This is a one-shot, set in the Twisted Timeline world. A very vague, general idea of what took place directly before (after? never?) Out of Time. If you haven't read either Out of Time or Shattered Moments, you're going to end up spoiling just about the entire series for yourself with this. You have been warned.

A Widening Gyre
By Rurouni Star

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold… the ceremony of innocence is drowned."
-W.B. Yeats

It is a good thing you've learned to break rules, Miss Granger.

So were the last words of Albus Dumbledore written.

She looked at the little golden timeturner, its chain twisted about her wrist. (There's no way to fix the future that's already happened, she thought).

There was a post script, she saw, on the back of the letter. Written in other handwriting – the same that had addressed the letter. Elegant, sharp, and slightly shaky.

I'm sorry.

There was no way to know who'd sent it.

00000

"You're so busy these days," George murmured to her, lips in her hair. She leaned back into him tiredly, thinking of the little golden hourglass that lay against her skin.

"I can't ignore the world forever," she told him, closing her eyes. The world, the world, the world was going to end…

"Of course you can. You have been. So have I. Let's ignore it again tonight."

It was so easy to do.

00000

The last piece of the puzzle.

This would hold the only chance to fix things, then. The other way was entirely out of the question.

Breaking back into Hogwarts to use an old pensieve wasn't only against the rules – it was against the law. Not that McGonagall would likely begrudge her.

The quicksilver memories stirred at her approach, quiet and mysterious in the dark. What memory had he wanted her to see?

They slid slowly up her hands, like oil. She wondered, only for an instant, that all memories looked alike.

00000

"Hermione! Hermione, what did you do?"

"Nothing. Everything. I want to hide, George, I want to hide again-"

There were too many memories, you never stop once you begin, you have to have someone to drag you out, oh god-

The worst of it became the fact that she wasn't crying for Harry, or Parvati, or Fred, and fuck Dumbledore, she'd never shed a tear for him again…

There was a way. She'd never do it. She wanted to do it. She hated herself.

When he was young, he was quiet, with a silver ring upon his finger and a thirst for simple things. The hat whispered to him, the hat broke him, he was condemned before the beginning, and Azkaban was such a terrible, frightening place to scream into the dark.

"So hide. No one is stopping you."

Thank god.

00000

She'd once thought the Imperius the least of all the Unforgivables.

Now, she was crippled, bloody (oh god, the blood wasn't hers-!), and everything was so incredibly wrong, and she was only half a person.

I want to die.

She couldn't.

It is a good thing you've learned to break rules, Miss Granger. I'm sorry, said the writing.

There would never be any apology good enough.

Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneight-

And twelve years ago, she found that the dark, cold depths of Azkaban held no more horror than the last few days, played over and over again.

"Hermione Granger," she whispered to him, the blood still drying underneath her fingernails.

When he laughed and held his face in his hands, she saw another person with only half a soul.