A/N: Hi everyone! This is my very first Harry Potter fanfic, so please go easy on me! Anyway I don't anything, including the greatness that is Harry Potter, only Rowling owns that.

Hermione sighed contentedly as the feel of dirt and rock spilled over her fingers and into the pan. She shook it once, twice and then removed a piece of stone, and delicately pushed aside years of silt and debris with a small brush. The work was methodical, calming even, and she moved between carefully marked squares upon the ground burrowing through soil that hadn't been touched by human hands in thousands of years. The work was also thankless however, and a small part of Hermione's mind wondered if this year would be their last. Funding had grown abysmally absent for many projects over these last few years, it was any wonder her team stayed afloat. She sighed and sat back on her haunches for a moment, reveling in the cool breeze as it whooshed past her ears, and the play of sunlight against her back. Trevor and Damon were farther afield, and she could see the tops of their heads as they worked, moving the dirt diligently and searching for any sign of an ancient relic. She wiped away the beads of sweat that slid across her face and she stood.

"Going for a bit of a break," she yelled out and she could see the Trevor nod slightly, he raised his finger in acknowledgement before once again focusing his eyes upon the ground below. Hermione made her way to their makeshift camp and sat with a tired huff in one of the folding chairs beneath a tarp. She looked down at her dirty nails and sighed. She would need a proper bath when she got back into town, though she didn't look forward to the long trip ahead of them. It would easily take them hours to get back to civilization, but it was worth it if she could just be clean and fall into a nice soft bed in the end. She smiled then, and chuckled. Funny how her only concern was a nice hot bath and the bother of a long car ride. A far cry from her wizarding world days. She lay back and stretched luxuriously. She never regretted leaving any of it behind. Not once. It was nice not having to worry about Dark Magic, pure blood politics and the demands of the Ministry. Here, in the muggle world, she was just Hermione Granger, archeologist and historian, a woman who wanted to prove herself through the means of labor and logic, not magic.

She sometimes wondered if Harry and Ginny ever married, if Hogwarts was the same place as it was before the war, and even how Draco was faring now that Lucius was in Azkaban. After she watched her best friend and roommate Padma Patil get blown away during a battle, everything seemed to run together. She barely noticed the days passing, no longer cared about current events and simply spent each day preparing for the next. After the Great Cleansing, Harry had rounded up as many wizards as he could find and managed to destroy Voldemort for good, and had lost a limb in the process. It had taken the medi-wizards weeks to reverse the damage done to his body, and luckily they were able to encourage the growth of a new leg. Months later Harry was nearly back up to speed. The world rejoiced and Voldemort was no more. Everything would return to normal.

But normalcy didn't return for Hermione. She'd felt alone, misunderstood and tormented by all that she'd seen. After the Ministry gathered all the death eaters, including Lucius Malfoy and his family, she'd stay long enough to see Lucius sentenced and then she disappeared. She'd found London to be too constricting, and the thought of bumping into Harry or anyone she'd known made her quiver with fear, and she'd made the move to the U.S. She attended a university for a time, unsure of what to study, before settling with archeology. She made provisions for herself before the war, so though she wasn't poor or hungry, she wasn't extremely well-off. She put enough aside to care for needs and used only enough magic to ensure the well-being of her parents, who, though obliviated, were settled happily in New Zealand.

She had thought of going to them, of reinserting herself back into their lives. But…they seemed so much happier, so much freer without her. Hermione had spent the bulk of the war running for her life and hiding in fear before obliviating them. She hadn't wanted them to go through what she had, and she would continue to do anything to keep them from harm, even if that meant staying as far from them as possible. She choked back a flood of tears and hardened her resolve. No, they were much better off without her.

"You okay, 'Mione?," Trevor asked and she looked up, her lips automatically forming a smile.

"Of course, why wouldn't I be? We've only been here for oh…..say three months and have yet to find a single thing of significance."

Trevor laughed a bit and dusted his hand before pulling up a chair to sit beside her.

"Well, I reckon we should be finding something soon. The tomes point to a specific location and this is the only one of its kind in the region. Ya gotta have faith girl."

Hermione looked over at Trevor and smiled once more as the Texan continued to wax poetic about failure and never giving up.

"My granddaddy always said-," he began.

"You gotta wash a pig before you fry a fish," both he and Hermione said in unison.

"I know, I know Trev. You've told me that a thousand times. What does that mean anyway?"

Trevor chuckled, "Damned if I know. But it sure lit a fire under our asses."

He continued to laugh and Hermione rolled her eyes, a teasing smirk playing around the edges of her full mouth.

"Wanna pack it in for the day?," he asked, punctuating his question with a hard slap to his knee, "I think I'm 'bout ready to get a bath and a beer."

Hermione nodded and stood, and beckoned to Damon. The blonde haired young man began to make his way to their camp, his face and body just as dirty as Hermione's and Trevor's.

"We're going now?," he intoned and wiped his dirty hands futilely on a handkerchief.

"Yes," Hermione answered and took in his cool, grey eyes and the thin, yet muscular build of his body.

"I'll go pack up," he told them and rushed off.

Besides his grey eyes, and light blonde hair, something about Damon reminded Hermione of Lucius. He had an easy, relaxed gait, a generally nice disposition and good nature, but there was something—hard and calculating beneath the surface, something she could never quite put her finger on. She had never been quite comfortable around him and hadn't wanted him to travel with them all the way to Egypt, citing only his youth and inexperience. She'd argued that Egypt had recently undergone several political upheavals, and though they had been granted admittance, they could not afford any missteps. Several of her colleagues had agreed, but ultimately he had been given clearance.

After they'd packed up the site and were on the road they made their way back to their hotel. It was one of the safer areas for foreign travelers and had been recommended by several top brass officials, many of them ex-military, before the University had signed off on their stay.

Once she was back in her hotel room, Hermione had immediately drawn a bath and relaxed before falling in an exhausted heap onto the bed.

HGHGHGHG

Hermione had been humming a wordless tune beneath her breath when she felt it. She rooted around and pulled it carefully from the earth, gently brushing away the detritus built around it. The feel of cool, sleek metal filled her hands. She narrowed her eyes, taking in its design and shape. It was ancient, that was for sure, it probably predated any groups living in the area. She carefully looked over the smooth, ovoid disk, the incantations carved against its teal body and she ran her thumb over the trace of ridges on its edge. There was something…alien about the artifact, but she dismissed the thought and concentrated on thoroughly cleaning it.
She gently blew on the artifact, and a chill slid up her body. She fought the impulse to chuck it back into the earth and run far, far away.

Stop being silly, she chided herself, you finally find something worth looking for and you're being a ninny!

She cleared her head of her ruminations and focused on the task at hand. The harsh sunlight then hit the metal, and it seemed to come to life, pulsing in waves from the center of the disk and raced painfully up Hermione's arm. She tried to scream but found her vocal cords would not work, and her body would not obey any of her commands as she fought to release herself from the artifact's hold.

She felt the breath, the very life of—something push into her, cutting across expanses in her brain and into the core of who she was. It was painful, more painful than any Crucio she'd ever endured. Trevor and Damon were too far away to hear her whimpers of pain, and a small part of Hermione was grateful, and wanted them to stay away. Whatever this thing was, it most definitely wasn't friendly and she'd endure the pain if it meant the lives of her teammates.

"Granger, ever the martyr," she could almost hear Draco's voice and could imagine his sneer as she twisted and contorted against the ground in agony, "Always thinking of others. Do others think of you, I wonder?"

The thing, inside her filled her, and settled itself deep within the recesses of her mind, her soul and her body.

The pain began to recede and the thing that was not-quite-Hermione stood, its violet eyes taking in the scene before her. The small part of the thing, the part that was really Hermione, could see the thing calculating, ruthlessly picking through her memories, her experiences as scene after scene played before her eyes. It rushed over her feelings, her emotions, and the sensation of long lost recollections and tossed them aside carelessly before settling onto her last memory of Voldemort and Harry squaring off on the battlefield.

She could feel its mind shift, and something akin to smug satisfaction filled it as it reversed the scene over and over. "Yessss," it whispered softly against her consciousness, its voice sweet and cloying like a lover as it washed over her, its tendrils of thought pushing against her own.

"This will do."

The thing that was Hermione screamed in protest, before being hurtled backwards into the cold, hard recesses of the thing's mind.