It's time to start talking about love.

It's the most overused cliché in the book, right? Love this, love that, love is all you need, love can save the world, love, love, love.

Honestly, what sort of power does love really have?

Let's start with a mother's love for her child. It may not be universal in a world so overpopulated, but the vast majority of mothers begin with an overwhelming love for their child from the first time they find out that they are going to have a baby. It is protective and pure and self-sacrificing. Dismiss it as instinctive, if you'd like, but a mother's love is one stronger than most people can even conceive, until and unless they feel it too.

Remember that this is where a person first learns about power? The baby cries, the mother comes, and the baby has his first lesson in power over others. The fundamentals of power are established, and how the baby sees the world. A loving mother will instill confidence. The child will begin to know that they do have power in this world. A neglectful mother will teach her child that he can't rely on his mother, and he will crave power without understanding why he needs to prove that he has power when so many others seem so content with what they've got.

Mothers have the power from the very start to shape the future of the world, by how much they love, and how willing they are to give up a bit of their power for the love of their child.

We've barely scraped the surface of just how powerful a force love is.

Chapter Twelve Just a Little Rest

Hermione kept her eyes closed, not wanting to wake up or move or do anything that would disturb the warm comfort she was enjoying right now. There was something terribly urgent that she was supposed to be attending to, but she couldn't think of what it was at all. She was just warm and content and being held close against someone's chest and listening to his heartbeat.

"Hermione," he whispered, shaking her a little.

"Five more minutes, Dad..."

That wasn't her father, though. The voice was all wrong. In fact, everything was. Size, scent, weight.

Hermione frowned and forced herself to open her eyes. "Who-?"

"Come on, Hermione. You've got to wake up. I'm sorry I screwed up the spell, but they-"

She reached up and covered his mouth. "Hush. I'm not upset. Just a little fuzzy. Around the edges. You're Ron, right?"

"Who else would I be?" He gave her a skeptical look for a minute before letting her go, slowly. "Are you going to be okay?"

"I hope so," she said slowly, struggling to balance on her own to feet. "That was a lot harder than I thought it would be."

"I'm sorry. I really am. I know Professor Riddle told them not to kill you, but I thought, I mean they didn't look, and what if they didn't listen to him, and you couldn't do anything, so I just did it and-"

"Don't forget, I know plenty of spells to get you to shut up. Don't make me use any right now, please?"

Ron shut his mouth right away and nodded quickly.

Hermione let things stand at that for a minute, seeing if he'd push his luck while she got her bearings. He kept his mouth shut, though, and her head cleared at last. "Here, you should hold onto one of these."

He held out his hand, and she dropped a small blue egg into his palm. "What's this?" he asked, holding it up to his eye.

"It's your ticket home, in case anything happens to me."

"What do you mean? Nothing's going to happen to you. And why do you have two of them, anyway?"

Hermione sighed and rubbed her eyes. There was dust in the air, and it was irritating her. "I made a few of them. Dumbledore warned me that I'd need to bring people with me, later on."

"So, wait a minute, I thought you said it would take too much out of you. Right?"

Hermione looked around. They seemed to be in a barn of some sort, and she sat down on a bale of hay so that she could explain. "That's what I said, yes. If you'll remember, I did faint just as I said I would. However, a great deal of that was the fact that I had to make these while I was casting the spell for them to work."

"Huh?"

"They're attuned to the initial spell I cast, so that any one of them will bring me back home in an emergency. That's now an anchor point, for us."

"Not the safest place to go back to now, is it?"

"Well, it was supposed to be," she muttered darkly. "I thought it would be, at the time. How was I supposed to know that would happen?"

"Mum seemed to know, as soon as Ginny told her about what Professor Riddle said to you. She started rushing everyone out of the house, and told me to protect you no matter what, and I did. Didn't I?"

"Well, you tried," Hermione said, patting him on the arm and smiling at him. "Though, I'm rather thankful they didn't start casting spells before we'd managed to escape."

"You and me both," Ron said, sitting down next to her.

"They got away then, right?"

"I don't know." He frowned, resting his knees on his elbows with his hands clasped in front of him. "I think so, but everything was too chaotic all at once to tell for sure."

Hermione nodded slowly. It probably wasn't a good idea to use the pendant yet, then, because if they were on the run or hiding it might give away their location. She'd have to wait until Ginny contacted her, first, just in case.

"So. What do we do now?" Ron asked quietly. "I know you had a plan and everything, but since neither of us knew I was coming with you..."

"I know," Hermione said with a soft smile. "It's okay. The first thing we do is we have to keep a little boy from getting killed."

"Really?" Ron looked at her with wide eyes. "But, won't that change everything in the future?"

"That's the idea," she said. "But it's okay. The person we're going to stop is a time traveler, too. If you think about it, we'll just be righting a wrong that should never have been committed in the first place."

"Well, yeah, that makes sense."

She stood up and took a deep breath. "We should go. We've only got a few hours to get there. It should be simple enough, too. We just stop the person and go on to the next stop on the timeline."

Ron just nodded and stood up too. "You're the boss. You know what you're doing."

Hermione smiled and took his hand. "Don't worry. It will work out just fine." She said it just as much to reassure herself as to reassure him.

He looked at their hands, surprised, but he didn't pull away at all. He squeezed a little bit. "Okay. Let's go."