Work Text:
(paper planes)
--
Hermione Granger meets Salazar Slytherin by accident.
Mostly.
Mostly by accident.
“Who did what in 1952?” she demands, the sharpened point of her quill tapping against the bottom of the scroll she’s supposed to be signing—it’s yet another improperly filled-out form from the Auror Department, an acquisition request for fourteen quaffles, a solid gold cauldron, and a mated pair of Great White Egrets. She doesn’t even have to look to know that Ron had sent it. “And why do we care?”
“Tom Riddle,” Zabini says, arching an eyebrow as he leisurely inspects his fingernails; he’s in an impossibly sleek, immaculately tailored charcoal pinstripe suit, silk pocket square a shiny sinuous black with emerald green polka-dots. “He’s the Slytherin who opened the Chamber of Secrets in the forties—the bloke responsible for inflicting Moaning fucking Myrtle on all of us for so many years. Bastard.”
Hermione wrinkles her nose.
“Quite the legacy, then,” she murmurs, glaring at the three—three—separate form lines that Ron had more than likely left blank on purpose. “But what did he do in 1952 that has the Unspeakables in such a tizzy that they’re actually speaking to us?”
Zabini doesn’t do anything so inelegant as chuckle, no, but the brief upward quirk of his lips indicates that he’s highly amused by her question.
“They found a tear in the Veil, and a crack in the timeline,” he replies in that deep, deadpan drawl of his that never really fluctuates in pitch, no matter the level of potential catastrophe they happen to be facing; she sometimes thinks, fondly, that they could be in the middle of the bloody apocalypse, fire and brimstone hailing in fantastic, fatalistic fashion from the sky, and he’d barely bother to blink. “Basically, someone comes back to life who shouldn’t, and they apparently shuffle the future around a fair bit. Three Prophecies have already self-destructed—Unspeakable Nott even caught a shard of glass in his eye.”
Hermione frowns, absently dipping her quill into a pot of vivid red ink and drawing an ‘x’ through Ron’s very nearly illegible explanation for the Egrets.
“Is he alright? You can go home if he isn’t, you know, it isn’t as if I can’t handle paperwork on my own.”
At that, Zabini offers her a small, genuine smile.
“Theo’s fine, Granger, don’t worry. They gave him an eye patch and some painkillers. He thinks he’s a pirate now—commandeered the kitchen table and used the curtains as a mainsail.” He pauses. “Visceral reminder of why I married him, waking up to that.”
Hermione snorts.
“Anyway,” she says drolly. “You said there’s a tear in the Veil? How serious is it?”
“Serious enough that they’ve gone back fifty years to pin the blame on this Tom Riddle, and to identify the precise date of an ‘incontrovertible’ shift in our timeline—the report refers to it as ‘more of a tsunami than a ripple’.”
Hermione finally stops attempting to proofread Ron’s request and just reaches for the heavy, brass-plated ‘REJECTED’ stamp that sits on the corner of her ink blotter.
“If that’s true—which I’m refusing on intellectual principle to accept—then how was this tsunami-sized shift in our timeline not detected earlier? They’ve had fifty years to figure it out, haven’t they?”
Zabini leans sideways into the oak-paneled wall of her office and crosses his ankles, leaving one of his gleaming wingtip loafers perfectly perpendicular to the floor.
“Something happens soon—in the present—that allegedly solidifies the time break. The report compares the events of 1952 to the ‘initial formation of a fault line’ and whatever’s about to occur now as the ‘ensuing quaking of the earth’s tectonic plates’.”
Hermione rolls her eyes.
“How poetic,” she huffs.
“Comes straight from the Head Unspeakable in the Time Room.”
Her expression sours.
“The Time Room is a glorified bloody storage unit for time turners,” she snaps, drumming her fingers along the edge of her desk. “Their credibility is nonexistent.”
Zabini hums, noncommittal.
“They have proof of Riddle making horcruxes, though. Three intact, one partial, and one…missing.”
Hermione goes still.
“Excuse me?”
“Horcruxes—Dark magic-infused receptacles for the pieces of one’s soul. Riddle made four and a half, according to the report.”
“That’s insane,” she scoffs. “That’s—that’s Darker magic than even Grindelwald tried, and he had the Elder Wand.”
Zabini shrugs.
“That’s what the report says. Error in the creation of a fifth horcrux resulted in a clean unstitching of the Veil in the middle right crosshatched quadrant—”
“Five horcruxes? Oh, honestly, they can’t be—this is ludicrous.”
“—fully corporeal ancestral time swap, corroborated by the unsolved tenth-century disappearance of—”
“Right,” Hermione interrupts, cutting him off and rising from her seat as gracefully as her heels will allow. “Right. That’s it.”
Zabini’s mouth twitches.
“I’ve already penciled us in for a ninety-minute inspection of the Veil, if you’re interested,” he says, blandly conversational. “Froze the lift for us, too. Just in case.”
Hermione steps out from behind her desk, smoothing her hands down the front of her skirt as she goes.
“I see. And does that report actually say anything about—what was it—tsunamis and earthquakes?” she inquires politely.
Zabini tucks a hand into his trouser pocket and holds open the door.
“Nope.”
(extra terrestrial)
--
She gets lucky, really.
Falling through the Veil at the exact moment that it’s torn down the center—
It’s almost like Fate, if she believed in that sort of thing.
She comes to in a shabby, unfamiliar flat with a pounding headache and a thickly muscled arm around her waist.
Her first instinct is to scream—loudly, shrilly, unapologetically—but her brain catches up with her vocal chords just in time to put a stop to that lunacy, and she decides to give herself a few minutes to shut her eyes and slow down her heartrate and collect her emotional bearings before she continues on with her second instinct—
Which is to visually inspect her surroundings and assess the viability of the Threat that is currently snoring—snuffling—directly into the nape of her neck.
The room she’s in is curious; there’s a bookshelf along the far wall, sturdy and clearly well-made, with all but one of its shelves stuffed with books—she can’t read any of their titles, not from a distance, but she can tell that the spines are leather, and that more than one is quivering with magic. The bottom shelf is empty, which she wonders at, and the laundry hamper is barely half-full, positioned in the corner next to the door—closed, covered in a coat of peeling white paint, brass doorknob scarred black with age; there’s also a medium-sized landscape painting in a gaudy silver frame over by the window—closed, locked tight, dying red-orange sunlight seeping in through the single-paned glass. There’s a nightstand—cheap, flimsy, untreated pine wood—with an analog aluminum alarm clock resting on top, and a tiny square of a mirror hanging from a nail above the mismatched mahogany dresser.
That’s it.
There aren’t any photographs, no watch or wallet or discarded pile of gender-specific jewelry—it’s as impersonal as a hotel room, not quite bare enough to look abandoned, but not quite full enough to offer any real insight into the type of person who might live there. Furthermore, there’s an air of compulsive tidiness about the room, as if everything has a place and is always, without fail, in its place.
It’s disturbing.
It’s annoying.
Hermione resolutely turns her attention to the Threat. She maneuvers herself out of his arms with careful, unhurried movements, pleased when he rather helpfully stays asleep, flopping flat on his back with a wheezing grunt and a low snore, providing her with an unobstructed view of his face and his upper body and—
The Threat is enormous.
He’s older than her by at least a decade, possibly more; dark-haired and tan-skinned, eyebrows bushy and beard neatly trimmed, lips pink and parted as he gently exhales—he’s handsome, she thinks faintly, handsome in an arrestingly masculine sort of way that brings to mind tedious words like testosterone and virility. His shoulders are broad, bulky with muscle even while relaxed, and his chest—his abdomen—his biceps—well.
The Threat is enormous.
The Threat is enormous everywhere.
Hermione knows that she didn’t sleep with him—she’s still fully clothed in the sleeveless white blouse and burgundy tweed pencil skirt she’d worn to work that morning—but she also knows that he could physically overpower in an instant; probably less than an instant, actually, if he was feeling ambitious.
She considers her options.
She could run, of course. She has a particular talent for shield charms—she could hide for a while, figure out where, exactly, the Veil had deigned to send her, and then—
No.
She scowls.
No.
No, no, no.
Not where the Veil had deigned to send her.
No.
When the Veil had deigned to send her.
Because now that she’s not so frazzled, not so panicked, not so anxious, she realizes that she recognizes the furious thrum of her current headache as identical to the headaches she’d gotten at Hogwarts whenever she’d used her time turner. The fuzziness of her most recent memories, the peculiar stretching sensation prickling through her bones—it’s textbook time travel fatigue, and it had apparently been severe enough that she had passed out in the aftermath.
She grits her teeth.
She’s in 1952.
1952.
She doesn’t want to give the smarmy bloody pseudo-scientists in the Department of Mysteries any undue credit, but—
“I can hear you thinking from all the way over here, myn lyking,” an exasperated male voice with an intriguingly odd accent suddenly says. “Calm down. We both need our rest.”
She freezes.
“When you say you can hear me thinking…” she hedges.
“I am an expert Legilimens,” he replies, sounding amused. “And your inner commentary on my—virility, yes? It is accurate. I have fathered thirteen children that I know of.”
She counts backwards from twenty-five before mustering up the courage to glance over at the Threat—who is studying her with half-lidded, startlingly slate grey eyes.
“That you know of?” she repeats blankly. “Wait—no—Legilimency requires eye contact to work.”
The Threat smirks.
“Not for me.”
She hesitates, abruptly wary.
“Oh.”
His expression remains placid, mild, but there’s a calculating sharpness to his gaze that reminds her of Zabini and Malfoy and even Parkinson—the Threat is evaluating her, weighing her strengths and her weaknesses, undoubtedly already formulating ten different plans to neutralize her should it become necessary—
“It will not become necessary,” he says matter-of-factly. “You cannot hurt me.”
She jumps.
“Don’t do that,” she hisses, pink-tinged heat creeping across the base of her throat. “It’s—rude.”
Quizzically, he tilts his head to the side.
“Perhaps you should close your mind to me, then, myn lyking.”
He’s testing her, she knows, but she’s only a passably competent Occlumens—like flying and Divination, it had been one of the few magical disciplines she had never quite managed to master.
“Don’t call me that, either,” she says, lifting her chin. “My name is Hermione.”
He chuckles, and the sound rumbles through the room like a rolling clap of thunder.
“I know what your name is,” he replies, an arrogant lilt to his voice that shouldn’t be anywhere near as attractive as it is. “Just as I know your age, and your occupation, and your rather fascinating blood status in our world.”
She sneers.
“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” she retorts. “I don’t know your name, or your age, or your blood status—although, really, why that’s even relevant—”
The Threat smiles at her, exposing a row of slightly uneven, incredibly bright white teeth.
“My name is Salazar Slytherin,” he replies graciously. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Hermione.”
Her eyes widen, and then her stomach drops.
“Oh, no,” she blurts out.
(give it up)
--
It could have turned out so much worse than it did, frankly.
Just—
So much worse.
A week passes in relative harmony.
Hermione predictably discovers that Tom Riddle is the owner of the flat that they’d woken up in, and Salazar takes great delight in the ‘muggle ingenuity’ of electricity and processed chocolate bars and indoor plumbing.
“It is remarkable, is it not, what these muggles have accomplished without the benefit of magic?” he asks her, idly flipping through one of Tom Riddle’s left-behind books.
“It’s been a thousand years,” she replies dryly. “What were you expecting? Siege warfare and Spanish accents?”
He barks out a laugh, tossing aside his book with an impatient flick of his wrist—there’s a disarming incongruity to his actions that she has discerned, over the course of the past several days, is entirely deliberate. He’s simultaneously composed and volatile, easygoing and irritable, the most understanding man she’s ever met and the most maddening—he likes control, likes to be in control, and his propensity for manipulating the direction their conversations often take, just by virtue of how off-balance he leaves her feeling—it’s frustrating. It’s impressive.
“You will have to forgive me, myn lyking. I am unused to muggles being so…clean.” He looks at her askance, expression speculative, almost challenging. “And open-minded. That is a happy development.”
“You talk about muggles as if they’re a separate species,” she says. “Just because they can’t do magic—”
“You attended Hogwarts, yes?” he interrupts. “As a muggle-born?”
She narrows her eyes.
“Yes.”
“And you excelled?”
She licks her lips.
“What do you think?”
He appears to seriously contemplate how to best answer her.
“I think,” he says, tone thoughtful, “that you are extraordinarily clever, myn lyking. Tell me, how did your muggle parents react to your magic?”
Hermione stiffens.
“They were very supportive,” she starts to snap, temper flaring—but then she stops. Arguing with her about her parents is hardly likely to be the primary purpose of his question; he’s leading her somewhere, steering her towards a specific response, hoping to trap her with his ridiculously slippery brand of infallible Slytherin logic. She changes tactics. “When I was eight, a girl made fun of my teeth on the playground. I got so angry that I subconsciously wished for her to fall off a swing. She fractured her arm in three places, and no one could explain how it had happened. How much damage do you think I would have eventually done had I not been taught how to properly use my magic, Salazar?”
He lifts an eyebrow.
She clamps her jaw shut.
He leans forward, the lumpy, floral-patterned sofa creaking beneath his weight.
“You know how the Houses at Hogwarts work, yes?”
She frowns at the subject change.
“Students are Sorted by an admittedly slim criteria—usually just a few defining personality traits. Why?”
“Slim criteria or not—it was effective,” he says, sniffing as he scratches the underside of his chin. “Rowena got a tower in the clouds full of inventors, and philosophers, and free-thinkers; Godric…Godric—he got the bold ones, the ones who were often noble and brave and outspoken, yes, but to the detriment of their own safety. I suspect history has taught you that Helga’s house was for the leftovers—the quiet, or the boring, or the forgotten. Is that correct?”
“Being a Hufflepuff is about fairness,” she shoots back. “About loyalty. And—hard work.”
He hums.
“Yes, Helga was very fair,” he says. “And hard-working. And loyal. Ferociously loyal, if you will permit me the qualifier.”
“What are you—”
“My own students—my Slytherins—they were special. Ambitious. Power-hungry, as Godric liked to say. Self-serving. Shrewd. Eager to protect themselves; protect each other.”
“That hasn’t changed much, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
He shrugs, staring at her with a crease in his brow and an uncomfortably intense shadow passing across his features.
“Not all problems have agreeable solutions, Hermione,” he finally says, words slow and measured. “I have not had to live a thousand years to learn that.” He breaks off, clears his throat, rattles something around in his trouser pocket as he shakes out his too-long black hair. “Now, I would like to go to Hogwarts before we return you to your future. I should visit with Theseus—my basilisk.”
She blinks.
“That’s it? What do you—Theseus? Really? That’s a bit morbid, isn’t it? Especially since your basilisk is, well, a horrendously vilified mythical creature, not unlike a minotaur—”
“I appreciated the irony of the sentiment.”
She gapes at him, nonplussed.
“Wait. Wait. Did you say you were returning me to my future?”
(we’re only dreaming)
--
She knows better.
She knows better than to be surprised by Salazar Slytherin’s consummate mastery of the art of time traveling.
She does.
She tumbles back through the tear in the Veil and unceremoniously face-plants into Blaise Zabini’s lap.
“You’ve only been gone twelve minutes, Granger,” Zabini drawls, awkwardly patting her on the head. “I didn’t miss you that much.”
She coughs out a suspiciously wet laugh, relief weighing heavy on her conscience, and she thinks that if she didn’t already have her cheek pressed against the inside of his thigh—she would hug him, certainly, because that single bloody sentence—you’ve only been gone twelve minutes, Granger—had alleviated the vast majority of her fears about what had happened with the Veil and the timeline and the stupid, stupid bloody Unspeakables—
“So nothing’s changed, then—”
“Myn lyking? What are you doing?”
She sits up, gingerly rubbing at the bruises blossoming across her kneecaps, and looks over her shoulder just in time to see Salazar gracefully emerge from behind the Veil.
“Who is that? Is that Tom Riddle?” Zabini hisses into her ear.
“No, it’s—”
“What is a—an underwear model?” Salazar asks, nose scrunched up in confusion.
Zabini’s mouth falls open for a second, but then he’s calmly turning towards Hermione, the only evidence of his possible embarrassment the faint red glow suffusing the back of his neck.
“Did he just—”
“Yes,” Hermione interrupts. “Yes, he did. It was worse for me, though. I called him virile.”
Zabini makes a garbled choking sound, which is, to be fair, the most emotionally charged reaction she’s ever seen him produce.
“Theo and his painkillers are going to love that one, Granger, thank you.”
(what i didn’t say)
--
Smuggling an infamous Hogwarts’ Founder through the Veil and out of the Ministry—
Well, it’s much less difficult than it should be, honestly.
Security is distressingly lax.
Salazar doesn’t settle into Hermione’s flat in quite the same way he’d settled into Tom Riddle’s—rather, he’s pensive, restless, frequently disengaged, preoccupied, and even if it does take him two weeks to disappear, she can’t rightly say she’s surprised by the note she finds on her nightstand one morning:
I have returned to the past. This is not good-bye.
(pillow talk)
--
Four days isn’t such a long time to be left alone, really.
Neither is five.
Six, though—
Six is too long.
“Our Lord and Savior is back,” Zabini informs her without inflection, ducking his head into her office. “He smells like horses. You should do something about that.”
Hermione flails for a moment, accidentally crumpling the Auror Department’s most recent improperly filled-out acquisition form—a request for twenty-six purple crayons and a deflated muggle soccer ball, Harry’s chicken-scratch signature incomprehensibly taking up almost a quarter of the page.
“What—Blaise, don’t you dare leave me alone right now—” she hisses, scrambling to comb her fingers through the chaotic mess of her half-braided hair; she’d been so lazy that morning, had rolled out of bed and forgotten to brush her teeth and chosen to wear a sundress for the sole, mortifyingly pathetic reason that it hadn’t had any buttons or zippers or pieces to put together—
“Myn lyking?”
She glances up from the tangled ends of her hair and immediately grimaces. Because of course—just, of course Salazar Slytherin can smell like horses in his sweat-soaked buckskin breeches and mud-streaked leather tunic and still look like he belongs on the cover of a bloody romance novel. Of course.
“I’m very angry with you,” she decides to say instead of properly greeting him. “You left.”
He takes a leisurely step forward, into the room, closing her office door behind him with a neat snick of the lock.
“I destroyed Tom Riddle’s horcruxes,” he replies. “The ones I found in his bookshelf. With venom I took from Theseus. Tom Riddle cannot return to any version of the future without my assistance.”
She snorts.
“I know that,” she says, getting to her feet. “Do you really think I believed that you just happened to miss your pet basilisk and fancied paying him a fun family visit? One of the first things I did after you left—still very angry with you about that, by the way—was to look up alternative uses for basilisk venom, and there it was, in the third appendix of Moste Potente Potions—destroying horcruxes. So—yes, Salazar, I know that you’ve essentially rendered Tom Riddle temporally immobile. I am aware. What I am not aware of is why you had to leave to do it.”
He moves closer, stopping when he reaches the side of her desk.
“Tom Riddle is no longer a threat, myn lyking. That is all that matters.”
“Don’t patronize me,” she snaps. “Is he dead? Is that what you went back for? To kill him?”
He crosses his arms over his lower abdomen and rocks back on his heels.
“He is no longer a threat,” he repeats.
Frustrated, she pokes him in the chest.
“Why won’t you tell me what you did? I could’ve—I could’ve helped, Salazar, could’ve gone back with you to make sure Riddle was really stuck—”
“It is not in my nature to trust, myn lyking,” he interjects, voice uncharacteristically tender. “And your mind, when I delve into your thoughts…it is so well-organized; so methodical. It feels like a trap.”
“You didn’t—you don’t trust me?” she echoes, disbelievingly.
“Do you trust me?” he counters.
She hesitates, biting back her instinctive urge to respond in the affirmative—because no, she realizes, she doesn’t trust him. Not absolutely, not unconditionally. She trusts him with her safety, maybe, trusts him to not hurt her, to not let her be hurt; but she doesn’t trust him with her secrets, not yet.
“Is it in your nature to stay, then? Here? With me? Or…is visiting just easier than sending an owl?”
He reaches out to cup one huge hand over the hinge of her jaw, thumb sweeping across the slant of her cheekbone—and she feels the warm silk of his palm and the rough callus of his fingertips and it’s like electricity, sizzling and bright, like lightning and thunder and the faulty bloody wiring in Riddle’s London flat—
“It is in my nature to do many things,” Salazar says, cryptically.
Her lips part.
“Like what?”
He bends down, nose brushing her face.
“It is in my nature to fight,” he replies, voice low, husky, a distractingly deep vibrato against the shell of her ear. “And to flee, too, if the occasion calls for it.”
She shivers.
“Any—anything else?”
“Mm,” he says, tongue darting out to trace the line of a tendon up the side of her neck. “It is in my nature to win. To take.”
She swallows, running her own hands around the broad, broad expanse of his shoulders as he presses a molten-slow kiss to the sensitive spot of skin behind her ear.
“Is that all?”
He drags his fingers over her chin, down the column of her throat, between the wings of her clavicle, until he reaches the swells of her breasts and halts, waits—
“It is in my nature, myn lyking, to do many, many things,” he says again, finally, finally moving his mouth over hers, not quite a kiss, no, but somehow more thrilling, more intimate, the slide of his lips and the heat of his breath and the brief, tantalizing touch of his tongue against hers.
“So—so you’ve said,” she stammers, pushing her hips forward, into his, the thick bulge of his cock grinding into the hollow of her pelvis.
He huffs out a helpless, strangled laugh.
“My nature is to stay, yes,” he murmurs.
She tugs on his bottom lip with her teeth.
“Good.”
He plucks at the lace trim framing the top of her camisole, the flat of his wrist just barely grazing her nipple.
“Yes. I stay, and I treasure, and I…” he trails off, rolling the words around his mouth as if he wants to emphasize just how good they taste, how right they sound. “And I savor.”
It’s a promise.
It’s a dare.
“Show me,” she whispers.
He smirks.
And she isn’t sure who makes the first move, isn’t sure who closes off the remaining distance between their bodies, their lips, isn’t sure if it’s him, or if it’s her, or if it’s both of them, together, perfectly synchronized—
She thinks that might be the point.
(infinity)
--
Hermione Granger falls in love with Salazar Slytherin by accident.
Mostly.
Mostly by accident.