Title: Aetas Aliasmodi

Title: Aetas Aliasmodi
Author: Ultima Dea
Rating: M, not necessarily right off the bat.
Summary: AU/AR. The Final Battle came earlier than anyone had expected. Once again, they've been forced to a last resort: time travel. Unfortunately, the spell makes for pretty shoddy aim, and nothing is quite going to plan…
Pairings: The main one is LM/HG. Secondary pairings are still quite up in the air. For that matter, so's the first one. Nothing is cemented, people!
Author's Note: Welcome to the fic! :) Please enjoy. Also, Snape has not killed Dumbledore yet! Harry and Hermione are in the middle of their sixth year at the beginning of this story.

Aetas Aliasmodi
Prologue: From the Ashes

"Life is short, but it is wide."
-Rebecca Wells, in The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

December 24th, 1996: 9:43 p.m.

Hermione tore through her room, stuffing things into her knapsack. After casting a nervous, almost guilty look at her books, the teenaged girl shrunk them all and put them into her knapsack, as well. She wasn't going to let a little Death Eater invasion/massacre separate her from her books, and nobody who knew her would begrudge her that.

Pausing for a moment as she heard her name being called, she began to leave the room, but stopped and looked back at her trunk. "Coming!" she called down the stairs, and after a moment's more of struggling with herself, she finally made a small, exasperated noise and rounded on her trunk before digging through it frantically. Her knapsack held a fresh change of underwear, her books, a few magical artifacts she thought she might make use of, and, quite secretly, a few items that held too much personal value to leave behind, no matter how grim their circumstances.

She didn't bother grabbing more clothes, although her own were splattered with blood. Where she was going, if she made it there, her clothes would not fit in, and she'd have to find new ones, anyway.

Finally, Hermione sighed with relief as she pulled out a small book, the words "Memories" scrawled across it in lazy cursive. Feeling tears sting her eyes, she shook her head, firmly. They could take her friends from her, but she would cling to these pictures with her dying breath, if necessary.

"Hermione!" Harry Potter bellowed from the bottom of the stairs to the girl's dorm.

Pursing her lips in annoyance, Hermione stuffed the photo album in her knapsack and ran from her room, taking the steps down two at a time. "I'm here, Harry," she said, breathlessly, and would have snapped something if he hadn't taken her elbow as soon as she appeared and started dragging her behind him.

His clothes were no better than hers were; covered with blood and grime.

She knew that if Ron had been there, he'd have pulled at her other elbow, rolling his eyes and rhetorically asking why girls took so bloody long to pack things. A pained frown tugged at her lips as Harry looked around a corner before releasing her arm, gesturing at her to be silent and follow. Harry didn't have Ron's gift of making light of every situation. It was a talent that Hermione had always outwardly shown exasperation for, even while she was relieved – with Ron around, keeping solemnity at bay, their problems never seemed to be too big to tackle.

But he wasn't here. And she couldn't risk crying and blurring her vision. Holding her wand at ready, she ran behind Harry, glad that he was keeping a steady pace she could keep up with.

Suddenly, there was movement from the corner of the corridor they'd just turned around. Whirling, Hermione slid to a stop, training her wand on the movement and shouting, "Stupe—" before faltering and falling silent.

"Hermione?" Harry asked nervously, turning and coming back towards her.

"Harry…" Hermione said, her tone sounding oddly like a warning, but without any note of panic. Her brown eyes turned and connected with his green ones before returning to the lone figure at the end of her wand.

Harry's expression turned grim when he realized who it was.

A first-year, whose name Hermione didn't know and who sported the green tie of Slytherin, was cowering in the corner, watching the tip of Hermione's wand fearfully. Cussing, Harry turned and looked down the corridor before turning back to the small boy, running his fingers through his already-messy hair.

The castle should have been empty.

The Death Eaters had chosen to attack during Christmas. Ron and Ginny had stayed in the castle for the holidays rather than Harry and Hermione joining their family at the Burrow because their parents had gone to visit Charlie. Harry, of course, had nowhere to go, and Hermione had owled her parents and asked if she could stay with her friends.

Mr. and Mrs. Granger had agreed. They would certainly regret it for the rest of their lives, now.

While the first wave of dark creatures had attacked the castle, the teachers had rounded up the only students in the castle. Thankfully, there had been few, maybe about thirty five in total. Twenty of them had been sixth and seventh years, and had joined most of the teachers on the battlefield as the wards surrounding Hogwarts had weakened.

Professor McGonagall and Headmaster Dumbledore had ushered the younger students up to his office, where they were Flooed to relative safety. Then, over the battlefield, all the owls were released simultaneously – probably to warn the students that had gone home for the holidays that the school would be closed until further notice or something similar.

"On bloody Christmas Eve!" Ron had exclaimed, rolling his eyes and pretending that his face wasn't as white as a sheet. "They certainly have a solid grip on what constitutes holiday cheer."

Ginny had smacked him on the back of his head with her wand. "Fine time to be making jokes, Ron. It's not going to be so funny if somebody dies, now will it?"

Rubbing at his head and frowning at his sister, Ron had simply grumbled, "Nobody's going to die. We're the good side." Ginny had rolled her eyes, although Hermione could tell from the fact that she was even bothering to banter with her brother that she held Ron's opinion.

Nobody was going to die. Dying happened to other people.

"Come on," Hermione finally ordered, when it was clear that Harry was still wrestling with the sudden arrival of the Slytherin first-year. Striding towards the boy, she grabbed him by the elbow and hauled him into a standing position. At his stricken look, Hermione tried to soften her grip somewhat. "What's your name?"

She heard Harry exhale sharply in annoyance. "Now isn't the time, Hermione. We have to go before they get in."

At that, the boy was suddenly clutching Hermione's hand. "Connor." Tears were welling up in his eyes. "Connor O'Mallory." There was a faint Irish lilt to his voice, and Hermione frowned at Harry when she didn't recognize the name. That was good, though – it left it up in the air, whether he was the son of a Death Eater or not.

"Where are your parents?" Hermione asked, then gave Harry a glare when he began to fidget. However, she knew herself that time was of the essence, and began to walk. Connor walked with her willingly, sniffing and wiping his nose on the sleeve of his robe.

"I don't know," he all but wailed. "P-professor Dumbledore said I couldn't go home and then everyone else in Slytherin was really mean to me and told me I wouldn't get any presents for Christmas."

Harry, who had been looking hard at the boy until that point, softened somewhat, mouthing "Death Eater murders" at Hermione, who understood. Lately, there had been a rash of deaths among the parents of their Slytherin classmates, and Harry had long since speculated that they were old Death Eaters who Voldemort had decided didn't have their uses anymore. Their children did a fine job of stepping in, apparently.

Hermione chose not to address this with the boy, since Dumbledore had apparently decided not to tell Connor about his parents' untimely demise. "Come on. We're getting to safety. How come you didn't floo out with the others?"

"When?" the boy asked, obviously confused as to what she was talking about. Hermione hadn't recalled seeing him at Christmas Eve dinner, which was when the attack had started and when the students had started getting evacuated.

"At dinner," Harry supplied, and then gave a relieved "Finally" as the door to the Room of Requirement suddenly appeared around the corner.

Connor's face fell. "Ellen said that you only got to eat Christmas Eve dinner if you were going to get presents. She said I couldn't come."

Oh, really! Slytherins were honestly appallingly horrible to each other, Hermione thought as she ushered the first-year into the Room of Requirement. As the petty thought crossed her mind, she was forced to remind herself, harshly, that there were worse things than the personality traits of Slytherin. There had been an obscene amount of death that day, and no matter how she tried to distract herself, Hermione knew that her battle instincts were simply forcing her to wait until she had the leisure to grieve. She wasn't sure when said leisure would arrive, if ever; the plan Harry had come up with wasn't even assured of working.

After evacuating the students, Professor McGonagall and Dumbledore had joined the students and teachers on the battlefield with promises that Aurors would arrive soon. The Aurors hadn't shown up by the time everyone had fallen.

Voldemort, the coward, hadn't even bothered to make an appearance. Harry's scar told him that he was in the vicinity, but he was obviously waiting for one of the Death Eaters to finish the boy, since Harry had proved so tenacious when it came to battling Voldemort one on one. Smart, but despicable, and with the dark creatures barreling through them, none of them had really stood a chance. There had only been, possibly, forty on the side of Good at that battle, with hundreds upon hundred backing up the Bad side.

Hermione and Harry were side by side, casting hex after hex at the Death Eaters. She heard Harry almost say the Killing Curse, and had found herself, absurdly, holding her breath and wishing that he wouldn't use an Unforgivable. Thankfully, he'd stuttered on the fourth syllable, and had changed tactics suddenly and cast a Stupefy.

Ron should have been flanking her other side, but he'd seen Ginny in trouble and had bounded towards the giant with an indignant holler.. The sounds of battle had arisen around her, and his voice had faded in the noise.

She knew that with every moment that passed without him by her side, it was becoming steadily more certain that he'd been killed. But she hadn't had time to look for him.

She could only focus on the seemingly endless stream of targets..

Finally, in the haze of all the cursing, hexing, and spellcasting, a huge blast had sent the dark creatures flying backwards, and Harry had turned to her with a strangely panicked look to his bright green eyes. "Dumbledore's down. We're the only ones fighting."

The only ones fighting.

She had looked into her best friend's bright green eyes and saw her heartbreak, the splintering, rupturing pain, mirrored there. Her chest seized, and a bruised feeling rose in the back of her throat as she struggled not to cry.

The opposing side was beginning to rally. "Inside," Harry ordered, turning her around and pushing her into a run. "Go! Don't look down," he bellowed in afterthought, but it was too late, and once she'd looked at the ground, she couldn't look away.

Lupin had landed on his stomach, and looked strangely as though he were sleeping. McGonagall's limbs had been twisted in a sickening manner, and her eyes were staring up at the sky, bulging from her sockets. Ginny seemed to have stumbled backwards over her brother, and her glassy gaze was focused on the grass near her shoulder.

Hermione thanked and cursed whatever God there was that Ron's face had been turned away from her as she passed his fallen body.

"Hermione?" Harry asked, waving a hand in front of her face. Hermione snapped back into focus, blinking and sending him a questioning look. Harry looked oddly… old. Sadness seemed to line his mouth, and there was a weariness to his gaze and posture that hadn't been there a mere five hours prior. Dimly aware of a pain in her arm, she looked down at Connor, who was digging his fingers into her wrist with a single-minded sort of panic as explosions and great booming noises began sounding from outside the castle. The Death Eaters were getting in.

"Yes, Harry?"

"Here's the book," he said, his voice soft as he handed the tome to her. She took it with her free hand and looked at the boy clinging to her.

Twisting her wrist from his grasp, Hermione settled her hand on his head reassuringly when he turned his blue gaze up at her. "I need to look through this book. Why don't you tell Harry about yourself?"

Connor gave Harry a mistrusting look through his black fringe, but nodded mutely and allowed Harry to lead him a few feet away. Hermione glanced at the cover of the book, noting how worn and old it appeared, and traced her finger over the title.

Tyme Travelle: A Compendiumme of Usses, Abusses and Niftie Tricks.

She didn't have it in herself to appreciate the scope of how ridiculous the title was. Olde English left a lot to be desired. Feeling a dead weight in her chest where she knew mirth would be bubbling had she the inclination, Hermione cracked the hard cover open, carefully handling the pages so they didn't turn to dust in her fingers. It was a beautifully kept book, although nearly ancient.

"My favorite color is orange," she heard Connor telling Harry happily, although there was a twinge of nervousness every time a loud noise echoed through the castle. Tearing her attention away from the two boys, she focused on the book. Connor seemed to fade from her senses as he chattered. "My birthday is in February…"

She had known going in that many of the spells would be useless. Time travel was a tricky, complex and very illegal art, and most of the spells involved ingredients that the Room of Requirement was not readily equipped to give. After all, if one could simply procure priceless ingredients from the place, nobody would bother searching the jungles for any of it.

Hermione began every spell by skimming the instructions, turning the page immediately if she saw an ingredient she knew she would not be able to get.

An hour later, she still hadn't found a workable spell, and she was a little more than halfway through the tome. She glanced up at Harry, who had gone glassy-eyed in the face of Connor's incessant prattle, although the younger boy didn't seem to notice Harry's mental absence at all.

A mere fifteen minutes later, an explosion shook the very foundation of the castle. Above them, the mini-chandelier tinkled as the movement rocked the Room of Requirement, and Hermione cast a look up towards the ceiling as dust sprinkled down on top of them. Shouts of victory echoed through the corridors of the castle outside of their room. Feeling Harry's gaze on her, Hermione raised her brown eyes and looked at him squarely. Connor had fallen silent, his blue eyes wide with horror.

"It's only a matter of time before they find us," Harry reminded her in a quiet tone that belied the panic that had stolen into his body, forcing him to clench and unclench his fists.

She merely nodded. "I know. I'm looking."

He almost told her to hurry, but then shut his mouth. Hermione didn't need any rushing. She knew the stakes.

Another hour later, Hermione finished the book. She had two places marked with her fingers, and when she flipped back to them, Harry stood up, glad to get away from Connor's attempts to play I Spy with him. He felt bad for not indulging the child, but he was too wrapped up in the imminence of his own death and the permanence of his friends' death to really care about Connor's psychological health.

"What have you got?" he asked softly, crouching down behind her. Hermione's lips were tight, held thin, when she looked over her shoulder at him. After a tense moment, she sighed, rubbing at her temples with her free hand.

Shifting the book over so he could see it, she showed him the first and then the second option. "Nothing good, I'm afraid. We might as well throw out the idea of using specifics, now; those spells are too complex to be an option, considering that we're running low on time and don't have the ability to gather most of the ingredients.

"The first option will send us back in time, but there's no guarantee that we'll land in a time when Riddle is still a child. Although we can do the best we've got, the spell is well known for being unwieldy and unreliable, and we could end up precisely where we like or about three hundred years prior.

"The second option is a spell that won't send us back more than sixty years, which is good, because sixty-five years would have been our target… but like the first, there's no way to guarantee that we'll end up sixty years back. It'll at least send us twenty years back. It says that the spell's destination becomes more concrete if the casters can imagine the timezone. Which we can try to do, but neither of us have lived in the forties, and we'd have to explain it as best we could to Connor."

She sighed once more, through her nose, which Harry knew meant that she was done. Shoving his glasses up and rubbing the bridge of his nose in frustration, he squeezed his eyes shut. "That's absolutely bloody terrible options," he commented, almost idly.

"I know."

"Well, at this point we've got nothing to lose. Connor!" Harry said, raising his voice and beckoning the boy over – the first-year had been hovering where Harry had left him, unsure as to whether he was going to be allowed to participate in the conversation or not. "Come here… I've got a plan, but we're going to need your help."

Ignoring the way the boy's eyes brightened up at being needed, Hermione let the book fall open at the second option, knowing that that's what Harry had chosen.

xo
xoxo
xoxoxo
xoxo
xo

"Do you remember the words?" Harry asked Connor gently as Hermione drew a rough double-pentagram with a piece of chalk the Room had happily supplied. It had taken two hours of drilling it into the boy's head along with the wand movements and the visualizing of the forties lifestyle, and neither Harry nor Hermione had much faith that the spell would work. But as Harry had pointed out, they had nothing to lose. It was either that or wait to die.

Connor nodded fervently, his eyes gleaming happily with the notion that two sixth-years were relying on his help. "Aetis Aliasmodi," he supplied, in case Harry didn't believe him.

Harry nodded, and Connor beamed.

Closing the circle she'd drawn around the double-pentagram, Hermione rocked back onto her heels. "It would be more stable with a fourth person," she fretted, running the chalk between her fingers worriedly.

"It will be fine. Connor will take East point, and you and I will take North and South… and then you'll move to West point and finish it," Harry said, somewhat unnecessarily, since Hermione no doubt had every move down pat. There was a tense moment of silence before Harry put a hand to Connor's shoulder, moving him into position. "No time like the present."

The three students took up their positions, all bravely ignoring the nervous flutterings of their bellies as they stepped within the double-pentagram. They closed their eyes, trying to think of nothing but what they imagined the forties to look like. Hermione willed the spell to send them to the correct time. Harry prayed that the spell wouldn't mess up. Connor merely hoped that the other two would notice that he did a good job of doing the words right.

"Aetis Aliasmodi," Hermione finally intoned, keeping her eyes closed and pointing her wand Northwards. After a pause in which she wondered if Connor had passed out from anxiety, she finally heard a tremulous, young Irish voice repeat the words, followed by Harry's much lower, more masculine tone.

Although her legs felt heavy with the electrical sparkings of magic as the three incantations settled neatly on top of each other, she forced herself to move to the West point, keeping her wand outstretched, and said the fourth and final incantation.

There was a pregnant pause.

Hermione felt the magic sink downwards, as if fading away, and sighed as Harry whispered, "Did it work? I don't think—"

At that precise moment, a feeling of intense vertigo overcame her, so intense that she felt as if all of her organs had shifted upside down and twisted into each other. She thought she might have cried out, but didn't hear herself or the others. Opening her eyes, she saw the room shift rhythmically, as if pulsating, but the movement was so violent that it instantly made her feel sick.

Then little black dots swarmed her vision from the corners of her eyes, turning the world fuzzy until everything went dark.

xo
xoxo
xoxoxo
xoxo
xo

She awoke to the sound of someone retching, and something hot, wet, and chunky landing on her arm and stomach. The smell of fresh vomit followed soon after, and Hermione bit her own tongue, hoping the pain would distract her from emptying the contents of her stomach, herself.

Her head hurt so badly that she didn't think she could stand opening her eyes. A low moan sounded a few feet away from her, one that echoed her misery and amplified it as the noise entered her ears before promptly crashing around her brain and making her wish she'd never been born. A whimper sounded from somewhere near her elbow, and Hermione realized that Connor, the first-year, was the one that had hurled all over her. Nice. Should have left the bugger to rot in the castle.

There was no telling how long the three of them laid there, eyes shut, moving only slightly. Eventually, Hermione's pounding headache lessened. It seemed that Harry's had followed suit, because he spoke.

"I think I'm going to throw up."

"Do it on me and I will stomp on your throat," Hermione whispered, her tone flat and heavy with promise.

"Looks like the first-year beat him to it, anyway," came a fully new, not-one-of-the-new-trio voice. It had a drawling quality to it, as though the boy speaking always had eight to twelve better things to do than engage in conversation with anyone, anywhere.

Alarmed, Hermione snapped her eyes open, but hurriedly shut them again. The light, wherever she was, was meager, but it was enough to sting. She had rather thought that the spell would have kept them in the Room of Requirement, but it seemed as though the Room had somewhere else to be, and the spell had deposited them elsewhere. Fan-bloody-tastic.

She heard Harry try and sit up. "Who are you?"

"None of your business," was the prompt, sharp reply. "Knowing who you are is definitely my business, though, as I don't know any of you and have reason to believe that you are trespassing on school grounds."

She hated that voice already. Cutting Harry off before he said something stupid, like, My name's Harry Potter! Hermione spoke, managing to open her eyes and look at her bleary surroundings. "Dumbledore."

The figure was unfocused before her. "What?" came the exasperated response.

"Dumbledore. I assume you know him, since he works here?" she snapped, hauling herself up into a sitting position and digging her thumb into a spot at the corner of her eye where the headache was markedly persistent. The vomit on her shirt had cooled, apparently, and now she could feel it anew as she moved. Disgusting.

Hermione felt, rather than saw, the figure draw itself in, as if about to explode or at least do something very nasty to them. Suddenly, she was aware of how unwise it was to be rude to someone who clearly had you at a disadvantage.

Thankfully, the boy who'd found them had no time to do anything.

"Here I am," came a brand new voice, somewhat old and still containing that twinkling sort of vibrancy that told Hermione that there was a perpetual smile on his face. "Ah, Mr. Malfoy. Diligent in your prefect duties as usual! I'll take everything from here."

There was no response from the boy, but Hermione assumed he nodded.

Beside her, Harry startled. "Malfoy? Lucius Malfoy?" he asked, and Hermione could have smacked him for saying something so stupid. Why not just broadcast to everyone that they had used an illegal time traveling spell?

There was a short silence from the Malfoy. Then, "It seems you have me at a disadvantage, Mr….?"

Harry's only response was a groan. "Hermione. We missed."

And, as if to add further commentary to their failings, Connor retched and threw up all over Hermione's lap.

xo
xoxo
xoxoxo
xoxo
xo

End note: Woo! What a blasty-blast this'll turn out to be. Harry really should learn to be more discrete.