Burn With Me

"I would kill you if I could."

Hermione smiled and stretched out more comfortably on her bed – on their bed – running her hands up over his arms. "You say that every time."

Voldemort returned her smile with a sharp, jagged one of his own and she chuckled as she did each time she saw it. His Lady was so amused that she'd somehow concocted a slightly more handsome version of his first horrific visage - so amused. "And every time I mean it more and more." He traced the tip of the wood over one of her pert nipples, reveling in the way she wriggled under the touch.

He couldn't break her.

He couldn't snap her delicate little spine no matter how much he might long to do so.

He couldn't punish her for bringing him back and entrapping him as she'd managed to do.

All he could do was her bidding…

…except here.

Here, he could take her.

Here, he could have her in whatever way he desired.

Here, he did take her.

And Merlin how his Lady enjoyed it.

His lips replaced the path his wand had traveled moments before and she shifted again, wriggling, writhing, arching into his touches. He'd learned her, every bit of her, and he would perhaps be lying if he were to say that he didn't enjoy it as well.

"I would pick you apart. I would torture you until you screamed… I would make it slow for you," he hissed against her neck. "So very slow."

Hermione turned her head into her pillows, exhaling when his teeth traveled to tug at the diamond set into the single piercing on her lobe – the one he'd extracted from the previous Minister's vaults for her after setting her on the proverbial throne. "I think you'd miss me," she purred.

"Mmm…" Voldemort hummed, drawing her legs up around either side of his bare hips. He rubbed himself against the inside of her thighs, first one, then the other, smirking at the remnants of their coupling not even an hour before. "I think you give yourself too much credit."

She laughed.

It was a laugh that continued to draw him in.

It was sane, far too sane, for a woman that resurrected a Dark Lord to subjugate their people because she was insulted.

But there it was.

Color him intrigued.

"Well someone has to," Hermione mumbled and wove her fingers through his hair to pull him back to a favored spot on her neck. "Merlin knows you won't."

He chuckled against her skin and began a torturous line of nips and bites. "If it is your command…" he felt the words spill forth from his lips and the bile that always accompanied it touched the back of his tongue.

Hermione shook her head. "Not here…never here…"

He shifted his softly glowing red gaze up from the spot at her collarbone to meet her dark one. That too sane mirth that was always present, was gone. Voldemort felt her fingers card through his hair and he couldn't help himself a grin. "You've grown sentimental." He pressed a kiss to her chest, ran his nails over her thighs again with the slightest touch of fondness that he'd reserved for so very little in his first lives. "Perhaps it is you that would miss me."

She huffed and rolled her eyes, pushing him off of her with a stiff arm. Hermione rolled away from him, gave him her back and looked out the window at the world which she now owned. "You ruin everything."

Voldemort chuckled at the grouchy mutter of her words and curled himself all along the length of her backside, slipping one of his legs between both of hers with minimal resistance and only one petulant noise. "And is that not precisely what you called me back to do?" His lips were pressed again to her ear as he spoke and proceeded to dot kisses over the sensitive spot behind it all along her hairline.

Her shoulder moved in a dramatic shrug and it only made him laugh once more.

His arm draped over her waist, palm sliding over her belly in a soothing set of circles before winding its way down and between her thighs to find her center. He stroked her until that same dramatic shoulder started to sag and her breaths turned into huffs and pants and the softest of moans.

"I would kill you if I could," he rasped and groaned when she pushed her rear against him. His hips jerked forward in response and her top leg looped over his. His breath stuttered out in a shaky exhale when she angled her hips to catch on the tip of him and he flattened his palm to push her the rest of the way down his length.

"Tom!"

That most hated name was the closest he'd ever reach to Heaven when it fell from her lips in such a way. He buried his face in the crook of her neck and shoulder, the soft curls of her hair holding the scent of her magic, her ambition, her tenacity…her, her, her…

His grip tightened on her and his words were little more than a husky growl. "I would kill you if I could," he rumbled, "but your magic is no longer what stills my hand."

. . . . .

The world did burn.

It burned practically every day.

Such was the way of things when someone like him was released into it for that very purpose.

She rolled his locket around in her palm, the palm that should have been aged and wrinkled by now, but remained youthful and taut and not. Not immortal, as she didn't quite care for splitting her soul, but other things…other equally dark things that kept her body frozen in time so she could enjoy her rule.

With a great, shuddering sigh, she took his hand and dropped the thing into his cupped fingers, the long golden chain falling to his skin in a pile with a quick whoosh.

"You can kill me now," she said simply.

He stared hard at the locket. He'd felt the magic release him, somehow. She'd pulled those threads, those bonds, from his form and tucked it all away into this little pendant instead; isolated it and unmade the contract without unmaking him.

Because she was brilliant.

Because she wasn't truly the monster that people called her – that was his role, also his duty to flay those that spouted off too loudly about his Lady.

Because the distaste of enslaving a devil that she had come to care for had become too great for her to continue to bear.

Intriguing, she was always—had always been—so very intriguing.

His hand shot out to her neck, clamping around her throat more firmly than the magic had ever allowed before. She gasped, but didn't defend herself, didn't move away. Her lids fluttered at the tightening, squeezing grip, but she just swallowed and steadied herself with hands gripping his arm as the oxygen was steadily barred from entering her lungs.

He watched her eyes start to water and turn glassy.

Her mouth came open in another reflexive gasp for air.

But she didn't beg.

She never begged.

It was a lie, she did, but only when they…

His hand released her abruptly and she stumbled, coughing and hacking as her body shuddered, trying to pull in great gulps of air. Hermione wobbled on her feet, teetering and nearly falling, and he scooped her up into his arms to bring her to their bed.

Voldemort deposited her onto the expensive satin sheets, waiting until she'd stopped her wheezing and had her head about her again before he climbed in beside her. He looped his locket around his neck and propped himself on an elbow so he could see her pensive expression staring back at him. When he reached for her again, she didn't flinch, and it made him smile his wicked smile – the one that brought her own out at the show of those sharpened edges of ivory.

"I've not been able to kill you for some time now," he admitted lowly, moving over her.

She tugged her lip between her teeth and reached for his face, her fingers tracing over the harsh angles of his cheeks and chin. Hermione gasped and whimpered at the touch that was now unwrapping her from her formal attire like a present; stroking, touching, feeling every inch of her body, as it was his – had been his – for so long.

"Tom…" she purred softly when he nestled himself between her legs, teasing her with the heat of him beneath his robes.

His lips burned a path from her belly, to her ribs, to her breasts, to her neck, all the way up, up, up to her ear where he licked a wet line over the shell of it with his devil's tongue and she shivered.

She whimpered.

She cried his favorite kind of 'please'.

And he murmured against her skin. "In the morning…you shall come with me and we shall find a way that is more accommodating to your preferences to make it so that no one else can either." He nipped at her jaw with those razor teeth and watched her blood trickle down her neck. "I am afraid I've become sentimental as well."

And she laughed that too sane laugh.

He set the world aflame for her and would not have her consumed by it.

A/N: Well, hello. So this WAS supposed to be a one-shot. Now, clearly, it's a...two-shot? I've gotten a flood of messages actually to continue this story and, while I'd really love to, I haven't actually got any ideas for a full length thing. I'm still in the midst of writing the ever so complicated Persephone, but the more I think about this plot bunny, the more I want to expand it too... I can't make any promises, but I can say I'm thinking about it! I have a couple of ideas and, if it turns into something that could possibly be an actual story, I will start it. If I do, it'll be under a separate post, though. For all intents and purposes, we can - for realsies this time - call Burn With Me complete. :) Thanks for the support all!