hello! this is not a cruel joke. the story is actually completed. i acknowledge how ridiculous it is for me to finish this six years after starting, and after four years' long abandonment, but, well, merry christmas i guess?

and good grief, thanks to everyone who stopped in over the years to send love or kindly request that i get my butt in gear. i really, really hope it lives up to expectations after this long—i tried my best to keep the style sort of consistent.

i'd probably recommend rereading the earlier chapters to refresh, bc it does dive right back in!

-speech

x

x

x

The bowels of the ship are mayhem. Icy greenish water hisses against the base of warm equipment while machines champ and steam high overhead. Panicked male voices echo in the dim air, overlapping so Hermione can't make out a single word.

"One boiler room is already sealed," Minerva yells over the thrumming turbines as they fly through the engine room. "The front three cargo holds, too. All flooded."

"And the rest?" Hermione yells back.

But Minerva doesn't answer, for at that moment they burst from the engine room into the rearmost boiler room. Crewmembers are pumping water out of the compartment. Others, astonishingly, are still working under directions boomed out by a foreman, even as seawater sloshes up to their knees: "Reduce the fires! Vent! Vent out the steam!"

Hermione knows that the lower decks are divided into sixteen compartments. The Titanic could stay afloat with three, possibly even four compartments flooded. With one boiler room and three holds flooded, maybe the crew will be able to pump out enough water to contain the breach.

They have to, she thinks.

"There," Minerva yells. She points ahead to a notch of pale light atop a set of iron steps.

They hurtle pell-mell toward the exit, running through water so cold that Hermione can no longer feel her toes. Soon enough they're climbing. Hermione's soaked shoes squeak and slip on the stairs. With every step, she thinks a new prayer. She's never been religious, but if there's any chance that any god might hear her thoughts and show some mercy—let them pump out the water, she thinks. Or, if that's too much to ask—let us all escape with our lives. And if even that's too much—let Minerva live. Let Ginny live.

The thought of Ginny makes Hermione push herself even harder. Surely the ship's crew will load women and children aboard the lifeboats first, but Hermione's mind automatically retrieves the facts: there are only twenty lifeboats. Even packed to capacity, they'll hardly hold half the people aboard, and Ginny is a third-class passenger.

They're nearly to the door now. Hermione imagines the raw destructive power of the ocean, probing eagerly at their weaknesses, barely kept at bay. Deep groans resound around the ship's interior. When she reaches the landing at the top of the ladder, she can't resist a glance back.

The world is askew, tilted into bizarre angles like a surrealist's nightmare. At the very pit of it all, down in the hell Minerva saved her from, streaks of light play upon the shifting surface of black water.

Dread fills Hermione, making it hard to breathe. Looking into the rising water, she knows there's no hope. It can't have been longer than half an hour since impact, but soon enough, the ocean will surge to the top of every sealed compartment and spill into the others. If the crew can't vent the steam from the boilers quickly enough, the icy seawater will rupture them with the firepower of explosions. Eventually the ship will take on such weight that it will be unable to bear the load, and then … then …

"Hermione, move!" Minerva seizes her forearm and yanks her through the exit. They enter a small metal antechamber, and from it, emerge into the upper decks.

The transition is so disorienting that they both stop in their tracks. Hermione blinks rapidly, feeling like she's toppled into a dream, or like she's just awoken from one. Their feet squelch on clean, dry carpet. The lights are steady, the halls empty and peaceful, everything disturbingly normal. If she weren't already aware of it, the tilt of several degrees in the ship's angle might not even be noticeable to her. The brutal sounds of below are sealed away entirely.

She exchanges an unnerved look with Minerva. "This way," Minerva says, and they break back into a run.

In the second-class area, Hermione hears ship's stewards calling for passengers to put on their lifebelts and evacuate to the boat deck. To her shock, though, the people wandering out of their rooms don't look disturbed at all. They seem faintly irritated, as if they think this is a joke, or some kind of unnecessary drill.

"What do they think is happening, exactly?" Hermione hisses as they bolt toward the third-class cabins.

"I don't know," Minerva pants. "We heard it happen up at the fore—like the ship tearing in two. They must not have heard it back here."

"Did you see Ginny?"

"No, I was in my room until I heard you. I was trying to listen to the transmissions."

While they run the maze of halls, the listing of the ship becomes more and more noticeable, pulling down at Hermione's inner ear. Voices start to echo from all sides, and she becomes unavoidably aware of the fact that she and Minerva are running downhill.

Stewards redirect them multiple times. She's starting to panic about how long it's been since impact. Can the ship last two hours, three? How long do they have to reach the lifeboats?

She can't shake the image of the gradually rising water in the boiler room. The realization penetrates into her core: she dodged death that narrowly. If Minerva hadn't happened to use her equipment at that precise moment, Hermione would be treading water already, close to drowning soon, exactly the way Tom Riddle planned.

The thought of him hits her like a jab to the solar plexus. Tom Riddle. Riddle, laughing and teasing as he left her to die. Riddle, looking at her with a kind of fond regret, as if toying with the idea of remorse, his face as cruel and elegant as a hawk's.

He, and all his fellow first-class passengers, will surely get through this alive, and when they do, he'll have won the game, the murderous, treacherous snake.

Hermione's teeth are gritted, her heart thumping hard, as they burst into the third-class common room. Frantic passengers scramble past her and Minerva. Some are clutching bits and pieces of their luggage. Others have abandoned everything they brought to this place. A few families, to Hermione's disbelief, are seated on top of their trunks or clustered in chairs, looking around meekly, hopelessly, as if waiting for someone to descend from on high to show them the exit.

Then, in a distant corner, Hermione sees a freckled face.

The sight of her punctures through Hermione's numbness. "Ginny!" she cries.

Ginny's face turns toward her. Behind her freckles, her skin is white with fear, but at the sight of Hermione and Minerva, relief breaks over her expression. She sprints for them and flings her arms around Hermione. "I didn't know where you were," she gasps. "I didn't realize—I thought—"

"Never mind that now." Hermione pulls back from her. Her mind has gone strangely clear. "There's a door with a metal handle down that corridor," she says, pointing. "It leads through the crew's passageways, and then a fork leads to the restaurant. Go through the restaurant out to the boat deck. You'll have an easier time if you're not fighting all these people to get outside. Then you go to the lifeboats."

"What do you mean, you go?" Ginny demands.

"Where exactly do you intend to go?" Minerva says, her grey eyes flashing.

"I'm sorry," Hermione says breathlessly. "No time to explain. I'll see you soon. Go. Go!"

As a fresh tide of people crushes in on them, splitting them apart, Hermione flies down the corridors toward the first-class berths. She lets her fear fuel her mad sprint, and then, out of the fear, surprising her with its force, comes an anger more powerful than any she's felt in her life.

Riddle meant to destroy her. He meant her to lie at the bottom of the ocean, to be forgotten forever. He would have torn her from Harry and Ron and Ginny, from her future, as carelessly as someone pinching the life out of an insect. Now her survival is a weapon that can ruin his carefully laid plots. He will not win.

The ship's size has never been more evident. Parties of fleeing people, clots and throngs of steerage passengers—they pour through the corridors and double back on themselves, searching more and more hysterically for the exits. She hears snatches of their conversation, some in English, many others speaking Spanish, Polish, German. Hermione sees a mass buildup of people at one main stairway and stops, horrified, in her tracks: someone has locked the grille. People are howling, banging on the grate. Even as Hermione watches a woman thrusting her arm through the gate, the figure of a crewmember on the other side strides away.

"This way," Hermione yells. "There's another exit this way!"

No one can hear her. No one is taking notice. Some people are splitting away from the throng and pelting back down the corridor. A man with a louder voice is encouraging people down a side passage, insisting there's an emergency ladder.

But Hermione recognizes this passage. She's not far from Riddle's quarters now. Two turns, then a few short hallways, and she breaks out into a first-class area.

Hermione's wet shoes slip and slide on the angled floors. First-class passengers in their nightclothes glide past her, rippling like ghosts. Every single party seems to have a steward to guide them, catering to each individual, while not five minutes from here hundreds are lost and terrified with not a single helping hand. Her anger mounts higher.

Moments away from Riddle's room, she glances into a berth whose door is open and spots a decorative wooden statue rolling across the floor. She darts in, snatches it up, brandishes it like a club, and careens down the hallway, finally crashing through the door of his suite.

"Tom!" she yells, the statue held over her head.

But he isn't there. The suite is empty. As the furniture slips an inch on the carpeted floor, she flings herself toward the desk on her hands and knees and shoves one arm behind the desk, hunting for the briefcase.

Nothing.

"No," she hisses, sliding her hands frantically over the smooth wood, over the wallpaper. "No!" She slams her fist hard on the side of the desk. Has he taken it with him? Has he already disposed of it? If not all the details of his sordid history, she'd settle for the contract he signed with Dumbledore, but—no. She's too late.

Think, Hermione. She's considering trying to find him on the deck, to wrest it all out of his murderous hands, when somebody scrabbles at the door handle outside. She barely has time to dive into the space beneath the desk and yank the tall chair in to cover herself when two people burst inside.

She isn't quite prepared for the shock of seeing him, tall and lethal, something glowing in his face as if he were made to exist in this landscape of catastrophe. She certainly isn't prepared for the shock of the person hot on his heels: Severus Snape.

"—ready at any time," Snape says, his voice cool and sibilant. He hardly even sounds agitated. "However, sir, I must advise that we allow the ship to do its own work. Why bother to attack Dumbledore when he will certainly die among hundreds of others?"

Hermione fastens a hand over her mouth to stifle a sharp intake of breath.

Snape has been working for Riddle. He must have been the one to overhear her visit to Dumbledore's quarters. And in that final dinner deliberation between Dumbledore and Snape, he must have changed Dumbledore's mind.

She doesn't know what to do with the information. Even if she found Dumbledore to warn him, why should he believe her, a girl he scarcely met hours ago, above his most trusted adviser?

"No," Riddle says. "Eliminating Dumbledore is paramount. This will be a convenient excuse, but we must still see to it personally. There is no room for error at this stage."

"But sir—"

"I've sent a steward with a message," Riddle mutters, checking his pocket watch. "Dumbledore should be here any moment." He turns away from Snape and strides toward the desk, toward Hermione. She cringes back from the light, curling into a ball until she can't see anything, but she hears him pull open a drawer and rifle through it.

When his footsteps cross the suite again, she steals a glance. Cradled in Riddle's hand is a shiny black revolver. He presses it into Snape's palm and says something Hermione can't hear.

It's at that moment that the door opens again, and Albus Dumbledore walks inside.

Light surprise crosses Dumbledore's ancient features as he glances to Snape. Both Snape and Riddle regain their composure almost at once. "Severus," Dumbledore says. "I had a final matter to discuss with Mr. Riddle. But of course, you are welcome to … ah …"

Dumbledore's eyes light on the revolver in Snape's hand.

There is a long silence. Then several things happen at the same time. Riddle shuts the door. Snape lifts the gun, an expression of hatred and disgust on his face. Hermione opens her mouth to scream. Dumbledore says, "Severus … please …"

The shot splits the air.

Hermione clamps her hands over her mouth. Scarcely ten seconds after walking through the door, Dumbledore strikes the ground, dead. It's all impossibly fast.

Hermione's eyes have filled with tears. Her head is whirling, and the tilt of the ship seems more sickening than ever.

Riddle regards Dumbledore's body blankly. "Good," he says quietly to Snape, who lowers the revolver. Hermione can't read the expression on either of their faces.

Riddle extends his hand. Snape doesn't move.

"My revolver, Severus," Riddle says.

Snape hands him the gun. After a long moment, Snape says, his lips hardly moving, "Shall we finish the new contract? Better to do it here, I think, than on the deck."

"Yes, yes," Riddle says distractedly, seemingly unable to look away from Dumbledore's fallen figure. "You've duplicated his signature onto the merger?"

"Of course, sir. And I've already signed as witness." Snape withdraws three thin stacks of paper from the briefcase and shuffles the back pages of each to the front. "Your name on each copy."

With the hand that isn't holding the gun, Riddle scribbles once on each stack of papers, hardly looking at them. Snape replaces them into the briefcase immediately.

"You've done well, Severus," Riddle says. "I hope you're ready for the responsibilities of your new position."

The corner of Snape's mouth lifts infinitesimally. "I daresay I am."

Riddle nods. "You should have replaced that doddering old fool years ago." As Snape lowers the lid of the briefcase, Riddle adds, "And the first contracts?"

"Lost, tragically, at sea, along with the original contents of this briefcase."

"A terrible shame."

The men share a smile. Shouts from outside make Riddle sigh. "To the lifeboats, then. You go first. Best if we're not seen together."

For the first time, Snape hesitates. "Sir …"

"The briefcase." Riddle extends a hand. Hermione thinks she detects a moment of reluctance before Snape places the briefcase into it, but in the next instant, Snape has exited the suite.

As the door shuts, Riddle turns back to Dumbledore, the strange look on his face intensifying. Then he kneels beside the man. After regarding the body for a long moment, he moves a stray strand of long silver hair out of Dumbledore's face and flips his embroidered jacket open to reveal the bloody wound in his chest. Hermione's eyes have filled with tears. He looks so still and frail in death.

"Human after all," Riddle murmurs.

Then he rises back to his feet. He sets the gun on the table so he can pull on his woolen coat.

Hermione didn't realize she was waiting for him to do it, but the second he steps away from the weapon, she bursts from beneath the desk. Riddle whirls around to face her, his eyes moving from her to the revolver, but too late. She sends the wooden statue crashing into his jaw. The shock of impact rings through her hands as he topples backward, spinning into the sofa, his torso slumping over its arm, coat half-on and half-off.

Gasping for breath, Hermione stares at his fallen body for a moment. The weight of the truth settles hard on her shoulders. Only she knows what he and Snape have done. For the rest of the world to know, she needs to make it out alive.

She doubts he'll be unconscious for more than a few minutes. She snatches the revolver from the table. Then she seizes the briefcase, stows the revolver inside, and takes off running.

By the time she reaches the stairs, water is puddling in the corners of the hall.

#

Riddle's eyes crack open. There's a splitting pain in his head; his ears are ringing, his mouth dry. He doesn't know how much time has passed. For an instant he doesn't even remember where he is or what's happened.

Then he feels the water moving around his ankles.

Fear erupts in him. Fully awake in the space of a second, he pushes himself off the sofa and staggers to his feet, sloshing through the still seawater toward the door. He seizes the handle, but it takes great effort to turn. He realizes too late why.

As the catch clicks open, the door snaps back like paper in a gale. A wave of thigh-deep water slams into his suite, knocking him back against the wall, surging in until he loses his footing. Then he's underneath, his eyes burning, his mouth filled with bitter salt. It's so cold that it doesn't even feel like water. It sears through him like winter wind. He rears out of it, mouth wide open, the abraded skin on his face smarting and stinging. Half-blind with panic, he grabs for the table to stabilize himself.

A cry tears out of him, and he nearly falls again. A pale hand has risen up out of the foam, the fingers stirring weightlessly, pointing—no—not pointing at me, he tells himself wildly; he knows the fingers are dead, that they belong to the body of Albus Dumbledore, nothing more than an empty corpse turning and shifting beneath the surface—but for an instant the old man's face is near the surface, and the current has tugged one of his eyelids open, and the sight of that terrible bright blue eye is almost accusatory.

Gasping, freezing, Riddle twists away from the hand and finally flings himself over the threshold, away from everything he's done.

The water in the corridor is still, but it's heavy, too, a trial to get through. By the time he reaches the stairs, the water is up to his hips, and when he staggers up and out of it, soaking and freezing—then, at last, he remembers Hermione Granger.

There's something physically pleasurable in the rage that floods him. It warms his icy skin. Mixed with the fury, though, are other feelings he can't decipher. After he locked her into that room in the hold, he had to repress thoughts of her screaming for help. They lingered strangely, made him feel an unfamiliar tension, like panic. In one bizarre moment, he even found himself calculating how long it would take him to return to that room and undo the lock.

Then, in the split second that he'd seen her burst out from beneath his desk, determination etched upon her face, he'd felt something other than shock to see her alive—a bizarre relief, a backwards kind of affection. Of course he doesn't begrudge her the will to live. He knows that defiant instinct for survival.

None of that matters, he thinks, shivering violently as he sprints up the stairs. The girl is unimportant. He must recover that briefcase at any cost. That's the only thing of consequence, years of planning come to fruition.

He emerges onto the boat deck, invigorated by the pain ringing through his head and his skin, using the adrenaline like a drug. The icy air cuts daggerlike through him. All around, there is a low, almighty, unrelenting bellow of steam venting from the ship's innards. On the deck, all-out havoc reigns: passengers are battling the stewards, yelling and pointing at the lifeboats, and as Riddle moves toward the ship's aft he could swear he sees a boat being lowered into the darkness scarcely half full.

He scans every wild face, hunting for her, or for Abraxas, Cygnus, Druella, Snape.

Instead, he sees a flash of long red hair.

#

Hermione forces herself through a knot of people, the briefcase hugged tightly to her chest. She hasn't caught sight of Ginny or Minerva, but they would have been two of the first onto the deck, she's certain. They must have boarded a lifeboat already, and the thought is a moment of relief.

But the evacuation is well underway now. It seems that no sooner can she reach the outskirts of the crowds around a lifeboat than the boat begins to descend.

Sprinting toward a lifeboat at the starboard side, she stops so suddenly that she nearly slips and falls. She's seen a familiar corpulent old man near the front of the shifting queue, picking nervously at his mustache.

"Mr. Slughorn," she yells, trying to force her way toward him. "Mr. Slughorn!"

But she's inaudible in the frenzy, invisible, just another third-class passenger trying to save herself. Slughorn doesn't look back. She sees immense relief on his face as he steps into the lifeboat, dabbing sweat from his brow. Soon they're lowering him out of sight, the boat swinging precariously into the dark.

Hermione swears loudly and turns away, hunting for another lifeboat. Then someone bangs into the briefcase. The catches break open. Hermione contorts herself to the deck to clap it shut before the contents fly out. The papers catch between the briefcase's halves, white corners flapping, and, holding the whole mess to her chest, she retreats to the rail.

Hunching over to protect the briefcase's contents from the wind, she grows still. Protruding from the briefcase is the corner of a familiar telegram.

She crouches and opens the briefcase a crack. There's a false backing inside that's peeled away. Concealed behind it are Riddle's documents—the ones Snape claimed he threw to the ocean.

Hermione's mind is racing now. She seizes a copy of the contracts Riddle signed. Paging through, she spots a name she knows: Kingsley Shacklebolt, a well-known philanthropist, who has no business being anywhere in this document. Her eyes fly back and forth, reading so quickly that she gives herself a headache.

I, Tom Marvolo Riddle, do hereby cede all rights to inheritance of Slytherin Industries and its holdings to Kingsley Amitus Shacklebolt …

Now Hermione understands Snape's reluctance to let the briefcase out of his sight. These contracts aren't proof of his betrayal, but proof of his loyalty.

If Riddle survives this, she has the only key to his downfall.

She leaps to her feet, her heart pounding, but as she looks down toward the fore of the ship she feels the breath fly violently out from her as if a metal weight has slammed into her sternum. Water has ridden up onto the forecastle deck, sealing over the wood like dark glass. The ship is being slowly consumed.

She turns and scrambles toward the ship's aft. The remaining lifeboats are so few now that people are hurling themselves bodily toward them. She sees somebody fling themselves over the rail to screams from the others, landing half-in and half-out of the lifeboat, which spins and bangs against the ship.

Someone slams into her shoulder, sending her flying into the starboard rail. She reels as she stares around, forgetting—for an instant—the briefcase in her hand, watching the world fall apart around her. The confusion is tremendous, masses of bodies thrashing in the dark as families disgorge their children onto the last boats, as couples cling to each other in hysterics, refusing to be separated. Some are sitting in serene, defeated silence. Others are weeping, rocking, praying, huddled in corners. An old gentleman is sweeping down the deck in evening wear and everything in his carriage and expression reads defiant stoicism. Nearby, a new mass of people erupts from a door and stampede down the deck, clouds of wet white breath issuing from their mouths in the freezing black air, and then, from somewhere—unbelievably—Hermione hears the sound of music.

She turns back and sees a mahogany flash, a bow gliding against a violin. The band whose gentle music underscored the dinners in the restaurant have begun to play a tune. It's in a major key, something lively and familiar, like she might have heard in the corner of a public house at night. Like something her mother might have hummed under her breath in their tiny but studiously clean home.

Hermione's breath comes faster, shaking in her throat. She doesn't know whether she feels heartened by the music or whether she wants to dissolve into hopeless tears.

Get off the rail, she hears a voice in her mind say, a voice like Harry's or Ron's. Hermione, move!

With every ounce of strength in her, she leaves the rail and totters toward the sight of a final, swaying lifeboat. She accelerates up the slanted deck. Not far now.

But when she's fifteen feet away, she feels a plummeting sensation that has nothing to do with the tilting of the ship.

Long red hair. A freckled face. Beside her a tall male body, moving sporadically as if in residual pain.

She doesn't comprehend what she's seeing for a moment. Ginny's meant to have gone to safety already. How can she stand there, grappling with Tom Riddle, who's trying to pull her back from the lifeboat?

"Riddle," she screams. "RIDDLE!"

He turns and sees her—sees the briefcase swinging from her wrist. His face is half in shadow, half in light. His mouth contorts into a snarl, but his eyes are triumphant. He releases Ginny and makes for Hermione.

Ginny dives, every inch of her athlete's body taut with purpose, over the ship's rail into the lifeboat as it begins its descent. But as Ginny lands beside Minerva and looks back, panting, surrounded by passengers yelling and berating her, she meets Hermione's eyes.

Ginny's mouth moves, and Hermione recognizes the shape of her own name, but there's too much noise to hear her voice.

Then Ginny's lowered beneath the rail, out of sight, and Hermione is running. She veers wildly left, right. If there are any more lifeboats, she can't see them, yet the deck is so full of people it seems that hardly anyone must have made it out.

She forces her way forward, toward the ship's stern, until she reaches the rail at the very back of the ship and has nowhere else to go. Then, her arms wound into the rail, the briefcase swinging from her wrist, she sees him push out of the crowd.

He breaks out of his run and stands still, looking at her. His hair is wet, clinging to the side of his face, which shines like a polished coin. His shoulders rise and fall, shaking hard with the cold. There's anger in his face, and cold satisfaction, too.

She has no plan anymore, no next step laid methodically before her. It's almost funny, she thinks numbly, watching him watch her, remembering everything she's felt these past few days at the sight of him. She feels as if it's all been compressed into one, the desire and the hatred, the fascination and the revulsion, the forbidden thrill and the welcoming of some final determination.

Come here, she thinks. Come here and let's see the way it ends.

He approaches, and stops hardly a pace away.

"I'll take that," he says with a nod to the briefcase.

"No," she says, and spits at his feet.

His expression darkens. "Then you—"

He breaks off. She thinks for a moment that the pressure on her arms is something she's exerting on herself, but in the next instant, groups of people are slipping and falling backward as if yanked by invisible ropes around their ankles. Tom Riddle teeters, lets out a cry that sounds nothing like his voice, and throws himself forward, sudden terror obliterating his composure. One of his arms twines into the railing beside her. The other wraps hard around her torso, and his body bucks desperately as he seeks a foothold. But Hermione's awareness of herself, of him, is fading. As he clings to her for dear life, she stares over his shoulder, down at the sight below, which seems to consume her.

The ship is angling more and more steeply forward as the boat deck floods. Water pours into the ship's orifices, through grates and windows and down hatches, and as the ship corrects nauseatingly to starboard, a surge of black ocean slams over the deck and flicks a host of people away into the dark as if they were nothing.

Hermione's mind is blank. Fear and injustice and unrest, like the crowds fighting to board lifeboats: she's seen those things before. They're related to the life she's lived before tonight. But this is another world entirely. Her weight hangs upon the rail as 46,000 tons of metal tilt before her, aimed down like a shining torpedo into the churning ocean, as if they were meant to sail into the center of the earth, and she sees human bodies falling, twisting, cracking, splitting apart as they collide with the smokestacks. She sees tiny figures like matchsticks throwing themselves free of the gargantuan wreck, flinging themselves as far as they can, but their efforts are pathetically small; they disappear alongside the ship's sinking hull. Farther from the ship, she sees specks bobbing in the dark water: human heads, their faces angled anonymously up to the Titanic as its stern end lifts steadily, thunderously, out of the ocean. They're a hundred feet in the air, now two. The roar of water pouring off the keel sounds like the roar of a thunderstorm.

All around her, on the rails and wherever people have clung on, mouths are open in dark round ohs, faces shimmering, muscles twisting, bathed in electric light for a final second. Then every face goes dark as the ship's lights die.

The night is moonless, starless. The world is as dark as if it were cut and pasted together from ten thousand pieces of overlapping black paper.

The ship hangs there, suspended at a steep angle, and Hermione imagines all the pockets of air in the structure struggling toward the surface, daring the bulk of metal to defy gravity a moment longer.

Then, slowly, inevitably, the sound changes. Deep octaves supplement the oceanic roar, the basso profundo of submerged steel separating torturously from itself. Everything builds in a terrible crescendo, screams splitting the air, new registers of breakage layering into the noise, as the ship wrenches apart near the waterline. Taut lines spring loose and fly like whipcords. Boards splinter. Glass shatters. A smokestack the size of a house smashes down into the water. Hermione's mouth is open but she can't scream, nor breathe. She is falling backward as the stern section of the ship plummets back down into place. The wind scythes through her clothes and hair, she feels naked. The sight of the ocean flies away, replaced by the starless sky, and Riddle is clinging so tightly to her that her skin has gone numb in sections, and he's unleashing terrified sounds beside her on the cusp of each breath.

The ship begins to tilt again.

Hermione knows what's next. She can solve for it like the blank in an equation, the exact, inexorable plunge, the way they'll be dragged into the depths by the bulk of the ship that hangs, now, deep underwater.

She looks around. Mass exodus. The only people left on the stern are climbing the rails and flinging themselves into the dark, but if she jumps here, she'll collide with the ship's propeller. No time. Already the ship is at fifteen degrees, rising higher and higher into the darkness.

She slips between the rails and pulls herself up as the stern tilts, first to twenty degrees, then thirty.

Once in place, she realizes Riddle hasn't moved. He's still clinging to the inside of the rail, and with the sea spray slicking the metal, once the ship tilts, he'll fall.

For God's sake, she thinks, leave him—let him die—

But though she might despise him, though she knows full well what he is, he is the only human being she might be able to save from this.

"Climb," she yells.

He looks up at her. He clearly hasn't understood, his black eyes dead with fear, his hair disheveled.

"Get on this side!"

Slowly, as if waking from a dream, Riddle begins to move. His hand slips around for the railing, but he can't seem to find the right hold to pull himself over.

Hermione thrusts her arm through. Their fingers fasten around each other's wrists, and she heaves backward. His other hand seizes the rail, and he pulls himself up, up, over, landing against the outside of the rail beside her, his jaw hanging limp. He looks sick.

For a split instant the ship stands perfectly on end, perpendicular in the ocean like a hammered nail. They must be two hundred feet in the air. From this height the ocean seems strangely motionless, laid out unendingly around them.

Then the massive bulk begins to thunder down, foot by foot, into the dark.

"We need to jump," Hermione pants, scanning the approaching water. Debris is flying up from the fathoms of the ocean, propelled to the surface at great speed, bobbing and spinning in the frothing water. "Get up."

But when she gets to her feet, arms pinwheeling for balance, Riddle is still clinging to the rails.

"Stand up," she screams, seizing his forearm, "or die!"

With a massive heave, he's on his feet. Then they're staggering over the ghostly grey-white plane of the ship's aft toward the edge, the massive propeller overshadowing them like the dark arms of a windmill at night. Hermione stops at the ship's starboard edge. Only moments now. They're seventy feet from the water, then sixty. Her eyes fix on a pale patch in the water: a large panel of wood. Forty feet. Thirty.

"Jump for that and hold onto it no matter what," she yells, pointing to the wood. There's panic on his face, but she doesn't wait. She takes a running leap off the plummeting wreck.

The air rips at her in freefall. She topples fifteen feet, arcing in a trajectory that might crack a rib but won't kill, careening toward the rising and falling of the waves.

She crashes into the water. The impact of surface tension sears across her body. Then the cold knifes in, and the ocean might as well be solid ice. It engulfs her, devours her, the downward pull of the Titanic's weight impossibly strong, but she kicks, kicks, resisting, bubbles bursting from her mouth. One shoe comes off, then the other, and her feet are so small and feeble, her body so minuscule, her ragged clothes soaking and pulling.

There's a tremendous weight on her left hand that she doesn't understand for a wild moment. Then she remembers the briefcase. Its handle bites into her wrist as she claws through the dark water.

No, she thinks madly. Don't let it go. But even as she thinks it, she knows the case is filling with water that will destroy everything it might, in another world, have proven. She knows that if she clings to the weight of this newly meaningless victory, it will bear her down into the dark.

She wrenches her hand out of the handle and, freed, reaches upward—upward, or just forward? She forces her eyes open but sees nothing, no light or solid object, only darkness. The salt sears her eyes. She needs oxygen, needed it a minute or more ago, her empty lungs suffused with needlelike stabbing sensations. She can't feel her body in the cold. It is like not having a body at all, only some core that registers immense pain.

Her hand brushes something solid. She twists toward it, seizes it, her fingers slipping, then fastening onto the wood.

She pulls.

Her head shatters the surface. She gasps cold clear air. She writhes up onto the wooden panel, and the wind is excruciating on her bare face, a host of blades entering and exiting her at once.

He's there too, sprawled out and heaving. Though her weight tips the panel, it holds.

Riddle turns his face toward her as she pants for breath. He's scarcely a foot away, his face like marble, tinted gray and blue. His eyes slide from her face to the wrist that held the briefcase.

"It's gone," she says, her throat raw, her teeth clicking together so that the words are hardly comprehensible. "'s … over."

It doesn't even seem to matter. All his delusions of grandeur, the aspirations she dared nurse herself, all the ideas of talent and worth, have fallen away, leveled to the base facts of life or death.

Riddle's head moves in what might be a nod, but doesn't reply. In his silence, she hears what he hears.

The black ocean is awash with the sound of dying people, a guttural, tuneless chorus. Voices howl and mewl, gasp and sob, as the waves lift and settle. As Hermione catches her breath, she feels a pain deep in her chest. If she were to imagine the sounds of hell itself, she couldn't come closer than this.

Hermione curls up into fetal position, but there's no escaping the wind. "The l-lifeboats," she says through violent shudders. "Where are they?"

"Gone."

"No. They'll c-come back soon. They have t-to."

Though Riddle looks half-dead already, his eyes are strangely calm. "Of course not," he says hoarsely, his voice ground down by brine and hard breathing. "They'll never risk it."

"Risk what?"

"Being boarded. You h-hear it." He pauses again as the moans wash over the ocean. "There are easily enough of us to c-capsize them. They won't come back."

"They will," Hermione insists. "They will."

"Don't be r-ridiculous." He's shivering so hard that his attempt at scorn looks more like pain. "They're ahead, we're b-behind. They have power, we h-have nothing. You've heard this s-story your whole life. You should kn-know the end by now."

Even now, even here, Hermione feels a flare of anger. "No," she says. "N-no. That's not the o-only story there is. Power doesn't have to b-breed cruelty. You act like it's human n-nature, but that's just the ch-choice you made."

"Just me?" He lets out a harsh monosyllabic laugh, which blooms and dies in white mist between them. "N-no, Hermione. I follow the rules. I didn't write them. You watch: they won't t-turn back." He breathes hard into his hands. "And if they do, they're fools."

Her voice is giving out now. It breaks as she says, "Even while you're lying here, d-dying, you think that?"

The words seem to ignite something in his eyes. "I will not die here," he hisses, and for an instant he struggles, his body spasming, as if he means to get to his feet right here, to show her his strength. "You say I'm dying, after you r-risk—after you waste—after you nearly die to get me th-this far?"

"Yes."

Riddle slumps, motionless but for the rhythm of his breath. He's staring into her face with pain, frustration, fear, bewilderment. His dark hair has begun to frost over. His eyes are liquid as he blinks.

"Why did you do it?" he breathes, his lips hardly moving. "All that I did. Why?"

Hermione is no longer shivering. She feels warm, as if a blanket has been laid over her. She knows this is only the herald for further stages of hypothermia, that soon the warmth will become an intolerable, maddening heat. For now, though, it's a relief.

"When I have a lifeboat," she whispers, "I turn back."

#

She's been still for a long time.

Riddle doesn't know what this feeling is, like something in him has been extinguished. Hermione's face is slack and bluish, and ice is in her brows and lashes, and she looks very small. He is unable to look away.

Ever since he can remember, Riddle has planned to live forever. He's always meant to change the course of architecture, and in that way to encompass humanity, to hold and remold the world in the particular shape of his vision, to conceal or reveal people's lives by his own design. In that way, he would be present for the rest of human history. He's never been interested in the people who might rise or fall at his side.

Now he thinks about the world in buildings, so far away, and about the pair of them shifting, untethered, on the open ocean, far from any structure.

He thinks about the potential he saw in her. He thinks about her indignation as she snapped at him in the library. He thinks about the fierce intelligence that arrested him, that made him act foolishly, that made him think philosophically like a teenager, that earned his fascination and attention, that made him eager for the future. He thinks about touching her, and her face when she laughed. The memories seem impossibly bright and warm, like little candles in his mind. It seems wrong that she can die this way, while he watches.

Riddle remembers the feeling of her hand as she helped him up onto the stern rail, then onto his feet, guiding him to his best chance at life.

This action seems to have broken something in him. He spins the fact around and it whirls unendingly, revealing nothing. He can't actually understand how she brought herself to save him.

Tom Riddle knows he is hard, he knows he is selfish, he knows he is cruel. But that's the world. He grew up in violence and neglect until he'd taken so much of these things into himself that he could only give them out again. At school he began to see kindness, but only from those who sought something of him. The concept of unconditional compassion has always seemed like some pathetic misunderstanding of how the world operates; as for love and care, they've seemed nothing more than Biblical euphemisms for devotion, and why waste time on those feebler forms of power when Old Testament fear and awe were available to him?

But he knows to his core that no one he's met before, no one who ever swore him their loyalty, would have stopped to help him on the rails. They would not have risked their lives. They would have fled and left him to die.

Moreover, it wasn't any power he held over her that drove her actions. It was something within her.

When I have a lifeboat, I turn back.

He wants to demand that she explain. It seems urgent that he understand. He reaches out with trembling fingers, though the motion is agony, and touches her wrist.

Live, he thinks.

Live.

For a long second, nothing.

Then her pulse taps once at the surface of her icy skin.

That feeling washes through him again, the same he felt when she burst from her hiding place in his suite, defiantly alive: relief.

Riddle doesn't understand. This isn't relief that she can be of use. Quite the opposite—her survival would mean his destruction. She knows everything he's done, everything he would do, everything he is.

Yet he seems to watch his past, his future, her past and her future, floating away on the colorless waves. He knows that they will die right here, alone on the ocean, that there is no chance anymore for either of them. He stares into the chasm of how inconsequential his life on earth was, nothing but a handful of years of unfulfilled potential at the end of the day. Despite his charm and his brilliance and his fierce talent, he was nothing after all: he will freeze to death among hundreds of others, his body mortal and unexceptional, even forgettable. And in himself he feels a great emptiness that he can only stave off by looking at her, considering her impossible choice to save him, as much as he could be saved upon this precipice.

In this new meaninglessness, he allows himself to feel relieved, even grateful, that under his fingers he can still feel her heartbeat. The feeling is beyond thoughts of permanence, greatness, or value, beyond the fear of aloneness, beyond even the facts of life or death. The feeling is strangely physical, like he's just stopped running a great distance and is allowing himself to breathe, maybe for the first time in his life. The feeling is personal. He's certain that at any other time of his life he would have thought it a catastrophic weakness.

He wishes, actually, that he had more time to understand. He accepts that maybe the feeling is due to the hypothermic fog—a kind of delirium—yet it remains.

He doesn't want her to go.

#

Hermione awakens. It happens slowly, like the creeping of flame onto damp wood. First, sensation. Pain, of course. Then the scent: salt and wet.

The wind seems to have settled. The voices have gone quiet. She knows what the silence means.

Why has she woken up?

A voice answers. It cuts the night.

"Ada?"

Another voice:

"Jacob?"

A third:

"Hermione?"

She sees, borne up and down by the dark choppy water, a lifeboat. Beams of light reach out from it, cutting the unending night in two.

Her body is so weak and filled with pain that to move feels like it might rupture her skin, but she twitches her hand. She must reach into the air. Inch by inch her hand rises, and as it moves, she realizes there's a weight on her arm. Riddle's hand is resting, cold and pale, on her bicep.

She realizes her back is to him. His body is curled around hers, blocking the wind.

"They came back," she says, her voice little more than a rasp. "They're here. See? Tom? …"

His face is still and unmoving. His hand falls from her arm like an object.

Hermione's breathing quickens. She forces her hand higher, higher. She begins to move it back and forth.

"Here," she rasps, trying to swallow, forcing more breath into the instrument. "I'm here. I'm here … here … HERE!"

Her voice rings like a bell through the darkness.

When the lifeboat reaches her, Ginny is sobbing. She, and the others inside, look so warm and alive that they seem to belong to a different lifetime. Ginny pulls Hermione into her arms. For a moment she grips Hermione so hard that it's agony, and Hermione smells her friend's hair and feels the touch of her hands, and warm tears move strangely down her cold face.

"Is he alive?" Minerva asks, very pale, looking down at Riddle.

Hermione can't answer. She can only look back at the body, still and frozen, of the man who in his last moments closed around her to give her some measure of protection from the elements. She doesn't know what it was, what he might have wanted or what he might have meant by it. Repayment, maybe, or a first and final try at the kind of warmth that saves a life.

#

The air coming through the window smells sweet. Hermione looks up from the papers on her desk and breathes it in slowly.

Outside, the sky over Manhattan is a cloudless blue. The sun rings off the brick buildings across the street. The trees are blooming in spring, which means flowers in Ginny's hair, allergies for Ron, and pensive walks for Harry.

The apartment in the Lower East Side is minuscule and always breaking in some way, and they share it between the four of them, but to Hermione it's paradise, this little spot high in the sky, looking out over vibrant streets. The first night she spent here after the hospital, they all gathered around to listen to the radio in the evening, and she fell asleep between Ron and Harry, with Ginny's head on her knee.

"Hermione?"

Hermione turns around. Harry and Ron are standing in the threshold of the bedroom she shares with Ginny, looking uncertain.

"How are you feeling?" Ron asks.

"Oh, you know," Hermione says, smiling. "Well enough to be getting on with."

Harry and Ron settle onto her bed, and Hermione begins to feel a sense of slight foreboding. She's had these moments for the past three weeks, like a premonition near the end of a dream, the suspicion that New York might shatter, the light and the warmth revealing themselves to be illusions, and she'll awaken to find herself on the ocean again, dying.

She hasn't been able to talk with Harry or Ron about it yet, not properly. Ginny's told them bits and pieces of what happened, and every so often Hermione can add a detail, but it seems almost wrong to speak about it, to bring that night into this place.

Ginny has found a job as a laundress, while Harry and Ron work as day laborers, but Hermione has only recently come off the painkilling medicine that would make seeking a job impossible. On the fourth finger of her left hand, she lost the last knuckle to frostbite. She could swear she still feels the fingertip sometimes, though, as cold as the ocean that night, like a nub of ice fastened onto the amputated skin.

"There's a letter for you," Ron says.

"What?" Hermione stops touching the sensitive, bandaged end of her finger.

Harry extends the envelope. It's made of heavy, expensive paper; Hermione's name is written in green ink, in extravagant cursive.

Hermione slits it open and extracts the letter.

Dear Ms. Granger,

I was pleased to see your name among the list of survivors.

I will call at your residence at 2 o'clock p.m. on the 8th of May.

Sincerely yours,

Druella Rosier

"But that's today," Hermione murmurs.

"What?" says Ron.

Hermione hands him the letter. He scans it. "Oh," he says, looking nonplussed. "Who's Druella Rosier?"

"I met her aboard."

Harry and Ron look at Hermione for a long second. She knows she's slightly different from the person they left in England. She feels so much older. Ginny has changed, too: she's slower to laugh and to poke fun, these days, and every so often she'll pull Harry suddenly back from the street as a car comes close, or she'll stop them in the street so Ron can tie his shoelaces. It's a sensibility that Hermione knows is related to the sounds she makes in her sleep.

"Hermione," Ron says carefully, "are you ever going to tell us what happened on the ship?"

Hermione turns over the events of those few nights, which even now, not a month from the sinking, have retreated from her into a kind of glassy middle distance. The anticipation of tremendous possibilities, the heat of passion, the fury of betrayal, the terror, it's all sealed in sepia like a photograph. She doesn't know how she could speak about it directly even if she had the inclination. The best she can manage is oblique summary.

"For a little while I had two lives," she says. "Then I lost them both. Now I have to make a new one."

#

Druella arrives with exact precision at 2 p.m., and while she looks around the minuscule apartment with a distinctly unimpressed expression, her beautiful clothes glimmering in the dusty air, she does not comment. Those clothes, Hermione notices, are black silks and crape.

With no parlor and certainly no receiving room, they sit at the dining table. Ron, Harry, and Ginny have gone to work; they're alone.

There's a kind of relief in sitting with Druella, looking at her, knowing that she understands.

"I'm very sorry to see you in mourning, Miss Rosier," Hermione says quietly.

Druella dips her head, her golden-brown ringlets swinging. "I wouldn't have thought it of Cygnus, but he gave his seat away."

"And Abraxas?"

Druella sighs. "We were separated. He went to the port side of the ship, where, as I understand it, only a single man was allowed to evacuate." She pauses. "Actually, we're the only surviving members of our little dinner party."

Hermione pours a cup of tea and is surprised to find her hands are steady. She pushes the saucer to Druella.

"Slytherin Industries is reeling from the blow," says Druella, sipping the tea. "Without Mr. Riddle, the company is undergoing a crisis of identity of sorts."

Hermione drinks from her own cup. "You warned me about him."

"Was I right to?"

"Yes. He tried to kill me, by the end."

Druella nods, looking unsurprised. "I understand if you'd wish to wash your hands of his influence entirely. However, I still have … yes, here. The reason for my visit."

She withdraws a piece of paper from her bag and unfolds it upon the table. "Tom had asked Cygnus to draw up a letter of hire for you. I found it in his case. As I'm managing some of Cygnus's duties temporarily while they hunt for his replacement, I could file it on your behalf."

Hermione looks at the letter in disbelief. It seems as impossible as her own survival, this fragile document, this lifeline to the hours she spent in Tom Riddle's company. What a strange list of last acts he wrote for himself that night: to give her this future upon the table, to try and rip it away, and then, at the last, to give it back one more time.

She considers the letter for a moment before lifting her eyes back to Druella, her mouth dry. "Why would you do this?" she asks. She knows it's an impertinent question, but she cares even less for propriety now than before. Life is too short, she knows, to stand on ceremony.

"Why?" Druella says, her dark, expressive eyes narrowing.

"You must have a reason."

A moment passes before Druella smiles. "My dear Miss Granger, despite what Tom might have suggested, we don't all build our lives on ulterior motives."

Hermione swallows and looks down at the letter. She would rather die than admit it aloud, but the sight of it makes her feel something like fear. If she signs her name on that piece of paper, she will have yet another new life, and in the aftermath of the sinking, it's all she can do to stay composed when she comes home in the evening to see Harry and Ron laughing at the table, or when she wakes in the morning to see Ginny in the twin bed opposite hers, safe and whole, but so nearly lost.

"I understand," Druella says softly.

"I'm sorry?"

"I know what you are feeling." Druella pauses. "It was scarcely three days from the wreck when I'd a telegram from my father about the hell that had broken loose at Slytherin. I knew I could help calm the havoc, but I could also hardly leave my house in the mornings without the worry that the sky would fall upon my head, or that I'd bring it down on myself somehow." She pauses. "What if I tried to help, and failed. What if I was the weak link in a chain that led to some new disaster."

Hermione's throat has grown tight. Druella sounds as if she's needed to say this for weeks.

"Yes," Hermione says softly. "That's right."

Druella smooths her skirts over her lap. "We can't tiptoe through the world that way, Miss Granger," she says. "We have our lives. We must live them."

Hermione looks down into her tea and finds it's nearly empty.

When she looks back up, Druella is rising to her feet. "Please do mail that back to me. Our address is included."

Hermione shows her to the door. With one foot over the threshold, Druella hesitates.

"You were found with his body," she says. It isn't a question.

"Yes." Hermione hesitates, her throat tighter than ever. Then the thing she's told no one else comes loose: "I know the world is better off without the man he was, but … in that last—at the end …" She swallows. "He saved my life."

For the first time since she's met the woman, Hermione sees faint surprise on Druella's face. Then Druella lets out a quiet laugh. "Odd," she says. "A riddle to the end." Then she turns and walks down the hall, her mourning silks glowing in the cheap electric light.

Hermione returns inside, into the shabby apartment which is nonetheless clean and comfortable. She sits before the letter and reads every word of it twice, then three times.

She knows that to stride boldly into the ranks of Slytherin Industries will to be invite ridicule: for her sex, for her common name, for her lack of status. At the same time, it's a dream she's never before seen so clearly, a shining opportunity born out of the longest night of her life. It's hard not to think that all the events of that voyage led to this: a blank for her signature at the bottom of the page.

For the first time in weeks, she allows herself to think, willingly, of Tom Riddle.

There are no straight paths or clear answers, only knots and snarls. She feels disgust for the man, of course, a mélange of pity and anger and revulsion. But she remembers his fear upon the rail, too, the way he shook as she saved his life. She remembers the frustration in his voice, the desperation and disbelief, when he asked her, "Why did you do it?" — the way he could not fathom his salvation at another person's hands, the way he looked at her in silence, as if trying to understand a new language, when she gave her answer.

She remembers waking to the feeling of his body at her back, cutting the cold in half, cradling the life that still burned in her.

She considers how change always moves in the same directions: from the outside in, and then from the inside out.

She signs her name.

x

x

x

oh my sweet friends. it's done. i hope you liked it and thank you again for your patience with me. :)

love always,

speech