Chapter Text
On a winding narrow street cobbled with brick, a row of houses stood interrupted, the roofline suddenly dropping away to nothing. A tree poked up into the air where a chimney had once stood. Around it there was only the ragged shape of stone walls and rotting wooden beams to tell of the pleasant cottage that once housed a young family before the wheel of fate turned and left them at the mercy of one who still struck terror into the hearts of wizards and witches across Europe.
Next to the gate a sign stood, visible even in the depths of night as a witch stood in front of it, the lettering defaced with thick scratches and bright paint.
On this spot, on the night of 31 October 1981,
Lily and James Potter lost their lives.
Their son, Harry, remains the only wizard
ever to have survived the Killing Curse.
This house, invisible to Muggles, has been left
in its ruined state as a monument to the Potters
and as a reminder of the violence
that tore apart their family.
Hermione examined the graffiti without looking too closely, aware of the vitriol Harry had attracted after things went south. Someone had scratched out most of the lines about him having survived the Killing Curse, apparently with something sharp, and neon insults covered half of the rest. A brightly flashing Potter Stinks badge stuck irrevocably to the top of the sign reminded her vividly of their Hogwarts days, of Cedric Diggory, the first to die at the hands of the resurrected Lord Voldemort but far from the last.
Tears didn’t come. Not now. Not anymore. She was done crying, having emptied herself of everything that might have passed for an emotion in the past two years. There was no point crying anymore, not when the world had turned so far in the direction Death Eaters had hoped for, when Voldemort pulled every string in the Ministry of Magic just as deftly as he cast Unforgiveables, and when there wasn’t even the refuge of Hogwarts to return to unless one was willing to give up every moralistic ideal in favour of the New Order.
All that was left was Hermione. The few friends who had managed to survive the various purges and battles had dropped contact with her for their own safety, knowing that the wanted posters with her image on them were not to be taken lightly, and they had already crossed into a grey zone when it came to personal safety simply by having known her at Hogwarts. It didn’t matter.
Harry was dead, and with him the Order of the Phoenix, never truly useful after Snape betrayed Dumbledore and threw him off the Astronomy tower at Hogwarts on the night the war started in earnest. Harry had lasted through the following year, dragging Hermione and Ron with him on a suicidal mission to find and destroy Voldemort’s Horcruxes, but they hadn’t been thorough enough: by the night of Harry’s final battle, there was still at least one Horcrux left. It had been enough to destroy the efforts of those still following Dumbledore’s will. Voldemort’s snake, Nagini, had been safely tucked away somewhere off of Hogwarts grounds, and Crabbe had managed to snag the diadem of Ravenclaw on their mad dash out of the Room of Requirement after the place was set alight by Fiendfyre. Hermione still wasn’t clear where the diadem had ended up, but it hardly mattered at this point. When Harry went into the forest to confront Voldemort he came out a corpse and Voldemort went on a thrilled killing spree, scattering the remaining defenders of Hogwarts like so many flies.
Hermione shuddered in spite of the warm summer evening as she stood in Godric’s Hollow. Memories were all she had left of Harry. She and Ron almost died in their escape from the carnage, and it only left them on the run once more, gradually running out of supplies and places to hide from the now emboldened Death Eaters. Hermione suggested escaping to France, when things got too bad; Ron refused, wanting to find the remains of his family.
The last time she saw him was six months later, his bloated corpse face up in one of the ponds outside the ruins of the Burrow.
She really had run, then. Run and not looked back, escaping into France and then deeper into Switzerland and Austria where she was less likely to be recognised even though she still saw her face on newspapers every so often or heard rumours of her own involvement in the last remains of rebellion in England.
And every night she wondered: where had they gone wrong? What could they have done differently? It seemed as if the odds were so heavily stacked against them that there wasn’t any way they could have succeeded, and Almighty Dumbledore had made a huge mistake in trusting this job to three teenagers. In her mind, it could hardly have gone any worse. Harry was dead, the Order was a shell of itself, propped up on the shoulders of the ineffective and now alcoholic Ted Tonks and the amoral Mundungus Fletcher, both of whom featured on as many wanted posters as Hermione did, although she thought it likely that this was just a way for Voldemort’s Ministry to have an enemy. Ted Tonks and Mundungus were both useless and she’d be honestly surprised if either of them were still alive now, four years after Harry’s death.
What was there left to live for? Voldemort was as ruthless a ruler as he had been a master, and people were still attempting to flee the country any way they could in spite of blockades manned by those willing to cast unforgiveable curses on sight. In the wash of death and blood, there was nothing recognisable of the country Hermione had grown up in, or of the magical world that had whisked her away aged eleven and promised her a future that she had never even imagined for herself.
In her pocket, a piece of paper slid against metal, and Hermione didn’t need to take it out to see what she’d written on it. The words were etched into her very soul, the decision of someone with nothing left to lose or live for.
It could only have been worse if I were dead. No. If I were dead I would not be alone anymore. Death would be preferable to this.
The stark message might have been read as a suicide note if not for the next line.
As there is no way it could be worse, it will not matter if I shred through time like paper.
Her fingers moved to the other item in her pocket, something that had taken her a full two years to find and steal. She’d had to leave Europe entirely then, fleeing via Greenland back into her home nation to avoid being captured by the Swiss Ministry of Magic, who had now laid a bounty on her head that rivalled the one Voldemort was offering. Her fingers caught the chain and played with it as the numbness in her soul was replaced with dread.
If she followed through, she would be back on the warpath again. She would be singled out, targeted, attacked, and she would be surrounded once more by people. People who would get killed. People who would trust her, or betray her, or let her down; or worse, she would do those things to them. Years of running meant years of solitude, alone with her own grief and regrets.
Hermione removed her hand from her pocket, the glittering golden object coming with it. She arranged her hands around it and took hold of the knob on the side.
How many turns? A hundred? A thousand? She had not done the maths, nor did she care to. As long as she turned it more than a hundred times she should get back to before Harry died, and that would be a start. If she went farther, then she went farther. It wasn’t as if she could go back and become a fourth person in their little golden trio; wherever the time turner dumped her she would have to work alone.
Who knew exactly how this time turner had been calibrated, Hermione thought. Not her, certainly. There had been no instruction manual with it when she stole it from the bank vault where it had been lying for the past fifty years. She watched it turn with detached interest, her fingers working of their own accord to wind it farther and farther until the knob became too hot to touch and she simply had to watch the thing spin, time warping around her.
One moment she was there and the next moment she was not, the air sizzling with magic as time bent to welcome her.