Author's Note: This is set after the war, but is non epilogue compliant (obviously). It starts off a bit dark and depressing, (well compared to my usual style which is more humor over substance) but will pick up from there. The earliest chapters are, I feel, needed to set the scene for the rest of the story. This is a time travel story, which means it will branch off and become very AU. This is a Tom Riddle/Hermione Granger story about circumstances and how they can shape the future. Anyway, enjoy.
Disclaimer: I in no way have any claim over any of JK Rowling's characters. I am merely a huge fan, posing a great big 'what if'.
The war was over; it had been for nearly a year, and the dark lord was gone. Yet, nothing had returned to normal, nothing was ever the same again. Harry had lost so much, they all had. But nothing came close to what the Weasley family had to endure. The physical injuries that Bill and George had received in the war were nothing to the emotional and psychological injuries left behind.
So much was lost. Fred was gone, the Gryffindor trio had watched and could do nothing. Poor Ronald had watched his first sibling die. Then Harry had walked into the forest to seemingly sacrifice himself. This had been another emotional blow for the family, to be losing another they thought of as a son, a brother or in Ginny's case, her great love.
Of course, Harry had come back to them safe and sound. But Ginny was never the same. Nobody noticed at first, all too wrapped up in their own grieving. Eventually it was Harry who expressed his concern. Ginny stopped spending time with him, isolated herself from her family and her friends. When Hermione stayed, her own parents lost to her forever because of the irreversible memory charm she had used to ensure their safety, she reported that Ginny suffered intense nightmares and barely had a whole night's rest.
Molly Weasley tried to talk to her daughter, to get her to open up, but it was all still too raw for both of them. Hermione and Harry often thought 'if only'; if only they had tried harder to draw the younger girl out of the emotional well she was caught in, if only they had realized how far the girl had sunk into her depression.
It was a warm July morning when the owl that changed everything had arrived at the Burrow. Nobody knew what to believe at first. They had all demanded Hermione, who had still shared a room with the youngest Weasley, to account for why she had let Ginny leave. They, in a way, blamed Hermione for not trying to stop her. Hermione hadn't even been awake. She hadn't known the younger girl had gone. How could she have known that Ginny would sneak out at night and would never ever come back? But grief can make even the best meaning nicest people act a little unreasonably.
The funeral was what really pushed the whole Weasley family over the edge. Ron, in particular, took it very hard. He had barely spoken two words since Ginny left. Any possibility of he and Hermione having any sort of relationship were over. He could hardly stand to have her in the same room as him. He blamed Hermione, much as his whole family seemed to, because he needed someone to blame. He needed to believe that it was someone else's fault. He couldn't accept that bad things could happen for seemingly no reason at all.
Molly Weasley lost her glow. She had always seemed okay, even in the darkest times during the war. But with the loss of one of her sons followed so closely by losing her only daughter, the strain was too much. Most days she didn't make it downstairs to cook breakfast. Most days she didn't make it downstairs at all.
Household responsibilities fell to Arthur, who had lost weight and looked gaunt and miserable. There was no jolly twinkle in his eye, no excited enthusiasm for anything. Not even the odd muggle contraptions Harry would send to try and spark something, some modicum of positive energy, in the numbed man.
It had become clear that Hermione was no longer welcome to stay with the Weasley family. They seemed to barely even tolerate Harry, who had previously been the golden child. Ron certainly didn't want to have much to do with them. He barely acknowledged their presence in a room, although he barely acknowledged much of anything anymore. Instead, the dark haired wizard and his muggleborn best friend were forced to seek out each other for company, and solace.
Harry had taken over number 12 Grimmauld Place, gradually cleaning it up with Kreacher's help until it was habitable once more. Hermione moved into a spare bedroom and together they tried to move forward. Harry was the only family Hermione had left, and vice versa. They were close like they had never been close before and together they spent many hours cleaning out remaining dark artifacts and objects left behind by the Black family. It was something to do. Something to focus on that did not give them time to dwell on other things.
Harry keenly felt the loss of his godfather when it came to cleaning out his old bedroom. He seemed unable to rid himself of anything from the room, which had taken on the dusty quality of a museum, rather than the cozy warmth of a bedroom. Kreacher tried to keep the house spick and span, but it didn't take a house elf expert to realize that the elf was beginning to give over to his age; even the simplest task of dusting wore him out.
Eventually, rather than forcing Harry to part with the objects that reminded him of someone he had cared for so deeply, Hermione had helped Harry box up some old clothing and trinkets into containers that they shrunk down and put into the closet and Harry had moved into Sirius's bedroom shortly after.
It was when they were clearing out Regulus's room that they had come across the dusty withered old tome. Harry had picked it up gingerly, about to toss it into the fireplace, where they rid themselves of many pieces of junk that they could not be bothered to box up and send to the thrift stores in Diagon Alley, when Hermione had reached out and grasped his wrist.
She was instantly taken with the thing, still being a bookworm deep down. The pages were yellowed with age and it seemed that a stiff breeze could blow them into oblivion, and the material cover was so discolored that the title was almost indecipherable; Forte in Aliud Tempus.
It had taken Hermione months of research, and many visits to book shops in Diagon and Knockturn Alleys, to be able to decipher what the book was telling them they could do. Si prius non inpetravi conatus sum tempus iterum. If they did not succeed the first time, they could try again.
Each page of the book, held together with every protection charm Hermione knew, was cluttered with Latin phrases, translations in cramped handwriting, and drawings of runes. Hermione had become obsessed with one idea, and one idea alone. They could go back, they could right so many wrongs.
Harry, for his part, was a little less taken with the idea. He had tried to explain that it was dangerous to mess with time. But every time he thought of an argument against what had become known as 'the plan' Hermione, or rather the book, had an answer to allay his fears. Eventually he had just given up on arguing at all and had decided to humor Hermione.
Soon the dining table in Grimmauld Place was littered with pages upon pages of Hermione's research. She had sheets of parchment dedicated solely to every possible meaning of each Latin word and phrase. She had rolls of parchment completely taken up with runes and breakdowns of spells. Often Harry would go to bed, leaving Hermione leaning over the book reading only by wand light well into the night. So possessed was she by the idea of being able to change everything.
One month passed, then two, then three. Christmas was spent sitting in the stiff backed chairs at the table, pouring over her notes. Neither of them had received an invite to the Burrow for the holidays that year, neither of them had expected to. Hermione promised that this would change once they had fixed everything. Harry wanted to believe her.
Finally, Hermione had given a yelp of surprise, knocking over a teetering pile of books on runes, time travel and Latin dictionaries. Harry was so startled by her sudden noise, so accustomed was he to spending long days in silence reading, that he had dropped his cup of pumpkin juice all over the floor.
"I've got it, Harry." Hermione had jumped up excitedly, dodging the juice puddle and shoving a dictionary into his hands. "Do you see?"
Harry, for his part, could not see what had the girl so worked up with excitement that she was practically bouncing. It was just another book full of more cramped up Hermione notes, and words he didn't understand.
"Look." Hermione urged. "It confirms everything. We can go back."
This was not a new idea to Harry, Hermione often told him of how they could do it, change their fate and make life better. Sometimes, Harry also lost himself in the idea of a better life. One where he wasn't the savior of the wizarding world. One where he wasn't so alone. But this was the first time Hermione had smiled in months, so he looked down at the book in his hands again, not wanting to end this tiny glimpse of the girl he had known in school, a happy Hermione.
Heavily underlined in black ink were three simple words, that Harry had no way of understanding the significance of.
"A new life?" He queried, glancing at Hermione to see if he was on the right track.
"Yes!" Hermione's smile grew bigger. She pointed to another page. "And here…"
"Somnus sine mente." Harry read. "Sleep without mind."
"Don't you see, Harry?" Hermione looked frustrated with how he hadn't instantly known what on earth she had to be excited about. "This solves everything. We don't go back as ourselves. We move into the body of another!"
Harry balked at those words.
"So if we go back we take over someone else's body?" He had caught on to what she was saying. "Great, so we cease to exist as Harry and Hermione."
"Yes!" Hermione was getting impatient. "We can't mess up our timeline by being recognized or anything like that. There won't be two Harry's and Hermione's. There will be us and them!"
"Yes, but we take over the bodies of two poor unsuspecting people." Harry was quick to point out. "What happens to them?"
"Somnus sine mente, Harry." Hermione said as if it were obvious. "Sleep without mind. It sends us into the body of people who have lost their minds. Coma patients. Vegetables. Something like that!"
"What if there are no coma patients." Harry pointed out. "Then where do we end up?"
"There are billions of people in the world, Harry. Statistically there will be two who have lost their mind somewhere."
"But what if there aren't?" Harry enunciated slowly, trying to drive the point home that this was a bad idea.
"Then it simply doesn't work." Hermione pointed to a rune she had scrawled in the margin of the page. "This rune is the domus rune. If our consciousness's don't find a host, they are drawn home back to our original bodies."
Harry decided to change tact.
"How can we guarantee we end up in the right time?" Harry pointed out.
"Simple." Hermione shot Harry a triumphant ghost of a grin, "we draw the tempus rune on an item of the time we want to end up in."
"And you just happen to have an item from that time?" Harry didn't know why he bothered to argue, as Hermione fished through her mounds of research and pulled out a yellowed back dated copy of the Daily Prophet. A moving picture of the darkest wizard of the time flashed up on the paper, before disappearing again, the charm to make pictures move slowly wearing off over time.
"Okay, so let's say we go back, we wake up in the bodies of two people somewhere in the world. How do we find each other?"
"I've been thinking about that, and I think we should practice wandless magic. You know, in case we wake up as muggles without wands, which is likely. Then we can wandlessly apparate to an agreed point to meet up."
"How do you know we will be able to use magic at all?" Harry pictured trying to fight Voldemort with a muggle gun and heaved a shudder at the thought.
"Here." She pointed to another rune. "This is the rune for self. We go back as ourselves, wholly ourselves, just into another body."
Harry shook his head, handing the book to his friend and sighing wearily. "I just don't know Hermione. There are too many if's."
"Harry." Hermione gently touched his arm. "I can't stay here. I can't accept that this is it. I can't live in this reality and move on with my life…"
Everything Hermione was saying Harry understood, he had felt exactly the same way a lot of the time.
"What do we have to lose?" Hermione prompted, pointing first to herself and then to Harry. "Think of what we can gain. Sirius back, your parents. My parents. The Weasleys…"
Hermione knew she wasn't being fair, tempting Harry with the idea that he could have a family again. Especially as she hadn't shown him the last rune, the most intricately inscribed one in the old Forte in Aliud Tempus book.
"So what happens to the timeline then?" Harry asked, not quite wanting to concede, even though he was steadily losing his fight. "Let's say we change everything. There is no war, no Voldemort, no dying. Then what? We just slip back into our bodies and act like we haven't changed? The younger versions of ourselves won't have felt war. They will be happy. We can't just take over their lives again. It wouldn't be fair. And what happens to this world? Does it just disappear?"
Harry was struggling to voice some very deep concerns, concerns Hermione herself had felt at first.
"This world ceases to exist for us. We move into a new reality, to a separate path. According to all my research every time people make a decision, the path of time splits into two branches. We take the other branch, we create a new timeline. I don't know whether this one continues or not, only that we won't be on it. Everything that has happened from the point we go back to, no longer happens. Hermione Granger and Harry Potter no longer exist, or should I say won't exist until the 80's. We have a new life."
"If we are changing the past how do we know we will even come to exist at all?" Harry pointed out. "Will we even have a life to come back to?"
"That's just it, Harry." Hermione said slowly, her voice dropping to barely a whisper. "Even if we are never born because of the changes we make, it doesn't matter. Because we can't ever come back."
Hermione cringed as Harry started pacing the room, full of furious energy.
"Then what's the point?" He hissed angrily. "Why even bother?"
"We can stop all this suffering before it even begins, Harry!" Hermione snapped in frustration. "Yes, we might not get to reap the benefits. But isn't it worth it? We don't make the better world for ourselves, we make it for everyone!"
Harry ceased his pacing and looked Hermione dead in the eye, his green orbs swirling with pent up emotion. "If I say no…" He didn't need to finish the thought.
"I'm doing it anyway." Hermione said.
"You'd risk everything, our whole lives, the whole world…"
"I don't want this life anymore." Hermione looked at Harry with such pleading desperation in her eyes he had to look away in order to voice his next thought.
"We should tell Ron we're going."
Hermione visibly blanched at the mention of their other friend, but at the same time felt a little relieved that Harry had seemed to give up on arguing with her.
"But…"
"We should tell him."
"I know." She sighed, weary from so many turbulent emotions. "But I can't do it."
"He's our friend."
"He wants nothing to do with us." Hermione pointed out. "And I think if we both went and said goodbye, even if it's to try and change his family's fate, he wouldn't be able to get past it. He's lost so much already…"
Harry could see her point of view, but he was quick to point out. "So we disappear without a word… What would that do to him, Hermione?"
Hermione nodded her understanding, then reluctantly voiced the other option they had.
"We could…" She swallowed the ball of strangled emotion in her throat. "We could send him an owl. After we've left."
"No." Harry said firmly. "That family has had enough bad news by ruddy owl post. We tell him, face to face, or we don't go at all."
Hermione nodded her ascent, her eyes transfixed on the floor. "Okay."
Author's Note: Well, let me know what you think…