Part II: Goldilocks and the Time Turner

Hermione Granger had given her time-turner back to the ministry after her third year. She had told them that it was too much, that she couldn't handle the schedule… but that hadn't been the whole truth.

She didn't trust herself with it.

She had felt it pull at her, luring her and seducing her. It was addictive. The feeling of loss of control scared her. It had taken all the self-control she had to give it back, but she had done it.

But then…then he had died and left her in possession of a time-turner. And not just any time turner, but one of his own design, one capable of moving both backwards and forwards, one capable of moving through minutes or through years.

She loved the adrenaline rush, the mystery of weaving together the past and the future.

Since his death, she had lived backwards and forwards through time. She hadn't been as daring as the professor had, but he had had nothing to lose. She only used hours, sometimes a day, sometimes a few days, but only if she really really needed it.

Ever since she had first felt the rush of time through her hair, she had known that she would never be happy with a linear life. She loved the feeling of time being pulled away from her. It was like standing in the shallow waves of the ocean as the tide was going out with her feet buried in the sand feeling the water rush around her and pull the sand with it as she stood still against the flow.

Hermione Granger stayed away from drugs, stayed away from the Dark Arts, but she couldn't resist the pull of time.

Time magic wasn't dark magic, but it was still powerful magic, dangerous in its own right.

Time was both her ally and her enemy. She both controlled it and was controlled by it. She was both its master and its slave. She stared down at the small instrument in her hand. She knew he had spun it, but not how many times. There was nothing in the past for him...she knew he had thrust himself into the future, but not how far. And so she waited, knowing that he could appear from oblivion at any second. She prepared for it, kept herself busy with the things that needed to be done, but always with that sense of anticipation. She sifted through a never-ending sea of seconds searching for the one, the one she so desperately sought, the needle in the haystack. She could play around with time all she wanted, but in the end, there was nothing to do but wait.

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Darkness. All he could see was darkness. And pain. The pain was so strong he could see it at the edges of his vision, a searing white against the pitch black.

"I won't bury you again," he heard a woman whisper. Who was she? Why had she buried him?

It all came back to him, Voldemort, Nagini, writing his will in blood, spinning the time-turner. He had split himself in two, one that stayed in the present and died and one that was flung forward into the future.

So this must be the future.

He forced his eyes open.

It didn't look much different than the past.

His gaze was fixed upwards on the rotted wooden ceiling of the shrieking shack. Oh yes. Hadn't a part of him always known that he would die here?

Was he dead already?

He felt small hands on his chest. He could only assume who they belonged to. Did she know what she was doing? She was just a student…No….he reminded himself, time has passed. How much?

His eyes shut again as he quietly slipped out of consciousness.

Severus cracked his eyes open. How long had he been out? It had been light out when he had first opened his eyes and now the room was dark, lit only by a few burning candles. He could only assume that it had been several hours at the very least. It could have been days.

It had worked then. How far had he traveled? He didn't remember how many times he had spun it, only the desperate feeling as his fingers had twisted the tiny metal parts, only the weightless feeling of being pulled out of and away from time.

A glass of water was brought to his lips and he drank. The cold water felt amazing on his raw throat. The glass remained at his lips but he pushed it away. It wasn't that he didn't want any more of it, just that he had to know…

"Did…is he…what…" he croaked in a hoarse voice.

"Harry killed Voldemort. He's gone. Forever." She answered him in a soft voice. He let out a deep breath, a breath he had possibly been holding over half his lifetime. It was over, at last. Had been over, he corrected himself, had been over for some time now.

He looked for the first time at the woman who sat in the chair beside his bed. She was older, much older than the last time he had seen her, but certain characteristics still tied her in to the overenthusiastic eighteen-year-old he had known. Her wild brown hair and her bright eyes seemed to have resisted the pull of time.

"Sixteen years?" He guessed, studying her face.

"Twelve," she responded curtly.

It was never good to tell a woman she looked older than she really was. But she didn't look offended, she looked…guilty. He would have thought he had insulted her if not for the guilty look she gave him. It was not that she looked older that her years. If only twelve linear years had passed, she had been playing with time.

His eyes drifted down to the delicate golden chain on her neck that disappeared beneath the collar of her robes. He had no doubt as to what lay on the end of the chain, hidden from view.

He reached up and stroked her face with an uncharacteristic tenderness.

"Yesterday you were a little girl."

"Yesterday was over a decade ago, Professor."

It always felt like this to him, when he ran into ex-students out in public. Sometimes it had been years since they had last graced his classroom, but he was always surprised that they were not still children. It always felt as if they had grown up in the blink of an eye…this time she actually had.

"Tell me about it, about how it ended," he asked quietly, pulling himself up and swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, but making no move to stand.

"It was the night you…d..d-disappeared…" Died, she had meant to say. She recounted the events for him, reliving every tragic death, uttering the names she had not spoken in years: Fred Weasley, Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Colin Creevy... When she finished, she took a deep, calm breath. She had had twelve years to make her peace with the past. He, on the other hand, was visibly disturbed. She had had fifteen years to deal with the pain and the loss, but for him it had been only days ago that it had all ended.

"Well, your plan worked," she said suddenly, breaking the silence in an effort to distract him from his morbid thoughts.

"I had only a slight hope that it would," he admitted, with an amused smirk on his face. "No one has traveled this far forward in time ever before."

"No, they haven't."

She pulled the chain out from under her shirt and fingered the time-turner on the end of it as he spoke.

"I would have expected that alone to kill me."

"It probably would have, but I spent two years at University on a research project about the effects of time travel on the body and was able to identify all the affected systems and to find procedures to alleviate the strain of long-distance time travel."

His mouth dropped open slightly, but then he reminded himself that this was why he had chosen the girl, after all.

"I would think that that would require a level of knowledge of healing..."

"I am a qualified Healer."

He studied her for a moment.

"Of course you are."

She didn't reply.

"But even for an experienced Healer, a bite of that extent from a dark creature such as Nagini would be almost incurable."

"I earned a degree in the Dark Arts with an emphasis in dark creatures and developed a potion that made healing a bite of that nature more easily cured."

"But to brew a potion that complex would require..."

"A mastership in Potions, yes." She looked down at her hands to avoid his penetrating stare.

"Exactly how many degrees do you have, Miss Granger?"

What followed was an inaudible mumble.

"How many, Miss Granger?"

"Well, I needed Arithmancy to do the time-travel research and then healing and dark arts and potions, and a few years in transfiguration and a degree in magical law because the laws they had dealing with wizards presumed dead really left something to be desired and..."

"How many?"

"Nine."

His mouth dropped open.

"Have you spent the past twelve years studying?"

"Not all of it," she replied indignantly. "What did you expect me to do? Just wait until you showed up and watch you die?"

She stood by the window for a moment, turned away from him. He was getting a strange feeling, one that he couldn't quite put his finger on. He didn't know what, but something was off with the woman.

"I haven't thanked you yet," she said finally. Thank him for what? She was the one who had saved his life.

"For what?"

Her lips cracked into a mischievous smile.

"For paying for my education." How else could she have achieved all those degrees?

He opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off.

"Don't worry, I've started earning money on some of the spells that I've created. I'll pay you back, it just might take some time. I didn't use all your money."

She bit her lip as if worried he was going to berate her for spending his money...spending his money to acquire the skills to save his life.

He stood, shakily.

"Miss Granger, I left the money to you. There is no need..."

"There is."

They stood at a deadlock, staring at one another for a moment. He got that feeling again, a strange look her in her that told him there was more going on than he knew about.

"Can you walk?" She asked. "We should probably get you somewhere more comfortable."

He looked around at the shack in which they stood.

"How do you have all this stuff here anyways?"

"I arranged for Hogwarts to let me use this place as a laboratory of sorts. But if you're feeling up to it..."

"Yes," he responded quickly. He hated the shrieking shack and had no desire to stay in it any longer than necessary.

"We can go then."

"Where?" He asked

"Home."

He gave her a questioning look.

"Your home," she corrected herself.

"You're living in my house?"

"It seemed like a waste to spend money renting somewhere to live when there was a perfectly good house just sitting empty."

He scowled at her. She smiled.

"As I said earlier, Professor, I'm not a little girl anymore. I'm only a few years younger than you now and it's going to take a hell of a lot more than that to intimidate me."

She already had a portkey set up to take them to Spinner's end since he had still not gotten all of his strength back.

They arrived on the front porch of the house. Her hand reached for the knob, but hesitated before turning it.

"I can be out in a few days, I just need some time...some time to find somewhere else to live." There was a sadness in her voice that he couldn't place. He knew Spinner's End was no dream house, why would anyone be reluctant to leave?

He nodded. She opened the door. They stepped inside.

She probably hadn't thought she had changed anything, but she had. It was clear that she had meant to disturb as little as possible, but there were a series of small changes that probably seemed insignificant over the years, but seen all at one were glaring. The house seemed brighter, happier.

He had no doubts that when she left, the brightness would follow her.

She looked around the room nervously. She had thought of this moment periodically over the past twelve years, thought of what she would say to him when he reappeared.

"All those years, berating me in class, implying that I was stupid…and in the end you gave me the biggest compliment you could. You put your life in my hands."

"There were others who could have, who had the ability. I chose you because you would."

She looked at him.

"You are brilliant, but there are other intelligent witches and wizards, some even that already possessed the specialized skills you had to acquire. How many of those would have taken the time, the personal risk to save my life? How many of those would have even thought that I deserved it?"

It was not the answer she had expected.

"Does anyone know?"

"Harry. Harry knows."

"Of course."

"He won't say anything."

So then her power over the boy had not changed. He wondered how Potter's wife must feel about that before he realized that she could very well be Potter's wife. He hoped she wasn't.

His gaze drifted down to her ring finger. There was no wedding ring, but there was an engagement ring…a small one. Not Potter's then, the boy had inherited his parents' money and the Black fortune, the ring would have been larger. This one was….tiny. Weasley, then. It must be.

"No one else needs to know," She told him, walking to the desk and pulling two folders out of a drawer, "Not unless you want them to."

She handed him one of the folders.

"This is if you want to go."

He looked inside. A foreign passport with an assumed name, an unregistered blackmarket wand, papers to transfer money to an overseas account, a deed to a house half-way across the world, a list of powerful identity charms that had been invented or uncovered since his disappearance.

She handed him another folder.

"And this is if you want to stay."

He opened it. A copy of a law she had been instrumental in passing dealing with regulations concerning time-travel, another with the administrative procedures that dealt with the appearance of a wizard thought to be dead, his wand, the key to his Gringotts account, a postmortem ministry pardon for his crimes,.

"It's your choice."

He wanted to kiss her. A choice. It was the first choice he had been given since he could remember. A free choice that affected none but himself. A choice about how to live in which no lives hung in the balance.

"Thank you," he whispered.

He opened the door to the library and she followed him inside. His eye shifted to the sofa where a white wedding gown sat draped over one arm.

"I was supposed to get married yesterday..." And then...and then the charm she had set up to let her know when he showed up in the shrieking shack activated and she dropped everything else for the moment she had been waiting for for so long. Was she really going to go through with it even before the charm was activated? She fingered the time-turner, "I still could if I wanted to…" It wouldn't have been the first time she had gone back to change events, to change decisions...

If his problem had been too few choices, hers had been too many. She was brilliant, talented, beautiful, famous. She could have been, have done, anything she set her mind to. The choices were overwhelming. Money was the only thing that might have limited her…but then he had left her all of his.

And then there was the time-turner…

The time-turner had only made things worse. With it, she had the ability to make decisions and then go back and unmake them. She could put off a choice and then go back before the deadline and finally decide. And she was drowning, drowning in infinite choices, in infinite time. It was not that she couldn't swim, but she was so far under the water that it seemed to extend equally in every direction. She could swim to safety, if only she could decide in which direction the surface lay.

At least she had had saving him to work for, something to give direction to her life. Now she had nothing.

"Please tell me it's not to Ronald Weasley." She stated in a scalding tone.

He pulled the time-turner from her grasp, breaking the chain which still hung around her neck and silently tucked it into the pocket of his robes.

"You were too good for him at eighteen, I doubt enough could have changed in twelve years to alter that fact."

"You didn't have to," she said with a twinge of desperation in her voice, reaching towards the hidden time-turner in his pocket. He caught her outstretched hand.

"I did. I can see it in your eyes."

"I need it," she whispered, as if fully aware of how pathetic she sounded.

He had used the same tone, hadn't he, when Lily had discovered one of his Dark Arts books and taken it away from him.

"I will let you borrow it when you need it, otherwise it stays with me," he told her firmly.

She walked to the window and ran her hand along its dusty sill. It was as she had something to say, but she said nothing.

The strange feeling he had been getting from her, it suddenly all made sense.

"You're in love with me, aren't you?"

She looked up at him quickly, her mouth dropping open. It was true, then.

He had left her access to everything, it had been the only way. She would have gone through his belongings, read through his journals, spent day after day thinking about him. Had she found something there that she was drawn to?

"What you think you know about me..." he started to say, but she interrupted him. "What? Are you going to tell me that I don't really know you, that going through your things, that reading your writings isn't enough? Who does know you, then? Who have you let get to know you? I'll bet you anything that without you even here, I've gotten to know you better that you've ever let anyone get to know you."

"And?" he asked sardonically.

"And I'm drawn to you, intrigued by and attracted to you in a completely ridiculous but very real way."

He stared at her silently. She turned. She hadn't planned...hadn't planned on ever telling him any of that and was now feeling fully vulnerable and embarrassed. All she wanted to do was get out of there before he made her feel like an idiot.

"I'll just get my things," she said quietly, "I'm sure I can stay with Harry until I find somewhere to live."

"Stay. Stay with me." The words impulsively slipped off his tongue. A demand, even though he knew he had no right to be making demands of her. She had already given him more than he deserved, yet he asked more of her.

She eyed him hesitantly.

"You say that I don't know you, but you know me even less. I'm not the little girl who sat in your classroom."

"I wouldn't be asking you to stay in I thought you were."

"It's been the blink of an eye for you, but I've grown up."

"That's what I'm counting on."

Why was a man who had so jealously guarded his privacy for so many years inviting someone in, inviting another person to share his house with him? Maybe it was that she was already in, that she had already invaded every inch of his privacy. He had let her in a desperate attempt to save his own life. She was right, she probably knew him better than anyone ever had and for once the thought of someone knowing him was comforting.

"Stay," he told her again. He knew better than to ask. She already had too many choices what she needed was an answer.

"Fine," she told him, walking towards the stairs, but turning her head to look at him with a smile he would almost call flirtatious, "but you should know that I've been sleeping in your bed and I don't intend to leave."

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A/N: Sorry, that's it. I have enough long stories that I really should be writing. I just wanted to write this quick little one to get some ideas out.