They were grad students when they met, Tom and Hermione. She had to admit he was brilliant. Of course, everyone had to admit that. Acknowledging the obvious didn't make her special and denying it would have made her seem petty. Along with smart, though, he was also rude, horrible, cruel, and even from a distance, she wasn't sure he followed any of the ethical guidelines required for human psych experiments. Also, there was the problem of him being so fucking gorgeous it annoyed her to look at him. Bad people shouldn't look like the way he did, with black wavy hair and piercing blue eyes. They should have red pupils, or grey skin or anything to let you know at a glance they were monsters.
He didn't.
Worse, they were in the same department. And the department was cheap. So, when they both were accepted to present at the same conference, the department chair decided it was super brilliant to have them drive together. To Minnesota. In the winter.
It was the first time she ever spent any significant amount of time with him.
"You aren't expecting us to share rooms, are you?" Tom asked with that upper-class British accent that was just a little too perfect. She hated the disgust in his voice. I don't want to share a room with you either, you little prick, she thought.
The department chair probably would have liked it if they'd wanted to share rooms, but he knew he couldn't ask opposite sex colleagues to do that, so he was quick to tell them that of course not, don't be ridiculous.
"Good to know," Tom said. His eyes glittered and that accent grated, and Hermione wanted to tell him she knew he wasn't to the manor born. She'd snitched his file from the secretary one day and looked through it, and her chief rival came up from nothing. An actual orphanage. She hadn't known people even still lived in orphanages. He had to have taught himself those perfect vowels, and they were as fake as everything else about him. He was a smooth, perfect sheen of brilliant prodigy and she knew that under all of that he was as viciously ambitious as she was.
Maybe more so.
Which made him interesting.
It didn't mean she wanted to share a car with him for days on end, but she threw her bags and her work and her smiles into the back seat, clicked her belt into place and told him to drive. They didn't talk for the first three hours. When the snow began to fall, one slow, fat flake after another, he pressed down on the gas, and she pulled out her phone to check the weather.
"Supposed to get worse," she said.
"We'll beat it," was his only response.
They didn't. The flakes got faster, then smaller, and went from pretty to dangerous to so thick she couldn't see more than foot in front of the car. The whole world became a swirling, white vortex. Tom went faster still, and Hermione opened her mouth to tell him to stop, and he did.
Suddenly.
Because he ran into the guard rail.
And the car wouldn't go again.
And her phone had no service.
"I saw a hotel about a mile back," he said shortly. "We'll call for a tow from there."
She had on dress flats. They were the kind of shoes a serious graduate student wore to give a serious talk about how the perception of luck changed outcomes in carefully regulated tests of lacrosse players, some of whom were told the sugar pill they had been given had performance enhancing properties. They were good shoes. Not too expensive. Comfortable. Wholly unsuitable for walking a mile in a blizzard.
Tom Riddle had boots.
Ten steps into their walk back to the hotel she hated him. He looked at her feet, groaned, and picked her up and carried her. "You'll get frostbite," he said. "Which would look bad on my record."
Within a quarter of a mile, Hermione was shivering and miserable and couldn't even bring herself to waste energy on hate. By the time they got to the hotel, she didn't even care the clerk told them no one would be around to deal with their car for at least two days or that there was only one room left. With one double bed.
Tom put a credit card down on the counter and said, "We'll take it."