[Cinema Competition: Rocky Horror Picture Show - write about a Time-Turner]
[Fanfiction Categories Competition: AU - Write about a change]
[Legendary Gods & Goddesses Challenge: Izanami no Mikoto - Write about a woman giving birth.]
[Interesting Words Challenge: Anacampserote - something that can bring back a lost love]
[Star Light Star Bright Challenge: Nebula - write about the birth of a child]
Sometimes, when she's lying awake late at night and feeling especially alone, she rolls over onto his side of the bed (still his side, even after all this time) and slides open the drawer of the bedside table.
The drawer is brimming with rubbish - she can't bring herself to clean it out - and it takes her a moment to shuffle through the odds and ends. Scraps of parchment, a few loose Knuts, and a watch are among the first things her hand brushes, but the items become more significant the deeper she goes. A silver cigarette lighter that he never used because he never smoked. An empty box of Chocolate Cauldrons. A lone Quidditch glove. A dragon scale. A wallet-sized moving photograph of a rat. A splintered wand. A knight from a chess set.
And then, at the very bottom of it all, the object her fingers have been seeking.
She closes her hand around it and rolls back over to her side. The moonlight is enough to make it twinkle, like a star, like a tiny golden orb with more power than anything so innocent-looking should have the right to possess. She stretches out on her back, covers thrown off her body, and dangles it over her face by the chain and watches it glitter. It sways gently back and forth, back and forth, blown by a breeze that doesn't affect the rest of the world, because it's part of a different world, a different place, a different time.
"Bring me back," she whispers, tapping it lightly with the tip of one finger. It begins to spin. "Bring me back."
It can't bring her back, though, and she knows she's foolish to try.
She had tried, once, right after his funeral when the shock still hadn't settled in yet. She'd moved to His Side of the bed and opened the drawer, intending to clear everything out, but instead she'd found this. She'd slipped the chain around her neck without a second thought and sent herself back farther than she'd meant to, back to the days of fighting and leaving and slamming doors, and she had had no choice but to watch from outside the window and scream at herself to stop, to let it go, to cherish him instead of battle him, because one day he'd be gone.
Then there were the later days, after they'd diagnosed his illness and realized it wasn't something that could be cured, and those were almost worse. She'd watched herself walking on eggshells around him, watched him try to pick a fight and then look sad when she didn't engage, watched them change into a couple they had never been before, and it had broken her heart even more than the death itself.
Going back, she'd learned that day, was not the same as trying again.
And there's no such thing as a do-over.
So she lies in bed, instead, holding the Time Turner just above her and looking into its core with glazed eyes.
She can see her entire past glowing within the pendant, if she looks long enough. Her Hogwarts letter, her wand, meeting Harry, meeting Ron (it hurts even to think the name, even after all this bloody time), finding her place in the wizarding world - every scene is there, depicted by characters made of glittering golden dust.
"Bring me back," she whispers again.
The Time Turner does nothing but sway from its chain.
"Bring it all back." And she isn't just talking about her husband anymore, no, she wants back the sunny days, and the long study sessions, and the terrifying rush adrenaline that came with knowing the world was counting on her, and the proposal, and the wedding, and the babies, and the tears and the curses and the pain and she wouldn't do a damned thing differently.
(Yes, she would. So many things.)
"Bring me back," she says, and suddenly she's filled with an inexplicable rage that makes her sit up and throw the Time Turner at the floor with every ounce of strength in her body.
It shatters.
The dust flies everywhere, coating her bed and her clothes and her eyelids, and she doesn't even care, doesn't even mind, she's shaking with sobs that she can't stop, even though she can't even remember why she's crying anymore, or what's going on, or even her own name, all she knows is something is not right and it's making her inconsolable.
"It's a girl," the doctor announces, and she hears his words but she doesn't understand them, doesn't know where he came from or how he's strong enough to lift her or why everything is suddenly so bright . . .
"My little baby," cries a woman, and the doctor places the newborn in her arms just as the last of the golden dust fades into her skin. "My little Hermione."
And the newborn blinks helplessly up at the ceiling, where a giant mobile of the sun is hanging, and tries to figure out where she has seen a golden orb like that one before.