Disclaimer: Not mine

AN: I have been fortunate enough to get a beta, Hufflepuff Proud, who has my earnest thanks. If you spot any mistakes, they are my own, though I'd thank you to point them out. Also, thanks to all those who have visited, reviewed, or followed. I hope you enjoy this chapter. Feedback is both appreciated and welcome.

Chapter I: Contradictions and Conversations

"Good morning," said Severus as Granger woke with a start. He was attempting his usual snide tone but his voice came a hoarse whisper. To compensate, he positioned himself next to her head, so he could loom over her.

But intimidation tactics no longer worked with Hermione. She had broken into Gringotts, battled Bellatrix, survived torture and had faced Nagini. Severus Snape was tame in comparison, especially after she had gained an understanding of his motivations.

Snape was like a brightly coloured insect, Hermione thought rather uncharitably, (even though he dressed monochromatically) – harmless in fact, but indulging in the mimicry of something much more dangerous. She wondered if his life would have been easier had he not adopted his "Impressive Dark Wizard" persona. It had just made decent people suspicious of him and the powerful and power hungry, those he wanted to impress and associate with, use him.

It was a shame, she thought, absently, for he was skilful and did not lack in intelligence, but he never had been exceedingly powerful. He had so much potential. She remembered being envious of the Half-blood Prince. It galled her to admit, but he had been the more talented student, at least in Potions and Defence. And yet, his carefully constructed persona was just a façade. In hindsight, it was obvious that he was overcompensating. Slightly built, he dressed in layers of forbidding fabric, which billowed as he swooped down on unsuspecting students, making him look larger than he actually was. Not that it had deterred them, anyway. Hermione and her friends had been outwitting him since they were 11. She had set him on fire in their first year, stolen from him in their second year, and knocked him out quite easily in their third year. No, Snape could not intimidate her. Not her, a member of the trio who had defeated Voldemort for good.

Severus meanwhile was surprised to see Granger staring at him. It was an assessing stare, perhaps a judgemental one. It was a stare that every Slytherin learned in their first year. Severus did not like it. What was she thinking? And then accidentally, he was in her mind:

An image of her stealing from his potions storeroom, of her with her cohorts, knocking him out while he put his life on the line for their protection.

Ungrateful brat! Those ingredients had cost him a month's salary to replace! He had put himself in front of one of his greatest fears to protect them. Even now, after all his sacrifice she thought him a joke? But she had still saved him, he couldn't help thinking. Why did she save him? He had thought...did he still pathetically hope for respect? Did she do it to gloat, like Potter Sr.? To hold him in debt? And they treated Slytherins like filth. Holier than thou Gryffindor hypocrisy! He needed to occlude. He could not afford to break down. Not Snivellus! Not again, never, never again! Not in front of an eighteen years old girl. She had been his student. He NEEDED TO OCCLUDE! Hadn't she seen enough?

A moment and he was calm. In spite of his anger and humiliation, years of discipline allowed him to push his feelings back and concentrate on the matter at hand. He had questions and he wouldn't get any answers if he didn't ask them. He could have pried them from her mind, if he wanted to, but he prided himself on his ability to detach his emotions and optimise his decisions after cool deliberation. Such tactics were no longer needed. It was apparent from her mind that the war was over. Whether they acknowledged it or not, he had honour. His accidental legilimency had been an embarrassment in more ways than one. He should not have lost control. But that did not mean that he could ignore what he saw. He'd show her! All thoughts of apologising for his accidental invasion that had entered his mind before he processed the images he saw left him. He silently incanted a spell instead.

When Hermione tried to stand up to nullify the apparent difference in height that was Snape's poor tactic of intimidation, she found herself stuck to the ground.

Snape was smiling; it was a foul smile, that did not reach his eyes. She knew immediately that he was the cause of her hampered motility.

"I take it the Dark Lord is dead," he rasped as he looked her in the eye. "Would you prefer to give me an account of how these events came about or would you like mental broadcast?"

"I'd prefer to tell you, Sir," Hermione answered, realising with a mix of anger and embarrassment that he had been using legilimency. She lowered her eyes, which flashed as she did so. But discretion was better than valour.

"Indeed, " he whispered, his lips curving into a familiar sneer.

Hermione wondered whether he was acknowledging her statement, the fact that he had rudely pranced through her personal thoughts or his preference for fighting another day. Keeping her eyes down, she recounted to him the story so long denied to him by Dumbledore. She told him of Tom Riddle, of his parents and his quest for immortality. She told him about the horcruxes and how she, along with Harry, and Ron, had destroyed them. Finally she told him of shared blood and Harry's triumph, of the destruction of an unexpected horcrux and Voldemort's self-destruction.

When she looked up, she saw that Snape's face was a blank mask. She had never seen him so rigid, so obviously trying to maintain control - and she had seen him weak and vulnerable before. She had seen him shouting at an old school enemy manically (rival was too mild a word for the relationship Snape shared with Sirius), watched him terrified in front of his former master and witnessed him paralysed, bleeding on the floor in front of her. None of the expressions she had seen however matched the complete blankness of expression that she saw now. It was as if he was expending all his energy into maintaining his mask. It was so expressionless that she was sure there was extreme emotion involved. She looked back down. He obviously needed a moment to compose himself and she decided she would be gracious enough to give it to him, in spite of his rudeness earlier. She couldn't help but feel sympathetic.

Severus, was, as Hermione had deduced, confronting (and trying to contain) an emotional whirlwind.

Potter was alive! That BASTARD Dumbledore! Why could he not hint that Potter need not have die. The guilt! God! The guilt that had overwhelmed him when he had given Potter his memories, assuming that he had been sending the boy he had protected his entire life to his death. He had lost control when he had seen Potter in the shack, overwhelmed by a strange mixture of relief and anguish, while his blood gushed out of his throat. He did not even know which of his memories Potter had seen. He had meant to give him only three: of Dumbledore's orders, Dumbledore's directions for Potter and his doe depositing the sword. Potter was alive! Occlude, Severus, occlude. Fuck! Breathe, breathe, breathe…one, two, three…one hundred…phew. Relief.

"Why did you save me, Granger?"

She looked at him and said earnestly, "I think it is rather obvious, Sir. You are a hero. Probably the bravest man in this war. Harry announced it aloud, to Voldemort himself, in fact. If anyone deserves to live past the war, it is you. I apologise for not coming sooner. We all thought you were dead. Even had it been so, your body deserved more respect than lying on that filthy floor."

Severus looked at her in disbelief. A hero. She thought him a hero. She wasn't lying. He did not need legilimency to tell. A part of him warmed. But had she not just minutes ago been thinking of his humiliations, at her hands that too? What a contradiction…but then, hadn't he always been contradictory, himself? A half-blood Death Eater, a Death Eater in love with a muggle-born, an expert in both Dark and Light magic, for were they not two sides of the same coin? Both were intent based...

She had saved him. She hadn't gloated, and she hadn't mentioned a debt. No one had done something for him and not wanted anything in return. Lily's friendship was conditional: he needed to give up the Dark Arts. Dumbledore the Merciful merely wanted enslavement in return for the protection of a friend, Voldemort demanded blind obedience in return for power. He looked at Granger in wonder. It was almost difficult for him to believe her, and yet it was his truest wish. To be acknowledged.

"The legilimency was accidental," Severus found himself explaining, "I am sorry for the intrusion."

Hermione was embarrassed. She had not expected Snape to apologise and had assumed that he was merely indulging in his usual git-like behaviour. It was obvious now that Snape had been, even then, quite overwhelmed. Why should it have surprised her? He was obviously human. He had spent his life distrusted, had spent a year knowing that he would need to kill his "mentor", another year being ostracised by the very people he was trying to save, and then set upon by a large snake, all because he was trying to atone for something that was only tangentially his fault. It was a wonder that he wasn't gibbering.

"I understand, Sir. And thanks."

Severus looked at her, comparing Granger's response to his apology to one that he had tendered to another muggle-born over twenty years ago, marvelling yet again at Granger. He decided not to ponder on it. Near-death, the Dark Lord's defeat and Potter's survival were playing havoc with his mind. Lily was finally avenged. He would mull over the implications after he got away from the girl. He needed a change of subject.

"Tell me, Granger, why are you wearing a frock?"

With Snape's statement, Hermione suddenly recalled their circumstances, following the events of her rescue of Snape at the shrieking shack.

"I can't truly say, Sir," she said carefully, "A spell hit me in the back. A white flash later, the Shrieking Shack was gone, and you were there, lying on the ground and I only had with me my wand and my bag. If this is the afterlife, it is a very strange one indeed. And it's oddly selective.

"From my observations however, I hypothesise a temporal displacement curse of some sort. There does not seem to be a spatial displacement element, though such a possibility should not be precluded, after all, space-time is intimately interlinked. Initially, I felt that the effects of the spell were suggestive of a thaumaturgic entropic phenomenon, from which one could derive the spell on the basis of syntactical principles. It makes sense at first glance. Hogwarts was intact, a definite reduction in overall entropy…if one assumes that time is nothing but a series of changes in the state of matter…

"Anyway, I digress. The point is that my dress changed. There does not seem to be any energetically viable reason for that to happen. Indeed, the amount of cloth that I am wearing now is more than what I was earlier and has probably taken more energy to produce. More importantly, I am not the same person either. I can feel it. I haven't looked in a mirror, but presumably the differences are subtle. After all, you do recognise me, Professor. But I can feel that I am shorter than I was. I am certain I am in another body, which implies that we are not talking about continuous changes of state. At the same time, I am confident that I am Hermione Granger. Without having met anyone, I can only presume that I have hijacked another body and that we are in a different era."

"Fascinating analysis, Miss Granger. Pray when did you get the time to ponder this happenstance in such detail? I admit to some curiosity."

"When I realised the shrieking shack had disappeared. You were unconscious, Sir. I needed to make a decision: to approach Hogwarts for help or not. If we had travelled in time, to your Headmastership…we would probably not be welcome. The rest I thought of now, I was thinking aloud, Sir."

"Hmm…you are correct. A temporal shift seems most likely, though the nature of the shift…let us examine the facts. Firstly, a spell hits you and I am brought along with you and two inanimate objects. Second, you are wearing fashions of a different era, whilst my clothes remain unchanged. Finally, your body is not the one that you are familiar with - your body has not been temporally displaced while mine has. What can one hypothesise from this?

"First, that I am here because you are. You were the target of the spell, possibly an attempt at revenge by my erstwhile colleagues. I got transported, most likely because you were in some physical contact with me. You were bandaging me, I gather. My thanks, by the way. The same goes for your wand and your bag. You were touching them, so they came with you. Had you been touching the shack, I believe that we may have had a roof over our heads, but no matter…

"Second, I have time travelled, as have your wand and your bag. You – or your body at least – belong whenever we are - assuming of course that we have travelled in time. Now this is where it gets interesting. If we have indeed been temporally displaced, we can infer that the object of the spell was not a place, or indeed a time, but a person who happened to be in some place or a time – otherwise you'd have merely found yourself in the, I presume, past, as I have. The white flash is indicative of this. There are few spells that generate white light. Most have blues and yellows and greens and reds, as I am sure you know. I won't be surprised if this is the first spell with a white light that you have seen for spells of this class are forbidden and exceedingly potent. White light is after all made up of all seven colours. The implications...Miss Granger, I am confident that this is soul magic."

Snape's voice, already hoarse after Nagini's ministrations, had become barely audible by the time he finished speaking. Hermione stood stunned. Soul magic. The darkest and the lightest of all magic…she wondered how this spell classified. She realised that she was, for all intents and purposes, in another incarnation.

"Let us find in which era we are, shall we?" Snape croaked, "I suggest we disillusion ourselves lest we seem out of place."

They side-along apparated to London to find a copy of The Times. They were in May, 1813. Nearly two hundred years in the past. No wonder Hogsmeade hadn't been familiar. Hosgmeade had, after all, been completely rebuilt in 1859, after a fight involving fiendfyre.

Problems of temporal displacement brought a unique set of problems. Neither of them had bank accounts here. They needed food. They needed money. They needed shelter. They were also sure to encounter culture shock sooner or later. But first things, first. Money and food.

Severus had a few galleons in his pocket, but would they be legal tender in 1813? Could they go to goblins to exchange them for pounds or whatever their current currency was? He wished he had paid more attention to Binns droning on in history class. Granger! She was a know-it-all, he thought desperately. He had heard from Minnie McGonagall (she was always Minnie in his mind, it was his way of getting back at his stuck up old instructor) that she actually paid attention to Binns. He decided to ask.

"Granger, would galleons from 1998 be considered legal tender?"

"Of course. Wizarding money has been the same for over one thousand years. Did you know they actually circulate the same coins? Very rarely are new coins minted. It is the goblin version of inflation control, I believe. Professor Binns covered this as a part of the wizard-goblin relations in the 11th century. The goblins set up the banking system for wizards and bespelled every coin so that it could not be duplicated or modified. For example, you can't melt the coins and recover their value in gold. The coins have goblin made security features that are unknown to wizard-kind. Disagreements regarding some of these spells led to the 1st goblin rebellion…I wouldn't know the current exchange rate, though."

It turned out that the exchange rate did not turn out too poorly for them.

After a few cleaning charms, they had decided that they were presentable enough for a trip to Gringotts. Their trip was uneventful, though walking through Diagon Alley was a pleasure. There was a passing familiarity that had been missing since the spell had transported them to 1813. They had both opened accounts in their names and exchanged part of their money to muggle money.

Hermione had a small fortune in galleons, which she had provisioned for her year on the run. Of the almost four hundred galleons that she had in her purse, she changed fifty galleons into a hundred pounds. While the exchange rate was lower than it had been in 1990s, it seemed that the Galleon was actually a very strong currency. Gold prices really had nothing to do with the exchange rate. Snape on the other hand, as someone not on the run, had only what was in his pocket – twenty five galleons and ten knuts – of which he had fifteen galleons and the knuts changed to thirty pounds, four pennies and a ha'penny, and had the rest deposited in his account.

They now needed to determine the identity of the body occupied by one Miss Hermione Granger, but neither had the energy to pursue it at the time. They were both exhausted. Snape more so, for he had nearly died of blood loss. The fact that he was still standing was a testament to his stubbornness. They were both glad to see the Leaky Cauldron, where they ate a hearty meal of soup, roast duck and pudding accompanied by elfish wine, before being showed to their rooms where they slept like the dead.

The next morning exhaustion truly set in. While Hermione was tired, Severus truly felt how close to death he had come and the soreness of his throat made itself known. Their innkeeper, a small man with a moustache and kindly eyes, seemed to sense this and brought them a hearty breakfast of oatmeal, sausages and mashed potatoes rather than the usual bread rolls and preserves. They washed their breakfast down with tea sweetened with honey, which brought a degree of relief to Severus' throat. Despite how much they wished to remain at the Leaky Cauldron, their uncertain finances and position meant that they needed to first establish their situation rather than allow themselves time to recover. They agreed upon their order of business:

1. Find out whose body Hermione Granger was currently inhabiting

2. Understand and attempt to reverse the curse

3. Learn the etiquette of the era

4. Find a source of income

5. Find friends

Hogwarts would be a good starting point to learn more about Hermione Granger's current identity and the curse she was hit with. The student register should potentially give a clue regarding Granger's identity, while the library could have something on the curse. They would pick up a book on etiquette in muggle London. The wizarding world was slow to change, and most people they had seen in Gringotts had worn robes. There had been an old man who looked as if he had stepped out of a Shakespeare play, though. Finding an income would be a challenge. It would be easy enough to get an un-skilled or semi-skilled job somewhere, but from what Severus understood of the "past", at least a muggle job in this era was undesirable. Could he get a job in the magical world? He was skilled but had no "official" existence. Would he be considered an immigrant? What about the paperwork? It would be easy to forge muggle documents, but forging a magical identity would be challenging. Perhaps he could find his ancestors. Maybe family could take him in…

He would come to that later. They needed to break in to Hogwarts later today. It was imperative that they did not mess up the life of whoever's body Granger was inhabiting out of ignorance.