Fighting Time
By Majestic Waters
Summary: Hermione and Severus go back in time, on a crusade to right some of the Dark Lord's wrongs.
Chapter 1: The Time-turner
Hermione sighed, removing her cloak and dropping it unceremoniously onto her desk-side chair. She should have been happy, it being her first night back at Hogwarts, in her new room, in her new position as Head Girl, but she was far from it. She took off the time-turner hanging from her neck, pulled out her hair-tie, and stared at her reflection in the mirror suspended on her wall. She wasn't a little girl anymore; all her baby fat had disappeared, and in its place there were soft curves; her once frizzy hair now hung in silky curls; her face had finally grown into her teeth and eyebrows. As much as she hated to admit it, she had out-grown the school that had once inspired such awe, that she had called her home away from home. What's more, without Dumbledore, the magic of Hogwarts ceased to exist. Hermione felt tears prickling at her eyes. Thoughts of Dumbledore always brought thoughts of him.
What am I doing here, she thought, looking up at the ceiling to prevent the tears from spilling over. This is all wrong. She was supposed to be out there, fighting the Dark Lord along with Harry and Ron; instead, all three of them had been forced to return to Hogwarts, "for their own safety." It seemed that overnight, her second home had become a prison. She crawled under her comforter fully dressed, to shield herself from the permanent chill that seemed to plague the room.
Oh, Severus… she thought, as she drifted off to sleep. Why did you have leave…?
She woke up later, with moonlight filtering through her window and a hand clamped down hard against her mouth. She tried to scream, and bite the hand that held her, but all that came out was a muffled squeak. The hand held her fast and yanked her head up in one swift motion.
"I wouldn't do that, Hermione," A deep voice hissed into her ear. She placed the voice immediately, but her gasp was muffled. He called me 'Hermione', she thought wildly as she twisted in his grip to try and see his face. She felt something long and hard being pressed into her back. "Calm yourself," he whispered. "I'm going to let go, now, but if you try to scream I won't hesitate to stun you." Hermione lifted her own hand to her captor's, and gently pried the fingers away.
"Professor… Severus," she murmured, turning to face him. It surprised her to see him looking so well. His dark hair, gleaming in the moonlight was combed back handsomely into a pony-tail at the nape of his neck, and his face was cleanly shaven; his eyes were as darkly intense as ever, however, the worry lines around them seemed to have gotten deeper. After months of imagining him fleeing for his life, homeless and helpless, a few extra wrinkles were nothing to Hermione.
Snape was surprised that Hermione hadn't put up more of a struggle, and was completely floored that she would deign to address him by his first name. She didn't seem to be at all angered by his presence, but a world of sadness echoed in the depths of her eyes. He decided to get straight to the point.
"Hermione, I need your help." It was the last thing she expected him to say. Severus Snape was asking her for help? For the past two years, they had developed a quiet respect for each other, bordering on friendship, but he had not once asked her for his help. She wanted to ask him about Dumbledore, about where he had been hiding for the past few months, and about when he had taken to calling her 'Hermione,' but the urgency in his voice seemed to strike a cord within her.
"What do you need me to do?" Her apparent willingness to help him left him even more shocked. He had been prepared to fight with her, but he hadn't been prepared for complete submission. There was no easy way to say it, so he just spit it out.
"I need to borrow you and your time-turner."
"…What?" Severus sighed, and scrubbed at his eyes.
"I don't have time to explain it all to you. It was Albus' idea. To put it simply, I was supposed to kill him. He was to leave you the time turner, and we would go back in time to fix it all."
"I… what? Fix what all? Why would Dumbledore do that? And why would he choose you and me?" After Dumbledore's death, the time-turner had been delivered to her home, with a note from him. It came back to her now.
'If you're reading this, I must be long gone. But don't cry for me; for all living things have their time to die. I know you understand this, which is why I am bestowing upon you this gift. I know you will use it wisely, when the time comes. When it does come, try to remember to keep an open mind and heart, and remember that though I am getting old, I am not yet senile.
Good Luck,
Albus Dumbledore'
The note had seemed strange to her then, but with Severus Snape standing before her, it was beginning to make sense.
Severus gave her a withering look. "All I know is that we must fix the 'wrong that has mattered most.'" He removed a folded piece of parchment from his cloak. "You know how ambiguous Albus could be. He left me instructions as to how many turns we need to go back, and a few details about where we should go, but nothing more." He sneered. "He said we'd know what we needed to do once we were there."
Hermione shook her head. "But you're not supposed to meddle with time. Dumbledore knew that."
"Why do you think time-turners were invented? To collect dust on the shelf? These are dark times, and we were chosen, for whatever reason, to save wizardkind, however cliché that might sound."
Hermione's eyes widened with the weight of his words. This was a huge responsibility. Was she prepared to follow Severus blindly into danger? What if Dumbledore was wrong? Listen to yourself, girl, said the voice in her head. Weren't you just going on about how you should be out there, fighting against the Dark Lord? You can't let this opportunity pass. Besides, the voice prodded, you've been unable to think about anything but Severus Snape since the day he left.
Hermione lifted herself from her bed, and walked over to her desk. She fastened her cloak about her neck, and returned to Severus with the time-turner clutched between her white fingers. She threw the chain about both their necks. "Where to?" Severus smiled grimly.
"Thirty-three turns into the past." As Hermione began to spin the hourglass, and the room began to dissolve around them, she couldn't help thinking that she was just asking for trouble.