Chapter Text
Something in Hermione broke that night.
Something painful and visceral and irreversible.
A crack in the foundation.
A splinter driven straight through the center of her soul.
The war was over, and the world had already begun to move on.
Spring came to London with blood on its boots. Gardens bloomed in Muggle neighborhoods, daffodils uncurling in neat yellow rows as if nothing terrible had happened. The Daily Prophet printed celebratory headlines in thick, triumphant fonts. Ministry appointments, memorial dedications, promotions. Promotions. Promotions.
Hermione couldn’t seem to breathe.
At first, she tried. She returned to work, filed reports, smiled at the appropriate moments. She kissed Ron when he leaned in, though each kiss felt stranger, more obligatory, like accepting a flyer she didn’t want. Harry suggested dinner. Molly sent pies.
And still
All she felt were the warped floorboards of the Shrieking Shack beneath her knees.
All she heard was the rasp of Severus Snape’s breathwet, broken, ruined.
All she saw were his eyes.
Those eyes.
Those terrible, hollow, lonely eyes.
She tried. Merlin, she tried. She smiled when people smiled, nodded when they spoke, ate when someone set a plate in front of her. But everything tasted of dust. Everything felt wrong, subtly and insistently misaligned, as though the world had shifted half an inch to the left and could never, never be put to rights again.
And she didn’t understand why.
He had been cruel. Distant. Unkind. He had belittled her as a student. Docked points for breathing, sneered when she knew the answers, terrified first-years. He walked like the world had already broken him and seemed to despise anyone who had not yet been crushed the same way.
He had been a Death Eater.
He had killed Dumbledore.
And yet.
He had loved.
Not her. Not anyone still living. But that did not matter. He had loved deeply, wretchedly, with all the ferocity of a man who had nothing left to give. And he had died giving the last of himself to a boy who barely understood, to a cause that would never remember him with kindness.
But Hermione remembered.
She remembered the tremor in his voice as he pressed those memories into Harry’s hands. The way his fingers had clenched not in anger, but in fear. And how his final sight had not been Lily, as he might have hoped, but Hermione herself kneeling, frantic, too late.
It should not have mattered.
He should not have mattered.
Her parents were still in Australia, without memory of her. Ron joked about marriage. Harry was happy. Everyone was happy.
Except her.
Hermione was trapped in that night.
She dreamed of it, night after night.
His blood soaking into her robes.
The darkness pressing in.
Harry’s stunned silence. Ron’s shallow breathing.
Snape’s mouth moving without sound, begging something of the world with the last of his life.
And always her.
Frozen. Helpless. Witness.
“Earth to Hermione.”
She blinked, the world blurring back into colorwashed-out, muted, like a bad watercolor left in the rain. The teacup in her hand was lukewarm. She was sitting at a café in Diagon Alley. Birds chirped overhead. A breeze stirred the tablecloth. She was supposed to be alive.
Ron leaned forward, brow furrowed in frustration. “I said you’ve had three bloody job offers. People would kill for the kind of future you’ve got waiting.”
“I don’t know,” Hermione murmured.
“What?”
“I… I don’t know if I can take any of them.”
He stared at her. “What does that even mean?”
She did not answer.
Ron exhaled sharply. “Is this about… you know. Him?”
Her head tilted, but she remained silent.
“Oh, come on. Not Snape again.” His voice sharpened, incredulous. “He was a bastard. Always was.”
“He wasn’t,” she said, surprised by the steadiness of her own voice. “Not really.”
Ron blinked, unsettled by her certainty.
“He was on our side, sure. But that doesn’t make him a saint. It doesn’t mean you have to… what? Mourn him?”
Her silence answered for her.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered. “You are, aren’t you? For Snape?”
Her fists curled in her lap. “You didn’t see what I saw.”
“Yeah, I did. I saw him die. Horribly. But he was horrible. He made your life hell for years.”
“He was alone,” Hermione snapped, louder than she intended. “He died alone, Ron. And he… he didn’t deserve that.”
“So what?” Ron scoffed. “You’re going to write a eulogy? Start a fan club?”
“Don’t.” Her voice cut like glass.
He recoiled, blinking. “Alright. Merlin. Sorry.”
Hermione rose abruptly, robes swishing against the cobblestones. Her chest felt tight, breath shallow.
“I just…” Her throat constricted. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
Ron stood more slowly. “Hermione, you need to let it go. There’s nothing to do. Even if we could have saved him… we didn’t. He’s gone. And it’s not like there are even time-turners anymore.”
The words sliced through her.
Even if you could have saved him.
You could have saved him.
Save him.
A thrill ran down her spine: terrible, electric. Ron did not see it, but her eyes burned with sudden clarity.
An idea.
A vow.
A desperate attempt to free herself from the ghost that would not leave her.
Hermione walked away. She did not look back.
Because if there was any way to undo what had happened
She would find it.
Even if it broke her.
Even if it cost her everything.
Even if it meant walking through time itself.
Hermione refused the Ministry.
The letters arrived anyway.
They stacked themselves neatly on the small table by her door at first. Thick parchment, embossed seals catching the light. Owls came at dawn and dusk, tapping insistently at the glass. Interview requests. Department heads she had admired as a student writing in their own hands. Positions she had once dreamed of, mapped out in color-coded plans back when the future still felt real.
She turned them all away.
At first, people called it noble.
Grief, they said. Recovery. Taking time.
Then strange.
Then worrying.
Hermione shut the door on Grimmauld Place, on friends, on daylight. Her flat transformed, slowly and then all at once, into something unrecognizable. A laboratory. A tomb. Parchment towers rose from every surface. Diagrams crept up the walls, pinned and repinned until the plaster beneath was scarred. Candles burned down to stubs without her noticing.
Her hair grew long. Her sleep grew short. Her hands shook from hunger and ink.
The war had left scars. But this became the wound that would not close.
Some nights she collapsed on the floor beside her books, lungs aching, whispering into the dark that there had to be a way. That the world could not be so cruel and still call itself finished.
Weeks blurred into months.
This was not a single spell rewound and replayed. Hermione understood that instinctively. Time was not a ribbon to be tugged backward. It was structure. Engineering. Arithmetic and star charts and layered sigils, all bound together in a system the world pretended was immutable because no one alive had dared to challenge it properly.
She began by dismantling what was known.
The Ministry’s old time-turners, those delicate, cruel little devices that had moved minutes and hours, were complex but finite. Hermione traced their gears, mapped the enchantments layered over brass and bone. She diagrammed where torsion collected, where heat leaked, where echoes formed if a moment was stressed too hard.
Then she pushed past them.
Hours became days. Days stretched into years.
She discovered three truths about time, each one learned the hard way.
Imprecision destroyed everything. The smallest wobble in a weave created echoes or glitches that rippled outward, compounding until the strain tore holes in the fabric of reality.
Power demanded a backbone. Tiny devices could siphon a single hour; to hold years required stabilizers… something that could anchor temporal flow without burning it to ash.
And time resented theft. It recoiled from shortcuts. Anything taken had to be paid for, somewhere else, somehow.
So Hermione built toward stability.
She sketched the Temporal Weave, a lattice of runes designed to distribute strain instead of concentrating it. She spent nights in the Departmental archives, slipping between stacks to copy marginalia no one had read in a century. She broke and recast binding charms until the smoke alarms in two neighboring flats shrieked alarms she slept through, curled on the floor with chalk still in her fingers.
She bargained with a goblin-smith in a closed-for-business alley for a sliver of chronosteel and iron tempered with moonstone that refused to forget. She paid him in labor and a promise she did not name. She summoned a phoenix feather under permissions so strict they bordered on absurd, and talked herself through the moral calculus until the ink blurred on the page.
She learned how to hold a time-thread between two fingers.
It felt alive. Fragile. Furious.
She failed spectacularly.
One midnight, she tested a crude prototype. The glass spindle glowed, then screamed, exploding into sparks that scorched her curtains and filled the flat with smoke. Hermione choked, ears ringing, hands blackened. Ash drifted down over her notes like snow.
For one terrible moment, she did nothing.
She stood there and watched the flames lick higher, a hollow thought whispering through her mind that maybe this was for the best. The realization frightened her more than the fire itself. She moved then, violently, stamping out the flames with shaking hands.
Failure taught precision.
The sketches became plans. The plans became a device.
Each catastrophe narrowed her focus: widen the braid here, lock the sigil with three anti-echo runes instead of two, temper the spindle slowly, evenly, never with a flare. She mapped the danger zones where time wanted to fold, where memory would tear and built safeguards. Wards to hold the edges. Runes to bleed off strain. A small talisman etched with an anchor mark, so the world would remember which version of Hermione was meant to return.
Her flat hummed faintly now, the air prickling as if charged with static. Each breath tasted of ozone.
Ron noticed.
“You haven’t been out in weeks,” he said one night, standing in her doorway with his arms crossed.
Hermione blinked blearily at him from behind a barricade of scrolls. She hadn’t heard him knock.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You’re not.”
She turned back to her notes.
“You skipped Bill and Fleur’s dinner,” he pressed. “You missed Harry’s birthday.”
“I was working.”
“On what? You’re not even employed!”
Her jaw tightened.
“And speaking of,” Ron continued, voice rising, “are you going to tell me why you’re turning down every job that gets sent your way? The Ministry’s practically throwing itself at your feet.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t look up.
“Bloody hell, Hermione.” Ron threw up his hands. “I thought you were going to get over this.”
“I’ll never be over it,” she hissed, surging to her feet, hair wild around her face. “He died alone, Ron. He gave everything, and no one cared. He saved all of us and they buried him like a dog. Do you understand that?”
“No, I don’t!” Ron shouted back. “Because he was a git! To you, to me, to everyone! And now you're what? Wasting your life on him?”
“I’m not wasting it.” The words scraped out of her throat, thin and raw.
Ron stared at her, red-faced, breath heavy.
Her shoulders shook. “Please. Just go.”
“Hermione”
“I can’t talk to you about this,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
The door shut behind him with a final, echoing thud.
Two years vanished.
Two years of agony and sacrifice. Of sleepless research and quiet desperation. Of falling apart while convincing everyone, including herself, that she was fine.
And then, one night, the prototype clicked into place with a soft, unmistakable snap.
Hermione stared at it, unmoving.
A faint hum radiated from the device, rhythmic and warm, almost like a heartbeat.
Her hands trembled.
It was done.
The time-turner gleamed in the lamplight, larger and far more complex than the one she had carried as a girl. This one could be controlled down to the second. This one was built not for minutes or hours, but for years. But it could only go backwards. That was the price.
One twist, and she could fracture the spine of time.
She cradled it in her hands. Her heart pounded. Her throat closed.
After everything she had lostafter everything she had givenhere it was.
The next morning, Hermione cleaned her flat.
She dusted every book. Folded every blanket. Brewed one last pot of tea. For the first time in months, the shadows beneath her eyes had faded. The decision had already been made; she simply hadn’t admitted it yet.
She wore a dress.
Not heavy wool, but something airy and blue.
When Ron knocked, she greeted him with a smile.
He blinked, startled. “You look…”
“Better?” she offered.
He nodded slowly. “Yeah. Loads better.”
She busied herself with the tea. Everything felt normal. Too normal.
“I think we should end things,” Hermione said gently.
Ron froze. “What?”
“I care about you,” she said, folding her hands in her lap. “But we both know this hasn’t been working. Not for a while.”
“It's him, isn't it? Even now. It's him.”
“Yes.” She held his gaze, steady and kind. “And no. That night changed everything, but it isn’t really about him. It’s about us. You can’t understand what it did to me and because of that, we’re not on the same path anymore. I’m lost in something you can’t reach. And I can’t pretend otherwise. It’s not fair to you. I want you to live, even if I can’t.”
His face crumpled, anger flaring sharp to hide the hurt. “So that’s it? After everything? Two bloody years I’ve been here trying, waiting, hoping you’d come back to me. And you’ve been gone the whole time.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“You don’t!” He dragged a hand through his hair. “You shut yourself away with books and ghosts, and I kept telling myself it was just grief. That it would pass. But it never did, did it? You chose a dead man over me. Over us.”
She flinched, but didn’t deny it.
Silence fell, heavy as stone.
Finally, Ron shook his head, voice breaking. “Merlin, I don’t even know who you are now.”
Hermione reached for his hand, squeezed it gently. “Neither do I.”
He didn’t pull away, but he didn’t return the pressure either. His eyes were wet, furious and wounded all at once.
She rose and pressed a trembling kiss to his cheek. “Goodbye, Ron.”
The next day, she caught sight of Harry in Diagon Alley.
“Oi! Granger!” he called, waving her over with that easy grin. “Didn’t think I’d see you out in daylight again.”
She smiled, but it felt strange on her face. “I just needed a change of scenery.”
He looked her up and down, frowning. “You’re acting… different. Off.”
“Ron and I ended things.”
Harry’s brow furrowed. “What? When?”
“Last night.” Her voice stayed calm. “It was time. I still care about him. I hope we can stay friends.”
He studied her like a puzzle he couldn’t quite solve. “Are you alright?”
“I will be,” she said. It was true.
They walked together for a bit, talking about Ginny and Quidditch, about nothing that mattered and everything that did. It felt ordinary, and the ordinariness hurt.
At the corner, Hermione stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Let’s meet up. Three days from now. October seventeenth. The Three Broomsticks. Bring Ron, if he’ll come.”
“You want to go out for butterbeer?” Harry tilted his head. “That’s odd somehow. Why do I feel like you’re saying goodbye instead of making plans?”
She laughed softly. “Don’t be daft, Harry. It’s just butterbeer.”
He held her gaze for a long moment, then sighed. “Alright. I’ll be there. I’ll drag Ron if I have to.”
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Harry clapped her shoulder and headed off. Hermione watched him disappear into the crowd, the weight of the promise burning in her chest.
A thread.
A tether.
The place she would return to if she succeeded.
That night, Hermione packed a single bag.
No robes. No holsters. No books beyond what she needed.
She left her flat spotless.
And when the clock struck midnight
She twisted the device.
The world unraveled.
And Hermione vanished.