Hermione
August 1978, Saltburn
She landed in a heap on the hard concrete floor of the alleyway behind their house, with Sirius somehow both on top of and underneath her. She wasn't used to Apparating with an unwilling and much heavier person. It was almost certain that her elbow would bruise and most likely her leg, too. Still, she could heal that, and she would not have been able to heal the effects of whatever it was Sirius had been up to.
Sirius was fighting to extract himself and get to his feet. She did the same, ending upright with her back against a fence. Her elbow was bleeding slightly.
He was glowering at her from across the alley, splattered with blood and his jeans ripped at the knee. The hair that had looked as though it was brushed now looked as though he had been dragged through a hedge backwards. She reflected that he essentially had, or across a muddy patch of bushes and undergrowth backwards at any rate.
"Thank you for the rescue," he spat. "Next time, don't bother."
"You said you weren't going to try this again!"
"I did not. I clearly remember apologising for lying to you, and since then I haven't said anything about my plans."
"You said you were going to the chip shop!" She knew her voice sounded hysterical, it was high and slightly wailing in tone. She didn't find herself able to care.
"I said I might. I still might. Seeing as I've got nothing else to do now thanks to your fucking interfering. Are you always like that? Do you always need to control what everyone else does?" His voice was low and angry, growling out his words as much as speaking them. "Do you routinely follow everyone who is going to the fucking chip shop?"
"Only when I don't trust them!"
"I've told you to trust me. I know what I'm doing! And you know full well what my intentions have always been!"
"And I know you're going to ruin everything if you keep going this way!"
"Oh yeah? Is that definitely what all your calculations and reading have said? Truthfully, Hermione? It's not already all fucking ruined, if you hadn't noticed!"
A window opened in the house behind Hermione, and a blond-haired Muggle woman's head popped out. It was accompanied by the sound of a screaming baby and a wailing child.
"Will you take you take your fucking domestic somewhere else?" she shouted. "I've got a baby that's trying to sleep here, learn some f-ing consideration!"
"We're sorry!" Sirius shouted back, and grabbed Hermione's elbow. "Come on. We should move. She's right. This isn't the place."
"And this isn't finished," Hermione hissed as she allowed herself to be led out of the alleyway and around to the front of their house.
"Of course not," he replied.
Ginny and Luna were in the front room when they opened the door. Luna reading on the squashy brown armchair, and Ginny balancing on one leg in the centre of the room. Occasionally, she would hop from one foot to the other.
"Balance improving exercises," she said as Hermione and Sirius entered the house. She had either failed to notice the glower on Sirus' face, which Hermione was sure was matched on her own, or she didn't care. "Harpies coach makes us do this for up to twenty minutes. Says if we can do this we can stay on our broom whatever happens."
"She has managed eighteen so far," said Luna, peering over her copy of 'Murky: Stories of Ghouls'. "And she's fallen down twice, which she says doesn't count."
"Tell that to someone who cares," said Sirius, with menace. He stomped up the stairs. Several loud thudding sounds came from the upper floor of the house, and then the slam of a door and silence.
"Do I want to know?" Ginny asked, hopping again.
"Probably not," said Hermione. She threw herself down on the sofa. It was important that Ginny knew, and Luna, but it wasn't as if she really wanted to talk about this right now. "I don't even know if I know. Well I do. And it's shit."
"Are you aware that you are talking in riddles?" asked Luna. "Is that what's frustrated Sirius? He does not look happy, does he?"
"Tell me something I don't know," said Hermione.
"Okay." Luna put her book down, neatly folding in a bookmark as she did so. "He's not yet processed how he feels about you."
"About me?" Hermione asked.
"I definitely do want to know, I've decided," said Ginny, thankfully interrupting whatever it was Luna was about to say. She wobbled, and fell over again. "Also, we need to clean this carpet. Mum has a charm that gets all the dust out and sends it out the door in a neat little stream, but when I tried it everything just flew up into my face."
"We've got a vacuum cleaner," said Hermione.
"A what?" asked Luna.
"Dad had one of those. It exploded when he tried to use it and Mum threw it out. Threatened to report him to his own department at the Ministry. Do they really work, then?"
"They do," said Hermione, unsure that she wanted to get into an explanation of how. Arthur Weasley would have an absolute field day in this house, with every Muggle contraption of the 1970s in full working order.
"But that's not exactly the point, is it Hermione?" Luna was staring at her very intently.
"No. Thank you, Luna. I followed Sirius from the house earlier, and grabbed onto him when he Apparated from the alley. He… well… I don't know what exactly he was intending to do but we got involved in a fight between the Order and the Death Eaters outside some huge mansion. Sirius knew they would be there, I think."
"Seriously?" Ginny looked outraged.
"Well, perhaps that is the way he felt was best to deal with the situation he finds himself in." Luna was more thoughtful.
Hermione bristled slightly. "He might think so," she snapped, "but the rest of the world doesn't."
"I'm not sure that you have ever asked us our opinions," said Luna.
"I don't understand half of it," said Ginny. "I'm not sure mine would count for much."
"Luna," said Hermione, her anger increasing again. "You thought we were dead."
"And I still haven't ruled that out," said Luna, calmly. "I just think that perhaps we need to be aware of all of our options and consider all of them equally, not relying on some perceived wisdom about time travel and the other myriad ways we could have arrived here in what we would have assumed to have been the past. And Sirius' past, specifically so. He has at least a chance of having been here before, and we have almost definitely not."
"Yep, didn't understand half of that," said Ginny.
"Do not consider yourself to be stupid, Ginevra," said Luna.
"I'm smarter than Ron," said Ginny, "and that's the standard I've always held myself to. Achievable. I'm also much better at Quidditch than he is, and at relationships. Unfortunately for Hermione."
"Can one person around here stick to the point!" Hermione was losing what little patience she had managed to drag up. Nobody here was stupid, but all of them were proving completely unable to listen to her or to look at things from a scientific point of view. Scientific was the wrong word. Wizarding society had no concept of it. Theoretical. And not one of them could stick to the point.
"Luna, go get Sirius," said Ginny. "Hermione, stay here."
Whether Luna knew what Ginny was intending or not, she did as she was asked. Hermione went to the kitchen and fetched herself a glass of water. Sirius walked into the front room at the same time as Hermione did, and both of them immediately opened their mouths. No sound came out.
"I've used a Silencing Charm on you both," said Ginny smugly, raising her wand to show them. "One of Mum's better techniques. I will lift it when you feel you are ready to talk without shouting at each other or us. Shouting, swearing, interrupting and being needlessly rude will result in me Silencing you again. Understood?"
Sirius and Hermione glared at one another, and then at Ginny who laughed.
"I may not understand the theory of time travel," she said, "but I have a few tricks up my sleeve."
Hermione fully appreciated right now that Ginny was the daughter of Molly Weasley. And that both of them were related to Fred and George.
Sirius flung himself down onto the sofa, and lay there unmoving with his arms crossed. Hermione took a seat in the chair Luna had vacated, and Luna happily sat cross-legged on a patch of carpet.
It was a ridiculous idea though, she thought. Talking to Sirius was not going to change anything. She had tried that, and it had resulted in him avoiding her and doing what he was going to do anyway. She still had no idea what he had been intending that evening, or even where they had travelled to. Or what the point of it all had been except to cause more, unspecified, future disasters.
Perhaps she should try asking that. If it resulted in shouting, Ginny could just silence him again and at least she would have tried to have done something constructive with the man.
Hermione raised her hand. Ginny gave a small, slightly triumphant smile, and waved her wand to remove the Silencing Charm.
"Sirius, exactly what were you planning tonight?"
Ginny looked at him, and removed the Charm on Sirius with a warning glance.
"I was going to make sure my brother did not take the Dark Mark."
There were no Silencing Charms in place in the room, but nobody spoke.
Hermione couldn't see the logic in his plans. He'd said that he couldn't forgive his brother. Ginny appeared to be waiting for Hermione to react. And Luna was humming, almost as if she'd worked that out for herself.
But Sirius had said he'd wanted to help Regulus. And as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy who hadn't yet taken the Dark Mark, perhaps he hadn't yet done anything that would need to be forgiven. It was still a stupid idea, but perhaps there was some logic to it after all.
With everyone else quiet, Sirius continued. "James was there, tonight, and last time around he told me that Regulus had been present tonight and that something big was going to happen. The Death Eaters were having an event, or a ceremony. Regulus did not have the Mark on his arm tonight, but we saw him in a fight just before he went back to Hogwarts, before he will go back, in a few weeks, and he did. This was likely to be my last chance to prevent my brother from becoming a Death Eater." His voice was flat and without emotion, but his body was shaking slightly.
"Where were we?" Hermione asked.
"Hambleton Hall. The Lestrange ancestral home, and therefore Bellatrix's place. Voldemort used to spend a lot of time there."
"Shit," said Ginny. "I'm sorry, Sirius. That must be a horrible thing to know, that your brother has just been Marked. If it was one of mine, I'd want to help them. Or kill them. Maybe both."
"Is Hermione sorry?" If eyes alone could cast spells, Hermione was sure that curses were coming her way.
"I am sorry, but there's nothing we could have done without…"
"Show me the proof," he said.
Hermione took a deep breath. She couldn't be the first one to lose her cool, not when Sirius was actually talking for once.
"I don't have any proof," she said finally.
"Exactly." His arms flopped down to his sides, and he closed his eyes. "There is no proof that anything we do now will change anything, and there is no proof that it won't change just by us being here. I'll be completely honest and say there is no proof of it not all fucking up if we try, at least on the basis of your calculations."
"You read my notes."
"You read my notepad. Equal violations of privacy, I'd say, and I only read your notes yesterday when you were out with Ginny."
"Let's not get into who screwed up and betrayed the other one's trust first," said Ginny.
Hermione felt that was unfair. She had violated his privacy, she supposed, but she'd done it for a very good reason. It wasn't like she was snooping to find out who he fancied, or to copy his homework, or any other of the myriad reasons her dorm mates at Hogwarts had had for rummaging through each others' trunks.
However, she couldn't deny that what Sirius had said was true. All of her research had lead to one conclusion, which was that there was no consensus on what their presence in the past would do.
"He's right, isn't he, Hermione?" said Luna.
She was forced to consider that Luna may well also have read her notes. That wasn't necessarily surprising, as Luna would read almost anything. She wished she could say that Luna and Sirius had likely drawn the wrong conclusions, but they were both intelligent and they had reached the exact same conclusion that she had reached. This was all such a mess.
Every other person in the room had fixed her with an expectant look. Sirius had even propped himself up a little bit to hear her answer. She had to say something eventually. Well, she didn't. She could do the Sirius approach of ignoring them all for days and then running off, but it wasn't the mature option.
"Yes. He's right."
"Shit."
"Indeed."
"Am I the only one who didn't know?" asked Ginny.
"You mean, are you the only one who didn't wade through my private papers?"
"When you put it that way, it makes me seem less uninformed and much more polite," Ginny smiled.
"You were very polite as an eleven-year-old," said Hermione. "I'm not sure you have been since."
"I feel as though," said Luna, slowly, "that you were the one reminding us of the importance of staying with one point in an argument and working our way through it, Hermione."
Hermione was sure that was the closest anyone had ever got to a telling-off from Luna. But she was right, they had gone off the topic at hand yet again, and it was important that they finished the discussion while everyone was calm and willing to talk. Sirius especially.
"So, Hermione," said Sirius. "Why don't you tell Ginny what you've discovered."
"You said yesterday, that you had discovered that you might be able to get us back, and something about your previous Time-Turner having not had that power, that you had to catch up with yourself."
"Yes," Hermione said. She took a sip of her water. "The Time-Turner I had in my third year… perhaps I had better start at the very beginning. In the late 1700s, a man called Herbert Dinglewood began to experiment with time magic in an ordered way. There had almost certainly been experiments before his, but he was the first to do it in what Muggles would call a scientific manner with proper experimental theory. He built what could be described as the first Time-Turner and used it to travel backwards in time on multiple occasions.
"It's difficult to know what if anything he changed, as the records of wizarding history conflicted with each other enough as it was. The Ministry took an interest, though, and offered Dinglewood a position in the Department of Mysteries, where he continued his experimentation with official funding. There was a period of just over a hundred years which is commonly seen as the era that most of our knowledge on time magic stems from, where experiments were carried out on a regular basis with different forms of time-travel devices and differing lengths of stay in the past and amount of time travelled backwards. The Time-Turners they made could bring you back into the future, then.
"They had never attempted to go back more than a hundred years into their past, and all those who went back more than fifty years or so tended to die fairly soon after. There was an accident in 1899 when an Unspeakable called Eloise Mintumble tried to go back further and became trapped in the 1400s. She died on arrival back in her time period. Her body essentially aged nearly 500 years in one go. So it's possible to travel forwards in time, at least as far as the point where you originally used your time device, if you have the right device, but not necessarily advisable."
"We're well within that time frame, though, aren't we? It's less than fifty years to our future."
"Yes," said Hermione. "Although, things have moved on since then. After Eloise's death, the Ministry passed regulations on time experimentation, and banned everything except for the Time-Turners that I had. They were limited to not be able to go back more than five hours in one stretch, and not more than eight hours back in a twenty-four hour period. Much of the data on previous time experimentation was destroyed, too, the Minister at the time was particularly cautious and organised a mass burning of the whole time section of the Department of Mysteries.
"And then we destroyed what was left the day Sirius died."
"We did. A couple of years ago, the Department of Mysteries expressed an interest in renewing their time travel research. Kingsley was reluctant, but he allowed them some basic experimentation provided it all remained theoretical and no travel was done until their theory and calculations could be independently reviewed."
"What does Kingsley have to do with all of this?" asked Sirius. "The man was an Auror."
"I shouldn't tell you that," said Hermione. "But then I shouldn't be telling any of you this part, as one of the other conditions of the research was that it was to remain strictly confidential. Kingsley didn't want the general public becoming aware that the Ministry was able to travel in time again. He was Minister for Magic at this point, Sirius."
"Always the overachiever," said Sirius.
"Anyway, time research started again in early 2000. Kingsley approved the creation of a time travel device in late 2001, which lead to the arrival of the prototype on my desk. In essence, it's the same as previous Time-Turners, it works via the inclusion of Furstian principles with the essential charms and the time-agent, which in this case is an infusion of Sespilian sand, a Morek stone, and…"
"We aren't going to understand that bit," Ginny interrupted. "Well, Luna or Sirius might. Skip to the bit I have a hope of, please?"
"It works," said Hermione. "It isn't the same, though. It has a different interface, and less limits on than the previous ones. Apparently the Unspeakables thought nobody would be stupid enough to use it in a way that would get them killed. I recommended, or was going to recommend, in my papers in response that they did add those limits."
"Never trust the general public," said Ginny. "That's what Dad says."
"It was very easy to get into the Department of Mysteries that night Sirius died," said Luna.
"Exactly," said Hermione. "Lucius probably unlocked it for the Death Eaters somehow, but still, it's dangerous. Because a lot of the data on the original Time-Turners was burnt, like I said, this one was about fifty-percent memory from Unspeakables on what the previous ones had been like and the other fifty percent is theory and ultimately some guesswork based. In theory, it can travel forwards in time as well as backwards. However, we don't know how to make it do that, and neither did the Unspeakables. The last time a Time-Turner was used to go forwards in time was 1899.
"They went out of their way in fact to say that they didn't know if it would work, even to go backwards, but they were reasonably confident it would."
"Why didn't they test it?" asked Sirius.
"We hadn't given them the approval yet, from the Minister's office. Kingsley was unsure it was a good idea. He'd got cold feet, a bit, I think."
"And what about our ability to change things?" Ginny walked to the kitchen and came back with an apple.
"Well, that's complicated."
"What of this isn't?" asked Ginny, taking a bit from her apple.
"Okay. So, there are two predominant theories about time travel. One is the casual loop, which you'll know about Ginny from what Harry told you about the night we saved Sirius. Essentially, he could cast the stag Patronus even though he'd never done it before because he had seen himself doing it when he had done that hour the first time around."
"And you don't know how grateful I am for that, or I'd have been a sad little husk of a man before you could rescue me," said Sirius. "Chuck us an apple, Ginny? Hermione still hasn't let me get down the chippy."
Hermione carried on, ignoring Sirius as Ginny used her Chaser skills to good advantage and an apple flew past her head.
"The other is that everything you do has the ability to change something. That is what I'm worried about. If we were to say, save James Potter in 1981, then that could have a knock-on effect onto something else. It may mean for example that Harry dies, or that the Voldemort fails, tries again another day, and all three of them die. Or he gives up and attacks Neville, who dies and it cements Voldemort's strength."
"Right," said Ginny.
"Those are more on the morbid end of the possible effects continuum," said Luna. "But I take your point."
"Or we could do a hell of a lot of good," said Sirius.
"And that's where the two of you essentially disagree," said Ginny. "Okay. What now? And remember, I absolutely will make good on my promise to Silence you if there is any shouting."
"She tends to start the shouting," grumbled Sirius, but was quiet at a look from Ginny.
"I still don't think deliberately seeking to fiddle with time is a good thing," said Hermione. "There's a chance we're meant to be here, but I don't think we have any proof that we are. And how unlikely is it that both sets of us were meant to be here? We've come from two different times in two different ways. Sirius arrived here in a way I've never even heard of."
"Just because you've never heard of it, doesn't mean it hasn't happened before and isn't perfectly ordinary," said Luna. "Nobody believed in Wrackspurts."
"They don't exist," said Hermione.
"I doubt you've ever seen a Lethifold either, and do you deny that they exist?"
"Children," said Ginny, showing them her wand in warning.
"I can't see why we can't," said Sirius. "We can be careful."
"Careful?" said Hermione. "You can be careful all you like, and it can still lead to consequences you can't even imagine."
"Fucking hell, Hermione, do you think I'm dense or something? I can imagine a hell of a lot of consequences, and there's quite a few of them if we don't do anything here too. James. Lily. Harry growing up an orphan. Remus dies. I die. Perhaps you win in the end, but is the cost worth it? What if we can do it quicker?"
"And what if we kill them anyway?"
"We won't!"
"How do you know, Sirius?" Hermione could feel her voice getting higher and closer to shouting. She took a deep breath. Nobody could work out all the different myriad ways that the consequences of their actions could interact, nobody.
"How do you know that I'll fuck it all up?" He was close to shouting now too. "I'm not stupid."
"I never said that!"
"Yes you fucking well did! You don't know any more than I do about what might happen, and yet you're acting like you know fucking everything! You're withholding information about your future thinking it will make me fall into line, so you get to control what happens!"
"I'm trying to keep it safe!"
"You're making it less safe! I'm going to try whether you give me that information or not. If you give it to me I can sort through it and work out a plan that will make less people die, I'm sure of it! You're being needlessly obstructive and people will fucking die! It isn't a game!"
Hermione opened her mouth to retort, and once again found that no sound was able to get out. Sirius appeared to be having a similar problem.
"I said I would," said Ginny. "Shame. You were doing so well."
"I wouldn't cross Ginny, if I were you," said Luna.
Sirius threw his apple core at the wall with force and folded his arms again.
Hermione silently huffed. This was completely and utterly unreasonable. She hadn't done anything wrong. She had explained her position so many times, and Sirius had gone off and done something without even attempting to speak to the rest of them. He'd known that Remus and James would be in the library that day too. He was manipulating the whole thing.
She reached in her pocket and, without really thinking about it, her hand tightened around her wand. She knew enough non-verbal magic to hex him well and good even with the Silencing Charm in place on her.
"Expelliarmus," said Ginny, almost lazily, flicking her own wand at Hermione. The wand flew out of Hermione's pocket and Ginny caught it neatly. "And as a precaution, Expelliarmus!" Sirius' wand flew out of his pocket, too.
Sirius got up and made to leave the room, but as he approached the door to the stairs it banged shut. He tried the handle; it was locked.
"I'll do that to whichever door you approach," said Ginny. "I've had it with listening to both of you rant about the other one and never talking this out properly. We've been in the past two months and you've achieved literally nothing except a tonne of research and increasing your desire to argue with and then ignore each other. We are getting this over with today."
Hermione did not want to be the first to speak this time. Sirius ought to make an effort too. He'd just laid there so far, chomping his apple and glaring and making snide comments.
"I'm hungry," said Luna. "I'm going to make some food."
Sirius raised his hand. Ginny waved her wand at him.
"Bread's stale," he said. "You can Silence me again now. Got nothing else useful to say, apparently."
Ginny laughed. It started as a slightly nervous giggle but soon turned into a full-scale laughing fit, with Ginny crouching on the floor doubled over in hysterics. Luna was humming in the kitchen, trying to cobble together some kind of meal from whatever they had in the cupboards, which was rarely anything useful. Sirius watched Ginny with an increasingly confused look on his face.
"I'm sorry," she said, after a while. "It's just… of all the things that have happened to us over the years this has got to be the most absurd. Bread's stale. Oh Merlin. The bread is stale and we're all a bunch of incompetents. We brought down Voldemort and we can't even buy bread often enough!"
"Do you understand?" Sirius asked Hermione. Still unable to talk, she shook her head. "Makes two of us."
It was several minutes before Ginny had calmed down enough to cast the counter-spell to allow Hermione to speak again, and several more before she was able to talk without collapsing back into laughter. Hermione waited as patiently as she could. It was perhaps useful, she thought, as it had at least persuaded them all to stop attempting to snipe at each other and to consider their positions carefully before they resumed the argument.
Luna returned into the living room with some kind of chicken, rice and carrot based dish, which tasted reasonable. The one thing to be said for this adventure was that it was far more comfortable than the Horcrux hunt. She had a decent bed, not a bunk in a slightly smelly tent, and food that was regular and tasted like food. Ron would have enjoyed this one.
As always when she thought of Ron, she felt a faint tugging in her heart. He was not who she had expected to fall in love with, but fall she had and she felt the absence of the boy in every quiet moment here. She knew that Ginny did too, for Harry.
And truth be told she wished Harry could have been here, too. He would have an idea of what to do. It wasn't that she wanted someone she could boss around, like Ginny had suggested she did, but that at least Harry and Ron listened to her and they thought about her ideas. Sirius just went off on one without any care for her thoughts.
She did get why he wanted to do this. She really did. But she just couldn't get on board with it.
"Hermione? Look, I'm sorry. I was a dick, and I should have told you I wanted to read your stuff and then talked through your findings with you. I really do think we can change this in a way that will help everyone, you know, and I'm maybe being a little bit selfish but only a little bit. It's Harry I feel for. And James, and Lily, and Remus. I coped with having nothing for twelve years, and I can do it again. They shouldn't have to."
He was sat up on the sofa, still holding his bowl with its brown border and coral coloured flower pattern around the inside. Not making eye contact, he watched the progress of his fork chasing around the last few grains of rice. She hadn't noticed before, but the whole of one side of his face and much of his shoulder and body was still splattered in blood.
He'd watched his friend have his arm sliced open tonight, and he'd left his brother behind to pledge his life to Voldemort.
Maybe she should have cut him some slack.
And he was right, in that there was no way of saying that just them being here wouldn't have affected everything.
She should apologise, too.
"I'm sorry, too. I should have made more effort to talk to you instead of just distrusting you. I want Harry to be okay too. And everyone else. I'm just worried about the impacts on everything else. I… Are you okay, after tonight? You're covered in blood."
"I'm fine. It's James' blood."
"Oh." Hermione got up from her chair, and walked over to Sirius. Kneeling at his feet, she used the spells she knew to Vanish the blood from his face and body and to heal the graze on his knee. "I'm sorry," she said, fixing the rip in his jeans. "I should have done this earlier."
"Could have done it myself," said Sirius. "Wasn't your responsibility."
"We all have to look after each other," said Hermione, and she meant it.
Ginny spoilt the moment a bit by giving the two of them a round of applause that seemed only slightly sarcastic. Luna just smiled a vague smile.
Hermione wondered if she would regret saying the next bit. It seemed sensible, and her calculations and the theory suggested it would be fine, and it would help Sirius. And her. She could hide it better, but she was about as good as Sirius was at doing nothing in truth.
"Sirius," she said. "I've got a proposal for you."
"I don't get married," said Sirius, sticking his tongue out.
"Oh for Merlin's sake," said Hermione, and nearly changed her mind. "I still think setting out to deliberately change the future is a bad idea. But how about… well, we know which Death Eaters die or get captured, don't we? Let's make sure that that all happens. Make sure all the ones that are out of the war stay out of it, so that we're certain nothing gets worse?"
"And if we do that, you'll talk to me about stuff and let me leave this house without being stalked?"
"Yes. And you'll agree not to go off and change things? Just us being here could cause a disaster, we don't know for certain if that might be affecting the timeline already, so it makes sense to do what we can to keep at least as many Death Eaters out of it as possible."
"I still want to." Sirius sighed. "But we don't know what would happen. You're right about that. And, we can review it in the future."
"We can," said Hermione, although she was certain she wouldn't change her view. But she was happy to talk about it. After all, not talking about it had nearly resulted in a disaster. She wasn't going to repeat that mistake. Hermione Granger had always prided herself on learning from her mistakes.