"Harry Potter and the Transformation of Things"

Hermione read off the title slowly, tasting it, wondering if it would fit. It wasn't finished, wasn't even really started, but her quill had put words on parchment so there it was anyway.

It'd been a whim really, that summer when she'd returned home and it'd been too quiet and Harry had lived too far away. Something to do when the summer homework had been a bit too easy, even after redoing it and checking her answers multiple times, and after reading all the next years textbooks (and there were quite a few of them particularly in Defense).

It was more than being bored though, because for boredom she had writing letters to Harry or else being around her parents, she'd wanted to do it. Her fantasy books had lined the shelves, filled with brave knights, dragons, and epic journeys and she couldn't help but compare them to her own journey which seemed both epic and not at the same time.

Her story perhaps wasn't as daring as there's were, wasn't as gripping, but all the same she wanted to write it down even if it wasn't her story at all. It was really his, she was just narrating, like how The Great Gatsby wasn't actually narrated by Gatsby or Jekyll and Hyde wasn't narrated by Doctor Jekyll.

She'd been sort of insulted by her own thought at first, on how it was about Harry and not her, because everything did seem to be about Harry but it was also right.

It'd start with the Hogwarts Express, perhaps detailing a little about her situation in muggle primary school, nothing too detailed but enough to make people understand. Then it'd go on through her observations of the two Harry's, one not necessarily worse than the other but both very different, and on through the year ending with the Hogwarts Express again and the uncertain school year ahead.

"It doesn't seem like the ending to anything else I've read but maybe it's like a series, where you end at one point in one book but only because there's more coming; because it wasn't really the end after all." She'd said after describing her idea to Harry with a flushed face feeling more than a little embarrassed, after all what near thirteen year old girl spends her time writing fantasy books about her and her friends even if they did go to a magic school.

They'd been at Harry's apartment again; his uncle didn't own a car so it was easier for her to go to him than him to her, and besides whenever he visited her house he always seemed a little on edge. Like he didn't know what to make of being alone with just her and her parents and a normal family; there was always a bit of steel in his eyes then.

They were sitting at that cluttered kitchen table, which always seemed to have new clutter whenever Hermione visited, with tea in the center and his uncle loitering in the living room with his own cup of tea working on some project that Harry said he had started the year before. She didn't know if he was listening or not, she hoped he wasn't because that would be dreadfully embarrassing, but regardless he pretended he wasn't which she felt more than a little grateful for.

She never was sure what to make of Harry's uncle, even after meeting him more than a few times over the holidays, he was so present and yet not in the same moment like he was larger than everyone else and had some fire burning within him. He never was any less pretty, even when tired and rumpled he still had that sharp edge to him, and she wondered if he even really knew it.

When she asked if he had a girlfriend Harry had first looked horribly confused by the question and then had broken out into hysterics.

Regardless she tried not to blush whenever his uncle was in the room or looking at her with those pale blue eyes, tried not to stammer when talking to him, and above all just tried to keep her cool like every good heroine should. Most of the time she didn't exceed and felt mortified about it later, not wanting to sound like Lavender Brown of all people, but was just unable to do anything about it at all.

(Sometimes she caught a stray smile on his face, a smile so like Harry's slight quirking of the lips, that she felt he knew exactly what was going through her head and found it vaguely funny.)

"That sounds like it covers everything, last year I mean." Harry said with a shrug, dragging Hermione's thoughts back to the story she had just outlined for him. "I can't think where else it would end."

She paused then and they looked at each other, and she knew even though she hadn't said it aloud that he knew that she still wanted to ask just what had happened last year behind the curtains, because Hermione really only had half the story. He smiled at her slightly, a small sad thing that dropped from his face as soon as it was born, and sipped at his tea without a word.

She should have expected it but she felt something in her sink with disappointment regardless. How was it, that her best and only friend, had so many terrible secrets?

"Right, well, I think it will be fun." Hermione said to cover the silence when it stretched on for too long.

"It'll be really good, I know it."

She'd smiled back at him, because he'd sounded so sure and no one had ever been so sure of Hermione, not when it didn't come to books or grades.

"Well, I don't have a title for it yet."

She'd been reading Professor Lockhart's extensive required reading list over the summer and they had always had such interesting titles but those didn't seem to fit what she wanted to write. Hers wasn't as blatant as that, not as heroic, and she felt that giving it a name like Sunday with a Sorcerer's Stone wouldn't really fit. It just wasn't that kind of a story.

A shadow had entered his eyes and he considered her for a moment, finally, as if the idea had only just occurred to him as he was speaking it he said, "Call it 'The Transformation of Things'…"

(Out of the corner of her eye she caught Harry's uncle stiffening slightly, an odd almost mechanical movement instead of an emotional one, but when she turned her head to look at him fully he was back to normal still staring at yellow notebook paper crossing things off here and rewriting them again with strange intent.)

She'd felt then as if that was some reference she should have understood, something she should have recognized, and even later when she still didn't recall the phrase from anywhere she had taken the name from Harry because even if she didn't know the words they still fit.

"Harry Potter and the Transformation of Things."

She repeated to herself, and it did fit, because while there were dragons they weren't the dragons you saw right away but were the ones that saw and watched you and just waited. And then, like tragedy rather than adventure, the beast was slain off-scene making you wonder if there had been a beast at all. That type of story, with heroes wandering off into the shadows only to come back pale and exhausted was the type that needed a title that did not razzle dazzle. Something plain, something vague, and something with weight and Harry had given it to her.

Before she lost her nerve she moved to the next piece of parchment and began to scribble down the beginnings of the first chapter.

"Hermione Granger had always wanted friends…"

He was staring at the stone again, twisting it this way and that in his hand, letting it catch the light so that the dark center could be seen like a jagged heart in the middle. Transparent in some parts, opaque in others, rough around the edges, jagged, there was nothing polished in it. It had been beaten, torn, and willed into existence until there it was the single philosopher's stone in Harry Potter's hand.

It should not exist.

He didn't know why he had that thought, where it had come from, but the longer he held onto it the more he felt it. The stone should not exist, like Quirrell and the thing in Quirrell's head, like the thing outside Harry's head, it was an aberration and clashed against reality eating at it like a parasite.

He'd almost destroyed it, a few times at Hogwarts before he'd returned, and then a few times afterwards but something had always stopped him.

He and Tom had never openly discussed what to do with the stone now that Harry had it, Tom had never attempted to take it from him, to use it, or to even acknowledge its existence.

When Harry had stepped out of the platform into the greater King's Cross, when he and Tom had stared at each other with no words left in their mouths, Tom hadn't said anything at all about it. In the end it had been Harry who had brought it up.

They'd gone to the park they usually visited, sitting on a bench and staring at the early summer scenery, and Tom had started talking.

"There has only ever been one philosopher's stone. There have been many who have attempted to create it, both before Flamel, and long afterwards on the side of wizards and muggles but only Flamel has ever succeeded and he has never managed to make a second."

The bubble of quiet around them intensified both on Harry's and Tom's instinct, drawing tighter around them just in case someone was passing by or else watching them. These were the words they usually saved for dreams but Harry had wanted reality, stability, when he heard them and not the shifting mess inside his head. He'd needed that.

"The trouble is that even if one were to somehow to procure the only stone they would have no idea how it works. Flamel has never released his secrets on the methods of its use, has been very secretive about the entire process really, and so the thief is left with a rock that under some procedure can create gold from lead and eternal youth but with no idea how it is accomplished." Tom sighed running a hand through his hair, parting gold curls into disarray, and looking altogether quite exhausted.

"If I were to guess at its actual function, how it works, then I would say that it is a battery. Mind you this is more the physics talking than alchemy but to have the energy necessary to transfigure lead into gold and stabilize it (without setting off a chain reaction that would decimate a city) a lot of energy would need to be involved; the same idea would apply to the constant transfiguration of older aging cells into their younger state. Of course, this is just a guess, just like everyone else I really have no idea."

Harry had stared at him for a moment, at the slight smile that had grown on his lips at the admission that he simply didn't know, and asked, "So even if you wanted to you couldn't use it?"

"Not without great difficulty."

And then Tom seemed to forget about it, focusing instead on updating the magical system, to move the focus away from wands and instead to hand motions and simplify the words used in spells.

Perhaps it was as simple as the fact that it required too much effort to use and Tom for the moment didn't need it. With the Potter vaults at their disposal they had more than enough money to live on and Tom had never really felt the need to live in luxury, Harry had the feeling that he wouldn't know what to do with it, as if wealth was never truly a thing that belonged to him.

More than that though Thomas Evans already seemed to be eternally young; in three years he still looked the same way he had when Harry had first seen him in the hospital. As a nineteen year old he had been pushing credulity with his appearance, as a twenty one almost twenty two year old it became more ridiculous. His features were sculpted but there was no hint of facial hair and altogether he just looked too young.

He made up for it with words, height, and just being Tom but it was starting to become more and more obvious that Thomas Evans looked off of his age.

But then, Harry thought to himself, if he doesn't need money and he doesn't age then he doesn't really need the stone.

Nevertheless Harry had held onto it, and after the first few attempts at destroying it, he'd realized that it was because one day they might really need it after all. Tom might not need it now but something told him that Tom might need it later, that it would be good to have on hand even if its very presence itched in Harry's brain. Harry was willing to do pretty much anything for Tom, Dudley had been evidence of that, so Harry kept it and stared at it and wondered if he was making the right decision after all because it looked like something that just wasn't right.

Like something you didn't touch.

Tom spent most of his time not thinking on certain topics.

It was an odd state of mind for him, one that had only come about after he had become a notebook when he would do just about anything to distract himself from the fact that reality was suspended. As a human he'd found such ideas to be weakness, that reality must be faced head on and those who deliberated or else hesitated were fools or cowards. There was something to be said about that, something to be admired even, but Tom would have gone insane long ago if he had kept to that philosophy.

He tried not to think of what had happened to his other half, what he had done to his other half, or what Harry had done to his other half. It wasn't so much the fact that it was him, a piece of the greater him, but rather that there had been that initial fifty-fifty chance that it could have been him being burned alive by Harry and Voldemort tucked inside Harry's head. This hadn't occurred to him until a few days after it had happened but once the thought had sprung it couldn't be recalled and he always found himself drifting to the fact that it had been so close to being him instead; the toss of a coin.

Of course it was more complicated than that, the other half of his soul had made decisions over many decades that Tom had found bizarre, violent, and nonsensical but nevertheless a thought was a thought.

The other topic he was avoiding was Harry. Harry was different since that night, not too different, he was still himself but there was something just a little bit off about him. Harry had always had odd aspects to him, things that even Tom Riddle hadn't possessed as a human, but they'd always been blanketed by other more normal features.

Harry had the great desire to be loved, to be cherished and appreciated, to fit in with his peers and be accepted by a community. Beneath all that though was a raging river of power that seemed almost to have a mind and will of its own.

It wasn't all the time, certainly it was subtle, but in his thoughts there would be an edge that had not been quite as blatant before. An echo in his voice that made it difficult to picture Harry as the almost twelve year old child he was instead of the being that had disposed of Quirrell with only the touch of his hands.

How did one avoid thinking about such worrisome topics?

They invented.

At least, that was what Tom found himself doing, and soon enough given the months in the spring where he had started it was beginning to come together. The basic framework of the hand motions for the spells, the logic behind it, had all been written out in pseudo instructions as if part of a greater program. There were many steps remaining, designing the runes to connect it to whatever the source of magic was, finding some power source to bind it and keep it in place, but never the less it was more headway in a shorter period of time than he had ever expected.

There was something to be said for escapism; it was certainly more useful than Tom Riddle had ever given it credit for.

Mostly though he felt as if he wanted to do something to differentiate himself from what he had been and then what he could have been. Terrorizing peasants as Voldemort didn't hold appeal and in fact began to appear grotesque to him with Quirrell but he still wanted to be more than just someone who wasn't being someone else. Thomas Evans needed purpose, recognition as being Thomas Evans, and with that came the desire to go beyond any other wizard before him by stepping in a direction they never would have considered.

That last meeting with Snape had solidified it for him, the man had looked over him, as Tom had intended to be looked over because it would only cause difficulties if he was identified as a too young Tom Riddle but still it had stung. He had not seen Thomas Evans but rather someone who wasn't acting quite muggle enough to be satisfying; he had been restricted to an idea rather than a person.

Well, he was an idea, rather than a person, that's what horcruxes were at the heart of things but all the same that line of thinking was becoming old. It was a shallow need, one that didn't cut to the true heart of the matter, but it gave him something to do and some small amount of pride.

At the very least he would be doing something besides not being Tom Riddle and a distraction from the things he did not wish to consider.

Author's Note: So here we are catching up with some of our narrators as the summer rolls on slowly but surely approaching Hogwarts all the while wondering just what the hell is up with Harry. At any rate thanks to readers and reviewers, you guys are excellent, and reviews are always much appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter