Chapter Text
"At any given moment you have the power to say: This is not how the story is going to end." – Christine Mason Miller
Chapter 1
“Ron,” she said for the third (and definitely last) time. “Whatever game you’re playing, it’s not funny any more. In fact, it wasn’t funny the first time.” She was wearing her angry eyebrows, but Ron kept looking at her with that combination of witlessness and exasperation that used to make her refuse to do his laundry for weeks.
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he said. He had his arms crossed, but it was hard to tell whether that was defensiveness or just obstinacy; you never knew with Ron. “Maybe you’ve got me confused with some other bloke whose best friend is called Harry.
Ah. Aggrieved. Her favourite.
It had been just one of too many points of contention between them during six months of endless, tortured dating; Hermione’s eagerness to discuss the bright ideas of other wizards drove Ron crazy, and Ron’s lack of interest, in both the ideas and the brightness therein, left Hermione bereft and furious—an unhappy combination. That one Severus Snape made cameo appearances with growing frequency and enthusiasm on her part did not help her cause in the least, never mind her insistence that Ron ought to just shut up and be grateful.
She and Ron managed to not actually kill each other, but it was a close thing.
Never mind. Severus had known precisely what she had been talking about, as he so often did, and had been furious on her behalf that Harry failed to show for their monthly lunch date. He’d shifted from indignant to broody when her efforts to Floo-call Harry resulted not only in no response, but in a snotty, “No such location” recording from the Floo-witch in charge, accompanied by a suggestion to articulate her directions more clearly in future.
“No such location!” Hermione paced circles around Severus’s lab. “How can the Floo-company lose Harry Potter?”
Severus raised an eyebrow and stirred his potion precisely four times, anti-clockwise.
“I’ve sent my Patronus twice, and nothing. It’s not like him.”
Severus nodded, sprinkled ground mugwort root onto the surface of the potion and stepped back. Hermione frowned. There was no invective. No commentary on the capriciousness of Potters from generation to generation, or that inconsiderate is as inconsiderate does.
There was only silence. Just. Silence.
The vague unease in her gut turned into a knot.
Fuck.
“What is it?” she asked.
“What is what?”
He didn’t meet her eyes. Double fuck.
The knot in her stomach rose to her chest.
“You’re keeping something from me,” she said. “Severus, what is it?”
He turned on his heel and walked out of the lab into the sitting room just beyond, Hermione right behind him. She sat on the sofa and waited while he rearranged the papers on his desk and scowled at the owl post he’d neglected to send out that morning. In years past, she would have hounded him, but a decade of friendship, first wary, then warm, taught her that where Severus was concerned, patience yielded far more fruit than shouting at the tree.
She could barely hear him when he finally spoke.
“I can’t reach Draco.”
Hermione let out the breath she’d been holding.
“Draco’s gone, too?”
He nodded. “It would appear so. It’s Lucius’s birthday next week, and I sent an owl to arrange dinner plans. He’s always been easy enough to contact. When the owl returned with my message still attached, I Flooed him. I received the same response you did when you tried to fire-call Potter.”
“How does the Floo-company lose two—”
“Hermione.” Severus’s voice was sharp and it cut through the head of steam she was well on her way to building up. “I checked in at the Ministry and then at Hogwarts. Nobody had any idea whom I was talking about. In fact, nobody could repeat back either name when I said it.”
“You mean, nobody at the Ministry or Hogwarts knows who Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy are?”
“That’s precisely what I mean.”
“That’s impossible.”
Severus laughed. “From your mouth to—” He gestured vaguely upward.
“As if you believe in a deity,” she scoffed.
“Who says I don’t?” He actually had the nerve to look affronted.
“Oh, come on, Severus. I’d have noticed.”
“Belief? You’d have noticed belief?”
“I’ve never known you to go to church; you thoroughly ignore Christmas and Easter, and you tossed the article I brought you about the ‘God Potion’ into the hearth.”
“Just because I don’t subscribe to organised religion doesn’t mean I don’t believe that there is something… hmm… larger than ourselves out there. Somewhere.” His expression was sour, as if the larger something had failed him over and over again, as well it had.
“So, what are you saying? That Harry and Draco have been swept away by a vengeful God?”
“My word,” he said. “I had no idea that your concept of God was so harsh.”
“Stop it,” she said, and she could barely keep the shout out of her voice. “Aren’t you worried? Both of them gone at once. Doesn’t it matter to you that nobody else has noticed?”
The knot in her chest rose to her throat. Her heart pounded in her head. Severus’s expression was frozen, and she had a momentary flashback of the moment just before he realised Nagini would strike. Pain and confusion and a sort of fierce need warring for dominance.
“Am I worried, Hermione? Does it matter?” His voice actually broke, and she didn’t stop to think—in a moment she was at his side. “You have no idea what is happening here. It’s not simply that we can’t reach them or that we can get nobody to discuss them with us,” he said. “I checked every relevant book. Every record I could access in the wizarding world. There’s nothing. Every last trace of them has been wiped away. It’s as if they never existed at all.”
~~~***~~~
“Have you found us shelter yet, Potter?” the little prince asked again, as if Harry had some singular way of divining the location of the nearest bedsit.
“Shut up, Malfoy,” Harry said, from his position under the tallest tree, just a few yards from a sign warning, ‘Trespassers W’. They’d done a circuit of the area twice already, and a third round was unlikely to reveal anything more than a garden with a hole dug deep into the earth, and a chestnut tree with a door perched just above a high branch. After the sun came up, he reckoned they’d meet the inhabitants, but Harry wasn’t about to knock on doors or peek his head into holes in the ground in the dead of night. Besides, if he was right about where they were, the residents of these particular hidey holes had a proclivity towards the anxious and grumpy, especially when surprised.
“Go to sleep.”
“I’m not sleeping in the dirt, Potter,” Malfoy said, kicking at a mound of soil just beyond the tree. “I’m not a Muggle.”
Harry opened his mouth, then closed it, the pang of disappointment heavy in his chest. He’d managed to largely avoid Malfoy over the years, despite far too many anniversary balls and Ministry meetings. But he’d been given to understand that the other wizard’s views about blood purity had evolved with time.
“Charming,” he muttered. “Suit yourself.”
He shook his head; silly to feel let down. What difference did it make to him how Malfoy viewed Muggles and Muggle-borns these days? Besides, he didn’t even want to know what sleeping on the ground had to do with Muggles. He’d had enough twisty and unlikely scenarios for one day.
Harry settled himself on the softest part of the ground he could find (which wasn’t saying much, to be honest). Even months of camping had come equipped with a cot. Thankfully, he managed to drop off before he could see whether Malfoy decided whether sleep trumped pure-blood protocol.
Morning came none too soon, and was accompanied by the unsettling presence of a distressed pig, a confused bear, and an anxious rabbit standing in a lopsided semi-circle around them. Three animals made of fabric and stuffing, as animated as if they were flesh and blood, stared down at Harry and Malfoy (who had apparently lost the battle for wakefulness and ended up asleep, wedged between a medium-sized tree and a very large rock).
“Good morning,” said Harry, struggling to simultaneously sit up and brush the dirt out of his hair and finding that he didn’t have quite enough hands to manage the manoeuvre.
The pig squeaked and jumped.
“Piglet,” said the bear, “don’t worry. They don’t look dangerous. They look like two very large sized Christopher Robins. Remember, we like Christopher Robin.”
“Perhaps we should call Christopher Robin. The real one, of course,” said the rabbit, hopping here and there, examining the men from all angles. “We’ve never seen such large Robins before.”
“I’m not a bloody robin, I’m a wizard,” snarled Malfoy from behind his rock.
Harry snickered and turned to address the animals.
“We’re quite a bit like Christopher Robin, actually,” he explained.
“Do you know him?” asked Piglet, eagerly. “Is he your friend?”
“You could say so,” said Harry. His only friend for years, actually, he thought. Living in a cupboard under the stairs, he had claimed the dusty Winnie-the-Pooh collection discarded there as his own.
“Owl will know what to do,” said Pooh, already turning towards the very tall tree that Harry had slept beneath.
“Did that furry beast say something about an owl?” asked Malfoy, now sitting on top of the enormous stone and sounding far more awake than a moment ago.
“That ‘furry beast’ is Winnie-the-Pooh, Malfoy, which you would already know if you’d paid a lick of attention during Muggle Studies.”
“I didn’t take Muggle Studies, Potter,” he said. “And a good thing, if it involved—” He waved at the assembled creatures with a moue of disgust.
“Didn’t anybody read stories to you as a child, Malfoy? Oh, never mind. They were too busy teaching you how to curse Muggle-borns.”
Malfoy flinched and Harry felt a pang of regret. It had been many years since the days when Muggle-born witches and wizards had been herded together like animals and carted away. The wizarding world, including (presumably) Draco Malfoy, had come a long way since then.
“Of course my mother read me stories, Potter. Real ones.” He stood up and made a futile attempt to straighten his robes. “Babbity Rabbity and her Cackling Stump, The Fountain of Fair Fortune—”
“Yes, yes,” Harry interrupted. “The Tales of Beedle the Bard. I know them.”
Malfoy raised his eyebrows, and Harry suppressed the urge to punch him. Later. First, they had to figure out how they’d ended up smack in the middle of the Hundred-Acre Wood, wandless.
Ignoring Malfoy for the moment, Harry turned to Rabbit.
“Rabbit,” Harry said, careful not to speak too loudly or move quickly lest he spook him. “Didn’t Pooh suggest we speak with Owl?”
Rabbit nodded gravely, his long ears flopping.
“I think,” said Harry, “that would be a really good idea.”
~~~***~~~
It reminded Hermione of the hours and days after the war, when she and Ron and Harry would sit huddled in a ball of misery, together in an uppermost room of the Burrow, all the unspoken words spooling up between them until someone would spring up and bolt from the room, returning with red eyes and blotchy skin. Then two would make way again for three, small patches of skin touching skin as if to remind them all that their bodies were still warm and blood still thrummed in their veins.
Hermione didn’t remove her hand from Severus’s arm, not even when they made their way to the sofa. That he hadn’t pulled away spoke volumes about his own unspoken need. The disappearance—no—eradication of Harry Potter from the universe was devastating to her. She could only imagine what it meant to Severus, and what Draco’s obliteration might mean to him, as well.
So many things she didn’t know. She shifted in her seat, disquiet tingling on her skin.
“Severus?”
He turned his head and made eye contact.
“Do you have a copy of Hogwarts: A History?”
He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath.
“I do.”
“I was just thinking,” she said, and he laughed, a short bark of humour laced with no small amount of affection.
“You were thinking that we might want to see what the eradication of Harry Potter has done to our history.”
With Severus, she sometimes wasn’t sure why she bothered to speak out loud.
“Yes.”
She glanced at the door and shivered. What would she find on the other side of the threshold? Would she be safe: A Muggle-born witch in this wizarding London? She’d long considered Severus’s home a safe place. Never more so than in this moment.
Severus stood and made his way to the corner bookshelf. He pulled out a large, worn book and opened it.
“No, wait!” Hermione said. “Do it here. Next to me.”
He looked up and tilted his head, quizzical.
“It’s the sort of thing best done… not alone. You know?”
He paused and then nodded, but his hesitation reminded her that the worst events of his life had been endured alone. Survived alone. All but the last, really, but this wasn’t the time to mention that.
Once he’d settled in beside her, she slid even closer as he opened the book.
“The Second War.” He flipped through the pages until he found the spot towards the end where the story of their Hogwarts years and the final battle were told. He skimmed the pages and snorted, handing the book to Hermione. She laid it on her knees and scrambled to find the passage. Severus leaned his head back against the couch and burst out laughing.
“What is it? Severus?” But he was overcome and so she looked down at the first section, where the story of ‘The Boy Who Lived,’ Neville Longbottom, was told. “Neville?”
Severus shook his head until he could catch his breath.
“He is the other boy to whom the prophecy could have referred,” said Severus. He cleared his throat and reached for a glass of water. “And in the absence of Harry James Potter, who else?”
“Neville.” It was rather hard to imagine, despite Neville’s heroic behaviour their seventh year, and at the Battle of Hogwarts. “What about Draco,” she asked. “What changes happen if he never was?” She swallowed hard. “Now that he never was.”
Severus shook his head, abruptly sober. “So many,” he said, and Hermione flinched.
“Is Dumbledore still alive?” she asked. Her thoughts raced, one tumbling over the other. Questions with no answers. Not yet. If Draco hadn’t been set up for the job, would Severus have been in the position to kill the Headmaster? Would he have become headmaster himself? And, most importantly of all, if Dumbledore had not been killed, would Voldemort had obtained the Elder Wand, ultimately setting his snake on Severus, believing him the wand’s true master?
Severus turned the pages until he found what he was looking for. Hermione watched him and tried to decode the micro-expressions on his face. The twitch of an eyebrow, the quiver of his lip, to anticipate what this reality held for him.
“Dumbledore was killed on the astronomy tower at the hand of Severus Snape,” he read, “after being disarmed by Zacharias Smith. Snape served as headmaster of Hogwarts in the year after Dumbledore’s death. He was subsequently attacked by Nagini in the Shrieking Shack during the Battle of Hogwarts and rescued by Hermione Granger who administered anti-venin… bla bla bla… and transported him to St Mungos preventing him from dying of his injuries. Snape was later exonerated when it emerged that Dumbledore had ordered him to perform the killing.”
“Nearly the same, then,” she said, relieved, ignoring his cavalier recitation of what still rated as the most anxiety-provoking night of her life. She tentatively put her hand back on his arm. He let her, and she breathed a sigh of relief. “Another student replaced Draco in the history, but the string of events is mostly unchanged.”
“Mostly,” he agreed. “Although I suspect many subtle details will have shifted.”
Hermione nodded. “What do we do now?”
She didn’t want to be the one to say it. Not considering his history there.
“There’s only one thing to do,” said Severus. “Only one place to go if we’re to have any hope of finding answers.”
Hermione nodded. She’d known from the moment the reality sunk in that only one place in the wizarding world might hold the key to finding Harry and Draco. She owed Professor McGonagall a visit, anyhow.
“Hogwarts, it is.”