Notes: Well, here we are! This work will be a collection of one-shots (and two-shots, and so on... short pieces, at any rate) that all occur in the AU of my Tomione fic Choosing Grey. Most of them assume some prior knowledge of what happens in that story and may make reference to things that occur in it. They will all take place after the events of that story, though they probably won't be in chronological order in this work. I'll identify a time, either precise or relative to some other piece, when each one takes place. The rating may increase to M.

I know that in my end notes for that story, I said I preferred to leave it open. I do have my own headcanon (if that's the correct term for this :P), of course, but since I am putting this up against my expressed word, I don't insist that readers accept all, or even any, of these as their own headcanon. Don't like something? It doesn't have to be "official" for you.

I don't know exactly how often I will update this, since it is a collection of mostly self-contained pieces rather than an ongoing story with a distinct plot. I'll try to make updates reasonable, though.

A Marked Deck

Chapter One: Unfunny Jokes

December 1946.

The house was a pigsty.

It was not the lovely, elegant row house that Hermione and Tom owned and lived in. That house had been meticulously cared for, and they had not had to do very much work to prepare it before they moved in. That house had also been owned by Muggles, so it had no magical problems—or visitors—to deal with when they bought it.

No, this house was a former magical residence. The family that had owned it had moved to the Godric's Hollow wizarding neighborhood because of the Muggle war, and in the space of a mere five years, a plethora of magical pests had infested it. Hermione had bought it for a deeply discounted price, and she was going to strip it down and turn it into library, office, and laboratory space for her organization, but it had to be cleaned out first.

It's nice to be the breadwinner, Hermione thought as she blasted away a cache of dead doxy eggs—denatured, decomposing, and therefore unfortunately useless as a potions ingredient. This has worked out pretty well: Tom has the highly visible Ministry job, but the amount of money I've raised dwarfs his salary. He seems all right with it, too. Though I suppose even in his alternate life, he didn't care that much about wealth.

Over the last year and a half, they had hashed out a system that worked for them. It was counterproductive for them to keep each other in the dark about what was happening, policy-wise, in their work, but Tom did not give Hermione the gory details of whatever manipulations he got up to in the Ministry and she did not ask. Her unspoken rule for him was to not murder or torture anyone and to be very careful with any other magic he felt compelled to use to get his way. It wasn't that damned much to ask, considering what he had forced her to watch him do not quite two years ago—and figuratively hold her nose about thereafter.

He had it open again. Her heart gave an unpleasant thump at the sight. A serene, satisfied look gracing his handsome face, he lifted a gleaming strand of memory from his head and dropped it over the blank pages of the diary. It had perhaps saved her life, had definitely saved his, and it was a part of him, so she did have regard and affection for what lived in it. But the thing itself was still a permanent reminder of who, or what, her husband was and what she had become for him—and for the greater good. She winced, looked away, and as unobtrusively as she could, slipped the flask of Calming Draught–infused firewhisky out of her pocket. One sip would suffice.

Hermione had a dark suspicion that Tom sometimes used Imperius, Confundus, and Memory Charms on colleagues to push them into doing what he wanted, but she couldn't prove it and didn't really want to have it confirmed. What was the point in knowing about something like that? He wasn't puppeting anyone permanently, at least, and he knew that she didn't want to hear the more sordid details of whatever he did to get his way as Deputy Advisor to the Head of Magical Law Enforcement. A small part of her would have been content to play the mafia wife, to not to know anything at all about his "business," and for the intellectual part of their relationship to be based strictly on their mutual interests in advanced magic and culture. But that wasn't who the rest of her was at all. They were both deeply interested in politics, and the idea of suppressing that around him was stupid and offensive to the greater part of her. Unworkable, too, because in a very real sense, they were colleagues. Her organization, her donors, needed to know what was going on in the upper echelons of the Ministry, and he wanted to know what ideas her think tank had come up with recently.

What they did worked, at any rate. Marital strife was minimal—and easily dispelled by the other, physical aspect of their relationship. It was not what she had expected, going into this, and it was a pleasant outcome.

He stood up. "I'm going to tackle that box room upstairs," he said.

She snorted, standing up. "Good luck with that. It's a disaster."

"It is, but it has to be done eventually. Might as well be now." He passed by her and squeezed her shoulder affectionately.

He cared about her. There was no question about that. It was a different sort of caring, a darker and far more possessive one, but one tough lesson that Hermione had been forced to swallow was that love was not always pure angelic lightness. In fact, it very rarely—if ever—was that.

Hermione finished tidying up the room and gazed around. It was empty but clean, at last. Time to move on to the other room that she had been avoiding: the library. At least, what had once been a library. There were no books anymore, or she certainly wouldn't have avoided it.

Tom stood in the middle of the dirty box room. It was filthy. Splinters lurked on the edges of the old wooden door frames, ready to tear anything that brushed them. Dust lay everywhere in the room. If he had been wearing any of the elegant, tailored, expensive suits and robes he usually wore these days, he would have been so angry that he probably would have blasted the very walls with Dark curses just as payback. But he and Hermione had come into this place prepared for a mess, and that was exactly what they had found. Tattered drapes hung from tall, dusty windows. A clutter of broken and half-broken magical objects dotted the wood floor, creating a hazard for the unwary to walk upon. A battered old closet awaited, hiding Merlin knew what inside.

It was probably best to deal with the closet first. He could see pretty well what the main room offered. But if something were lurking in that closet, then it could burst out and undo any work that he did in the outside room. He strode across the room, readied his wand, and opened the door.

His eyes adjusted to the dimmer light at once. He glanced down and scowled: There was another floor that was covered with rubbish. It was embarrassing in a deep-seated, visceral way that wizards could abandon a place and leave it in this condition. Muggles at least had the excuse that they couldn't do magic. What excuse did wizards have? Lazy, slovenly, or simply magically incompetent, none of those things earned his sympathy. He bent down to examine the trash for anything valuable, just in case. It seemed to be just a layer of paper and parchment, broken quills, broken glass….

A puddle of fresh red liquid seeped out from under the rubbish. Great, Tom thought in annoyance. It was probably just potion, but if it were blood—well, this was exactly the sort of place that one might try to hide a body, and it would just be too ironic if he had to deal with paperwork and perfunctory questioning over a murder that he hadn't even committed. He shifted the trash aside to see what he was dealing with.

It was a body. His heart almost stopped as it came into sight. The face was dead white, and a truly horrific wound sliced through the neck. The head had been almost sawed off. Dust tinged the curly locks with grey—at least, where they had not become sticky with blood.

Tom moved more of the rubbish aside. The facial features came into view. The eye sockets were empty, and more blood oozed from below them. It looked like they had been gouged out. But much worse than that was—

No, he thought, his heart pounding. It can't be. It literally can't be. I was just with her.

He turned the body onto its back, and the dead, mutilated face of Hermione stared back at him—or would have done.

It can't it can't it can't—

Wizarding house infested with pests. Dark closet. It must be—

But it should be my corpse that I see, shouldn't it? It always has been before….

Tom stood up shakily and directed his wand at the thing on the floor. He supposed it made sense that the form of a boggart would have changed for him. He was protected now, after all, and Hermione was not.

He tried to think of something, but—and it was so humiliating—he had never been able to master this spell. It was one of a minutely few Defense spells that he had been unable to do. He remembered that awful day in third-year Defense, the first time. After seeing classmates banish vampires, banshees, flocks of doxies, and the like—stupid, childish, superficial fears to suit childish, superficial people, people who did not understand—then he, the magical genius of Slytherin, the young orphan of unknown pedigree and blood status that the house grudgingly had to respect due to his power—

There was simply nothing funny about his fears. Not his own dead body, and not the body of the one person in the world he loved. It wasn't funny. There was no way to make it funny.

The horror that Tom had been feeling transformed to anger. Riddikulus, indeed. How ridiculous of smug Defense educators, and whatever placid, self-satisfied fool had invented that spell, to imagine that fears were always going to be like monsters under the bed for a three-year-old. That they were always going to be something that could be made amusing by dressing it up in funny clothes. Laugh at your fears! There's no reason to be scared of anything your mind might think of! Your fears aren't serious. No matter what you're most afraid of, it really only deserves to be made light of and laughed at. That was the subtext of the whole procedure, and it was a fucking platitude. Stupid, offensive, patronizing—

Thoroughly enraged by now, Tom directed his wand at the boggart that disgracefully borrowed his Hermione's form. What right had it to do that, to violate his mind and then throw her body back in his face, mutilated and abused like this? How dare it.

Unable to cast Riddikulus on his old boggart, laughed at in Defense—his best subject—for failing to do something that everyone else could do, Tom had taken to the library with a vengeance, determined never to let any old boggart cripple him like that ever again. There he had learned of another way to deal with them, a way that the sanctimonious Hogwarts faculty would not have wanted the students to use. Not because a Dark creature had rights, but presumably because it would corrupt their innocent souls.

Clearly, his had never been innocent.

Tom swiped his wand harshly through the air, casting a shockingly Dark curse, and a fountain of blood and flesh erupted from the floor as the creature was shredded.

Another swipe, and a small explosion rocked the third floor as the bits of killed boggart were consumed by fire.

A final swipe, and the ashes disappeared.

Tom sank to the floor and put his hands over his face. The anger vanished at once now that the offensive thing stealing and defiling Hermione's form was gone. In its place was the gut-wrenching visceral horror that he had felt at first. His rage was just masking that, it seemed.

It was just a stupid boggart. It shouldn't do this to him.

He closed his eyes. No. It should do this to him. He was right to be afraid of this. It was something that could actually happen—indeed, would happen eventually if nothing ever changed. Maybe not this specific form of it—no, it wouldn't be this form of it, not ever—he would never let that happen to her—but it would happen in some form. Hermione, with her… different… code of morality, had still refused to take the precaution he had. She didn't even like him bringing up the topic.

It hurt. It hurt so much. Tom had accepted for two years that he could be hurt in this relationship, so the initial anger at that little discovery had long passed, but that had not made it any easier. She knew what she was condemning him to someday with her choice. He knew that it wasn't out of malice, but still…. He preferred not to think too much about what would happen someday if she persisted with her refusal. The thought of not having her—

His heart thudded in dread again.

There's the ring, he thought at once. He fingered the stone on his hand, feeling the contours of the symbol that had been etched into it. He wouldn't ever really lose her. It was good that he had gone to Grindelwald; otherwise he might not have ever learned what the ring did.

But it wouldn't be the same.

To Hermione, empty, dusty bookshelves were sad. Not as sad as moldering books, but they still spoke to an abandoned library. A place where learning had once taken place but did not anymore.

The previous occupants had left an oval side table overturned in a corner. Hermione flicked her wand at it, sending it flying upright. She walked over to examine it. There didn't appear to be anything wrong with it; it was nice, maybe from about 1910 or so, and would be perfectly serviceable once dusted and polished. She might even bring it home with her. What had happened to the magical family that had lived here? They had moved to the country, to Godric's Hollow, but why had they left their house in such a state? It was a puzzle. Hermione knew that she could find them in their new home and ask them, if she were so inclined, but it would only be to sate her own curiosity. She would leave them be, of course. But she had bought this house and everything in it, so whatever they had left behind, for whatever reason, was now hers.

There was also a large cabinet in one corner. It was as tall as the bookshelves, but it had doors that closed, concealing whatever was inside. Hermione could not tell if it was a detachable piece of furniture or was carpentered into the house. Well, she needed to see whatever was in it. She passed through the room, holding her robes up to avoid catching too much dust on the edges. She reached the cabinet and opened the doors.

It was definitely a magical object. Natural light had to reach inside it, or would have, at least, but the entire interior was pitch black and impenetrable. Hermione readied her wand. That would not have been done except to conceal something.

A figure seemingly came into being from thin air, not visible until it stepped outside the cabinet into the light. It faced Hermione and smiled.

Hermione stumbled backward. Her eyes widened in shock.

It was Tom, but not. He still had a head full of thick, silky black hair, but his skin was chalk white and somewhat… melted. His facial features were no longer handsome. His eyes were blood red now, and black robes that seemed as impenetrable as the darkness of the cabinet trailed behind him.

"Hello, Hermione," the thing said, thin lips curling over teeth.

Hermione pointed her wand at it. It's not actually Tom, she thought. This is a dark enclosed cabinet in a house that hasn't been maintained in years. It's obvious what it is. Not exactly what I expected… but it is a representation of failure. It makes sense.

The Boggart-Tom—or Boggart-Voldemort, she thought—strode forward. It fingered a badge on its robes that Hermione had not noticed before, one with the imposing logo of the Ministry of Magic. A gold object dangling from its neck slipped through the robes. Hermione's breath caught in her chest at that sight.

Boggart-Voldemort turned around and faced her, a cruel smile on its face. "You always were a self-deluded idealist, Mudblood."

"Shut up," she said. Her wand hand shook.

"You were useful, though," the thing said. "You helped me. I would have failed without you. You showed me that, after all." It grinned harshly at her.

"I'm not bandying words with a boggart," Hermione said, trying to inject firmness into her voice. She lifted her wand.

How could she make this amusing? There was just nothing funny about it. That was the inherent problem with the theory for the boggart-banishing spell. If your greatest fear was a giant spider, like Ron's had been, you could make that entertaining. If your greatest fear was a dementor, like Harry's, or being a failure, like hers—

"Lord Voldemort does reward those—aahh!" The thing's voice tapered off to a high-pitched squeal, the voice of a toddler.

Hermione forced out a chuckle, but it had no effect.

The thing before her scowled and drew a wand threateningly.

She tried again, casting the spell nonverbally. The wand turned into a rubber chicken. Hermione smiled, this one not forced, but then—

Weasley's Wizard Wheezes.

The smile fled her face. Boggart-Voldemort stepped forward again.

She tried one last time. The void-black robes on the thing vanished, revealing an emaciated form. Countable ribs, deathly white legs with hardly any muscle, and a pair of emerald green boxers bearing Slytherin's serpentine mark over a very specific place.

"You must be joking," she said, staring at him in bed.

He looked insulted for a moment. "You really think it's that stupid?"

"Erm, yes. It's like wearing boxers of your favorite Quidditch team, but worse."

"And is that something you know about?" A flash of anger and jealousy filled his words.

"Not for the reason you're worried about," she said, smirking. "One of my best friends had five brothers, some of whom were slobs. I saw plenty of laundry. And if you actually charm them to look like that, I will laugh all night. Honestly, Tom. You have taste. Just don't."

Hermione laughed nastily. "You look even more ridiculous than I thought you would."

The thing stumbled back, trying to cover its crotch.

"It must be what you did to your body," she mocked, though it pained her to do so. "If Tom wore them, it would just be ridiculous in a narcissistic way. You, on the other hand… you're a complete caricature." She stared at Boggart-Voldemort, who cowered in shame now, and laughed a harsh, brutal, cruel laugh. The thing vaporized in a puff of smoke.

Hermione sank to the floor and sighed. This shouldn't bother her so much. –No, it should, she corrected herself at once. The only type of humor that worked on this fear was vicious, mocking, mean-spirited ridicule of physical appearance—and a form concocted from an actual memory that involved her Tom. It had been a humorous memory… a bit of levity in their lives… and now it was tainted by this. There would be something wrong with her if that didn't disturb her.

Also, the fact that her "failure fear" now assumed this form was unsettling in its own right. That thing was not just her fear—the fear that she would fail herself, fail Tom, fail all the loved ones who would not know her now but whom she still wanted to give better lives than they'd otherwise have—but it was also a little part of her conscience that periodically spoke up. It would whisper to her, You're not actually stopping him from being evil. You're just allowing a smaller amount of evil to happen.

She had not thought of Tom and Voldemort as the same person since early autumn of 1944….

No, she thought quickly, that's not really true; there was a brief time after he made the Horcrux that I thought of him as Voldemort, but since then, no.

And yet… no, she corrected herself again, they weren't the same. Tom, her Tom, had diverged from Voldemort when she got to know him. He had made different choices.

Some of them weren't that different, and you realize that, that voice in her head whispered. Why do you drink that concoction every time you see him putting memories in his diary, and why do you insist on not knowing what he does to coerce and manipulate people?

They were still different. One is better than six—or seven—and coercing people is better than killing them. I have control over this. He has already seen that outcome in my old memories and he revolted against it. It won't happen this time. He listens to me, he respects me, and… if nothing else, his determination not to lose me will override other impulses.

Somewhat later, Tom emerged from the upstairs room and entered the library. He stared at Hermione, who was busy cleaning and polishing the bookshelves, with wide eyes. He stood in place, unable to go any further.

She caught a glimpse of him out the corner of one eye. She turned her head. A peculiar look filled her face, a look of… shame, Tom realized.

"Is everything all right?" he asked.

She looked away, facing the bookshelves again, and nodded. "There was a boggart in that cabinet"—she gestured at it—"but I took care of it."

"Really."

Hermione nodded, not looking at him. "That—the form it took—bothered me. I'm sure you think that's silly," she said, managing a brittle laugh.

He moved across the room to stand next to her and put his hands on top of hers. "I don't," he said abruptly. "There was one in the box room too. Its form… was a surprise to me. A bad one."

Compassion suddenly flooded Hermione. She realized in a flash what he must have seen. The thought was disturbing to her in one way, but at the same time….

He won't become that. Not if what he fears most has changed as I think it has.

She freed her hands, turned to face him, and wrapped her arms around him. He was clearly taken by surprise, but he nonetheless cradled her head on his shoulders with an awkward return hug.

After about a minute, Hermione broke the embrace. His arms lingered on her back. He looked at her, meeting her eyes with his own, willing her to understand, No. Not yet.

She drew close again.