Disclaimer: No, I don't own Harry Potter. Do I strike you as the kind of person who'd pair Ron with Hermione?

A/N: I ship Harry/Hermione, hard. Almost obsessively so. If you notice some tropes of those sorts of fics, good for you, because this is written like one.

Written in an AU where Voldemort was more fond of Crucio than Avada Kedavra, with a few interesting changes to canon stuff because I'm a shameless self-inserting harlot. No, Harry and Hermione do not end up in a relationship, but there are going to be a lot of moments reminiscent of tropes in Harry/Hermione stories, so if that's not your jam... oops?

Fair warning, this fic will not be updated until I've at least got an incredible head start on getting the bugger done. That way, you don't get invested only for it to taper off after I vanish for ten years. You don't like it, and I don't want to do that to you, so don't get shocked if this sits on this site for a year or two without an update.

Oh, and this will probably be my longest Author's Note in this entire story. Yay!

Chapter One: A Whole New World

Hermione Granger was, by her own admission, not a normal eleven-year-old. Whereas most girls her age took pride in the size of their stuffed animal collections, she had been raised to aspire to higher ideas. There were more important things, like building a proper future for herself, or ensuring that her books were alphabetized so she wouldn't have to spend valuable time searching through her bookshelf when the mood hit her to read, which it so often did.

She had, of course, paid a heftier price than she had wanted for her strangeness. The children at primary school would always pester her about whatever their devilish little minds could invent at that moment, usually in the schoolyard. Some days it was her teeth, ever-so-irksomely too long in the front, not substantial enough to be a problem but large enough to be made fun of, especially seeing as her parents were dentists. Other days it was her study habits, always with a schedule and a plan, usually two or three books so she could get to the meat of the issue while avoiding author bias. Run-of-the-mill study habits, to be sure, but nevertheless her classmates were absolutely merciless.

However, some days her strangeness began to baffle even her. There had been times when she'd been particularly hurt by her peers when simply impossible things had happened. A boy with curly brown hair and a smattering of freckles had been taunting her from atop the jungle gym, only to miraculously fall through the solid bar he'd been sitting on mere moments before, as if it were never there. Or when the girl behind her so devilishly used her scissors to shear the back of her hair off, only for it to grow back by the end of the day as though nothing had happened. Even to her learned mind, that encroached into the realm of the impossible. It was strange even for her, and that only meant her peers would be all the more vicious.

Today, however, took the metaphorical weirdness cake. In front of her and her dumbfounded parents stood the recipient of said cake, an ancient, scowling fossil of a woman in the most ostentatiously medieval outfit her rather imaginative mind could possibly conjure. Her eyes were a piercing blue that seemed to see every facet of her character, and she was presently explaining that no, Hermione Jean Granger was not, in fact, a strange girl but in fact had simply been born with an auspicious gift.

Magic.

And for the life of her, no matter how much she might regret missing it in the future, Hermione simply could not manage to pay the imposing woman a moment's notice, so lost in her own thoughts she was. While her mind absently noted the woman politely reading out a list of what she assumed were magical school supplies in a rather harsh Scottish accent, she was busy cataloguing every possible moment when her previously-imagined strangeness could possibly have been magic. Accidental magic, if the renaissance-fair dropout was to be believed.

It did make a lot of sense, and for what it was worth her parents hadn't shown the woman the door just yet so she imagined it made at least some amount of sense to them, too. They had taken her into their practice one time to have a cavity fixed (for shame, Hermione!) only for her mother to discover that it had, in fact, vanished in the intervening time, something Hermione had desperately wished would happen but had never imagined actually would.

The next few days vanished in a blur, as her parents were chaperoned by this mysterious woman from one mind-boggling circumstance to another, seemingly without end. By the end of the ordeal she had a set of robes (who even wears robes outside the restroom anyway?), a cauldron, what a normal person might consider a mountain of textbooks and reading material, and a wand. She still couldn't quite get over that last bit, even sitting in her room. They'd gone to a magical shopping bazaar and returned with a stick that channeled magic. Her magic.

To her immense surprise, however, she had found that the most fascinating thing about discovering that an entire world of magical people existed wasn't the fact that she may one day be able to literally turn things into frogs, but the history of it all. An entire world populated with people, struggles, stories. And she wanted to know them all. For a shy, imaginative bibliophile like her, it was as though her library had quadrupled in size, except in the new sections the stories involving fairy godmothers may actually be true.

She spent the better part of the next week absolutely devouring all the information she could about this new world. About Grindelwalds and Voldemorts and Dumbledores and Hogwarts...es? Wands and spells and incantations and potions and creatures and battles and love. It was beyond unfathomable; it was every wildest dream she'd ever had come true, and then made more mystical than she could ever have imagined.

What she didn't quite understand was how… violent it all seemed. Sure, the world of Diagon Alley had seemed peaceful enough, but not only did the whole of magical Britain seem to have an air of uncomfortable aristocracy to it, there seemed to have been war after war after war against evil wizards, some even happening around when she was born. It didn't make sense to her. If she had the ability to do even half the things magic was capable of, her thoughts would never go toward murder and torture and the myriad horrible things the history books were telling her had been commonplace a mere decade ago.

Hermione read about a man named Voldemort, so terrifying and unfathomably powerful that witches and wizards still wouldn't utter his name, even though he'd been defeated ten years prior by the most powerful good wizard of the time, Albus Dumbledore. She learned about how years had gone by where people like her - muggleborns, as she discovered - were afraid to even sleep in their own homes for fear of having their minds taken from them in their sleep. This so-called Dark Lord had a penchant for breaking the minds of his victims, leaving swathes of them catatonic in his wake.

This one man and his followers had terrorized the magical world - nearly brought it to its knees - for the better part of the entire seventies. It was only after Voldemort murdered a baby in his crib, one Leo Black, that the headmaster of the premier magical school in Britain (Hogwarts, what an odd name) decided enough was enough.

Even as a charcoal-black owl dropped a fancy-looking envelope on her nightstand and left, she couldn't quite come to terms with the idea that this world had dark wizards who were capable of murdering babies, especially ones that did it immediately after torturing his parents until they went insane.

It was like every nightmare she'd ever had came true.

And on her nightstand, she would later find out, was a letter from Lord Black.