Summary: The chamber of secrets was never re-opened; Tom Riddle's diary was never found. Now Hermione must journey back in time to find and destroy Voldemort's first horcrux. But she soon discovers that the rules of time travel are far from set in stone, and even a heart of darkness can give birth to light - and love. (Hermione/Tom Riddle)

"Every rose has its thorn, and every thorn its rose."

~Prologue~

Agatha was old, even for a witch.

At a respectable 289 years of age, she felt perfectly entitled to take her time with her shopping, thank-you-very-much. And if anyone took issue with her tottering slowly among the book stacks at Florish and Botts, she wasn't afraid to hit them with a mean slug-barfing hex.

But today she found herself browsing the shelves of the famous bookstore at a particularly sedate pace. The whole place was crowded from wall to wall with gaggles of school children buying their books for the coming year at Hogwarts, and normally that would be enough to drive her to the peace and quiet of the apothecary, but today…

Something was going to happen in that crowded bookshop. She could feel the very fabric of time tremble around her in anticipation, twisting in on itself, thinning. There was a Crux here, a lynch-pin in the course of history, and Agatha knew that soon, very soon, an event would occur—or not occur- that would tip the very universe onto one path or another.

She had always been able to sense the coming of such events. They tickled the soles of her feet as they drew nearer, lingering in her nose with the smell of ozone after a lightning storm. She had felt the coming battle between Dumbledore and Grindelwald; and when the two mighty wizards had finally dueled, she felt history itself balancing of the knife-edge of fate, capable of tipping in either direction, knowing that where it fell would determine the path of the universe forever after.

And then Dumbledore had struck the winning blow, and the scent of apple-blossoms bloomed in her nose, and she breathed a sigh of relief. The darker path had not prevailed. Not then, anyway. There were always darker paths cropping up all over the place, but only rarely did they hold such importance as did that particular duel. Cruxes, Agatha liked to call them-the combination of a particular time and place where the fate of the world would be decided. Sometimes, like with Dumbledore's famous duel, everyone and their blind old aunt could tell that the outcome of the event would drastically change history.

Other times, like today, only barmy old Agatha with her pink slippers and flower bag knew that the world was at a Crux.

She watched carefully as a regal man with long blond hair—Lucius Malfoy, if she remembered correctly— strode into the shop. His nose wrinkled in discrete disdain and the noise and mess. She counted the tiny crows circling in his wake, and wondered if he knew that sorrow and suffering dogged his steps. He glowed faintly, like all those involved in a Crux tended to do.

The other parties involved in the Crux were already doing their own bit of loitering about the shop. A family of redheads, laughing and shoving each other. (Ah yes, the Weasleys. Quite a lovely bunch.) But the one who glowed the most brightly was a small little girl clutching a cauldron full of Lockhart's ridiculous books. She didn't look happy to be toting them about, smart child. The smell of sweetbread hovered about her, but a snake slithered through her shadows. A possibility.

The blonde man caught sight of the redhead family and moved towards them purposefully. There was something small and rectangular tucked beneath his coat that blazed with dark light. Agatha had never seen it's like before. So dark and terrible, and yet time and fate were snarled about it in tight knots. She shivered, and fought the urge to flee from that ugly, pulsing presence. How the rest of the people shuffling about the shop could be so thick, so blind to that unnatural thing, she didn't know.

But it was her unspoken duty to watch a Crux unfold, so stay and watch she did.

The blonde man and the redhead patriarch squared off against each other. Sharp pops of green static sizzled between then—a spicy verbal confrontation must have been taking place. If not for the unnatural dark thing inside the blonde man's robes, Agatha would have crept closer to hear the juicy gossip.

The blonde man suddenly reached down and extracted a book from the small girl's cauldron. Agatha held her breath. This was it. Fate thinned and stretched—and suddenly splintered, when the girl went red and angrily snatched her book back, stuffing it into her cauldron again. The blonde man looked only mildly taken aback on the surface, but underneath Agatha could see the pulsing red veins of thwarted ambitions.

The universe wobbled and reeled, fate trying to pull events back on course, trying to arrange for the blonde man to deposit his awful burden in the girl's cauldron….but then a hulking giant of a man was there, coming between them. More green sparks flew, and the blonde man was hustled out of the shop.

Time gave one last heave, then settled and stilled. The lines of fate smoothed out in their new course. The Crux had ended.

Agatha found herself letting out a shaky breath of mingled relief and trepidation. The old way, the wide dark road that would have come to pass had the blonde man's burden made it into the girl's stack of books, faded away, like footprints in sand erased by the wind. The world was now set upon a different path, a narrow and twisting way, and she couldn't predict where it led.

But then, Agatha saw something on the new thorny way, something that caused a gentle smile to light up her face and good cheer to steal through her heart.

There, among the brambles and thorns of fear and suffering, bloomed a brilliant red rose.

Author's note:

For those of you who only skimmed over this prologue chapter (don't do that, bad reader), this is the scene in the second Harry Potter book where Lucius Malfoy slips a certain diary into Ginny's stack of school books. For the purposes of this story, I'm trying a 'what-if' scenario: what if the chamber of secrets was never reopened, and Tom Riddle's diary never found and destroyed?

Something interesting is bound to happen, I'm sure.

8)