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lomonaaerenTitle: The Stars Our Measure
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Ron/Hermione
Content Notes: Time travel, ignores the epilogue, Dark characters, murder, gore, torture, violence, angst, minor character deaths, past major character death, animal sacrifice
Rating: R
Wordcount: 3600
Summary: Harry died at Voldemort’s hands. Ron and Hermione go back in time with a shared mission: protect Harry at any and all costs. And when it turns out that Harry is showing some signs of recovering his own memories, Ron and Hermione commit, as well, to protecting what’s blossoming between them.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” series, one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. Thundramon requested Dark Ron and Hermione, time travel to save Harry, and Harry getting back his own memories of the previous timeline. Note that this story is fairly Dark and that the rating is mostly for violence. Also, it grew much longer than expected, so it’s going to be probably three parts, to be posted over the next few days.
The Stars Our Measure
“You’re ready.”
Hermione didn’t need to speak the words, although she felt good as she did speak them. She could tell that Ron was ready. The vibration singing between their souls had attuned them to each other until it was hard to even think apart.
Ron nodded and eased back on his heels, hands spread over his side of the ritual circle. They’d traced it with salt and sand and tears and blood on the grass in the clearing where Harry had died from Voldemort’s Killing Curse. “Ready.”
Hermione nodded and closed her eyes. The intent was rising within her, circling around her soul like an eddy of a whirlpool.
She extended her hand and snapped her fingers, once, twice.
The magic and the intent and the will soared out of her fingers and draped over the clutch of phoenix eggs on the ground in front of her, glittering like the most incredible jewels. Hermione heard the small cries as immortal lives were cut short by her sacrifice of them.
No ordinary human or animal sacrifice would suffice to allow someone to time travel, or many more people would have managed it without Time-Turners. Instead, it had to be a creature like a phoenix or a unicorn.
But Hermione and Ron didn’t want cursed lives, so a phoenix it was.
Hermione opened her eyes and saw the spinning torrent of gold and crimson in front of her. It wanted to lash out at her. She knew that much. Her mouth firmed into a hard line, and she stared as she watched the magic writhe and drift slowly away from her, captured within the circle. Ron’s hand was splayed firmly on the ground, fingers digging in.
It didn’t look like much. But it taken all their research to discover how they could travel in time and how to build this circle, and it was taking all of Ron’s will to hold the phoenix magic in place now.
Hermione drew a small, sharp dagger from her side. Ron sagged back, gasping, as the golden power of the sacrificed eggs settled fully within the circle. He glanced at her and nodded.
Then he drew his own dagger.
Hermione held his eyes across the circle, smiling. She knew her smile was hard, but so was his. They hadn’t been able to smile any other way in the two years since Harry had died.
We are going to get him back.
She and Ron nodded to each other and counted slow heartbeats. The world around them was moving slowly, in fact, thundering and shuddering. Hermione lifted the dagger, and Ron did the same thing.
They plunged them into their hearts at the same time, smooth, precise movements they’d practiced on other victims again and again.
Hermione sagged forwards, she saw her blood spilling, and she focused, forced, her insistent desire down it.
Bring me to Harry Potter.
*
The troll was a distraction. But that meant that other people than Quirrell could use it as a distraction, too, while everyone else was running around and screaming and waving their arms.
Ron and Hermione separated without having to discuss it. Ron stayed close at Harry’s side and made sure that their best friend went back to Gryffindor Tower without delay or any side trips. Hermione, who had still pretended to have a fight with Ron earlier that day, had slipped away to Quirrell’s rooms.
Of course, Harry being Harry, he noticed that Hermione was missing, worried about the troll, and wanted to go find her,
“But she doesn’t know about the troll, Ron! She could be in danger!”
Ron stood on a staircase blocking Harry’s way past him, his arms spread out like that was all he was capable of doing. Of course, he could have cast spells, a lot stronger ones than a first-year could manage, but revealing that so early in the game would have been a mistake. Hermione was convinced that Harry’s memories would start returning if they’d done everything right, but they hadn’t known how to answer Harry’s inevitable questions until then.
“I promise she’s not, Harry. I promise.”
Harry stopped and stared at Ron with wide eyes. Ron stared earnestly back. He saw something shift and heave in the back of Harry’s gaze, something deep and complicated.
“You swear?”
Harry’s voice had an undertone to it that made Ron shiver, but he immediately nodded. “I swear.”
Harry leaned back and studied him. Ron made sure to keep his face as open and earnest as possible. Instinct, memory, love, they all told him that nothing else would work with Harry right now.
“Why isn’t she in danger?”
Ron smiled and took a gamble, the way Hermione was always telling him not to do. “Because she knows what she’s doing.”
“She’s not anywhere near the troll, is she?”
Harry had lowered his voice, so Ron did the same thing, shaking his head. “No, she’s not. I promise.”
A small smile played around Harry’s lips for a second, and then he inclined his head. “Okay. Let’s go back to the Tower.”
(Hermione did scold Ron for taking the risk of almost revealing things to Harry when she came back to the Tower, but she also hugged him. Ron hugged her back and thought longingly of the day that the hug would feel right, when it was all three of them in the embrace. They were all three friends right now—Ron and Hermione had made sure of that on the train—but not close enough that Harry would just let them hug him outright like that.
And when Quirrell sickened and died of the environmental contact poison Hermione had left in his room over the next few weeks, Harry gave them thoughtful glances but didn’t say anything).
*
Harry wasn’t stupid.
He had always felt different. He had assumed the source of that difference was his magic. But since he had met Ron and Hermione on the train, it seemed to be something else, a shifting, whispering difference that had settled deeply into the back of his head.
He’d been a little frightened by it at first. But then Ron had spoken to him on the stairs last year about Hermione knowing what she was doing, and Harry had felt the rightness of that, even though at the time he hadn’t known Hermione all that well.
He hadn’t been that upset when Quirrell died, either, although he’d reckoned Hermione had something to do with it. It was just—right.
So when he heard the door of the room Hermione shared with Ginny open late at night, Harry followed her down the stairs without hesitation. All three of them were staying at the Burrow for the summer. The Dursleys had given permission. Harry didn’t know why, but he had the feeling it had to do with the word Hermione had whispered at Uncle Vernon at the train station, the end of their first year. Something that sound like, “Imperio.”
Harry sneaked down the stairs and peered around the corner into the kitchen.
Hermione was standing in the middle of a complicated silver triangle. It was made of light and came up from the floor to surround her. Harry blinked. On the floor in front of her was a little black book.
“Hermione? What are you doing?”
Hermione glanced up at him with a smile. She didn’t look afraid or ashamed at having been caught, or embarrassed. That was right, too, Harry thought. It was right that she welcome him into this and not feel upset that he’d seen her. She would have raised wards against anyone else in the Burrow to make sure they didn’t catch her, but not Ron and not him.
Harry paused. How did he know that?
Well, he didn’t know. But he did.
“I’m getting rid of something Dark,” Hermione said quietly. “I felt it the moment Mr. Malfoy slipped it into Ginny’s cauldron today. You remember? He dropped that old book in? He slipped this in with it.”
“Why?”
“The Malfoys hate the Weasleys, Harry. Mr. Malfoy gave Ginny something that could destroy her just because he could, because he hates her for being Mr. Weasley’s daughter.”
“Wow,” Harry said, not thinking of the words before he said them. “He’s a dick.”
Hermione laughed aloud, a carefree sound that Harry had never heard her make. He stared at her, enthralled, and suddenly sure that he had heard her laugh like that, just not before, but before.
That made no sense. But Harry was willing to embrace it.
“He really is,” Hermione agreed. “Do you want to watch me destroy it? You have to stay on the other side of this triangle so it doesn’t hurt you—I have to contain the spell—but you can watch me.”
“Does it have to do with Voldemort?”
Hermione nodded at once, her eyes dark. “He left—well, I can’t tell you how I know everything, but he left pieces of his soul lying around in some objects. They can possess people and help resurrect him.” She paused. “You believe me.”
“Well, yeah.”
“Even though I can’t tell you how I know.”
“Well, yeah.”
“Why?”
“You’re Hermione.”
Hermione blinked hard, several times. Then her eyes seemed to water, and she turned her head away. “And you’re Harry,” she whispered, as if she was reminding herself of something she had forgotten.
Harry smiled back at her, hearing echoes of the words down corridors that weren’t the ones at the Burrow. He thought they might be Hogwarts. He thought maybe they were Hermione’s house, where he’d never been.
He thought he might not care, as long as he got to be with Hermione and Ron.
Harry watched as the scorching-bright fire Hermione called consumed the book on the floor. His eyes were dry when he returned to Ron’s room, and when Ron rolled over and nodded solemnly to him, Harry nodded back.
*
Hermione was a little startled to see Professor Dumbledore standing by her table in the library when she emerged from the shelves with tottering stacks of books in her arms, but she had known that it was something that could happen. She set the books neatly down on the table she’d been using and nodded to him. “Hello, sir. Is there something I can help you with?”
Dumbledore looked at her long and searchingly. Hermione just smiled back. She had perfected Occlumency in the tense, driven, dark two years before she and Ron had enacted their ritual, and she knew better than to look him in the eye anyway. She ducked her head and pretended it was shy awe before the Headmaster.
“I can’t help noticing, Miss Granger, that you study rather…esoteric subjects.” Dumbledore nodded to the books she already had on the table as well as some of the ones she’d been carrying. Hermione was using some of them as camouflage, but there were plenty that were about high-level spells and magical theory.
The theory helped more than the curses that Ron had thought they should study, at first.
“I like studying, sir.” Hermione hesitated. “Can I tell you a secret, Headmaster?”
“Of course,” Dumbledore encouraged, leaning forwards. His eyes twinkled a little. “I like to think that all of my students can confide in me.”
Yeah, right. But Hermione’s thoughts were gentle. Dumbledore wasn’t an evil man. He had fought Voldemort to a standstill in the first war often, when so few people would stand with him.
But he wasn’t Harry or Ron, and that meant he automatically didn’t matter to Hermione.
“I think that my classes are boring,” Hermione whispered, and then glanced around anxiously, as if thinking that Professor McGonagall was going to walk up to her and stare at her in offense. “I’m sorry! I don’t mean to act like I think I’m smarter than everyone else! But they move so slowly…”
“So you’re doing some extra studying to keep your brain occupied?” Dumbledore twinkled at her.
Hermione ducked her head in pretended gratitude. “Yes, sir. Exactly.”
“Well, that’s fine, my dear. I want you to feel that you can come to me and your other professors for book recommendations, of course. And always remember that there are some tomes that are not only above your level but actively dangerous.”
“Oh, yes, sir! Like the ones in the Restricted Section?”
“Yes.” Dumbledore wagged a finger at her. “You know that none of my professors will give a second-year student a pass for the Restricted Section, I think, young lady?”
Then you don’t know Gilderoy Lockhart very well, Hermione thought, but she nodded and made herself blush. “Oh, of course they shouldn’t, sir. I do hope to study those books when I’m older, but I wouldn’t ask you or Professor McGonagall or anyone like that for one right now!”
There. The kind of carefully-worded truth that would slip right past the skill of a Legilimens to detect lies.
Dumbledore nodded and smiled at her. “Then I am glad to give you some book recommendations if you want them, Miss Granger.”
Hermione seized a piece of parchment and a quill with real enthusiasm. She hadn’t had any chance to study under Professor Dumbledore in the future that didn’t exist anymore, so this would be a treat.
“I’m ready, sir.”
*
“You’re different.”
Ron looked up, blinking. Ginny stood in front of him with her hands on her hips and a frown on her face. It seemed an odd expression to him, until he remembered that he had last seen it during the summer—the first summer—before his second year in the other timeline. After the diary, she hadn’t frowned like that anymore.
It gave him a stab of vicious satisfaction that they had destroyed the diary—for Harry’s sake, of course, but also for Ginny’s.
“Yeah, Gin.” Ron set aside the book he’d been reading, which was only a book of chess strategies if you judged it by its cover, and leaned forwards. “There was a death that happened in the school last year. Did the twins tell you about it? Or Percy?”
Ginny sat down opposite him. “The Defense professor then. Squirrel something?”
“Quirrell.” Ron smothered a smile at the way she’d pronounced it. His little sister wouldn’t appreciate being made fun of. “Yeah. He died, and they never found out why, and—I’d seen him in class every week. He ate breakfast at the professors’ table and fussed over his eggs. He wore this ridiculous turban…” He took a deep breath. “It was just a shock, you know? Understanding that he was dead.”
At Hermione’s insistence, Ron always spoke the kind of statements that would pass as truth to a Legilimens when he was in a conversation with someone else, even though Ginny was very much not a Legilimens. But it was true, in a way. It was just true from the other timeline.
And that was something he’d never told Harry. He’d only told Hermione when they were working on the ritual to come back.
“Oh.” Ginny’s eyes widened, and were shiny for a second. “I’m sorry, Ron. I didn’t know about that.”
“Hey, it’s okay, Gin. It’s not like I wrote to you about it, either.” Ron reached out to pat her arm.
Ginny abruptly flung herself at him and hugged him. Ron froze for a second, and hugged her back.
He sighed as he watched Ginny dart off back to the group of Gryffindor first-year girls she spent all her time with. She was making friends, now, in a way that hadn’t been possible for her the first time around.
Ron had come back for Hermione and Harry and he would have sacrificed Ginny on an altar for them in a heartbeat. But since he didn’t have to, he was glad that the world they had created would be kinder to her.
*
“Potty!”
Harry turned around with a sigh. Honestly, he was on his way to meet Ron and Hermione in one of the second-floor bathrooms that they’d turned into an illicit brewing station because a ghost haunted it and no one else would come in there. And there was something else significant about it, something Ron and Hermione had hinted at with sharp glances and sharper smiles when Harry asked them.
They wanted him to figure it out. Harry didn’t mind doing that. He was figuring lots of things out, it seemed. His brain sprouted new memories every day.
“Potty!”
Malfoy was standing right in front of him, something that made Harry almost draw his wand. He hadn’t even seen Malfoy come close. Ron was working with him on his strategy and situational awareness. He would be disappointed that Harry hadn’t reacted before this.
Upset at the thought of disappointing Ron, Harry snapped harder than he’d meant to, “What do you want, Malfoy?”
“There you are.”
Harry stared. Even for Malfoy, that made no sense. “What are you going on about?”
Malfoy took a step back and nodded to him. “You’ve been acting as though you don’t even see me or know I exist, lately,” he said, a whine slipping into his voice. Then again, a whine was practically Malfoy’s natural state of being. “I want you to stop paying attention to whatever you were doing and pay attention to me.”
Harry snorted. “Sorry, Malfoy, you just don’t matter that much.”
Malfoy gaped at him, his mouth stretching so wide that Harry almost believed he’d glimpse the git’s tonsils. Then Malfoy stomped his foot and walked away actually shouting, “It’s not fair!”
Harry stared after him. He hadn’t known anyone could be that childish.
Immediately after thinking it, he thought, That’s a little weird. He’s twelve. I’m twelve. There’s lots of people who would only expect childish behavior from us.
But nonetheless, it was different. Harry was a child, sure, in some ways, like the ways that he couldn’t go anywhere without the Dursleys’ permission (unless Hermione was around to cast that spell at them). But he was different in other ways, like the ones that the voice in his head whispered to him about.
And those differences mattered more.
Harry shook his head, then turned and started walking towards the bathroom again, where Ron and Hermione were waiting for him.
*
“You’re absolutely sure that he’s innocent, Hermione?”
“I am.”
And Harry fell silent, apparently trusting them. Well, of course he did. Hermione exchanged a grin with Ron across the top of Harry’s head, and then turned towards the back of the broken-down shop in Knockturn Alley where they’d asked Sirius Black to meet them.
She and Ron had had a long argument about how they ought to contact him. They could have tracked him, but then they would have had to explain how. Likewise with sending him a Patronus. They weren’t thirteen, but they looked that way, and Hermione was deeply invested in making sure that none of the adults around them realized the truth until she, Harry, and Ron were absolutely sure they could trust them.
She hoped Sirius would become one they could trust. But the fact that they weren’t sure—plus the fact that they had come back to their eleven-year-old bodies—meant they hadn’t tried to contact him or get him out of Azkaban before he broke out.
Ron had made sure to force-feed “Scabbers” the Draught of Living Death their first day back, though, and had kept him in a coma with regular doses since. No need to be around that stupid rat who could notice something far more than an animal would and run off to report it all to Voldemort.
In the end, they’d just sent an owl to Sirius, and hoped for the best.
Heavy, padding footsteps came close to the corner. Harry tensed. Ron and Hermione exchanged glances and drew their wands. They hoped it was Sirius, but in Knockturn Alley, it could be lots of other things, too.
Just as Sirius came trotting around the corner in dog form, Harry stepped forwards and whispered, “Paddy?”
Ron started. Hermione gave him a small smile. It went with their cover story, which was that Harry had distorted infant memories of Pettigrew being at the Godric’s Hollow cottage the night his parents had died. If Sirius thought Harry remembered him from this lifetime, well, that was all right.
In reality, it was just another sign that his memories were coming back, that he was their Harry. Hermione sighed in contentment, and smiled at Sirius, too, as the dog sat down and stared at Harry with his tongue lolling out.
“You can transform, Mr. Black,” Hermione said.
The dog leaped, and came down looking as if he was ready to run away. But Harry stepped forwards with one hand out like you would with a strange dog to get it to sniff you, and said softly, “Please don’t go, Padfoot.”
They hadn’t told him that name. Hermione closed her eyes briefly.
She didn’t watch for the next minute or so as Sirius transformed and made a cautious overture to Harry, who responded by flinging himself at Sirius and hugging him while sobbing like his heart would break. She and Ron had once vowed to keep Harry from ever sounding like that again. But, well, this time it was for a good cause.
And when Sirius began asking questions, Harry could earnestly answer them, and at least Hermione was pretty sure Sirius was no Legilimens.
Ron moved towards her and leaned against her briefly. Hermione leaned back.
I promise, Harry. Things are only going to get better from here.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Ron/Hermione
Content Notes: Time travel, ignores the epilogue, Dark characters, murder, gore, torture, violence, angst, minor character deaths, past major character death, animal sacrifice
Rating: R
Wordcount: 3600
Summary: Harry died at Voldemort’s hands. Ron and Hermione go back in time with a shared mission: protect Harry at any and all costs. And when it turns out that Harry is showing some signs of recovering his own memories, Ron and Hermione commit, as well, to protecting what’s blossoming between them.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Stormy Season” series, one-shots being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. Thundramon requested Dark Ron and Hermione, time travel to save Harry, and Harry getting back his own memories of the previous timeline. Note that this story is fairly Dark and that the rating is mostly for violence. Also, it grew much longer than expected, so it’s going to be probably three parts, to be posted over the next few days.
The Stars Our Measure
“You’re ready.”
Hermione didn’t need to speak the words, although she felt good as she did speak them. She could tell that Ron was ready. The vibration singing between their souls had attuned them to each other until it was hard to even think apart.
Ron nodded and eased back on his heels, hands spread over his side of the ritual circle. They’d traced it with salt and sand and tears and blood on the grass in the clearing where Harry had died from Voldemort’s Killing Curse. “Ready.”
Hermione nodded and closed her eyes. The intent was rising within her, circling around her soul like an eddy of a whirlpool.
She extended her hand and snapped her fingers, once, twice.
The magic and the intent and the will soared out of her fingers and draped over the clutch of phoenix eggs on the ground in front of her, glittering like the most incredible jewels. Hermione heard the small cries as immortal lives were cut short by her sacrifice of them.
No ordinary human or animal sacrifice would suffice to allow someone to time travel, or many more people would have managed it without Time-Turners. Instead, it had to be a creature like a phoenix or a unicorn.
But Hermione and Ron didn’t want cursed lives, so a phoenix it was.
Hermione opened her eyes and saw the spinning torrent of gold and crimson in front of her. It wanted to lash out at her. She knew that much. Her mouth firmed into a hard line, and she stared as she watched the magic writhe and drift slowly away from her, captured within the circle. Ron’s hand was splayed firmly on the ground, fingers digging in.
It didn’t look like much. But it taken all their research to discover how they could travel in time and how to build this circle, and it was taking all of Ron’s will to hold the phoenix magic in place now.
Hermione drew a small, sharp dagger from her side. Ron sagged back, gasping, as the golden power of the sacrificed eggs settled fully within the circle. He glanced at her and nodded.
Then he drew his own dagger.
Hermione held his eyes across the circle, smiling. She knew her smile was hard, but so was his. They hadn’t been able to smile any other way in the two years since Harry had died.
We are going to get him back.
She and Ron nodded to each other and counted slow heartbeats. The world around them was moving slowly, in fact, thundering and shuddering. Hermione lifted the dagger, and Ron did the same thing.
They plunged them into their hearts at the same time, smooth, precise movements they’d practiced on other victims again and again.
Hermione sagged forwards, she saw her blood spilling, and she focused, forced, her insistent desire down it.
Bring me to Harry Potter.
*
The troll was a distraction. But that meant that other people than Quirrell could use it as a distraction, too, while everyone else was running around and screaming and waving their arms.
Ron and Hermione separated without having to discuss it. Ron stayed close at Harry’s side and made sure that their best friend went back to Gryffindor Tower without delay or any side trips. Hermione, who had still pretended to have a fight with Ron earlier that day, had slipped away to Quirrell’s rooms.
Of course, Harry being Harry, he noticed that Hermione was missing, worried about the troll, and wanted to go find her,
“But she doesn’t know about the troll, Ron! She could be in danger!”
Ron stood on a staircase blocking Harry’s way past him, his arms spread out like that was all he was capable of doing. Of course, he could have cast spells, a lot stronger ones than a first-year could manage, but revealing that so early in the game would have been a mistake. Hermione was convinced that Harry’s memories would start returning if they’d done everything right, but they hadn’t known how to answer Harry’s inevitable questions until then.
“I promise she’s not, Harry. I promise.”
Harry stopped and stared at Ron with wide eyes. Ron stared earnestly back. He saw something shift and heave in the back of Harry’s gaze, something deep and complicated.
“You swear?”
Harry’s voice had an undertone to it that made Ron shiver, but he immediately nodded. “I swear.”
Harry leaned back and studied him. Ron made sure to keep his face as open and earnest as possible. Instinct, memory, love, they all told him that nothing else would work with Harry right now.
“Why isn’t she in danger?”
Ron smiled and took a gamble, the way Hermione was always telling him not to do. “Because she knows what she’s doing.”
“She’s not anywhere near the troll, is she?”
Harry had lowered his voice, so Ron did the same thing, shaking his head. “No, she’s not. I promise.”
A small smile played around Harry’s lips for a second, and then he inclined his head. “Okay. Let’s go back to the Tower.”
(Hermione did scold Ron for taking the risk of almost revealing things to Harry when she came back to the Tower, but she also hugged him. Ron hugged her back and thought longingly of the day that the hug would feel right, when it was all three of them in the embrace. They were all three friends right now—Ron and Hermione had made sure of that on the train—but not close enough that Harry would just let them hug him outright like that.
And when Quirrell sickened and died of the environmental contact poison Hermione had left in his room over the next few weeks, Harry gave them thoughtful glances but didn’t say anything).
*
Harry wasn’t stupid.
He had always felt different. He had assumed the source of that difference was his magic. But since he had met Ron and Hermione on the train, it seemed to be something else, a shifting, whispering difference that had settled deeply into the back of his head.
He’d been a little frightened by it at first. But then Ron had spoken to him on the stairs last year about Hermione knowing what she was doing, and Harry had felt the rightness of that, even though at the time he hadn’t known Hermione all that well.
He hadn’t been that upset when Quirrell died, either, although he’d reckoned Hermione had something to do with it. It was just—right.
So when he heard the door of the room Hermione shared with Ginny open late at night, Harry followed her down the stairs without hesitation. All three of them were staying at the Burrow for the summer. The Dursleys had given permission. Harry didn’t know why, but he had the feeling it had to do with the word Hermione had whispered at Uncle Vernon at the train station, the end of their first year. Something that sound like, “Imperio.”
Harry sneaked down the stairs and peered around the corner into the kitchen.
Hermione was standing in the middle of a complicated silver triangle. It was made of light and came up from the floor to surround her. Harry blinked. On the floor in front of her was a little black book.
“Hermione? What are you doing?”
Hermione glanced up at him with a smile. She didn’t look afraid or ashamed at having been caught, or embarrassed. That was right, too, Harry thought. It was right that she welcome him into this and not feel upset that he’d seen her. She would have raised wards against anyone else in the Burrow to make sure they didn’t catch her, but not Ron and not him.
Harry paused. How did he know that?
Well, he didn’t know. But he did.
“I’m getting rid of something Dark,” Hermione said quietly. “I felt it the moment Mr. Malfoy slipped it into Ginny’s cauldron today. You remember? He dropped that old book in? He slipped this in with it.”
“Why?”
“The Malfoys hate the Weasleys, Harry. Mr. Malfoy gave Ginny something that could destroy her just because he could, because he hates her for being Mr. Weasley’s daughter.”
“Wow,” Harry said, not thinking of the words before he said them. “He’s a dick.”
Hermione laughed aloud, a carefree sound that Harry had never heard her make. He stared at her, enthralled, and suddenly sure that he had heard her laugh like that, just not before, but before.
That made no sense. But Harry was willing to embrace it.
“He really is,” Hermione agreed. “Do you want to watch me destroy it? You have to stay on the other side of this triangle so it doesn’t hurt you—I have to contain the spell—but you can watch me.”
“Does it have to do with Voldemort?”
Hermione nodded at once, her eyes dark. “He left—well, I can’t tell you how I know everything, but he left pieces of his soul lying around in some objects. They can possess people and help resurrect him.” She paused. “You believe me.”
“Well, yeah.”
“Even though I can’t tell you how I know.”
“Well, yeah.”
“Why?”
“You’re Hermione.”
Hermione blinked hard, several times. Then her eyes seemed to water, and she turned her head away. “And you’re Harry,” she whispered, as if she was reminding herself of something she had forgotten.
Harry smiled back at her, hearing echoes of the words down corridors that weren’t the ones at the Burrow. He thought they might be Hogwarts. He thought maybe they were Hermione’s house, where he’d never been.
He thought he might not care, as long as he got to be with Hermione and Ron.
Harry watched as the scorching-bright fire Hermione called consumed the book on the floor. His eyes were dry when he returned to Ron’s room, and when Ron rolled over and nodded solemnly to him, Harry nodded back.
*
Hermione was a little startled to see Professor Dumbledore standing by her table in the library when she emerged from the shelves with tottering stacks of books in her arms, but she had known that it was something that could happen. She set the books neatly down on the table she’d been using and nodded to him. “Hello, sir. Is there something I can help you with?”
Dumbledore looked at her long and searchingly. Hermione just smiled back. She had perfected Occlumency in the tense, driven, dark two years before she and Ron had enacted their ritual, and she knew better than to look him in the eye anyway. She ducked her head and pretended it was shy awe before the Headmaster.
“I can’t help noticing, Miss Granger, that you study rather…esoteric subjects.” Dumbledore nodded to the books she already had on the table as well as some of the ones she’d been carrying. Hermione was using some of them as camouflage, but there were plenty that were about high-level spells and magical theory.
The theory helped more than the curses that Ron had thought they should study, at first.
“I like studying, sir.” Hermione hesitated. “Can I tell you a secret, Headmaster?”
“Of course,” Dumbledore encouraged, leaning forwards. His eyes twinkled a little. “I like to think that all of my students can confide in me.”
Yeah, right. But Hermione’s thoughts were gentle. Dumbledore wasn’t an evil man. He had fought Voldemort to a standstill in the first war often, when so few people would stand with him.
But he wasn’t Harry or Ron, and that meant he automatically didn’t matter to Hermione.
“I think that my classes are boring,” Hermione whispered, and then glanced around anxiously, as if thinking that Professor McGonagall was going to walk up to her and stare at her in offense. “I’m sorry! I don’t mean to act like I think I’m smarter than everyone else! But they move so slowly…”
“So you’re doing some extra studying to keep your brain occupied?” Dumbledore twinkled at her.
Hermione ducked her head in pretended gratitude. “Yes, sir. Exactly.”
“Well, that’s fine, my dear. I want you to feel that you can come to me and your other professors for book recommendations, of course. And always remember that there are some tomes that are not only above your level but actively dangerous.”
“Oh, yes, sir! Like the ones in the Restricted Section?”
“Yes.” Dumbledore wagged a finger at her. “You know that none of my professors will give a second-year student a pass for the Restricted Section, I think, young lady?”
Then you don’t know Gilderoy Lockhart very well, Hermione thought, but she nodded and made herself blush. “Oh, of course they shouldn’t, sir. I do hope to study those books when I’m older, but I wouldn’t ask you or Professor McGonagall or anyone like that for one right now!”
There. The kind of carefully-worded truth that would slip right past the skill of a Legilimens to detect lies.
Dumbledore nodded and smiled at her. “Then I am glad to give you some book recommendations if you want them, Miss Granger.”
Hermione seized a piece of parchment and a quill with real enthusiasm. She hadn’t had any chance to study under Professor Dumbledore in the future that didn’t exist anymore, so this would be a treat.
“I’m ready, sir.”
*
“You’re different.”
Ron looked up, blinking. Ginny stood in front of him with her hands on her hips and a frown on her face. It seemed an odd expression to him, until he remembered that he had last seen it during the summer—the first summer—before his second year in the other timeline. After the diary, she hadn’t frowned like that anymore.
It gave him a stab of vicious satisfaction that they had destroyed the diary—for Harry’s sake, of course, but also for Ginny’s.
“Yeah, Gin.” Ron set aside the book he’d been reading, which was only a book of chess strategies if you judged it by its cover, and leaned forwards. “There was a death that happened in the school last year. Did the twins tell you about it? Or Percy?”
Ginny sat down opposite him. “The Defense professor then. Squirrel something?”
“Quirrell.” Ron smothered a smile at the way she’d pronounced it. His little sister wouldn’t appreciate being made fun of. “Yeah. He died, and they never found out why, and—I’d seen him in class every week. He ate breakfast at the professors’ table and fussed over his eggs. He wore this ridiculous turban…” He took a deep breath. “It was just a shock, you know? Understanding that he was dead.”
At Hermione’s insistence, Ron always spoke the kind of statements that would pass as truth to a Legilimens when he was in a conversation with someone else, even though Ginny was very much not a Legilimens. But it was true, in a way. It was just true from the other timeline.
And that was something he’d never told Harry. He’d only told Hermione when they were working on the ritual to come back.
“Oh.” Ginny’s eyes widened, and were shiny for a second. “I’m sorry, Ron. I didn’t know about that.”
“Hey, it’s okay, Gin. It’s not like I wrote to you about it, either.” Ron reached out to pat her arm.
Ginny abruptly flung herself at him and hugged him. Ron froze for a second, and hugged her back.
He sighed as he watched Ginny dart off back to the group of Gryffindor first-year girls she spent all her time with. She was making friends, now, in a way that hadn’t been possible for her the first time around.
Ron had come back for Hermione and Harry and he would have sacrificed Ginny on an altar for them in a heartbeat. But since he didn’t have to, he was glad that the world they had created would be kinder to her.
*
“Potty!”
Harry turned around with a sigh. Honestly, he was on his way to meet Ron and Hermione in one of the second-floor bathrooms that they’d turned into an illicit brewing station because a ghost haunted it and no one else would come in there. And there was something else significant about it, something Ron and Hermione had hinted at with sharp glances and sharper smiles when Harry asked them.
They wanted him to figure it out. Harry didn’t mind doing that. He was figuring lots of things out, it seemed. His brain sprouted new memories every day.
“Potty!”
Malfoy was standing right in front of him, something that made Harry almost draw his wand. He hadn’t even seen Malfoy come close. Ron was working with him on his strategy and situational awareness. He would be disappointed that Harry hadn’t reacted before this.
Upset at the thought of disappointing Ron, Harry snapped harder than he’d meant to, “What do you want, Malfoy?”
“There you are.”
Harry stared. Even for Malfoy, that made no sense. “What are you going on about?”
Malfoy took a step back and nodded to him. “You’ve been acting as though you don’t even see me or know I exist, lately,” he said, a whine slipping into his voice. Then again, a whine was practically Malfoy’s natural state of being. “I want you to stop paying attention to whatever you were doing and pay attention to me.”
Harry snorted. “Sorry, Malfoy, you just don’t matter that much.”
Malfoy gaped at him, his mouth stretching so wide that Harry almost believed he’d glimpse the git’s tonsils. Then Malfoy stomped his foot and walked away actually shouting, “It’s not fair!”
Harry stared after him. He hadn’t known anyone could be that childish.
Immediately after thinking it, he thought, That’s a little weird. He’s twelve. I’m twelve. There’s lots of people who would only expect childish behavior from us.
But nonetheless, it was different. Harry was a child, sure, in some ways, like the ways that he couldn’t go anywhere without the Dursleys’ permission (unless Hermione was around to cast that spell at them). But he was different in other ways, like the ones that the voice in his head whispered to him about.
And those differences mattered more.
Harry shook his head, then turned and started walking towards the bathroom again, where Ron and Hermione were waiting for him.
*
“You’re absolutely sure that he’s innocent, Hermione?”
“I am.”
And Harry fell silent, apparently trusting them. Well, of course he did. Hermione exchanged a grin with Ron across the top of Harry’s head, and then turned towards the back of the broken-down shop in Knockturn Alley where they’d asked Sirius Black to meet them.
She and Ron had had a long argument about how they ought to contact him. They could have tracked him, but then they would have had to explain how. Likewise with sending him a Patronus. They weren’t thirteen, but they looked that way, and Hermione was deeply invested in making sure that none of the adults around them realized the truth until she, Harry, and Ron were absolutely sure they could trust them.
She hoped Sirius would become one they could trust. But the fact that they weren’t sure—plus the fact that they had come back to their eleven-year-old bodies—meant they hadn’t tried to contact him or get him out of Azkaban before he broke out.
Ron had made sure to force-feed “Scabbers” the Draught of Living Death their first day back, though, and had kept him in a coma with regular doses since. No need to be around that stupid rat who could notice something far more than an animal would and run off to report it all to Voldemort.
In the end, they’d just sent an owl to Sirius, and hoped for the best.
Heavy, padding footsteps came close to the corner. Harry tensed. Ron and Hermione exchanged glances and drew their wands. They hoped it was Sirius, but in Knockturn Alley, it could be lots of other things, too.
Just as Sirius came trotting around the corner in dog form, Harry stepped forwards and whispered, “Paddy?”
Ron started. Hermione gave him a small smile. It went with their cover story, which was that Harry had distorted infant memories of Pettigrew being at the Godric’s Hollow cottage the night his parents had died. If Sirius thought Harry remembered him from this lifetime, well, that was all right.
In reality, it was just another sign that his memories were coming back, that he was their Harry. Hermione sighed in contentment, and smiled at Sirius, too, as the dog sat down and stared at Harry with his tongue lolling out.
“You can transform, Mr. Black,” Hermione said.
The dog leaped, and came down looking as if he was ready to run away. But Harry stepped forwards with one hand out like you would with a strange dog to get it to sniff you, and said softly, “Please don’t go, Padfoot.”
They hadn’t told him that name. Hermione closed her eyes briefly.
She didn’t watch for the next minute or so as Sirius transformed and made a cautious overture to Harry, who responded by flinging himself at Sirius and hugging him while sobbing like his heart would break. She and Ron had once vowed to keep Harry from ever sounding like that again. But, well, this time it was for a good cause.
And when Sirius began asking questions, Harry could earnestly answer them, and at least Hermione was pretty sure Sirius was no Legilimens.
Ron moved towards her and leaned against her briefly. Hermione leaned back.
I promise, Harry. Things are only going to get better from here.
