"This is nothing personal."
She looked across the table at their faces, signs of shock, anger, bitterness, hope, and disappointment quickly discerned from their features. She could read their expressions so easily. She always could.
"It's been a few years since the war-"
"It's been two years, Hermione-"
"-Let her finish, will you?"
"-and I don't feel the same…" she chose her words carefully, "…the same thrill I once did during that time. We had a purpose, a real purpose-"
"We still do-"
"-Can you just let her finish?"
"-and I don't feel thrilled when I walk into work, I don't feel excited by what I'm doing, by this world, by this reality, by…by magic."
"You can't be serious." There was no trace of politeness in Harry's tone now. His deep green eyes bore into hers, yet she held his gaze confidently.
"I get it, Harry. I get that this is our world. We come up with new spells, new potions, we seek out dark magic, we push the boundaries of the magical realm. And I thought that's what I wanted – I thought that's what was going to make me happy. And it's not for lack of creativity," she looked at each of them now, "In these last two years I've won awards for creativity, for innovative teaching at Hogwarts at the age of nineteen for Merlin's sake. But there's…" she stared down at her hands now, noticing the tiny blue venules that moved delicately with every flexion of her tendons. She looked up again. "There's a universe beyond this world, a universe full of secrets and mystery and chaos. And the work is challenging – the physics is challenging, it's unlike anything I've had to do before – but there is so much purpose in their work, work that will illuminate worlds beyond ours long after I'm dead." She felt a smile upon her lips. "And they want me. They want me now. I'll be in Switzerland for a year, maybe more – the contract is only for a year, but you have to believe me, this is what I've been meant for, this is what I've been born to do-" She heard Ron sigh. He looked at Harry, then up at her, a sheepish grin on his face.
"I hate that you're leaving, Hermione," he met her eyes, "but I haven't seen you this excited in years." He rose from the table, his hand brushing the polished oak as he made his way over to her. "CERN, huh?" He pulled her toward himself in a tight hug. She smiled and thought to herself that it felt good. "Particle fucking physics?" He sighed again and held her at arm's length, his hands soft on her shoulders. "I gotta say, you never cease to amaze me. But I also think you're a bit nutty, y'know?" He released his hands back to his sides, and looked at Harry. "You can't argue. You know that. Let's just plan a proper get together for the holidays, yeah? When you come visit for Christmas, yeah?"
She smiled. "Yeah. Of course."
"I'm off then, mates," he started, grabbing his winter coat from the back of the chair. "We're starting early tomorrow, so y'know, early to bed and all that." He quickly pecked Hermione on the cheek and they heard the door close a moment later.
"You were never happy here, were you." Harry's tone remained flat.
"That doesn't sound like a question."
He nodded, his lips tight. "Was it me?"
Hermione immediately lifted her gaze to meet his. She felt the sting of tears behind her eyes. "Harry…" It was barely a whisper.
"When things went south with Ron, after the war, I figured it was because the heat of the moment was gone, you know? And he felt the same – that you two were better as friends. We all felt that way. I thought it was different with us. Everything felt so right, Hermione. Everything." He rose from his chair.
"Don't." She whispered, a little more forcefully. He continued to move toward her.
"Why didn't it work? Why wasn't I enough for you?" He was at her back now, as she turned, a hand raised to her mouth to stifle the sound. "I thought you were depressed. I was convinced of it. You stopped talking about work. You stopped taking weekend trips with me. You stopped reading for pleasure. Reading, Hermione. I thought you'd gone mental. I even bought you that muggle medicine to see if that would help, help bring you back to me-" His hand fell on her shoulder as he tried to turn her.
"STOP!" She heard herself shout, her eyes wide and swollen with the threat of tears. "Stop. Please. You have to believe me. It was never you." She saw his jaw clench uncomfortably. "Work is a huge part of our lives – we can't go into it every day dreading it, hating it, wanting something more. My boredom, my dissatisfaction – it was seeping into other parts of my life, into my time with you…" She met his gaze again. "I meant it when I said I'd loved you." She put her hand onto his. The touch was electric. "I just hated myself."
She saw his eyes drawn to her lips, and his face hovered barely an inch away from hers. She closed her eyes, heat rising in her chest. He placed a shadow of a kiss upon her left cheek. A chill rippled through her body.
"Come back to me when you are whole again."
She closed her eyes and nodded. Sometime later, she knew he was gone. She didn't hear the door close.
Tom Riddle did not have a problem sleeping. He was quick to fall asleep; he slept solidly, peacefully, often waking in the same position he was in initially, and he never dreamed. Because he never dreamed, his sleep was never fitful. Because he never dreamed, he always woke refreshed and purposeful. Because he never dreamed, the night of December 12, 1945 was an utter aberration.
He had been told once that people rarely remember their dreams when they wake. But as he shot up from the bed, sheets strewn haphazardly about him, his back soaked with an uncomfortable moisture, his eyes wide and dazed, breath quick and shallow, he remembered the dream as if it weren't a dream at all, as if he had lived it, as if each image and sound and emotion had simply transpired the very day before.
He rose from the bed, slightly dazed, and made his way to the bathroom. The cold water on his face felt refreshing, and grounding; he lifted his eyes to the mirror in front of him, his pale skin almost translucent in the moonlight. The moonlight…
He walked to the window, looking out unto the city streets. In that dream, he was somewhere else. A forest unlike any he'd seen, vast and endless with peaks of gargantuan snow-capped mountains barely visible above the dark outline of the trees. It was night, but the moonlight illuminated his task; he was going to split his soul again, one more step toward inevitability and immortality, one more step toward becoming the unstoppable force he had always imagined. The object…it wasn't clear unto which object his soul would attach, and it wasn't clear the sacrificial lamb who would help him in this task. It wasn't clear because there was a thundering roar, a bright, blinding light that enveloped him and all of the surrounding woods, a searing pain across his chest. He raised his hands to his chest, his fingers burning against what felt like a gaping hole – or a scar? Down, down from his neck – no, his shoulder – across his chest, to his leg, across his being, across his soul. And as soon as it had come, the pain and the light subsided, and he was almost blind were it not for the moonlight, the pale, blue moonlight that cooled his eyes, that cast a delicate shadow on his body, on his scar.
And in that moment of gratitude, in that moment of relief for the gift of life given after almost certain death, he turned his face to the moon.
And he saw the whisper of a woman's face.
"I think today's the day!" she exclaimed excitedly, a wide grin spreading across her face. She filled her mug with coffee and took a tentative sip; it was dour, but she smiled through it.
"Granger you are insane." Hans Friedrich similarly raised his mug to sip the coffee, but had no qualms about expressing his dissatisfaction with the burnt taste. "You've been here eleven months – we've been trying to do this for forty years! Today is most definitely not the day." But her smile was infectious; he found himself grinning. "A little optimism doesn't hurt I suppose. See you in there. The test is at noon."
"Thanks Dr. Friedrich!" he heard her voice echo from the kitchen as he entered the laboratory. The lab was still in a state of disarray; it was nearly three years into the building of the Large Hadron Collider, far too early to run any experiments, but the third detector was near completion and the teams were interested in a preliminary test. Hans paused in front of the enormous metal door before him as he swiped his access card; he always felt breathless when he entered the particle chamber, at this time already 10 miles in length, hollow, beautiful, and vast. He smiled. Her words filled him. Today's the day.
Hermione finished her coffee and practically skipped into the laboratory. She heard the overhead announcement detailing the team assignments for the day. She held her breath, hoping she wouldn't be stuck behind a computer screen for the test; and held a muted smile as she learned she would be on the ground at the third detector.
"Erik, Melanie, hello!" The other members of her team were already at their designated station.
"My my, you look chipper today Granger. You think we're really going to see something this time?" the woman turned slowly toward her, adjusting her rimless glasses over her nose. Her hair was a deep brown, always slicked back into a neat bun, but Hermione couldn't help but notice today a few strands were loose and swept haphazardly behind her ear.
"We are definitely going to see something." She saw their skeptical looks but continued anyway. "I know. I know it's only been three years, theoretically we don't have enough length yet, that we've been searching for the Higgs boson for forty years and we have yet to see any semblance of it, but guys—" she held her arms out above her shoulders, "just look at this thing. This is incredible!"
"So say we find it," the young man began, his English heavily tinged by German brusqueness. "What are you going to be most excited about?" He looked back down at the detector, punching in the last of the access codes. "For me, it's going to be the Standard Model. I mean, we found it. We proved it. It works, if we find this particle – the Model predicted its existence forty years ago, and to have that validation…it's going to be amazing."
"You too now?" Melanie quipped, turning to look at her German counterpart. "Mon dieu."
"I don't know," began Hermione. "I don't know what excites me more – that it validates decades of scientific theory or…" She looked at the gargantuan chamber before her, stretching miles beyond what her human eyes could fathom. "For me, it's about the beginning of the universe, you know? That first millisecond of time when our universe was born, the inflationary epoch, before that massive expansion of the Big Bang. This would tell us, in some ways, how the universe came to expand exponentially, how it all began." Her voice was soft. "And how it may end."
"I just want proof as to why some of these particles have mass and some don't. And then I can tell the string theorists to fuck off."
Hermione and Erik broke into laughter. The excitement was palpable as the teams readied themselves. Hours passed quickly; the team calibrated and re-calibrated the detector at least twenty times. The second reading was always off.
"Merde."
"I think we can fix it." Hermione looked up at her team. "Just give me a second – I wrote down a permutation of the original formula in my notebook – it could work if we just make a small over-adjustment."
Her team members nodded. "You don't have much time, Granger. They're set to go in 10 minutes."
"I know, I just left it at my workstation." She sprinted to the transport train, back to her desk, shoveling through towers of notebooks, documents and models. 'There you are – bollocks!" She huffed as she noticed the scientists filing through to the laboratory, heavy metal doors closing behind them. "No no no no no." Notebook in hand, she rushed to the transport train, but Erik and Melanie greeted her with hesitant looks.
"Granger it's too late, I don't think it was too far off though so there's still a chance-"
"You can't be serious! This is a particle, Erik, even the slightest degree of miscalculation can cause us to miss it!" She turned around and marched back to the laboratory. This couldn't be happening. She knew her calculation was precise. She couldn't wait another year before testing it again. Delay the test.
"Dr. Friedrich! You have to delay the test, the third detector isn't working right and I can fix it, we just need another few hours-"
"Are you serious?" The director looked directly at her, a look of exasperation etched into his features. "Granger, the sequence is programmed three months in advance – we evacuate small towns nearby before these types of tests and get governmental approval from three countries to run this, this is what we've been planning, we can't just 'delay the test'!" He turned back around to face the metal doors. "The first two detectors are working beautifully anyway. We knew the third was barely complete. It's just a risk we have to take."
She felt the breath stolen from her lungs. Some small part of her argued that he was right. They would have years to test this, decades to complete it, and she would have to be patient. They already waited forty years, didn't they?
But she had a way in. She knew she did.
She shuffled away from the crowd of scientists, following the hallway to the transport train. After dropping her off at the third detector, nine miles away from the rest of the team, Hermione stared at the glass wall in front of her. And she apparated.
A/N: Feeling transiently inspired. May or may not complete it. Enjoy.