Chapter Text
Not my images, by the way, I just created a mood board out of Pinterest images
Credits go to the actual artists.
The world was ending in fragments.
Stone tore itself apart in slow, violent punctuation—each explosion a sentence Hogwarts had never finished speaking. The sky above the castle was bruised and bleeding, streaked with wand light and fire. Hermione ran.
Not in the clean, orderly way she used to imagine courage. Not like Harry, not like in stories. This was something uglier—feet slipping on broken stone, lungs burning so hard she tasted iron, and a wand clenched so tightly her fingers had gone numb.
Her hand kept returning to the chain around her neck.
The Time-Turner.
It knocked against her collarbone with every step, spinning slightly on its axis whenever her fingers found it again. Spin. Spin. Spin. A nervous habit she hadn’t been able to stop since the moment everything stopped making sense in a straight line.
Time felt unstable here anyway.
Somewhere behind her, a wall collapsed.
She didn’t look back.
Looking back was how people died.
She tried to remember Hogwarts as it should have been. Warm. Bright. The corridors were buzzing with excitement, laughter echoing off polished stone, the scent of pumpkin juice and candle wax filling every hall. The library—quiet and comforting—with rows of familiar spines and parchment and the faint scratch of quills as she bent over homework. Fred and George are tossing a Pygmy Puff across the Great Hall. Ginny laughing, hair bouncing with reckless joy. Ron giving her that crooked smile she could never forget.
It all blurred immediately.
Smoke and screams erased colour and life.
The world was no longer a place of familiarity. It was a wound she walked through.
She pressed forward into the courtyard.
Smoke rolled low across the ground, curling around broken statues and shattered benches. The air was thick with ash and spells still burning mid-flight, as if the battle refused to resolve itself into anything simple like “past” or "present".
Her fingers found the Time-Turner again.
Spin.
Spin.
Spin.
She didn’t even realise she was doing it anymore.
Movement to her left caught her attention—Ron.
He was shouting something, his voice cracking. She couldn’t hear all of it, just fragments dragged through chaos.
“Hermione—!”
His voice was desperate and uncertain.
She turned.
And there was Harry.
And Voldemort.
The air shifted. The world tilted.
Hermione froze.
Not metaphorically.
Actually.
Voldemort stood in the open ruin of the courtyard, unnervingly still, pale, serpentine, and impossibly composed. Wand raised. Attention locked on Harry Potter.
But Hermione did not look away.
Her gaze caught—not on Harry, but on him.
The ground seemed to fall away.
Everything blurred except the line of his eyes—black as coal, sharp, calculating. Perfect. Terrifying. Alive.
And she felt it.
Recognition.
Not hatred. Not the anger she had expected. Something colder, sharper. A puzzle piece that didn’t belong to this moment but had been forced in anyway.
Voldemort’s eyes did not narrow.
They sharpened.
Hermione gripped the Time-Turner so tightly it dug into her skin.
Spin. Spin. Spin.
Her mind flickered—briefly, painfully—back to warmth: Ginny laughing in the common room, the smell of butterbeer in the Gryffindor Tower, and voices that felt distant now, like they belonged to someone else entirely.
That life felt blurred. Detached. Almost unreal.
The courtyard, the fire, and the screaming pressed forward again.
Ron’s voice hit her ears again, closer, desperate.
“Hermione, what are you doing—?!”
But he was distant. Not there. Not fully real.
The world under her feet shifted like a page being turned.
Stone changed texture. Air changed temperature. Smoke changed direction. Her stomach dropped violently as if gravity itself had forgotten the rules.
Everything folded—not violently, but precisely.
Hermione’s vision fractured at the edges.
Stone corridor. Torchlight. Not smoke. Not destruction. Quiet. Too quiet.
Her fingers still twitched on the Time-Turner.
Her breathing was ragged. Her body didn’t know where it was. Her mind tried to reconstruct context.
Hogwarts. Battle. Ron. Harry. Voldemort. The courtyard. The gaze. Recognition.
Her stomach turned sharply.
She tried to sit up.
Dizziness hit like a physical force. The world tilted sideways violently.
Her vision blurred white.
Stone corridor. Empty. Cold. Shadows stretched along the walls. Silence pressed down like something deliberate rather than absent.
Footsteps echoed in the distance.
Unhurried.
Deliberate.
Coming closer.
Her hand tightened instinctively, searching for the Time-Turner. It was no longer just a tool—it was proof, tether, and curse all at once.
However, she felt nothing
Her fingers searched again, more urgently this time, tracing the collar of her robes.
The Time-Turner was gone.
She swallowed.
Everything she knew—warmth, friendship, laughter—felt distant now. Blurred. Detached. Almost irrelevant.
All that remained was the feeling.
That she was not alone.
And that whatever was watching her—
was not surprised.