A/N: Happy Tomione Day! This fan-fiction is a part of the writing challenge littlemulattokitten dared me to join which was to write a Beauty and the Beast themed Tomione fan fiction. This is my first time writing a Tomione one-shot, so please tell me if anything is OOC or etc. Also, if you find any typos or grammar mistakes, please notify me about them :)

I hope that you will like this :)

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.

Or Christian Coulson... Gah!

Tom wakes up to the usual smell of burnt firewood and that feeling of a thousand pins and needles prickling onto his right hand. He slowly tries to move the hand out of the large tome which is now pinching his nerves.

He should stop falling asleep in the middle of reading.

Tom yawns, stretches his limbs and rubs his eyes—then pulls his robe tighter around him. It feels cold... far too cold compared to how it usually is in the morning. Not that his castle is that warm to begin with. The sun is always hiding behind layers and layers of dark clouds, even though it never rains.

The plants never grow very well. Fresh tomatoes are really hard to find.

Still, it's rarely this cold in the morning.

Tom blindly feels around the couch with his left hand, trying to find that dark green knitted blanket he used last night yet too tired to fully wake up and look for it.

Oh, just where can that bloody blanket be?

He sits up, the pillows which were resting on him tumbling to the floor. His tome shakes as it balances on the edge of his couch, contemplating if it too wants to take the jump down the soft cliff, but Tom is faster. With a swift move, he catches the falling tome.

And lets it go in a fright.

Below... down there... there is a girl... dressed in sharply contrasting colours of red and gold... sleeping, no huddling on his white furry rug... with his lost dark green knitted blanket.

She looks like the fire, bright and warm.

She looks like life, happy and alive.

She looks like a trespasser, a thief and a threat.

Tom snarls and jumps down from his couch, snatching his green blanket from her, unwrapping her from her warm cocoon.

Her eyelids shift before they open, revealing a pair of brilliant brown eyes.

She can go to hell with those eyes, what is she doing in his castle? In his library?

He grabs her by her collar and drags her out of the room, slamming her limp body onto the cold stone wall beside the library door.

A weak whimper escapes her lips.

"What are you doing here?" He asks, he demands, he hisses in a voice so snake-like that she flinches and tries to bury herself into the stone wall behind her. Tom rattles her frail body when she refuses to answer. "I will not repeat myself, little girl," he says, grabbing her chin to reveal her face to him.

Her eyes are brown... like the sweetest of caramel and the brightest of ember.

Her eyes shine with life, fear... and anger.

Her chin slips from his fingers when she squirms and trashes, throwing him a few feet back in her berserk as she catches him by surprise.

And she is as wild as a lion.

"I am not a little girl!" She screams, flinging her arms in anger.

Tom only smirks. "Only little girls are stupid enough to not answer me when I ask a question."

Her lips split into a feral snarl. "And only little boys are foolish enough to believe that everyone is afraid of them."

His lips twitch.

He roars out a laugh, a cold and maniacal laugh.

Tom grabs her left shoulder, pulling her along with him as he marches out of the hallway, chest still rumbling with his chuckles.

The girl, shocked and perplexed by his change of attitude, struggles at his side as a glimmer of dread fills her.

"Where are you taking me?" She questions.

"To the dungeon, my little girl. Where else do you think would I be taking you?"

Her knees lock in a panic and she finds herself being dragged instead as she loses her footing. "Wh-why?" She asks, stumbling as she tries to catch up with his stride.

"Because you said that only little boys are foolish enough to believe that everyone is afraid of them." He replies, voice amused. "Let me show you who exactly is the foolish one around here."

He can hear the girl's gasp as they reach the iron gates of the dungeon, the foul stench of rotten corpses and sewage infiltrating their nostrils.

"No!" She shouts, wrestling against his side. "Let me go, don't... don't throw me in there!"

"Well then tell me, what are you doing here?!"

The girl cowers, her lips trembling.

Tom smiles.

"I... I got lost," she replies, hugging her arms to her chest, a hand cradling her bruised bicep.

His fingers twitch, it itches to slap her in the face, but Tom has better control than to throw a temper like a mad horse.

"How did you get into my castle?" He asks, voice as silent as lightning. "Hogwarts is not a place where you can just sneak into without my knowledge."

She bites her lips, her hand still cradling her injured arm. "I didn't... sneak in, but I swear that I don't know how did I ended up here."

He grabs a fistful of her wild locks and drags her to him, sliding the iron gates open.

"Please! Please, don't" She pleads, pulling her hair away from him even when it feels as if she is ripping her scalp from her skull as she does so.

She can't go in there.

Not again.

Never again.

Tom rolls his eyes and huffs a breath of annoyance.

Does she want to do this the easy way where she'll just answer all of his questions or the hard way where he'll throw her into those catacombs and come down every few weeks to see if she is dead or alive and if she has finally decided to gift him with an answer?

Not that he minds the second option, but it is so much easier if she can cooperate.

"I swear, honestly, on my mother's grave I swear that I do not know how I ended up here."

I don't even know if your mother has died. Tom muses as he dumps her into the damp ground of the dungeon and moves to slam the iron gates closed when her hand catches his.

There is a ring hugging the base of her middle finger.

A gold ring with a diamond shaped black stone in the middle.

It can't be...

Tom snatches the ring away from her.

"How did you find this?" He asks, inspecting the black stone to find that it really does have the shape of a triangle, a circle and a line engraved onto it.

"My father," the girl replies, voice meek. "Before I was..."

Tom cocks an eyebrow. "Before you were what?"

"Before I was... lost, my father gave me that ring. He gave it to me as a birthday present after he traded a recipe for a concoction I helped him create with that."

Tom furrows his eyebrows and leans onto the iron rails separating the two of them. "What... sort of concoction did you create with that recipe?" He asks, testing the foreign word on his tongue.

The girl looks down to her fingers, picking at her nails. Tom pulls her chin up. He hates it when people refuse to maintain eye contact while speaking.

"The concoction binds a person to secrecy. When a person drops his or her blood into the concoction then makes another person drink it, the drinker can never speak of a secret which he has sworn to the giver that he will keep."

"So does it slices through their throats or squeezes their hearts until it bursts if the drinker attempts to break their vow?"

Hermione flinches, but replies nonetheless. "It works in a way that it confuses your mind when you are about to tell the secret, making you mumble and prattle nonsense instead."

Tom cocks his head to one side.

So she is a potions mistress? And a very good one at that. He can keep her here and use her wits to help him decipher the riddles of his own castle. For if she can invent such potion recipes, surely it means that she is smart and clever. He can keep her here and make her help him understand some of the books which are written in such confusing manners with complicating metaphors—not that she will be able to solve them herself when he can't, but having a different perspective on things is always useful.

"It seems that you have... apparated into my castle with this ring." He informs her, the ring twirling under his glimmering gaze.

The girl looks up with confused eyes. "What do you mean?"

Tom frowns before his eyes light up in realisation. "Oh, I forgot that you came from a different dimension."

"A different dimension?!"

"Where we are now and where you came from, these two places are both existing on the same planet, but in different dimensions," Tom explains, watching as her eyes dart from side to side, her forehead crinkles and her lips presses into a pout as he can practically see the wheels in her head turning.

"You mean like frequency?" She asks, looking up to find him frowning at her in confusion. "Like when you have a radio and you have to tune it to a certain frequency for you to be able to listen to the channel you want to. So you have to tune yourself to a certain frequency to live in a certain world?"

"I suppose," Tom replies, his lips still turned down into a frown. "I have never heard of radios, so perhaps they do not exist in this dimension, but I suppose that what you are saying makes sense."

A quiet silence passes by them as they both crack their heads to process the newly received information before Hermione remembers that she is still trapped inside a dungeon.

"Can I get out?" She asks him, flinching when his eyes snap to hers in a harsh manner. "I have replied your question and only spoke of the truth, haven't I?"

"Only a variation of your... concoctioncan be the judge of whether or not you are lying," Tom replies, enjoying the way her eyes bulge in fear. "However, I do believe that you are not a threat," he says, sliding the iron rails open... to be engulfed in a weird... warm... offensive... fuzzy... suffocating hold. He jolts when she touches her freezing hands onto his back and her right cheek presses onto his chest. Her wild hair tickles his neck and Tom moves to rests his chin onto the fuzzy mess.

He holds himself back.

A clearing of throat sends the girl back to her senses and she quickly pulls back, holding her hands behind her back.

"I-I'm sorry I was... I was not thinking. I mean, I felt so happy and I wanted to thank you and from my place, we usually do that to show gratitude, but you guys probably don't. I mean, I really didn't think of—"

Tom presses his index finger to her lips—her soft pink lips, rendering her silent.

"It's okay," he replies, and as an afterthought, he adds. "You can do those... signs of gratitude... sometimes."

The girl smiles.

"This castle is huge," The girl muses, inspecting each wall of the corridors she passes by.

Tom hums in agreement. Or maybe he just hums to reply something as to not offend her. For he really can't tell if the castle is huge or small—he's never seen any other castles in his life.

"So that ring, it belongs to you?"

Tom nods his head with a little hum emitted from the back of his throat. Well maybe not officially, but it was said to have been passed down from generations to generations... until his uncle disappeared with it, abandoning him at the age of nine.

Tom stubbornly shakes the thought out of his mind.

"Does it like, tunes myself to a certain frequency which transports me to this world of yours?"

Tom shrugs this time. If radios do work the way he guessed they do.

The girl stomps a foot to the ground, turning her body to face Tom. "Do you never speak unless when you are angry?" She asks, exasperated with his quietness. It doesn't just feel weird to be the only one talking in a conversation, but his silence is starting to creep her out and she does not like it.

Tom cocks his head to one side and raises an eyebrow. "Wise men speak when they have something to say; fools because they have to say something."

The girl crosses her arms over her chest. "So you are calling me a fool?"

"I am calling myself wise."

The girl scoffs and lets out a dry laugh. "Right-ty-oh, wise old man. Don't blame me when I turn insane then."

Tom furrows his eyebrows. "Why?" He asks.

"Well because you are making me feel insane, talking to myself like this."

At this, Tom frowns, shaking his head a little as he walks on.

Maybe keeping this insolent child isn't a very good idea.

What if she was just lying to me when she said that she helped her father brew the potion?

What if she is just a little minx sent to him by his father to further curse his life?

Tom shakes his head.

He refuses to drown himself in the past.

Tom treats the girl with a pleasant breakfast of Yorkshire pudding which he cooked by himself. She had asked him if he always cooks his own meals, and all that Tom did was giving her a raised eyebrow and asked back, "Have you seen another soul walking around this castle?"

It was then that the girl realised that Tom must be very lonely.

And people from this world probably hug too, it is just Tom who has never been introduced to it since he lives all alone.

Or is he the only person living in this world?

Hardly possible.

"So how do I get home?" She asks from the other side of the dining table, cutting a piece of the pudding and bringing it to her mouth.

"I'm afraid that I don't know."

Her spoon clatter as it drops onto the marble-topped table.

Tom scowls at the silver cutlery and the girl quickly picks it back up, mumbling an apology as she spoons her pudding again. However, when Tom finishes his breakfast, he realises that the girl hasn't taken a bite ever since.

"I assure you that I have tried eating those puddings when they are cold and they are not as delicious as when they are warm."

She puts down her spoon and pushes the plate away from her.

"I am not hungry," she mumbles.

Tom presses his lips together. "You do not offend the person who has just cooked for you."

"I did not ask you to."

"Eat."

"No."

"Eat."

"No!"

"I said eat, or I am throwing you into the dungeons."

The girl glares at him with disbelieving eyes before she pulls the plate back to herself, finally bringing the piece she spooned minutes ago to her mouth.

"Look," Tom says, leaning his weight onto the dining table. "I know that you want to get back home, but I really do not know how to help you. I myself have never left this world—or even this castle at that."

The girl glances shortly at him. "No wonder you look so pale."

Tom squeezes his eyes shut, taking in a deep breath to hold back his anger. "I have a room which you can borrow while we try to find a way to get you home."

Her brown eyes lift up.

"You will help me?" She asks.

"I am not that keen on keeping you in here for longer than what is necessary."

Her lips break into a smile. "Can I give you another of those signs of gratitude?"

"No," Tom snaps, bringing his empty plate to the kitchen. He places them in the sink as an unsaid sentence burns on his tongue.

"Maybe after you finish your food."