Chapter 2: A Challenge Issued

Tom Riddle had given Hermione Granger a diary. She thought for several hours before she decided what to write, and in the end, there were tears on the page.

21 July 1940

It's 1940. I'm stuck in 1940.

With Tom Riddle, of all people.

I really shouldn't ever have challenged Chang to that charm-casting contest. She just made me so mad.

And if I had, I should have listened to the twins when he said that withdrawing gracefully was the better part of valor.

But nooooo I just had to go and show her up in front of that Edgecombe girl.

Actually, I'm kind of surprised they were so vindictive about it. I wonder what they were actually trying to do? It had to be a curse or something on one of the books at the bottom of my trunk. That's what I was doing, when I was "dislocated," cleaning out my trunk. Maybe a portkey, gone terribly wrong? A Vanishment? Something age-related? Or just something that someone had been wanting to try out, and they thought they'd just throw it at me and see what happened? Well, joke's on them, I guess, if it's that. No data, you see.

My parents must be going spare. It's been three days, now. Unless, I guess, we do somehow figure out how to send me home, and de-age me, and haven't bollixed up the timeline too far in the meanwhile. Oh, who am I kidding? The timeline went to hell the second I told Tom that I was from the future. My parents will report me missing, and then assume it had something to do with magic, and then kick up enough of a fuss that the ministry will probably obliviate them of my entire existence. I hope they do it soon. I don't want them to suffer, wondering what happened to me.

My friends, they won't know until September that I'm missing. I don't imagine there will be much they can do about it, especially if it turns out that the Obliviators send my parents out of the country or something. I imagine they'll get over it, eventually. I do feel bad for Harry, though. He's lost an awful lot of people in his life already. And if the Dark Lord comes back, like they've been thinking he will, he'll probably win if I'm not there to help oppose him. I mean, Harry's the one who has to ultimately defeat him, but the only people who were really looking out for Harry were me and Ron, and Ron's an idiot. Bloody prophesy. Maybe the twins will carry on for me…

But it's not really my problem, anymore, I guess. That Bastard won't even be around for another thirty years or so. Shit, Grindelwald's still active in 1940, isn't he? And – FUCK! The camps. People are dying in the camps… And this is only the start of it. God. There's what? Another five years, millions dead, and the rationing doesn't end until… 1959, I think.

She had not intended to cry, but she had been so wrapped up in her thoughts of her friends and family, herself, and the implications of time travel for herself, that she had forgotten more than once that World War II was only beginning. Every time she thought of it, it was a shock, tearing through the generally bleak, mournful attitude she couldn't help having about her own prospects, and sending her into tears. Every new thing she thought of made it worse. She pulled herself together and re-read the first part, then finished writing what she had meant to.

I wonder how that will affect the magicals… It's not like they grow their own food or anything.

By the way, Tom, I know you only gave me this journal so you could steal it and see what I'd written. I don't care. I'm not going to say anything about why you were significant in my old future (oh, come on, you always knew you would be, right? That hardly counts.). It doesn't matter, anyway. You're still you, and who knows how the historical facts are going to change now, for you or for anyone? I'm certainly not planning on my ability to keep everything I know about what's possible under wraps forever. It's just, well, everything I know about history is subjunctive now.

The fact of my being here means that you're going to have different priorities than you would have done in my old future's past. If I don't at some point just disappear as a temporal anomaly, we're going to have to assume that we're now in a parallel universe from the one I grew up in. On the plus side, since a very specific chain of events had to happen for me to get here, I imagine we should know soon. Or not. I suppose if I turn out to not have existed, you may not remember me. But I have faith in the ability of magic and the universe to resolve such paradoxes. So I'm leaning toward a multiverse theory. Sorry, tangent.

She paused again, considering the wording of the next section. There were reasons that one was not allowed to meddle with the Past. She knew, better than many, she thought, the implications of time travel, having used her Time Turner… perhaps a bit more than strictly-speaking necessary the previous year. After all, if one could be in three places at once, there was no reason not to use that skill to slip in almost an entire school-year's worth of free time to study whatever one liked in the depths of the Hogwarts library. There was a sharp stab of guilt as she wondered if the reason the accident had taken the form it did was that she had already spent so much time "displaced" from her proper place in the time stream. She wrenched her mind away from that thought.

The relevant bit, here, was that the timeline was relatively stable as long as you created stable "loops" – everything that you did would have already been done before, chronologically speaking. There were dozens of laws and regulations regarding what one was and was not allowed to do while making these loops, to avoid paradoxes. Unstable loops, the little ones, had a tendency to collapse, leaving one chronologically in the past with hazy half-memories of your own subjective past-chronological future.

No one knew what happened when you created a loop that couldn't close, but there were theories. Multiverse Theory suggested that one was transported not only in time, but also across an additional dimension, into (or creating) a parallel universe, which had (probably) always existed, but which your consciousness had not inhabited. Hermione liked that idea ever so slightly more than the Revisionist Theory, which was simply that by changing the past, one changed the future, and either blinked out or became a "persistent magical anomaly" once the universe reached a state of paradox (she thought this seemed like a cop-out), or the Complex Dependent Major Loops theory, which suggested she would live the rest of her life from this point, and herself or someone else would eventually go back to the past and somehow change it again, so that her original self and personality would develop and contrive to be sent back again to live the life she was currently living, making a sort of co-dependent (but stable) pair of Major Loops, like a limited multiverse theory. She thought the CDML was probably the most likely scenario. In any case, it hardly mattered. The rules, such as they were, were the same, and boiled down to "minimize your impact". Time travelers were supposed to avoid seeing or talking to anyone, especially anyone important, and in the event that they did get "lost", they were to report to the Unspeakables for assistance in controlling their footprint.

That, she thought, would be impossible, as she had already told Tom fucking Riddle that she was from 1994. Everyone knew that people with a natural talent for the Mind Arts were resistant to memory modification and truth serums, and Dumbledore had said that Lord Voldemort was the best natural Legilimens he'd ever met. There was really no going back. The best she could hope for, really, was to try to stop things from going wrong in the first place, and not let anyone else know. Besides, if it was the CDML, it would work out in the end. So.

Anyway, it's 10am and I'm going to help clear the streets. If you read this before I find you, come talk to me. We need to come up with a cover story for me. It can't get out that I'm from the 1990s. I can't even imagine what Dumbledore or Grindelwald would do if they found out, but the fact that they might get the jump on time travel research and scoop you is probably the least of it.

Yes, I know that's the only reason you're being my friend. I also know that you won't care that I know, aside from maybe being a bit irritated that I saw through you. You still have to be nice to me so I'll help you, don't think my admitting I know gets you out of that. But I do so hate playing dumb. And there are more important things to be sneaky and deceptive about, at the moment. Or maybe I'm just encouraging you to play this game on a deeper level to keep things more interesting. Could be both. I can just imagine the look on your face. It's adorable. So come find me.

HJG

Tom read the first entry in Hermione's journal, which she had left in her pillowcase, clearly to hide it from her roommates more than from him. He smirked, and started thinking of all the inferences he could make from her words as he wandered the halls of the orphanage and then the surrounding streets, looking for his wayward companion.

She had written him a note.

She had known that he was tricking her (well, trying to), and preying on her trust, and she didn't seem to mind.

Interesting. On the whole, he had observed, people generally minded very much when they realized they were being manipulated.

The first half, the journal-entry bit, that didn't really seem to be too important, aside from the fact that she obviously knew his name, which was gratifying in a way. It was nice to find confirmation that he would succeed in gaining enough power that his name would be known throughout the Wizarding World in fifty years.

The girl had been upset, Tom thought. The first half of the page was blotted with tears, and she had nearly pierced the page with her pen when she mentioned these "camps," whatever that meant.

She had clearly had parents and friends, but he couldn't see that they mattered much, since they were out of his reach in the future. He could, he supposed, find out their names and stop them from having been born, but that would just increase the number of paradoxes in action, and wouldn't really help him, since he couldn't predict the outcome of the action. In fact, he thought, there wasn't really much of anything he could do to this girl to make her help him, except make her hurt, maybe. And torture really didn't guarantee honest efforts in cooperation.

The fact that it had been a Ravenclaw, or a group of them, that had sent her back was noteworthy, but not necessarily useful if they were using something that hadn't been developed yet, or it really had been some sort of accident with a new or existing spell. That was clearly no place to start.

He wondered idly who this Dark Lord was, who would rise in thirty years or so, and then if it even mattered. If he hadn't managed to take over by then, he thought he would be in a good position for a power play by then. Maybe he could nip this "Dark Lord" in the bud and take his place.

He wondered if she was specifically trying to derail history, mentioning dates and historical events. Maybe she hadn't liked her old future's past. And then he spent a couple of minutes wondering how the muggle war and rationing would affect the magical world. He had fully planned on hiding out in the magical world until the War was over, but maybe she was right. He had no idea how interrelated the muggle and magical worlds were, at a really basic level.

She was obviously a muggleborn, or a half-blood raised in the muggle world, since she called magicals "they."

She was right that she needed a cover story, if only because, as she had mentioned, it would be detrimental to his plans if someone else discovered how time travel worked first. She couldn't be British, because if she were, the Magical Student Registry at Hogwarts would have sent her a letter years ago. Maybe she could pretend to be French? Or if she only spoke English, then American, maybe. They could tell Dippet that she was a cousin on his Father's side… or, no. There was no reason that any parent would willingly send their child into the Blitz. Perhaps she could pretend to have lost all her memories. It wouldn't explain anything, but they wouldn't be expected to be able to explain… Unless Dumbledore thought he could fix it using Legilimency, in which case they would be, in Hermione's words, fucked. So she was right. They needed to talk about this.

And then he came back to the oh-so-casual "By the way, Tom…" Too casual, maybe. He thought she had left and come back to write the letter. Her handwriting was shaky at the beginning, and then not. There were no teardrops on the letter to him.

He honestly wasn't sure what to make of the note. Obviously she had been correct. He had only wanted to see what she would write. But should he revise his estimation of her intelligence upward, for seeing him clearly, or down, for admitting it? Was this what she wanted, for him to be confused? Maybe. But what purpose would it serve for her, for the only person who knew the truth to be irritated with her?

And was he really that predictable? Or transparent? He had thought his impression of a charming young man was quite good. And to call the face he would make at her challenge adorable, was she flirting with him? If she really did have any measure of him at all, that was truly inexplicable.

But, well…did he care, when it came right down to it? That she knew and had given up that point of potential leverage, possibly only to confuse him? No. He really didn't. In fact, the fact that it had worked so well was frustrating, which was interesting. But it also meant she was right again. Which in turn argued that she did know more about him than he thought she possibly could.

She made him want to scream.

She wasn't with any of the work crews clearing the streets. He supposed she must have wandered off, or gone back to the orphanage.

He walked, thinking, until dark, as usual, and then returned to the orphanage himself, to find the infuriating girl waiting in his room.