A/N: I know I need to stop starting new stories when I can't even keep track of the ones I've already posted, but this is a side project, ok? I watched Kokoro Connect yesterday and I thought it made a great AU idea and I couldn't get it out of my head, so here we are.

Part One – Random People

I-I

Given the chaos that had become of their summer break, Hermione had known better than to have high hopes for the year to come. Being named Prefect had simply been one small candle-flame of light in the murky uncertainty of going forward into a world that refused to see reason, ruled by a government content to stick their heads in the sand. So she had been upset, yes, when their new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher turned out to be a horrid, Ministry-appointed shrew, but in the grand scheme of things she'd felt that she really should have seen it coming.

This, however, was not something she ever could have predicted.

It started slowly, unobtrusively, and then it happened all at once.

Hermione ignored it at first.

She opened her eyes to darkness. It wasn't the first time Hermione had woken somewhere in the middle of the night, and she doubted it would be the last, but it took her a moment to realise that something was wrong. Night-time or no, it was too dark. She never pulled the hangings on her bed all the way closed, and the moon outside the window in the girls' dorm always offered a hazy light, however dim, to her surroundings. But she could barely see the shadowy outline of her own hands in front of her face.

Frowning, Hermione groped about the darkness around her until her fingers found the fabric of the curtains. They curled in the fabric, ready to tear it open, but she paused, rubbing it gently between finger and thumb. It was softer than she remembered it being. Almost… silky. But that was ridiculous. They wouldn't change the curtains in the middle of the night.

She breathed out a laugh – careful of her volume since Lavender was an unpredictably light sleeper. There was something about the dark that made her paranoia skyrocket, even in the relative safety of her own bed.

"Don't be silly Hermione," she whispered to herself, but her voice sounded strange. Unfamiliar. Her fingers tightened in the silken curtain. She would go to the bathroom, wash her face, and try to get some more sleep before having to stumble through a new day of heightened tension in the Gryffindor common room.

The dorm, when she pulled back the curtain, was darker than it should have been. Her gaze automatically sought out the window, wondering if a particularly bad storm had rolled in after she went to bed, but the window wasn't there. Instead, she found a single light source – a small wall sconce above a door that wasn't where she'd expected it to be, which held a wavering ball of soft, pale blue fire. It gave off just enough light for Hermione to make out the shapes of more beds, and, if she squinted, the dark shapes of trunks.

Nothing was where it was supposed to be.

Still, if she had learned anything in her four years at Hogwarts it was the courage to do a bit of investigating when things stopped making sense (more so than usual, in a school of magic, at any rate).

The temperature dropped the moment she stepped out of the confines of the bed. It wasn't uncomfortably cold, but it was a noticeable change. Her dorm was never this cold, particularly not in September.

Careful to keep her wits about her, she tiptoed carefully towards the lit doorway, trying to ignore the feel of unfamiliar carpet beneath her bare feet. The door, thankfully, led to a bathroom, and not a hallway. It was dark inside, but when she closed the door gently behind her a number of the same blue flames burst into life around the room, letting Hermione see properly for the first time since opening her eyes.

She headed straight for the large, ornate mirror that hung above a pair of sinks with fancy silver taps. If it was an enchanted mirror like the ones she'd first encountered in the Leaky Cauldron, it was currently asleep. The face that stared back at her from the glass was quite definitely not her own. Dark hair, pale skin, and cold eyes. It wasn't an entirely unfamiliar face, but Hermione couldn't for the life of her put a name to it. All she could say with any certainty was that the bewildered look she currently wore was one that likely very rarely – if at all – appeared on the aristocratic features she was suddenly in possession of.

Hermione stayed in the bathroom for nearly quarter of an hour, staring, thinking, trying to reach the trickle of memory that said she knew exactly whose face she was wearing, and then, when she failed to reach a conclusion, she tiptoed back to the bed, pulled the curtains shut, and forced herself to go back to sleep.

Because the next time she'd opened her eyes she had been back in her own bed in Gryffindor Tower, it had been simple enough to put it behind her as an unusually lucid dream. Hermione had never had a lucid dream before, and it was odd that she remembered so many of the details, even the day after, but what else could it have been?

Then, two days later, it happened again. A foreign bed, unfamiliar surroundings. A dream, surely. She didn't leave the bed that time – didn't want to know if it was the same person she was dreaming of, or someone else again – and lay still with her eyes closed until she eventually succumbed back to sleep.

Only this time, when she woke up, things were different.

She was back in her own bed, in her own body, yes, but when she was brushing her hair before breakfast Lavender kept sending her odd, fleeting glances.

"Is there something on my face?" Hermione asked, her eyes on her hands as she worked through a particularly stubborn knot.

"No."

She glanced across the room. Lavender had stopped pretending she wasn't watching her, and stared with a strange look on her face.

"This may be an odd question but… do you sleepwalk sometimes?"

At that Hermione abandoned her hairbrush and spun to face Lavender, eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

"Not to the best of my knowledge… Why? Did something happen?"

"Maybe? I'm… not so sure anymore." She shrugged, as though to brush it off, but Hermione wasn't about to let her off the hook without explaining.

"It's fine if you're not sure. Just tell me what you think happened."

"If you insist." She started doing her own hair as she spoke, so as to avoid maintaining eye contact the whole time. "You know I'm a light sleeper, but I also sort of take forever to wake up, so, it might just have been my imagination. But. I woke up last night because I thought I heard someone moving about in the dorm. And I saw you going through your trunk and your bag in the dark – I have no idea what you might have been looking for – and also maybe cursing? I think you were muttering to yourself anyway, but I couldn't tell what you were saying. You slammed your trunk shut – I'm sort of surprised it didn't wake anyone else up – and then you went to the bathroom and I fell asleep again."

"Huh." Hermione glanced over at her trunk. It had seemed a bit messier than she'd left it, but she had thought that was just her imagination. "It was just a dream," she told Lavender, hoping she sounded convincing, and that her smile won out over the frown that wanted to drag her lips down.

Lavender laughed a little, not meeting her gaze. "Right? I mean, we've been sharing a room for four years and you've never sleep walked before. Why would you suddenly start now?"

Neither of them had an answer for that. Lavender hurriedly left the room while Hermione fell into a contemplative silence.

She'd had a body-switching dream last night. Someone had been through her stuff. That would imply that it was less of a dream and more of a reality. But that was ridiculous. Wasn't it? Magic was crazy and defied all sorts of natural laws, but surely it couldn't instigate spontaneous body-switching!

"Be rational," she chided herself. She slapped her cheeks gently for good measure.

As she threw her hair up into a messy bun she made a decision. She didn't have class first period, so she would grab something for breakfast and then make tracks for the library. There was (almost) nothing a good round of research couldn't help with.

Neither Ron nor Harry were in the common room when she came down from the dorm, so they were either still asleep (lazy) or had gone on without her (because no one could get between Ron and food), so she headed out for the Great Hall by herself.

The path she took was relatively quiet – most of the Gryffindors were probably already in the Great Hall – and she allowed her thoughts to drift as her feet paced the familiar corridors. It was because she was swept away in planning out a start point for her research that she didn't immediately react when a hand grabbed her wrist and started tugging rather forcefully.

She was in an abandoned classroom before she could do more than hiss out a sound of pain and surprise. Her mysterious assailant let her go once she was inside and shut the door behind them, murmuring a quiet locking charm. Hermione spun with a glare, fingers reaching for her wand and an irate reprimand on the tip of her tongue, but when she saw who had grabbed her she froze.

In front of her, a frosty but determined look settled across a pale, aristocratic face, stood the girl Hermione had seen in the mirror. The green of her tie sent alarm bells ringing but her name was suddenly just within reach.

Hermione didn't know what to say, but thankfully the Slytherin girl did.

"Granger, we need to talk."