Summary: Hermione was meant to die that night. She was meant to die a gruesome death and live on through her works. Her murder was the headline of several newspapers both magical and not. But he fell in love with her through her work. He couldn't let her die. He has to save her. Would she let him?


A/N: Inspired by the plot of Holly Lisle's "Last Thorsday Night" which was published as a short story from "Mammoth Books of Time Travel Romance" by Trisha Telep. I didn't earn anything from writing this and please don't sue me. This series is already complete but I will be updating the next two chapters in a few days' time. I used the image of my beloved Takeshi Kaneshiro from his movie, "This is Not What I Expected" and the character's name, John Liu from "Turn Left, Turn Right".

Hi morganna12! You are awesome and the only person who left a review here so yay!


The Time Traveler


He pulled me into his arms and kissed me. I don't know about perfect kisses. I know only that I will never forget that one. In John's touch, in his taste, in his hunger lay the promise of a lifetime of wonder. We held each other, undressed each other, moved over and against and into each other. I knew that our one brief moment wasn't going to be enough.

We made love. This was everything. It was in an unspoken understanding of each other. I felt like I know him and at the same time, I wanted to get to know him better. It was something I'm probably never going to have again. There wasn't ever going to be another moment for us and I know there wasn't ever going to be another him for me.

We lay in my bed afterwards, and I realized he was looking at me with a worried expression. "I'm sorry?" he said worriedly. I realized I was crying.

"It wasn't you. You're amazing. You're wonderful. I just…" I closed my eyes, and took a deep breath and said, "I've been waiting all my life to meet the man I wanted to be with. I knew when I found him, I'd know. Now I know and I can't have you."

"You would want me?" He asked in an incredulous tone.

"I do want you." He looked away, and I saw his jaw working again. Under his breath, he muttered something that sounded a lot like "No guarantees." and then he said, "Your computer is it on? Is your internet connection working?"

"I shut down the computer, but I have broadband. The internet will work as soon as the computer comes on."

He nodded, pulled on underwear and his jeans, grabbed his backpack. He said, "We're almost out of time. I'll be right back. Stay here."

I nodded, and he jogged out of the bedroom. I wondered what he wanted with my computer. I wondered even more what he wanted with the internet. I heard the computer's boot-up sound, and him walking around in the living room, and then a couple of quick taps on the keyboard. Then I heard nothing. I waited. His instruction of "stay here" had sounded important so I stayed.

Then I heard footsteps on the little patio outside my bedroom window, and I looked at the clock.

It read 6:23 a.m. I stopped thinking at all.

I stared at the window, shuddering, willing my body to move. I heard the aluminum frame start sliding open. The blinds were drawn, so I was in near blackness. There were no sounds from the living room any more. Which meant…? That John had realized he was out of time, and had used the internet to connect to his time travel device?

That he'd been beamed home? Or that time had grabbed him and ripped him away from me while he was trying to stop it? It didn't matter. He was gone. There was a killer outside my window.

I grabbed my wand and moved fast, because there wasn't much time. I ran to the window.

The digital display on my alarm clock changed to 6:24 a.m. There were no more sounds outside my window. But John had been very clear: 6:24. He'd seen the recording of my murder.

6:24 became 6:25 a.m, and someone politely tapped on the glass. Tapped?

Wand at the ready, I gave the roll-up blind a quick tug. It shot upwards and rattled around its spindle for a second before falling silent. On the other side of the window stood floated an unconscious complete stranger. He was stunned and behind him stood John, shirtless and rumpled. The bat the stranger carried dropped to the floor with a clang, and I stared. It was 6:25 a.m., and John had not vanished into the future.

John was still here and looking a little uncomfortable. "Let us in before someone sees us."

"Oh." I opened the window, and my would-be killer came through head first, propelled by a vicious shove from behind by John. John followed, with a speed and grace that made my heart thud in my throat.

"You're here." I said in an almost breathless tone.

"We'll deal with that later," he said. Up close, I could see that he was going to have a bad bruise under his right eye, and that his lip was split and bleeding. "We still don't have a lot of time."

He handed me a gun. "This is his," he said, kicking the hit man in the thigh. "Shoot him with it if he so much as twitches. No-maj are more scared of guns than wands." I shrugged my shoulders just enough that John caught the gesture.

"Never shot a gun?" He asked. I shook my head.

He stepped behind me, reached around me with both arms, and thumbed the safety off. (I looked at the red dot staring back at me – "red is dead", I remembered someone telling me once.) He put me in a shooting stance with the gun aimed at the killer's chest. "He makes one move, you pull the trigger. Can you do that?"

"Yes," I said. "I can do that."

He ran into the living room and came back with a manila envelope. He thumbed through it and pulled out one of those amazing sheets of paper of his. Then he crouched in front of the killer, he used wandless magic to position the killer upright and then ended the stunning spell.

"Look at this," he said at my confused would be killer.

I could not see what they were looking at, but I did see all the color drain from the killer's face.

"How did you…?"

I could not see the page in front of them, but I could hear it. Moaning and whimpering, and a man laughing, and then the front door opened. "Kale, you here?" It was Elphias's voice.

The voice of the other man said, "Finishing up. You said make it chaotic."

"Yeah. Chaotic." A pause, then, "Look. I have a list of things to do after this, and I need her to still be warm when I make the 911 call. So wrap it up."

One wet noise and there were sounds of footsteps. The killer's eyes were bugging out as he tried to say something but the silencing charm John just casted won't let him.

John touched the surface of the paper and the sound stopped. He said, "I'll make it so you can talk again, but if you make any loud noises, she's going to kill you. You understand that?" The killer nodded.

John ended the silencing charm wandlessly.

"I never did that, man. It isn't me."

John touched the paper again. "That's what you came here to do."

"No. Just rob the place. Seriously. That isn't me, man."

"See how I can make the picture bigger?"

The man nodded.

John dragged a finger along the front of the page I could not see. "See how I can turn the image to get your full face? I can zoom in close enough to reveal your individual fingerprints. Want me to show you?"

Kale shook his head. "What is that?"

"New police surveillance technology."

"But I didn't do that…"

"You haven't yet and what happened next hasn't happened yet, either."

From the page in John's hand, I heard Elphias's voice. "Holy shit, what a mess."

"You said…"

"Yeah." I heard Elphias gagging and then vomiting. "It stinks! How can you stand it?" Elphias said. "You guaranteed I walk on the Burgess murders is how. No death penalty, no life in prison. I get a dismissal. We all have our needs, man."

"You'll get your dismissal," Elphias snarled. "Get out of here. Let me do what I have to do now." I heard boots hitting the floor, and more walking and then I heard an unmistakable gunshot. There was a heavy thud of a body falling.

"There's your dismissal, you freak," Elphias's voice said. Kale was staring wide-eyed at the paper. "He killed me?"

John told him, "His story was that you tried to escape, fleeing the scene of your crime, and he shot you before discovering what you'd done. Everybody believed him, except me." My would-be murderer stared from me to John, and back to me. "But you're not dead and I'm not dead."

At which point Elphias walked into the room. "This makes this harder for me. But not impossible."

Elphias blocked the door, and I remembered again what a big guy he was. I cursed the anti-apparition ward I have around my house. He wasn't lean and hard like John, but he was big and chunky and the gun he pointed straight at me made him a lot bigger.

The wand on my hand felt useless. I knew that by the time I cast any spell, he could have shot all of us. I felt my knees buckle under me.

I had been scared of the man who had come to kill me, but I was more scared of Elphias. I have faced dangers before but he was of a different breed. Despite the fact he's a traitorous snake. He was genteel. He was both respected and respectable. He had a lot of connections. Law partners, parents, siblings, guys he went yachting with, guys he went big-game hunting with.

What about me? Who did I have on this side of the world? I had the Merlin's Imaginarium Writers, whose odd-lot appearance and diverse lifestyles would make their testimony a hard sell. My family is in Australia, unaware they even have a daughter and my friends are back home in England.

But at least, for the moment, I had John. He hadn't yet disappeared, but was probably going to any second.

On one hand, there were three of us, and only one Elphias.

On the other hand, Elphias knew how to use his gun and had every other advantage, too.

Then there was Kale, would-be hit man, pond scum, violent criminal, said, "You shot me in the back, you son of a bitch." With his wrists were still under John's stunning spell but he lunged to his feet, yanked the gun out of my hands and charged Elphias with a speed and a fury that made me realize Kale could have been on me and I would have been dead before my reflexes even had a chance. I scooped up wand from my pocket as Kale's animal leap launched him across my bed towards Elphias. Elphias swung his gun away from me to protect himself.

Kale's gun jammed, and Elphias shot him. He dropped in a bloody heap on my bedspread. Elphias underestimated me. You see, I was still Hermione Granger, the girl who fought in a war. It was purely instinctive and with a deafening blast from my wand, Elphias flew across the room with his head hitting a metal decoration on the wall and the John Grisham wannabe of the wizardry world was flung to his death.


John introduced himself to the cops as John Liu, of Liu Detective Agency, and told them I'd hired him to check out the man I was dating. He presented them with his card and a folder from his backpack that included copies of documents on which Elphias had forged my signature, giving him control of my estate, naming him as my next of kin for all my personal effects. He handed them what he said was a phone tap of Kale getting the date and time of my murder from Elphias. He said it was clean, that the affidavit was in the folder.

The cops sent someone to the ER to talk to Kale, who admitted that Elphias had hired him to murder me. He also said that he hadn't intended to do it. No one believed him.

It was the end of a long, exhausting day.

John sat across the table from me in the hotel room we'd rented, his leg stitched and bandaged, working his way through room service steak and eggs, salad, roll and a dessert of questionable origin.

"What happens now?" I asked him. "What do you want to happen?" He asked me back.

"I want to be with you forever. I just keep waiting for this beam of light to surround you and whisk you out of my life, and I want to know how much longer we have."

Then he gave me that beautiful smile of his once more. The one that melted me from the moment I saw it.

"I'm staying," he said. "What about your time? What about the Unspeakables and Research Historians? Won't someone be along to drag you back?"

"I can never go back," he said. "The magical world of my time is more in tune with the muggle world. The instant I loaded my life data onto the internet through your computer and went after Kale so he couldn't come through your window to kill you, I broke my connection to home. I created a new branch in time, a new past relative to my own time. In this past, you live. The magical theorems of your generation erred in their belief of paradox. They do not understand that paradox can be prevented if certain time travel rules are followed and that is much too complicated for me to go into. But needless to say, what I did created what is called an alternate future. In the past I come from, you always will have died but there's no way to this past from there and no way there from here."

The piqued Hermione's interest but John shook his head before she could ask. "You and Harry were meant to save Buckbeak. There's something different about Harry. Historical Researchers theorized that his mother's protection of him gave him protection from paradox or something. Or maybe it was meant to be. There's still an on-going debate for that one." He said ruefully.

"What about your family and your friends?" Hermione asked. "I'll miss them. But I had a dangerous job, and they knew it, and so did I. Research historians get swallowed into alternate pasts from time to time. It's why we travel with life data."

"Which do what?" Hermione asked.

"In your time, they create validation in public databases for all the information that lets me prove who I am. Every research historian working in the age of the internet carries a life data with him that creates a name, social security number, driver's license… all of it. Complete with past. In my case, even a nice bank account in the Muggle world and a hefty Gringotts inheritance."

"You came planning to stay?" I asked in shock.

"I came hoping to stay. If you had not been you; if you had wanted to die so your books would live on; if you had not wanted me. I would have disappeared. I just would have blinked back to where I was supposed to be."

"But you've given up everything to be here. You decided knowing that I had just met you. You couldn't know whether I would change my mind and now you can't ever go back."

"Life doesn't come with guarantees, Hermione. What it does come with are chances. You're the chance I wanted to take."

I slid my hand into his. I might never be famous. I might never change someone's life (even though some would argue that I've done my part in the British Wizarding World but I feel it's more Harry's thing). I swear I'll try… but when I'm gone, maybe no one will remember my name except for a bunch of magical students who likes chocolate frogs and maybe read a small footnote in Hogwarts A History. That's all right. At least, I know what it is to be loved and I know what it means to love. The chance I've won is better than any guarantee.


Prequel or Sequel?

Fifteen year old John was sulking. He wanted to look at the new brooms instead of being dragged to this second hand dusty bookstore. His mother however charmed both of them to be unable to go beyond a few meters apart, distrusting John not to get into any trouble. His older sister was adamant she wanted to get some more books into her trunk before they head off to Hogwarts.

If he complained about it, he knew his parents would take his sister's side because, of course, they encouraged reading. He was looking for a good Quidditch book when his hand touched a hardbound second hand book. Since his sister was likely to camp in this bookstore until it closes for the day, he might as well do something with his time.

He shrugged to himself turning the page of "The Shadows Beyond the Veil". On the jacket of the book was a bushy haired woman who looked to be in her 20s with an older guy beside her who looks strangely familiar. He'd return this book to the shelf if it turns out to be one of those sappy romance novels his sisters favor where a hero saves the heroine. He would spend the next few hours engrossed with that book and spend what should have been his broom money on a few more of this author's work.

Hermione Granger established a magical work that seems parallel to the one she lived in but with different tones and touching different aspects of realities and situations. She edited and wrote war memoirs and was the author of hundreds of books on fantasy and time travel.