I'm a horrible person who should be working on "Ardent" and the final chapter of "Busting Boulanger," I know. Unfortunately, this plunny decided to overtake my brain. This will have sporadic updates, and has trigger warnings up the wazoo. Speaking of…

This is the only trigger warning which will be found in the entire fic. If you disregard it, that's on you, not me. In short, batshit, calculated, extreme and sometimes graphic violence, mentioned of sexual assault, smut… I mean, I'm going ham on this. Since I have a Lightish!Hermione fic out ("BB"), and a FirmlyGrey!Hermione ("Ardent"), I may as well get into the spirit and break out one of my versions of a Dark!Hermione.

Hopefully you enioy this. For anyone interested, there is a playlist I use for this when writing, on Youtube, and I have a link available upon request. I appreciate well thought out concrit, so feel free to send me a message and let me know what is on your mind. I don't have a beta, so I'm sort of just... doing my best.

Thank you to a few people for aiding in this. By a few, I mean Bri, Freya, everyone on the DEE and DHDA.

I own 13 snakes, not one of then is Nagini. I also don't own Harry Potter of any of J.K. Rowling's related property. This is the only disclaimer for the rest of the story.

Original photos used in aesthetic property of Stacee Magee (ForsakenKalika, 'A Serpent in Hand') and Briana Quinette Williams (Bs and Qs Art on Facebook, 'Desolated Wasteland' series). Do not use or replicate without express permission.

CH 1

"Your equal in might

You will know her by her magic."

The Seer's words filtered through his consciousness as clearly as if she were speaking in his ear, rather than across the length of the dusty floor of a Knockturn Alley antiquities dealer fifty years past. A shiver ran along his straight spine and his darkened gaze turned toward the figure laid arching in pain on the oak wood flooring. Through the cracked door, he watched as an obviously unhinged Dark witch stepped forward, pointing her wand at the mass on the floor, all hair and bird-fine bones.

"Of wild hair and keen eyes,

Short of stature and temperament."

He had initially passed off the statements as the words of a woman just this side of a mental breakdown. In no way would he ever have an equal. The idea alone had sparked an incredulous laugh. It was only when he had come closer to the dotty old woman in Borgin and Burke's that he noticed the milky haze of prophecy coating her eyes.

"She will know you by your name,

Tom Marvolo Riddle."

Lucius had done something correctly for a change and called him, with a simple touch of a wand to the mark on his arm during the din of confusion. As Narcissa and Lucius stood back and allowed Bellatrix to drag the girl into their drawing room, their son had been frozen in place watching as Potter and his red-headed sidekick had been moved through a side door to the dungeons screaming for their companion only moments earlier while Bellatrix worked on her captive. Before the Black witch could act again however, chaos erupted in the form of a freed elf. It hadn't mattered. Not really. Bella had wrapped an arm around the girl's throat and dragged her back, out of the way of the crashing chandelier, only suffering minor cuts from the shattered crystal.

The last sound heard as the elf Disapparated with the two was the cry of the girl's name and Bellatrix's shout as she threw her cursed blade with professional acumen. "'Mione!"

While Bella was distracted, knelt and basking in the spots of elfen blood on the floor, the girl - Mudblood Hermione Granger - twitched slightly and grasped her captor's forgotten wand where it lay beside them. Up her sleeve it went with the agility of a seasoned thief while her face remained impassive, nearly slack with catatonia. Still, he watched from his place on the other side of the door, intuition telling him things were about to become-

"Interesting," Bella spoke, her attention moving back to the girl in her arms. With her disturbingly childlike voice, she turned the younger witch's head this way and that, as though talking to a puppy. "Still with us, Muddy? Your friends just left you here. Can you believe that?" Her voice rasped at the teenager, still blankly gazing at nothing from her location half in the older woman's lap. "Seems they know exactly what you are. Trash. Detritus. Useless and weak."

The manic witch rose, dropping the upper half of the girl's body with an audible thud. He was impressed she didn't even flinch when her head smacked upon the flooring, turning instead to gaze toward the Malfoys standing by the door. Toward him. The movement of blood trickling from a cut on her throat drew his attention briefly curling his lips back before Voldemort could stop it. Schooling his features back to impassivity, his eyes flew back to Bellatrix circling around her scanning the floor. "Where is it?"

"Where is what, sister?" Narcissa's voice questioned, unseen from his limited vantage point. The matriarch's voice was filled with exhaustion tainted with the subtle hint of fear.

"My wand, Cissy!" Bellatrix raged and kicked the Mudblood to the side, rolling her over to check beneath her. "I swear if that ruddy elf- No matter. Lend me yours!" As soon as Narcissa had tossed her wand to her sister, who grasped it and spun back to her victim, a burst of magic shook the room, dropping everyone inside to their knees. The keening wail of a tempestuous wind sounded, forcing them to cover their ears and clench their eyes, and to his interest, the girl moved.

"You will know her by her magic."

With no emotion, no indication she had been tortured for hours, Hermione Granger calmly sat up.

In the recesses of her mind, Hermione heard the words which had been laughed at her through the years, mirroring the mad witch who now sat curled in on herself, clutching her head. From between eyelids half-clenched in pain, she recognized the damp stone walls around her. 'Potions,' she thought numbly, hearing the reverberation of her realization ring through her.

Filthy little Mudblood.

Insufferable know-it-all.

Know your betters.

Trash.

Traitor.

Disposable.

In her mindscape, she watched the words write themselves in stark white chalk upon the blackboard Professor Snape had once used before Slughorn had taken over. Hermione shook her head trying to dispel the morose sensation the scrawled words elicited, to no avail. The words themselves disappeared only to be replaced with Snape's own spiked handwriting.

Cauldron number twelve

She turned toward the far side wall, remembering her snarky Potions professor had always kept the cauldrons there. As she moved toward them, Hermione noticed them labelled with small handwritten plaques beneath them. Only one matched the writing on the board, which had been replaced with another sentence.

Are you so far above your peers, you no longer need to follow directions? Number twelve, Miss Granger.

Hermione turned back to the cauldrons to see them now emitting various swirls of colour.

'They were empty before… weren't they?' Starting at the cauldron before her, she moved along the row, reading the plaques until she reached her quarry.

Melissa Sherbrooke, 1983

Tyler Bennett, 1985

Louisa James, 1988

Antoinette Milieu, 1990

Severus Snape, 1991

She paused at that cauldron, confused as to why her professor's name was listed. The telltale scritching of chalk turned her head toward the board at the front of the room.

It is generally considered bad form to attempt to immolate a professor, Miss Granger. Keep moving.

Her stomach churned as she considered the names she had just passed before reaching his. She dimly recalled one of the girls, Louisa, losing all of her lustrous straight hair in the days after putting chewing gum in Hermione's own tempestuous curls, forcing Jean Granger to cut them to ear length. The result had been a series of invasive tests for the other girl, as medical professionals worked to determine whether the cause of her hair loss was cancer. Hermione recalled with grim satisfaction the horror on Louisa's face as whole sections of her hair had begun to detach themselves from her previously perfect head while she brushed her hair before classes not ten minutes after she had teased Hermione for the unruly puff of kinky twists she had been left with. She immediately buried the feeling.

Come now, Miss Granger, tell the class how you really feel.

She turned away from the board with a huff and eyed the cauldrons again.

Sean O'Riordan, 1993

Another tendril of glee curled through her remembering the freckle-faced, blue eyed git who had trapped her against the alley wall of her neighbourhood grocer, taunting her for her 'freakish' ways, and touching on her developing but still coltish body. She had kneed him in his bollocks to get free and run home, but that hadn't sated the desire for revenge in her heart. Almost two weeks later, she had overheard two girls discussing how the boy had boils and lesions all over his body, a cluster of which on his face spreading from one ruddy cheek to the other somehow spelling out "rapist." When he took his own life just before she began her next year at Hogwarts, Hermione hid her glee with false sympathy for her old classmate's parents.

Did he deserve it, Miss Granger?

"Yes," she snapped back at the board before moving back to the next cauldrons.

Draco Malfoy, 1994

Ronald Weasley, 1994

Rita Skeeter, 1995

Reliving this memory was a relished experience. The way she had trapped that snivelling reporter in an unbreakable jar for nearly two months, allowing Crookshanks to stand guard and taunt the animagus, batting it paw to paw. More satisfying was the twitching the transformed and captive witch had done in the vestiges of troubled sleep, courtesy of the Nightmare Potion Hermione had painstakingly dipped Rita's food into prior to dropping it in the jar.

10 points to Gryffindor for ingenuity.

Marietta Edgecombe, 1995

Dolores Umbridge, 1996

Jean and Roger Granger, 1997

"This isn't right," Hermione murmured to the room. Spinning, she addressed the chalkboard again. "This isn't right!" She hadn't done a thing against her parents… except for the Obliviate she had placed upon them, wiping herself from their minds. "It was for their safety!"

Was it?

"Wasn't it?" The response on the board had her falling against the cauldron lined table heavily, slopping the contents about.

You tell me.

With that, Hermione spun back toward the cauldron with her parents' names, slamming her palms down on either side and peering within. What she had at first thought were various potions based on the coloured fumes turned out to be, upon her inspection, vivid recollections. All the fights she had heard her parents have after one of her "incidents" when she was supposed to be in bed played before her. Though there was no audible noise, she could almost hear her father defending her to her mother as Jean railed on about the Devil and superstition. The scene changed to just after McGonagall's home visit, something which Hermione had not clearly recalled before. Her heart shattered a little seeing her mother clutching her rosary beads and blaming Roger for their daughter's abilities, her birthright. As though it were a Muggle video cassette player on fast-forward, the scenes quickly sped up to cycle through each return home from school, Jean becoming more and more distant from her husband and daughter. Her father had remained stoic through it all, a silent determination seeming to settle in his hazel eyes as the summers passed. Finally, the viscous fluid in the cauldron paused on a scene, this time allowing sound to be heard.

With trepidation, Hermione heard her father as he looked in on her sleeping form the night before her return to school Sixth Year, Jean standing behind him with a hateful stare toward the daughter she had once loved. "This is my fault, Jeannie. It's my blood that did this." Roger shifted his body toward his wife, regarding her without fully turning his back on his daughter. "I'll fix it. When she wakes up, she'll be better. Everything will be better."

A creeping feeling swept over her as Hermione watched, wide-eyed, tendrils of magic moving from Roger to her mother and her younger self. Her father, her own father, had somehow managed to ensorcell them, to- he was Obliviating them! Hermione pushed herself bodily away from the table, stumbling into the work tables behind her with a loud bang.

"Why?!" She shouted toward the blackboard. The betrayal ate at her skin, tiny pinpricks of sensation feeling like thousands of biting gnats. "Why did he do this?! How!"

Did you never register his lack of surprise when your Hogwarts letter arrived? It was either the love of his life, or his freak of a daughter. Which would YOU have chosen, Miss Granger?

Rage boiled at her. She was not a freak. She was his daughter, his blood! Blood. Hers was boiling. The scratch of chalk only amplified it.

It's time to wake up, Miss Granger

Hermione had no time to reply before the room had begun to dissipate around her. From the edges of her awareness, she felt a thin yet strong arm around her neck. Her body, slack with weakness, dragged heavily and quickly. A name. Her name. No, the nickname she had always hated, as though the person - Ronald Weasley, 1994 - who most used it were too lazy to sound out one extra syllable. A conduit of power next to her, which she grasped and hid away, not even feeling the motion. Small cuts, warm blood, sharp kicks to her ribs and back. A shrill voice screaming for a wand.

It's time to wake up, Miss Granger.

So she did.

Scabior, of all people, was the first among those in the room to notice the girl was no longer prone on the floor. Before he could open his mouth, she pointed a wand toward him - Bellatrix's wand! - and he was forcefully moved backwards, flat against the wall of the once opulent drawing room. The slash of a smirk on her heart-shaped face sent a sense of foreboding through him. The wink she gave him, bringing her index finger to her lips to shush him, only deepened the feeling.

Fenrir was next to be fastened to the papered surface after the werewolf had released a uncomfortable, irritated growl despite the blood staining his ears from the sound moments before. The witch was not gentle by any means, muttering something Scabior was sure only the werewolf could hear. Whatever it was, it had the creature wide-eyed with rage. The fierce teeth which had gnashed at her in protest were clamped shut by an unseen force, blood dribbling down the werewolf's chin from the pressure with which they had snapped closed. Scabior felt the warmth of his bladder releasing as the little witch simply sliced the werewolf from groin to gullet before Fenrir could utter another sound.

Bellatrix stared wide-eyed at the scene before her from her place still knelt on the carpet run just feet from the younger witch who was finally standing. "You filthy little bi-" Her anger-filled insult cut off sharply as she felt her lips being sealed together.

"Ah-ah, Madame LeStrange," Hermione taunted, waving Bella's wand like the chastising digit of a schoolmarm. The Dark witch scrabbled at her mouth in a panic feeling only smooth skin, glaring hatefully at the muggleborn witch who was nearly dancing toward her daintily. Bella's muscles were taut with effort as she fought against bonds she couldn't see holding her to the floor.

"Do you kiss your Lord's feet with that- oh, well I guess you would have to have a mouth first, hmm?" A feral grin accompanied Hermione's words. Crouching before Bellatrix, Hermione plucked Narcissa's borrowed wand from her. She rose and put out a hand to pat the silenced witch on her matted curls, Bella trying to duck away with the minute movement she could manage. Hair fluffed this way and that as she tossed her head like an unruly horse. Hermione simply grasped a handful and, as though she hadn't spelled the mad witch to the floor, dragged her kicking form toward the three Malfoys crouched by the door.

To their surprise, she only tossed them a dismissive yet unimpressed look where they cowered, stopping before the cracked door. Pitch dark irises and blackened whites seemed to gleam in silent amusement as she noticed that Lucius had also messed himself. "Really," she tutted, Scourgifying the mess away. She smiled brilliantly when the man flinched, his wide grey eyes meeting hers in shock. When none of them moved against her, she opened the door fully and raised an eyebrow to the figure who stood behind it.

"Hello, Mr. Riddle," her voice was low, gravel-rough from her screams, but pleasant. She quirked her lips a bit and raised the hand which still held tight to Bellatrix's hair. "I believe this is yours."

January

"My Lord?" Bellatrix's voice resounded behind him in the otherwise still chamber. His occupation of the ancestral Malfoy home had granted Voldemort nearly the entirety of the second floor of the East Wing, allowing him the privacy and silence he so dearly needed in the form he had been relegated to after his resurrection. When Dumbledore - that meddlesome fool - had destroyed the the Gaunt ring, the resulting release of the part if his soul which had been encased within had triggered a similar effect from Voldemort's own reanimated body. Whole walls had been demolished, priceless artifacts and heirlooms destroyed from the shockwave. It was only some months before, around the time the wizened wizard plunged from the Astronomy Tower of his once beloved school, that Voldemort had found the ritual which would restore his physical form to that of his younger self. How much younger, he had been unable to guess, but younger nonetheless, and whole.

Perhaps it was conceit, but he really had missed having hair. A nose would be nice, as well. When he did conquer Wizarding Britain, he could only imagine that perhaps people might find him less terrifying if he didn't have the serpentine slits he had worn.

Voldemort raised his hand to examine it, the skin on his fingers a pale peach. His nails were long still, jagged and chipped at their tips, but those were easily managed. Keeping his back to his first lieutenant, Voldemort allowed the shaking appendage to graze his face. Fine stubble ran along a strong jawline, scraping and catching against the whorls of his fingertips. Keeping contact, his fingers moved upward, over his cheekbones to his forehead, feeling the hair of eyebrows, before finally touching his nose.

Turning just so, he spied Bella's reaction in the mirror nearby. Wide, dark eyes gazed with adoration at his new - old - form, her stare caressing over his shoulders and face like the kiss of a breeze. He smiled at her reflection, a slight yet terribly devastating sight, and the woman shivered. He was sure she would be soaking the expensive lace knickers she always wore if he were of the mind to check. Maybe once upon a time, when she was younger and less ravaged by her stint in Azkaban, less damaged by insanity and time. Now, though, well, she had a way of making his skin crawl with her devotion and outright sexual advances. In the back of his mind, he thanked whatever magic had been at work that he had not returned in a younger form, as he was certain Bella would not be above such scruples, so predatory her gaze was even now.

Unfortunate, really, for she still was an attractive woman, despite the gauntness of her figure and poor dental hygiene in the prison. 'Thank Salazar for dental potions,' he thought, watching her as she ran her tongue over her teeth where she stood, eyes on his disrobed arse.

Wild hair and keen eyes

She certainly had those in spades, her hair a tangle of uncombed and unwashed kinks, her eyes very keenly attentive to his various changes. Turning around fully, he stepped toward her, his naked form only now feeling the chill from the open window.

"It has worked, my Lord," the willowy witch gasped in reverence and arousal, eyes watching his member as it swayed with each step.

'Seriously? Note to self, Bellatrix needs a hobby… or a toy.' Voldemort stifled an audible snort thinking of his most loyal follower chewing a bone like the dog she so often emulated in his presence.

"We have much work to do, Bellatrix," he stated to the unstable woman while he dressed himself with the clothes which had been set on a stool to the side. Her curls unbound themselves slightly with the force of her nods, forcing him to smother his amusement once more. She had no idea how truly low she had fallen, the once proud daughter of the House of Black. Oh how she had wished he would declare her his Lady, but no. Voldemort had known from the start of her service, she was not His.