, there was no sympathy. People were living in poverty as the galleon lost all value, the country was war-torn and ravaged, and there was absolutely no oversight. The only exemption to this was random shows of brute force and cruelty by a sporadically attending police force that worked at the whim of an unstable dictator. No one wanted to be here.

Alright, so assuming she was willing to defy the laws of time and travel back...

She was left with two major considerations. HOW would she do it and WHEN would she go.

The first question was alarmingly easy to answer, although it would still require quite a bit of work to accomplish what she would need to in order to effectively master time travel. One of Dumbledore's many oddities, which she had cataloged all of sometime in her 8th month spent hiding out at Hogwarts, was a shattered and non-functioning time turner. It would be a simple matter of reverse-engineering the magical object and finding the right intent to create the object again in the way she needed, lacking the ministry-imposed limitations. Perhaps the idea of recreating a magical object that had been lost to wizarding culture SHOULD have been intimidating, but obviously, someone along the way had managed it, and if they could she had no doubt that she could as well.

One of the only things Hermione had available as far as things to do with herself during her long months of solitude was to study and learn her magic. At its core, magic was entirely about will and intent. Correspondences, such as magical objects as focuses or even the specific wand movements used to mold that intent, were simply helpers, like training wheels. Given enough time, she figured, a person could render all of that entirely unnecessary. Magic was part of you, woven into you, and everything else was simply gravy (with the exemption of runes and potions.) Knowing that, she was confident she could construct whatever correspondences were necessary to recreate the magic of the time turner.

That being understood, there was still the incredibly delicate matter of exactly when would be best to return to. That was a conundrum that would not be so easily addressed.

It took her a little over two years of near-constant discipline to create a functioning time turner. As before, only the company of the Hogwarts ghosts kept her from going completely insane in her solitude. She tested it at midnight as September 18th turned to September 19th and in turn bought herself an extra hour of being 21 years old. As the morning of her 22nd birthday dawned, Hermione turned her attention to deciding when, exactly, she would use her time turner to return to.

Once again, she sat in the potions classroom, chewing her rice and beans precisely, and allowed her mind to wander. The easiest answer was to simply return to a time when Tom Riddle was unable to defend himself and murder him. Immediately, the thought of murdering someone made Hermione's stomach acid curdle. She was pragmatic, at times perhaps even coldly calculating, and she had cruelty within her. Marietta Edgecomb, Dolores Umbridge, and Rita Skeeter, among others, could attest to the viciousness she had always carried inside her. But for all of her sins, and in the darkest recesses of her mind she had to admit she had quite a few, she had never maliciously or purposefully killed anyone.

Stomping outside onto the grounds so she could move towards the lake for a morning walk, Hermione argued with herself. Try as she might, she simply could not convince herself to travel back in time and murder a young Tom Riddle. That meant she had to work outside the confines of his death, as no one else had accomplished anything near his demise until her time.

She snorted as she considered going back to find Dumbledore and share what she knew with him. The light and all their ilk would be completely unwilling to listen to anything she said, terrified and shortsighted when faced with the possible consequences of what she would have done to get back to them. The proof that the sort of rigid morality and confines of what was acceptable magic that Dumbledore and the Order of the Phoenix had insisted on working within were doomed to failure was all around her.

With a tired sigh, Hermione settled herself against a tree and looked out at the Black Lake. The thought had occurred to her over the years that she would have to work with the monster instead of against him if she wished to accomplish anything, but she had brutally throttled down that kind of thinking as she feared that truly considering what that would mean would have killed any progress she made on her project entirely in a sort of misguided attempt to protect herself. Now though, as she considered her options (or lack thereof,) she wasn't sure what else there was for her to do. Tom Riddle would kill her as sure as she was a witch, but again, that was hardly a concern. Most importantly was finding a way to buy herself enough time to influence things before he disposed of her so that her future self and her future loved ones had a chance in hell at a life.

Every group or individual that had ever offered Tom Riddle any real opposition failed. Spectacularly. While she could provide information that could almost assure their victory, none of the groups she knew of would accept it once they understood where the information came from. In truth, Dumbledore was liable to obliviate her and lock her in the mental wards at St. Mungo's, 'for the greater good.' That left her only the man himself to work with, and that in and of itself had implicit complications.

The problem then could only round all the way back to her original obsession, the nagging and incessant thoughts that had started this journey in the first place somewhere in the very first year she had been at Hogwarts during her necessary exile from the wizarding world.

When, exactly, did everything go off course for Tom Riddle?

What were his original goals, and when did they become so distorted by madness that it was now impossible to see them?

And how could she influence those goals by providing him with enough information about his future to avoid this horror show and not create a whole other one?

This was not a problem she was going to solve quickly, Hermione thought with a sigh. She took out a sheath of parchment and began to set her mind to the details.

It was another three years of planning and training before she made the decision that it was time to put her plan in action. Hermione Granger had honed her skills, created contingencies within her mind and her body, and had refined her tools to absolute perfection. She had even spent time in the still somewhat devastated Hogsmeade under the effects of the Polyjuice Potion after obtaining hairs from the place using the invisibility cloak so that she was no longer enormously socially awkward or still paralyzed by crowds. She had tried with everything she had to undo the effects of almost 7 years of solitude and hard training that had caused her ability to be around people to deteriorate and there was simply nothing else for it until she could be in public again without fear of death or discovery.

There was only one thing left to do, and she could not, would not, yet HAD to do it.

With a shaking hand, Hermione shifted slightly at the headmaster's desk and lifted the magically cursed blade she had foraged from Dumbledore's magical objects. She glanced down at the scar on her arm. Every test she had run on this blade showed her that the properties were similar to that of the blade used by Bellatrix Lestrange. It should heal badly, and the scar would never disappear, but it shouldn't poison her or cause any additional curses to manifest. She wasn't sure exactly how much of the blood purity prejudice was actually ingrained in Tom Riddle and how much was simply a tool to get what he wanted, but one thing was perfectly clear to her. She could not go back in time to meet a younger Tom Riddle with 'Mudblood' emblazoned on her arm.

She pressed the knife to her skin and began to carve.

The 'l' became the Witch's Rune called 'the crossroads,' and 'b' was sculpted into the Deathly Hallows symbol. The 'd's were changed to a modified lunar glyph for air and another for fire. The double 'o's became the Witch's Rune 'the rings' while the 'u' became 'the eye.' The 'M' she elongated, carving the carefully crafted sigil she had constructed for her fabricated Danish magical family, Mortensen.

Sweating and bleeding heavily, Hermione dropped the knife and cast a wandless cauterizing spell from a Medical Magics textbook. The wound knit together and where once had sat a crudely carved slur, her arm now showed runes of power. Of course, she mused as she downed a blood replenishing potion, any witch who would carve runes into her arms stood to be a little insane. But so too was a witch willing to rip asunder time itself, so a little eccentricity couldn't possibly come as a surprise to a younger version of the Dark Lord.

Hermione carefully picked her way back to the room of requirement, where she had been sleeping for all the years she had been hiding at Hogwarts. As she settled on her bed on the eve of September 18th, she was distinctly unnerved by the actions she would take upon waking in the morning. Her long-dead best friend who was raised to the slaughter, as Snape had put it, to save the wizarding world had discovered the magical world on his 11th birthday. She would try, as a very last resort, to save that world on her 25th.

She needed to fix what was broken. She needed the world to be orderly, people to do as they should, and for things to make sense. Otherwise, what was there left for her?