Yep. That's right. I'm back. I know it's been a few years since the last update (which actually was the first chapter of this story), but better late than never. Anyway, I'll try to get a little more regular, but I will not respond to any schedule. Yes, the story is on its way, (I actually already wrote its last chapter), but life always gets on the way, so no promises.
Back to business. I'm still french. That much hasn't change. I'm therefore still not a native english speaker. I'll gladly accept any remark, or, even better, any proposal for beta-reading.
Bonne lecture !
Chapter 2:
Time seemed to stop.
Which sounded pretty paradoxical, since she was actually getting back in time. But for a moment, she could analyze everything, see everything, hear everything; and not even a second had gone by.
It was an accident. A stupid accident. Not that it was not to be expected on a battlefield. Not that kind of accident, though.
So many things had happened, leading them to what everyone thought to be the Final Fight. And they had been right. Ron, Harry and herself had search so long for those Horcruxes, and actually succeeded in destroying them. They had known that the next time they were to face the Dark Lord, it would be that one last time.
And here they were, facing Voldemort - she still had a hard time saying his name, she had noted, after the Taboo incident - and his minions, Harry's limp body in the arms of a heart broken Hagrid. She had heard the cries, at first, sharp heart-breaking cries, ringing out through Hogwarts and its surroundings, before realizing that some of those screams were coming from her own lungs, tearing apart her throat, the pain close to relief compared to what she was actually feeling. Silence was forced upon them at once, as Voldemort boasted about Harry's cowardice, only to be broken off by a new wave of shouting. Silence fell once again, as the one wizard they had been fighting against imposed himself, his wand throwing a bright light which violently blew up in the sky.
Horrified, Hermione could do nothing but watch as Neville Longbottom had both the bravery and the foolishness to try and defy the Dark Lord as he was speaking, only to get thrown away, disarmed, and then punished for his defiance. And somehow, Neville being tortured by the wearing of a burning Sorting Hat seemed to be the trigger everyone was waiting for.
Everything seemed to happen in just a second; Grawp coming from the Forbidden Forest, more cries raising up in the crowd and from the outside of the castle, Neville slicing off Nagini's head, spells being cast from everywhere. But most of all, Harry's disappearance.
Breaking off from her turmoil, she lost no time and joined the fight, siding with Ginny and Luna against Bellatrix. She could still feel the pain from the curses the dark haired witch had cast upon her. She could still hear her whispers in her ear, as she tortured her. And she could still make out the scars she had left when she had engraved the world 'Mudblood' on her skin. Hermione was decided to erase from her face that evil smile she wore, to silence forever the mad laughter that could still make her shiver, to veil at once those eyes that still haunted her dreams.
But spell after spell, shield after shield, she had a hard time keeping up against Bellatrix power. Even after the years she had spent in Azkaban, she was still a powerful dangerous witch. Maybe even more powerful than before. They were three against her, but they had yet to hit her with a spell.
But then, she made a mistake. As Molly Weasly suddenly barged in, she got distracted for a few seconds. One second was more than enough for Bellatrix to aim her wand toward her, and Hermione could do nothing but hear her shout.
"REFLEXIO"
Hermione saw the jet of bright light coming towards her, helpless. She had never heard it before, but as she noticed both the lack of color - as the spell seemed to held no light at all- and the sprawling smile on Bellatrix's face, she acknowledged the fear building inside her.
But then, another second, a single one second, was enough for her to realize that something was wrong. Beyond the painful death she could be expecting from the witch and was actually trying to accept, she understood there was something else.
One second was enough for her to feel the Time-Turner she had been wearing since she had been picking it up burn against her chest, as the spell hit it.
One second was enough for her to see Bellatrix's frown.
One second was enough for her to cross the horrified look from Ron and Harry.
But above all, as time stopped, one second was more than enough for her to see the world she knew disappear in front of her wide opened eyes.
She hadn't had the time to blink once that it was all gone.
At first, she had tried to keep her eyes opened. She wasn't sure why. To make sure she wouldn't get attack, perhaps, or to burn the reality of her present, of what would be her past, but also her future, one of her future, anyway, in her memory. Not to forget.
But then it went too fast. The world got blurred, far too blurred, and the more she tried to focus on details, the more it changed, the effects of time undoing themselves before her eyes. It became so overwhelming that she eventually had to close her eyes, to keep from getting sick. She didn't know enough to judge the relevance of it, either from her readings or the few months she actually got to experienced time travels, but she had the strong sense that being sick while time-traveling wasn't that much of a great idea.
So rather than inflicting on herself mind and physical sickness, she concentrated on the whooshing of the air. As time flew by, she grew worried. Never before did it take so long. The Time Turner could only bring one a few hours in the past. The whole 'backing-in-time' process never took more than a few seconds, minutes at worst. If time actually meant anything at that exact moment. Here she was, trapped in the middle of a neverending hurricane, destroying the life she had built, leaving behind it only ruins of what she used to be. Something was definitely off.
Her heart sank as colors endlessly disappeared before her eyes. It briefly crossed her mind that she might be going years back in the past. Her heart sank some more. The she realised that it was not just merely from concern. She felt her whole body starting to ache. She muffled a cry as a stabbing pain took hold of her heart. She wanted to grab something, yet she dared not to move. She could only think of the pain. She didn't ponder on the memories she was going through backward, memories to be the remains of a time that would become a mythological one, one you heard of, one you wish for but that none actually expected to happen again: remains of something that used to be, but which didn't held any meaning any longer.
One lonely tear escaped from her closed eyes as the pain slowly eased, soon wiped off by this wind, which kept getting stronger, it seemed to her, anyway. She could hear laughters, cries, screams, explosions, in a confused roaring, and she thought for a few seconds that she was losing her mind.
As she saw once again in her mind the look Harry had given her when she got hit by Bellatrix's curse, she could almost hear him admonishing her. And he would be in his right mind to do so. She was leaving him in the mist of what was to be the final fight of the war. She didn't know where or rather when she would be, but she felt like she was deserting him in what would be in any case a future to rebuild in painful ruins. She was abandoning him when he would have needed her the most.
She knew she wasn't dying. Not yet. But she almost wished she were. She had the impending thought that life would never be the same. That she might never see them again. She briefly wonder how to let they know, so that they would be able to grieve her, and to keep on living, as peaceful as they could ever live in a after-war world. But was that even necessary ?
But she knew she wasn't dying. And they knew it too. Or maybe not. They wouldn't know where she would be, what would expect her, what she would be about to go through. And that might be the worst thing she could have left them. And gotten. The doubt. The unknown.
Why had she kept the Time Turner ?
That would have been one of the few reproaches Harry might have told her if she were to make it alive; well, if she were to make it with her friends, anyway. She would make it alive, she swore to herself. She would find a way out, no matter what she was involved in.
Time-Turner. Right.
She mused over it, as time seemed both to fly and to freeze, quite paradoxically.
Nearly two years had flown by since that one battle in the Ministry of Magic, which both led to the tragic death of Harry's godfather and the in extremis salvage of the last Time-Turner. She had been keeping it close to her, always around her neck, ever since. In a way, it almost felt the way it had with Salazar Slyntherin Locket. It would sometimes cloud her mind, obsess her, haunt her. Sometimes she would feel Harry's gaze upon her when Ron wouldn't be anywhere close. Both would share a knowing glance before shunning away. She would feel shame. Doubt. Hope.
Pride.
That's when she would knew it was the Time-Turner effect on her more than her own mind. She was a logical reasonable girl. Not a foolish selfish person.
So she had fight against it.
But never did she consider the hypothesis of destroying it. She had considered giving it to Dumbledore, but time had passed, and death had came along, leaving her with the last and only option she was comfortable with.
Keeping it.
She had in mind the idea that one day, it might have been of interest to have it, when the magic world would have been back on its track. Time-Turners were great rare objects, and its science was still to be completely understood. One day, she would be thanked for protecting that treasure of the Magic world.
It then came to her mind that she was still trapped in the magic of the Time-Turner, as the hurricane she was standing in didn't seem to falter. She hadn't kept track of the time she had spend in it - it was actually impossible - but she felt that it had been far too long. She wanted to take a look at the tiny hourglass, but she didn't dare move, too afraid of the effect it could have, both on her and her surroundings. She was going so fast back in time that she feared one small gesture would hurt someone standing next to her at the exact wrong time; she couldn't risk it. Therefore she forced herself to stay still a little longer. It would stop. It had to. She couldn't indefinitely go back in time. There had to be a limit. An end. A beginning. Right?
But then, it all stopped.
At this exact moment, in which the young witch was trapped, that precise instant between now and before, between now and after, between before and after, in a dark, isolated place, known to no man on earth, in one of the numerous hourglasses, that stood along an endless wall, sand had stopped flowing.
A single tiny grain of sand was trapped in-between the two bulbs, both seemingly attracted towards the top and the down. It stood, immobile, as if frozen, a slight jingle echoing in this borderless place.
And besides this one hourglass, if someone were to look at other hourglasses, thousand of hourglasses, thousand of billions hourglasses would be seen as equally frozen.
Frozen at that exact moment Time had stopped
