The Voice
The magic inside her felt different. Off-kilter. Wrong.
At first, it was subtle, barely noticeable beneath the exhaustion weighing down her limbs, the lingering ache of her journey through time. But as the hours passed, as she moved through the quiet halls of the Department of Mysteries, she could feel it creeping along the edges of her awareness, threading itself through her every step.
It was in the way the air shifted unnaturally when she moved—just a fraction too slow, as if it was reacting to her instead of simply existing. It was in the way the shadows curled in the corners of the room, stretching too far, too long, as though something unseen was lurking just beyond her vision, just beyond the reach of the candlelight. And then, there were the sounds—faint, fleeting things that disappeared the moment she tried to focus on them. Whispers that did not belong to the world around her. Echoes of words never spoken aloud.
More than once, she caught herself tensing, expecting a voice at her ear, a presence at her back. But there was never anything there.
At first, she convinced herself it was nothing.
Residual magic, perhaps. A consequence of wrenching herself back through the fabric of time, of forcing reality to bend to her will. After all, she had expected side effects. The body was not meant to move through time—not like that. Her nerves were frayed, her thoughts disjointed. She had torn herself from one existence and thrust herself into another. Of course she felt unsteady, of course her magic was unsettled.
It was only natural that she would feel… untethered.
And yet—
It worsened at night.
That was when the whispers began.
The first time she heard it, she had been sitting at the small desk in her assigned quarters, surrounded by parchment and books she had yet to read. The Unspeakables had given her space—had insisted she take time to regain her footing before they asked questions she could not yet answer. She had been grateful for that, for their patience, their restraint.
But solitude had its own dangers.
The quiet stretched too long. The room was too still.
Hermione had tried to focus, her fingers absently tracing the edges of an open book as she stared unseeingly at the text before her. She should have been exhausted, was exhausted, but sleep did not come easily. Every time she closed her eyes, she felt like she was still moving, still hurtling through the void of time, still feeling the burn of magic in her veins.
She had taken to keeping the candles lit, if only for the illusion of warmth. Their golden glow was meant to be reassuring, a fragile barrier against the darkness pressing in from all sides. But even they felt unnatural now. The flames trembled, flickering in odd, erratic patterns, stretching too tall one moment, sputtering weakly the next. They cast jagged shadows across the stone walls, their shifting shapes twisting and curling like unseen hands reaching from the abyss. Every so often, the light would gutter without cause, as if something unseen had breathed across the wicks.
She tried to ignore it, tried to focus on the work spread before her—the thick parchment littered with notes, the ink-stained fingertips she had yet to clean, the half-read books stacked precariously around her. But the silence of the room stretched too long, oppressive and smothering, pressing against her ears like cotton. The air itself felt wrong, charged with something she couldn't name, something that sent a shiver skating down her spine. And then—
"Hello, darling."
The voice slithered through the quiet like a blade wrapped in silk—soft, amused, intimate in a way that sent ice threading through her veins.
Her breath hitched, her body locking in place so suddenly, so entirely, that for a moment she thought she might shatter beneath the weight of it. Every muscle went rigid, her spine straight as a bowstring drawn too tight. The quill in her fingers snapped beneath the force of her grip, the fragile wood splintering between her fingertips, but she barely noticed. It was inconsequential—nothing compared to the cold wave of sheer, unfiltered terror that crashed over her, sinking into her bones like frostbite.
Because she knew that voice.
She knew it in the marrow of her bones, in the deepest recesses of her mind where it had once wormed its way in and taken root like a parasite. It had lingered there for months—filling the spaces between her thoughts, unravelling her piece by piece, coiling around her mind until she had struggled to tell where he ended and she began.
Tom.
His name struck through her like the ringing of a death knell, like the slamming of a door she had thought locked forever. The finality of it, the sheer impossibility, nearly knocked the breath from her lungs.
Her pulse roared, hammering against her ribs, a frantic, stuttering drumbeat that rattled in her ears. No, no, no. The sound of her own heartbeat nearly drowned out reason, nearly swallowed her whole. Slowly—so agonizingly slow—she turned her head, her vision sharpening with razor focus as her gaze swept the room, searching, hunting. Every nerve in her body screamed at her to run, to fight, to react.
The door remained shut. The windows latched. The room was still.
No shifting movement in the shadows, no breath of displaced air, no flicker of robes in the corner of her vision.
There was no one there.
She was alone.
A shudder wracked through her as she struggled to steady her breath, inhaling, exhaling, counting the seconds between. But it wasn’t enough. A cold sweat prickled along the nape of her neck, slipping down the curve of her spine like ice water, leaving a ghost of unease in its wake.
This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.
Her fingers trembled as she pressed them against the edge of her desk, grounding herself, forcing herself to think.
A hallucination. That was the only logical explanation. It had to be.
She had read about things like this, about what prolonged exposure to dark magic could do. The way it lingered—like poison in the veins, like rot that took hold in the mind and festered, warping perception, twisting reality until even the strongest minds fractured beneath its weight. She knew the symptoms, had studied the cases, the stories of those who had been consumed by it—Aurors who had spent too long staring into the abyss, scholars who had dared to pry into the forbidden corners of magic, victims who had brushed too close to something that should have been left undisturbed.
She knew what happened to people who let dark magic touch them for too long.
She knew what he had done to her mind.
Legilimency left traces—fragments, echoes, remnants. And he had been inside her mind far too often, far too deeply. She had spent months locked in battle with him, had fought to keep her thoughts her own, had felt his presence pressing against her skull like a vice more times than she could count. The human mind was not meant to endure that. She had known the risks, had accepted them, but now—
"Did you miss me?"
The voice curled through her mind like smoke, thick and cloying, wrapping around her thoughts like an old, familiar vice. It was rich with amusement, laced with something deeper—something patient. It was the kind of patience that had always unsettled her, the kind that spoke of knowing, of waiting, of inevitability.
Her chair scraped against the stone floor as she shoved back from the desk, the sharp, grating noise splitting the silence like a blade. The sound barely registered over the rush of blood in her ears, the frantic thunder of her heartbeat pounding against her ribs. She shot to her feet, breath coming too fast, chest rising and falling in sharp, uneven gasps as though she had surfaced from drowning. The air in the room felt suddenly thin, pressing in around her, heavy with something unseen.
No. No, this isn't real.
She forced the thought into place, anchored herself to it, gripped onto it with everything she had. But her mind wavered, betraying her. The candlelight flickered in a way that felt too intentional, casting jagged, writhing shadows along the stone walls. The silence stretched long and oppressive, as if the room itself was holding its breath, waiting.
"No," she whispered, the word barely more than a breath, raw and hoarse in her throat. She shook her head, as if the sheer force of denial could banish him from existence. "No, you’re not real."
A soft chuckle drifted through her mind, warm and knowing, edged with something that made her skin crawl.
"Aren’t I?"
Her throat closed around the answer she couldn’t give.
Hermione squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her palms to her temples, fingers digging into her skin as if she could physically claw him out of her head, as if she could reach into the recesses of her own mind and rip him free. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. She had torn herself away, had severed the bond, had left him behind.
Hadn’t she?
The thought sent a violent shudder through her, because the truth was—she didn’t know.
Her return had not been simple. The ritual had not been clean, had not been precise. It had ripped her from the past, had wrenched her from his grasp with the force of the universe itself snapping back into place, as if time had violently rejected her presence. She had felt it—the raw, unrelenting pull of magic consuming her, unravelling her, shattering her before hurling her forward, before forcing her back into the shape of herself. She had woken to the sharp, aching certainty that she had barely survived it.
And yet—something had changed.
She had known it the moment she opened her eyes.
Her magic no longer fit inside her the way it once had. It was heavier now, coiled thick beneath her skin, restless, volatile. It moved with an intent that was not entirely her own, shifting in ways that felt unnatural, that felt wrong. There was something else inside it, something other. It was like trying to hold onto sand as it slipped through her fingers—like something had followed her, like something had come with her through the fractures in time.
Like him.
"You thought you could leave me behind, didn’t you?"
The whisper came again, softer this time, coaxing, curling around her like the ghost of a touch, something that wasn’t quite there but still pressed against her skin.
Hermione’s breath stuttered out of her in a trembling exhale, her lungs tightening, her body reacting before her mind could catch up. She took a step back, then another, her hands curling into fists at her sides, nails biting into her palms until the sharp sting grounded her. It was real. That was real. The pain, the solid ground beneath her feet, the steady weight of her own body—those were real things. But this—
This was a hallucination. A trick. A shadow lingering in the corners of her own mind, nothing more.
"No," she said, shaking her head, forcing her voice to harden, to steel itself. "You’re gone. You didn’t—"
But she couldn't finish.
Because she didn’t know.
The thought tore through her, rattling inside her chest, clawing at the carefully constructed certainty she had tried to hold onto. What if she had been wrong? What if he had found a way? What if he was still here?
"Poor thing," he murmured, and this time, the words curled around her like a lover’s whisper, dark amusement threaded between every syllable. "You look so frightened."
A cold dread settled in the pit of her stomach.
Hermione forced herself to breathe, to think, to centre herself. She had spent too long letting him inside her head. She had spent too long playing his game. She would not let him have power over her now.
"You’re not real," she hissed, forcing every ounce of defiance into the words, willing them to carve through the air, to drive him out. "You’re a hallucination, a remnant of your Legilimency. That’s all you are."
Silence.
It swallowed the room whole, thick and absolute, pressing in around her like a held breath, like the universe itself had stilled in anticipation. The air no longer crackled with his presence, no longer hummed with the weight of something unseen. The oppressive pull of him, the sinister curl of his voice wrapping around her thoughts, had dissipated into nothingness.
For a moment—just a fragile, fleeting moment—she thought she had won.
The tension in her shoulders eased, fraction by fraction, as the heavy drum of her heartbeat began to slow, though not entirely, not enough. Her pulse still thrummed beneath her skin, sharp and uneven, but the unbearable weight pressing against her ribcage had lessened, the frantic pounding in her skull dulling just slightly. It was over. It had to be. Her mind, strained from exhaustion and the remnants of what he had done to her, had conjured something from the past, something that wasn’t real. That was all.
That was all.
She exhaled shakily, forcing herself to believe it, to grasp onto the idea and hold it close. If she could just move forward—if she could just let this go—then it would mean nothing. This was nothing. A trick of the mind, a phantom conjured by fatigue and stress. She just needed to ignore it, to bury it, to—
And then—
Laughter.
Low. Quiet. Drenched in amusement.
The sound unfurled in the silence like smoke, seeping into every corner, curling through her thoughts with a slow, deliberate satisfaction that made her breath catch in her throat. It was not an echo, not a memory twisting its way into the present. It was real, threaded with warmth, rich with the indulgence of something enjoying this, savouring this.
The sound slithered into her mind like a creeping vine, winding tighter, sinking deeper, burrowing into the marrow of her bones. It was insidious, invasive, inevitable.
She felt the laugh more than she heard it—felt the way it dragged its fingers through her mind, settling into the cracks, filling the spaces she had left unguarded.
"Oh, Hermione."
Her stomach turned to ice.
His voice was nothing more than a whisper of silk and shadows, smooth and endless and undeniable.
"You really should know better by now."