~ A Nose That Can See ~

. . . . . . . . . .

A/N – This is a very silly little story. I do feel, however, I have truly captured the genuine character of Tom Riddle and that he is not the slightest bit out of character.

. . . . . . . . . .

.

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff. ~ Eugene Ionesco

.

.

.

.

.

Getting thrown back in time wasn't actually the worst part.

The bit about having somehow gotten younger was pretty dreadful but even that wasn't the worst part.

No, the very worst part was so bad she'd decided to never get out of bed again and just let herself starve to death.

When Hermione first found herself trapped in the past, trapped in Tom Riddle's Hogwarts, she'd been sure nothing could possibly get worse than having to relive her adolescence in the company of a complete sociopath who was, she knew, destined to make the lives of everyone she loved miserable. He was even wearing the ring, one Horcrux made, so he was already basically immortal.

She assumed the diary was around somewhere.

Crazy bastard.

But, no, she could have lived with all of that. Could have just put her head down and plugged along. It was a little creepy, to be honest, how cheerfully and easily Albus Dumbledore had absorbed her into the school. Oh, you came from the future and you're marooned here in the past? Well, it's a strange school, strange things happen. There's a Muggle orphanage one of our boys goes to in the summer; I'll see there's a room for you there.

That part had been, she admitted, a little unsettling. I'll be living with Tom Riddle over the summers, she thought. Great. Me and Lord Voldemort, hanging out over coffee. Swell.

But none of that was what had made her decide to just never get up again.

Nope.

The final straw was that Tom Riddle, future Dark Lord, sociopathic murderer, was a Veela.

And she was his mate.

Some things were simply not to be borne so she crawled into bed, curled up, and tried to remember how long it took the average person to starve to death.

And it would have worked, too, if he hadn't shown up in her dorm with fresh strawberries.

"How did you get in here?" she demanded from under the covers as the evil maniac sat on the edge of her bed. "There are wards and charms and –"

"Don't be insulting," Tom Riddle said dismissively. "I can get anywhere I want."

She made a disgruntled noise but didn't come out.

"I can't let you starve yourself to death," he continued in a light conversational tone. "While I assure you I also find our mutual problem quite unpleasant, I've already researched what would happen if I killed you and I didn't make a horcrux or two just to allow myself to wither away and die because of some absurd magical bond thing. You're simply going to have to stay alive."

"Am I supposed to be reassured you researched what would happen if you killed me?"

"I have strawberries," he said, ignoring her question. "If these aren't tempting enough I can come back with some that have been covered in chocolate."

Hermione poked her nose out from under the blankets. "You are an evil wizard," she said.

"I am an evil wizard with strawberries," he corrected her.

"And you despise Muggle-borns," she said, looking somewhat longingly at the bowl of fruit in his hands. She was really very hungry. Perhaps she wasn't cut out for starving herself to death.

"I find I can make an exception when my life depends on it," he said. "Plus, pheromones."

Hermione shuddered.

"Does it not work both ways?" he asked, a ruthless scientific curiosity she found abominably appealing surfacing. "Because you smell like the best sex ever to me."

The appeal disappeared.

The evil wizard who – damn him – did smell wonderful, held a strawberry out towards her. "I know you want it," he said. "I know everything you feel and it's quite unpleasant. Feelings, in general, are unpleasant. How do people manage to get through their days when they respond to everything around them with all these messy emotions?"

"That, at least, doesn't work both ways," she muttered as she gave up and snatched the strawberry out of his hand.

"So the smell thing does?" Tom Riddle asked and she disappeared back under the covers, reaching her hand out for another strawberry. He sat there, handing her strawberries one at a time, until the bowl was empty.

"Come to dinner," he ordered and she muttered something incomprehensible and Riddle snorted. "I can keep bringing you food but, if I do that, sooner or later your Housemates will assume we're having wild sex multiple times a day and, if you'd prefer to avoid that, you'll come to meals." He paused. "Of course, we could just have the wild sex," he suggested. "I wouldn't mind. It seems like the one upside of this ridiculous and embarrassing connection."

"I hope you molt," she muttered.

. . . . . . . . . . .

That fucking girl was feeling things again. Tom Riddle had just about had it with having to feel things. Feelings were quite possibly the worst thing ever. And the things she got all feely about. She felt sorry for house elves. She found her own Housemates tiresome.

Well, he had to agree with her there. Gryffindors were tiresome.

She felt rage when she found a book had been dog-eared.

He kind of liked the rage and wondered if he could find some way of dog-earing books and then fucking her senseless while she spewed forth invective about the way people who abused books should be tortured.

It was unfortunate he was fairly sure she'd be upset if he actually tortured people for hurting books. This one was one of the things that made feelings so confusing; why want to torture people and then not do it? Or have him do it for her if she didn't want to get blood on her clothes?

At least she didn't like Quidditch. That would have been unbearable.

At first, he'd just planned on killing her. Being a Veela was clearly unacceptable and the obvious solution had been to get rid of her.

Bummer that would have killed him too.

And she did smell wonderful. He wanted to rub up against her and smell her hair and fuck her until he was so tired he couldn't move anymore and he really wished she'd stop feeling things because it was so damn distracting. He'd been calmly planning how to main and slaughter the lesser orders over breakfast when he felt a flash of utter longing and he'd slammed his quill down and stormed over to her at the Gryffindor table.

"What do you want now?" he'd snapped at her, inhaling as deeply as he could without obviously embarrassing himself. "You are interrupting my work."

"Go away," Hermione hissed but he'd already glared at the girl she'd been sitting next to with enough ferocity she flounced off muttering about stuck up Slytherins.

He made a mental note to kill her.

"I've decided we should date and whenever you really want something you should tell me and I'll get it for you to avoid this miserable thing where you feel at me," he said.

"I want to go home," his bushy-haired and perpetually annoying mate muttered.

"Oh." He contemplated her. "Well, I can't help you there. Perhaps sex would distract you?"

Well, at least her fury was a more pleasant feeling than the helpless longing. He could work with that going on in the background.

. . . . . . . . . .

"Does it ever occur to you that your 'I hate all the Muggles' thing is just a bit of an overreaction to your issues with your father?" Hermione asked, yanking her novel back from Tom.

She wasn't sure when she'd started thinking of him as 'Tom' but, really, it was hard to think of a megalomaniac killer as 'Riddle'. It was as if he were trying to be a scary clown or something and, once she'd had that thought, she couldn't think of him as 'Riddle' without giggling.

So 'Tom' it was.

"My filthy Muggle father," he snarled, a vicious snarl made far less intimidating by the way he was nearly twitching as he repressed his urge to pet her hair.

"Oh, I agree he seems to have been a bit of a bastard," Hermione agreed, patting him on the hand. "But can you blame him? Realizing he'd been drugged by your mother can't have been all that pleasant. Still, I think to go from 'my father figure was inadequate' to 'so I should kill everyone in his ethnic group' is a bit of a leap. Maybe you should explore those daddy issues a little."

"I do not have daddy issues," Tom snapped.

"If you say so," Hermione agreed pleasantly, looking back at her book. She let a few beats pass before she added, "Still, the urge to kill your father off is pretty Freudian, wouldn't you say?"

"My father is already dead." Tom was starting to sound frustrated.

"And thus you've decided to kill lots of substitutes," Hermione said with a nod. "Do you want to marry your mother too?"

Tom slammed his hand down on the ground right next to her hand but she didn't even flinch. "I plan to marry you," he snapped, "and you are nothing like my mother."

"You need to work on your proposal technique," Hermione said. "Why should I marry you?"

"Because I'll keep you in a cage as a pet if you don't," he suggested and she rolled her eyes.

"Do that and I'll feel all sorts of things at you." She concentrated on feeling how much she loved kittens and unicorns and fluffy stuffed animals.

He shuddered.

She patted him on the hand again. "Try to keep up, Tom. You can't hurt me but I can make you squirm just by not being a sociopath."

"I hate you," he muttered.

"Yes, but you hate everyone," she said. "That's hardly a good way to make a girl feel special. You really need to work on that proposal technique, sweetie."

. . . . . . . . .

"We need to talk about the future," Tom said.

"Mmm. I think this is the bit where I wring my hands and tell you I can't possibly reveal what is to come and that that would muck up the time line or something," Hermione said. "Do you have any more of those cherries?" she added. "I don't know how you get all this out of season fruit but I could be brought around to the dark side for fresh peaches."

"I'll make a note," he said. "Does this mean you decline to reveal my future?"

"I think you're supposed to threaten me here," she said.

"As you keep pointing out," Tom said with a sigh, "I can't threaten you effectively. Would bribery work?"

"You could try just asking questions," Hermione said. He gaped at her. "Well," she said, "We both know you're an incessant nag and manipulative and sneaky and quite thoroughly underhanded. Eventually you'd get the answers you want so it seems like a waste of energy to refuse to chat. Plus, of course, the future is pretty lousy and I'm not all that sure maintaining the time line should really be a priority for me."

"Is it really going to be this easy?" Tom didn't seem to quite believe it.

"Well, I am rather stuck with you and when I make you too sad you have this annoying habit of shedding. I found feathers in my bed, Tom. Feathers."

"You wouldn't let me kiss you," he muttered.

"You'd been smoking." Hermione said with a shudder. "So disgusting. It's like licking an ash tray."

"I'll quit," he offered and she looked smug. "So… tell me about the future," he prompted.

Her smug look didn't go away.

"You try to kill a baby and muck it up, become incorporeal, ride around on someone's head for a while, and then are eventually reborn out of a cauldron as an actual lunatic with no nose."

He blinked at her a few times.

"No nose?" he asked, reaching a hand up to touch his face.

"You're more bothered by the fact that you become hideously unattractive than that you lose your mind?"

"Hideous?" he asked in horror.

"You begin to see why I have a vested interest in changing the future," Hermione said. "If I must have this weird bond to a brilliant sociopath who periodically sprouts feathers, I would prefer him to be an attractive, brilliant sociopath. Also, maybe you could can it with the killing babies bit."

"I don't like babies," he said, hand still on his nose.

"That doesn't mean you have to kill them."

"Like you've never wanted to murder a baby."

Hermione recalled the time she'd been forced to babysit two cousins and muttered, "Toddlers are worse."

. . . . . . . . . .

"You really need to have sex with me," Tom Riddle whined again. "Sex with anyone else is going to be unpleasant."

"How do you know that?" Hermione asked as he cut another slice of fresh peach and handed it to her.

"I experimented," he said. "It was unpleasant."

"You cheated on me?" she demanded in apparent outrage and Tom narrowed his eyes.

"You do realize I know you're more amused than upset, right?"

She shrugged and held her hand out for another piece of peach. "The downside of our creepy emotional bond; I can't ever lie to you. Not that I'd bother."

He handed her a slice of fruit.

"I'm still curious why you thought to even try. Not to be mean, Tom, but you're pretty obsessed with your quest for world domination; that doesn't leave a lot of time for romance."

"The book said it would be unpleasant and I wanted to check," he said. "It was scientific curiosity."

"The book?" she asked.

"Our Bodies, Our Veelas," he said.

"Is that a joke?" she asked.

He looked offended.

. . . . . . . . . .

Tom Riddle watched his girlfriend look through his Big Book of World Domination and waited for her response.

"I'm just a little unclear on what the endgame is," she said at last.

"World Domination," he said. "Hello? Look at the title page."

"Well, do you really want to run everything, be immortal, or just torture Muggles to death to work out your daddy issues?" she asked, setting the book aside.

"I do not have daddy issues," he insisted.

"Oh, please. Leaving aside your obvious and rampant daddy issues, if you want to be immortal, your plan is shite, and if you want to have power, your plan is shite. If you want to be a ravening lunatic who tortures Muggles, well, I'd say you've got a pretty good handle on what you'll need to do to achieve that."

"I hate you," he muttered.

"Well, let me know if you want feedback on a better 'be immortal' or 'be in charge of everything' plan."

"Why did I get cursed with a swotty, know-it-all mate?" he demanded.

She narrowed her eyes at him and began to think about puppies gamboling in fields of flowers until he muttered, "Fine, I'm sorry. All your fucking cute is going to give me a migraine."

"That's my good little sociopath," she said.

. . . . . . . . . .

"If you don't start sleeping with me I'm going to keep molting," Tom snapped as small, downy feathers drifted from his head down to the ground. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to inspire fear in minions when you are shedding feathers?"

"Maybe you could work on new motivational techniques?"

"Hermione," he begged, "you don't have to actually have sex with me, though I'd really really like it if you would. You just have to be around me more. I physically need you. I'll die without you."

"No you won't," Hermione closed her eyes and stretched back out on her bed. Her roommates had done that thing where they looked at Tom in terror and fled as soon as he arrived and she was enjoying the break from their incessant chatter about hair styles and boys. "You need to research more closely," she continued. "Not being around me will make you sad. I'm pretty sure I can live with making Tom Riddle sad."

"I'm begging you," he said and when she didn't even open her eyes he tried again. "I'll kill your roommates if you don't."

That made her open her eyes. "Oh, Tom," she said with a sigh. "Is that really the best you can do for threats? No wonder your minions aren't operating at peak fear efficiency."

"If you don't sleep with me the out-of-season fruit stops," he threatened.

She sat up in alarm. "But that's the only good thing in my days," she protested. "I've already done all the coursework and, frankly, standards are a little more rigorous in the future. I'm bored and tormenting you with images of unicorns prancing about is only entertaining for so long – "

"Thank Merlin," he muttered.

"You have to keep that fruit coming," she said.

He smirked at her.

"You'll kick your roommates out," she ordered. "If I move in, they sleep someplace else."

"Done," he agreed.

"I hate you," she muttered.

"I know," he said, leaning over to kiss her on the forehead. She tried not to be too obvious about how she inhaled his scent. "But you'll end up fucking me anyway."

. . . . . . . . . .

A/N - More to come. In the meanwhile, indulge me with your amusing thoughts.