Chapter Text
Hermione was utterly exhausted. Fine grey dust rained down on her blood-soaked clothes and matted hair, settling like ash over a nightmare. The lingering residue of dark magic from her torturous hours at Malfoy Manor, combined with the raw magic crackling in the air around her, made her skin crawl with a deep, visceral revulsion. The ancient protective enchantments that had shielded Hogwarts for centuries were completely gone, ripped away like brittle cobwebs.
She watched in horror as her friends and fellow students fell around the courtyard. The Death Eaters were showing no mercy; it made no difference to them whether their curses struck a hardened Auror or a terrified third-year student.
Gasping for air, Hermione lunged behind a marble pillar as a jet of violet light obliterated the stone banner overhead. She clutched Bellatrix stolen wand in a hand slick with sweat and grime, her eyes frantically scanning the chaos of the quad just beyond the threshold.
Howgwarts was falling, Harry was dead, and the order was losing.
Her mind flashed backwards through the blur of the last few hours. After the suffocating chaos of the Room of Requirement, where Crabbe had (unsurprisingly) lost control of Fiendfyre, and the subsequent destruction of the diadem and cup, the trio’s primary mission had narrowed to finding Voldemort’s pet snake. She had frantically encouraged Harry to look into the Dark Lord's mind to pinpoint Nagini's location, and they had begun their descent toward the boathouse. The battle raged brutally around them as they moved. Along the way, they had stumbled across an unexpected pocket of resistance: Theodore Nott Jr., Blaise Zabini, Pansy Parkinson, and the Greengrass sisters. Stripped of their Slytherin allegiances, they were all clad in Ravenclaw house colours, fighting tooth and nail against a group of masked Death Eaters.
Without warning, Malfoy had thrown himself into the fray. He had charged forward to help his fellow Slytherins, his intervention creating a distraction that allowed the trio to slip past unnoticed.
That’s something I will have to think about later, Hermione thought, as they ran across the battlefield, dodging stray hexes as they moved towards the boathouse. She had never truly believed Draco Malfoy was pure evil. He had, after all, pointedly refused to identify Harry to the Death Eaters back at the manor. During her brief moments of lucidness amidst the agony, she had watched him. He had looked profoundly ill, all of the Malfoys had. The torture she endured, followed by the vicious assault from Fenrir Greyback, had lasted just over five hours, but to her mind, it had felt infinite.
Before long, Hermione was snapped out of her musings as they crept towards the wooden structure and the horrors within. After watching Nagini ruthlessly execute Snape on Voldemort’s orders, Harry was able to collect his memories before his lifeless eyes glazed over.
The Dark Lord had granted them a single hour to surrender.
Hollow and reeling, the trio had walked back up the hill to the castle. Harry had slipped away alone to the Headmaster’s office to view Snape’s final memories in the Pensieve, leaving Ron and Hermione to make their way to the Great Hall.
Nothing could have prepared Hermione for the devastation awaiting them inside.
Rows of lifeless bodies lined the stone floor. A tight, weeping cluster of redheads immediately caught their attention. Hermione had to physically catch Ron as his legs buckled beneath him, his strength completely evaporating. On her agonising walk over to the family, she passed the still forms of so many friends: Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Hannah Abbott, Ernie Macmillan, Luna Lovegood, Colin Creevey, and Lavender Brown. Only a few faces she realised in a sea of souls lost too soon. Her heart shattered into a million pieces when she finally reached the Weasleys. There, she found a lifeless Percy and a devastated George clinging desperately to his dead twin.
This was all too much; this was not how it was supposed to go. How had this war been allowed to happen? Why had Tom Riddle not been destroyed earlier? Why were they so unprepared to fight?
She felt a wave of violent nausea rise in her throat. “I need some air,” Hermione whispered. Not that any of the Weasleys heard her over their collective mourning. On her way out, she crossed paths with a battered, limping Neville Longbottom. Together, they stepped out into the ruined courtyard, immediately beginning to sift through the smoking rubble in search of the unaccounted.
Through the thick, acrid smoke, she spotted the towering silhouette of Hagrid. The half-giant's massive frame was shaking violently with heavy, shuddering sobs. In his enormous arms, he was cradling a limp, deceptively small figure.
"Harry Potter is dead!" Voldemort’s voice hissed through the ruins, "He was killed as he ran, crying for mercy on the forest floor!”
"No!" Hermione choked out. The word died in her throat, strangled by a wave of absolute despair that threatened to swallow her whole.
Everything that happened next unfolded in a disjointed, chaotic blur. There was Voldemort's sadistic taunting, Draco Malfoy crossing the courtyard to join his parents reluctantly, and then Neville, brave, miraculous Neville, stepping forward and slicing off the snake’s head with the Sword of Gryffindor.
Thick, black smoke erupted from Nagini's severed neck, and the fragile truce shattered instantly. Fighting erupted with renewed, frantic savagery.
A jet of violet light blasted into the stone above her. “Get it together, Hermione” she cursed to herself. She needed to keep fighting for Harry and the Lupins and every other casualty of this war.
"Granger! Move!”
A sharp, terrified voice pierced through the cacophony of spells. Hermione blinked away the mental fog, her eyes snapping open to see Draco Malfoy sprinting directly across the debris, strewn flagstones toward her. His sleek black suit was torn and shredded, his gaunt face pale and heavily smudged with ash, but his grey eyes were locked onto her with an intensity she had never seen before. He wasn't looking at her as an enemy, a rival, or a Mudblood; he was looking at her with a desperate, panicked urgency.
Behind her, a towering, unmasked Death Eater raised a gnarled wand, a sickly green light was already pooling ominously at its tip, aimed squarely at Hermione's exposed back.
Malfoy lunged forward, his arm outstretched in a desperate attempt to tackle her out of the line of fire and pull her beneath the relative safety of a fallen stone archway. His flying fingertips brushed the heavy wool of her sleeve.
“Chronos Transverto!” the Death Eater roared.
The spell didn't flash green. It exploded in a beam of unstable, swirling temporal energy, striking Hermione dead in the chest, right where her hidden velvet pouch rested against her sternum. Inside the pouch, the cracked, highly volatile Ministry Time-Turner she had been keeping secure shattered instantly under the magical impact.
The gold casing of the artefact liquefied into a white-hot liquid against her skin, and the tiny, enchanted hourglass burst violently outward. It released a localised vortex of glittering golden sand that aggressively warped and bent the very fabric of space and time around her. Hermione had never felt pain like it. Every nerve ending in her body was suddenly on fire.
Draco’s fingers desperately gripped her sleeve, but the fabric vanished from his grasp as the air itself began to dissolve.
The last thing Hermione Granger saw in the year 1998 was Malfoy’s horrified, screaming face and his desperate, almost feral grey eyes as he fell hard against the empty flagstones where she had stood a mere millisecond before.
Then, the world turned completely inside out.