Previously: Hermione narrowed her eyes at Draco. She saw the resignation already starting to creep back into his face, which was already screwing up again in pain. "If we're wrong about this, it doesn't matter. We'll still solve it, Draco. I promise."

And she would, that was certain. Even now, she was plotting all the different ways to solve Draco's problem, from running the Arithmancy equations to researching potions and charms. For now, Draco was casting a pretty steady muscle relaxing charm, and so all she needed to do was figure it out before ten days were up. Fortunately, it was almost winter break, so they would have plenty of time to work on it.

Time, Hermione's long-standing beau, was a terrible partner. It tended to run ever so slowly when she wanted to move forward, and strike like a snake when she needed more time. Hermione would have loved nothing more than to research for ages and ages, but even she could only turn back the clock so many times before it became nothing short of ridiculous.

Draco's sixth day of almost debilitating, chronic pain was the first day of break, so Hermione was using the fifth day with abandon to run equations, test potions theories, and hopefully reach a conclusion before the end of the day.

After her long talk with Draco, she turned back the clock and hid herself in her classroom. After fifteen hours of almost constant study (broken only by Dobby's helpful assistance, when he forced her to eat at least three meals) she had established that the spell could stay pain-free for seven hours if he didn't move at all, but any movement would minimize the spell's effectiveness.

Good for sleep, then, but nothing else. She did find evidence that potions and charms wouldn't interact badly with one another, so they could switch off between potions, pastes, and spells while limiting the body's resistance.

She didn't want to just band-aid the problem, however. Draco couldn't just rely on a cocktail of potions and charms for the rest of his life, not when it was clearly a magical reaction to something.

And if it was a magical reaction, then it had a magical cause. She started scribbling at her desk furiously. This could be it, if she could trace back the magic to the source, then she could figure out why the hell Draco was still feeling effects of it days after it started. She was finally setting up the arithmancy equation with her and Draco's original equation, and just put her wand to parchment when she heard a rustling sound. Something scraped the ground beside her bed, just beyond the screen.

"Dobby?" She called out.

No answer. She held her wand up quickly, snapping to her feet. "Who's there?"

A rustle came a second time, sounding less like someone scuffing the ground and more like scurrying. Casting a silent shield, she slowly approached the bed. Who could have made it in here? The only people who had a chance of entry were Dobby and Snape – Draco didn't even know where this room was.

With a wave of her hand, the screen was blown to the side, and she saw-

Herself. At least, someone who looked like her, cowering behind the bed and looking quite panicked at getting caught.

"Who are you?" She asked coldly.

"Bloody buggering fuck," the other Hermione said passionately. Hermione winced – was that really what she sounded like? She sounded like a child on a temper tantrum. "You're not supposed to see me."

"What the bloody hell are you doing in my skin? How did you get my hair for Polyjuice? I keep a proximity ward up at all times."

The other girl said nothing, looking up at her defiantly. "I know you have a proximity ward. Just like I know you've got an invisible shield up that you think can stop me, and just like I know that this will work."

And before Hermione thought to do anything at all, she was slammed over the head with the base of a lamp, and knew no more.

She was floating past a brook, her hair splayed behind her in an invisible wind, and feet dangling inches off the ground. She felt weightless, free, better than an imperio, and like she never wanted to leave here. She wandered past the brook, past an ivy-ridden cottage, and came upon a tall, tall tower.

And very fast, she was no longer gazing at the tower from afar, but standing inside it. She knew she was inside it, just as she knew she could walk through the walls in this building, but a small part of her felt quite jarred by it.

The entire floor made a circle, completely rounded on every side. Dizzyingly, everything in the room seemed to be circular as well, making the whole place a bubbly maze.

Hermione tilted her head to the side. Why was she here? What was happening?

She didn't know. All she knew was that center of the room contained a circular basin. A pensive.

Upon approach, the pensive looked, for lack of a better word, angry. It was not the usual, cool blue color of memories, but an angry, brownish red. It didn't swirl calmly, memories jumping over one another, but instead crashed like a windy sea. She tried to put her face to it, to enter any of the memories, to see what was wrong.

A terrible burning sensation came over her, and she was taken away from the pensive, the tower, and the bubbling brook.

Hermione opened her eyes. She had been placed quite comfortably on her camp bed, tucked in like she hadn't been for over twenty years. It was sort of nice, if she ignored the burning pain in her head and the fact that someone had knocked her out and then tucked her in.

Angrily, she unwound herself from the bedcovers, and noticed a rolled-up bit of parchment as it fluttered to the floor. She unsheathed her wand, which had been put back in its holster. Casting a few quick charms to make sure the parchment was safe, she picked it up. It read the most infuriatingly short message:

A considerable amount of pain can be saved tonight. Seven turns should do it. - AD

She huffed. Only two people could've made that reference, and one of them was Albus Dumbledore. The other was herself, and she found herself grinning despite herself. Sometimes, she really was brilliant. Her future self, after getting caught (like she must have known she would, for she had lived the other side already) knocked her former self out and wrote herself a note, like she must've known she would, and set her past in motion.

It was a dizzying circle, but Hermione gained two things out of it: one, she knew what she had to do to now, which was turn seven hours back and finish her work. Two, she knew that she would figure out Draco's problem tonight, for she wouldn't have made that reference to herself. And putting Dumbledore's initials at the end, well that was her best bet of insuring she remembered the reference. She had done all she could, without disrupting the timeline by telling herself what was to come.

And thinking of Dumbledore, well that made her think about Pensives and her strange dream. The tower, the strange familiar cottage, the brook- she'd seen it all before, first when she was transported back in time and second when she'd invaded Draco's mind. But the pensive was new, and it looked angry. How could a pensive look angry? Why would it have writhed around in there like some wild animal, and what did it all mean?

Checking the time, Hermione realized she had been asleep for four hours. She sat down at her desk, still reeling from the discombobulating sleep. That meant future-her had wanted her to either stay here for three more hours, then go back and knock herself out, or that she was meant to go back seven hours, accomplish something for three hours, then knock herself out and continue on with her day.

She put her head in her hands, thoroughly done with the amount of circular thinking this required.

Beneath her, left on the table, was her Arithmancy equations, still unfinished. She wanted to judge the likelihood of getting chronic pain in Draco's situation. It was all written out, and all she had to do was tap her wand to parchment and get the results.

Figuring it was better to find out now, she cast the spell.

It was 99% certain that Draco would develop chronic pain after his travel through time. But it was 40% certain that it would dissolve on it's own – a depressing statistic. Hermione sighed, shuffling the papers on her desk. She hated this. Hated having to watch Draco in pain, hated the time games that she was forced to play with herself. And because of these statistics, she would have spend ages writing out arithmancy equations.

Unless… maybe her vision was a hint? Some sort of expression of her unconscious mind that understood some basic problem, like the disturbing look of the reddened prophecy, writhing in its bowl like a wild animal. She frowned hard, the lines creasing her face into worry. If his memories had been locked away before, it was like these memories were trapped against their will. They wanted to be free.

Hermione didn't know too much about magical neurology (that being said, she still knew quite a bit more than the majority of magical Britain), but she did know that memories could be manipulated: removed, restored, pulled out, copied, protected… who was to say they couldn't be trapped as well?

But if they were trapped – she did some very fast calculations to imagine that possibility – Draco was in a good deal of danger. The balance between memories was delicate, she knew that much from her experiments with the memory shield potion. If Draco didn't get help in the next few days, he would look like Gilderoy Lockheart in the Janus Thickley ward: just a shell, barely even functioning, and completely useless to her.

She really needed to help Draco, tonight. Honestly, she really needed a master legilimens to examine Draco's mind. It was no wonder he couldn't remember the timeline before she poked his subconscious into chaos. He had two timelines stuck in his mind, and the brain just wasn't meant to integrate more memories than it already had at the drop of a hat. That was why pensives had to be watched, not just absorbed. By watching the memory, you actually created a new memory in your own mind, that consisted of the time inside the pensieve. Hermione figured that her body handled this by knocking herself out, then integrating the future memories so fast she couldn't do anything else at all. That was why she was out for six days, at the end of third year. It was finally beginning to make sense.

Unfortunately, knowing the problem didn't make it any easier to achieve. There were two legilimens at a higher functioning level than her in the school. Only one of them was a true master legilimens, and that was Severus Snape. The other was Albus Dumbledore, who was far too "moral" to delve into mastery-level legilimency. It took quite a bit of amoral dedication to forcibly read other's minds. If Hermione had to guess, Severus was partially a natural, and decided to foster that growth as he got older.

But however he gained the skills, he was still the best choice. And Draco, the consummate Slytherin he had become, was unwilling to trust his own godfather. To be fair, his godfather was a turncoat spy for the light, but so was Draco at this point.

She realized that she was arguing with herself instead of making the argument with Draco himself, and made herself stop.

What she really needed was verification that Snape was the best choice. If he was the only one who could help Draco, she would do it even if Draco was fighting tooth and nail. She did the only reasonable thing in her situation: she ran the arithmancy equations.

According to her not inconsiderable skill at arithmancy, she had an 80% chance of helping Draco manage the festering memories by herself. Severus had a 90% chance, which was honestly better than she could've hoped for. On a whim, Hermione tested how they would do if they teamed up, and tried to invade his mind together. She saw the answer, snorted, and immediately dismissed the idea. 4% was not her idea of good odds.

But what this did mean, was she would need to convince Draco to let Severus invade his mind and either free the memories, remove them, or destroy them. And Severus would have to agree to this, and be willing to try for 90% odds.

Sighing once more, Hermione checked her watch. It was two in the morning, and she had to turn back to nine to convince Severus to help her. That would mean there were three Hermione's running around, for she had turned back to study at ten o'clock. She swallowed her pride and stepped into Myrtle's bathroom to turn. It was the most secluded place in the castle, as long as the girl didn't blab.

"Hello, Myrtle," Hermione said carefully, making sure the ghost was elsewhere. Hearing nothing in reply, she entered a stall, cast a privacy ward for good measure, and turned back.

She panted as she landed at nine o'clock, reminding herself to take it easy for the next hour. She had forgotten just how exhausted she would get when there were three Hermiones at one time. So instead of using the magically-fuelled staircase that skipped four floors, Hermione took the long way down to the dungeons, sidling from hidden hallway, past trick stairs and irritating portraits, and finally making it to Severus's office.

She knocked, mentally preparing herself for some sort of justification depending what company Snape was keeping ("Oh professor, I had a question about the test last week that simply cannot wait!"), but let out a sigh of relief when he appeared at the door, quite alone.

"Miss Granger," Snape said imperiously, glancing down the hall. "Come in."

"Tea?" He asked, already starting to pour water.

Hermione shook her head. "Not tonight, Severus, sorry. I need your help."

His eyes widened incrementally, her only indication that this surprised him. "Something urgent, I suppose? Does it concern the horcruxes?" He set down the teapot, looking a bit disgruntled that he would be denied his tea.

Some part of Hermione was giggling insanely. If she told her Gryffindor friends that she was standing in Professor Snape's office, making him upset because she refused to drink tea with him; well, they may very well explode. Forcing this unreasonable laughter back to an aban doned part of her mind, she answered calmly. "No, not the Horcruxes. It's about Draco."

"What has he done? Finally decided he's a threat?"

"The only person Draco is a threat to is himself. See, the thing is…" and Hermione started explaining the situation at the speed of light. Fortunately, Severus was more than capable of keeping up.

"You poked his subconscious? Hermione, I hope you realize that sort of action is the height of foolishness-"

"I know that, Severus!" Hermione cut him off abruptly. "Don't think I don't know what a mistake I made. And he's been in pain for the last week, and it makes it worse to know it was all my fault."

Snape stood at his full height, a towering foot above her. "You made a mistake. And you lied to me." He hissed. "Any more stupidity and I'll start thinking I've allied with the wrong person."

"Oh shut it, Severus. You know I've got the best chance of defeating Voldemort, which solves all your problems. Plus, I only withheld the whole truth because Draco requested it. And I'm telling you now, because you need to know." Her hair, usually pretty tame under her charms, had turned wiry, small sparks flying through the strands. "I don't care if you think I'm a foolish little Gryffindor, I don't care if you don't like me. All I ask is you help me save your godson from his own mind!"

Snape looked at her impassively. She breathed deeply, and the sparks settled in her hair. "You are right, of course. He is an important ally to have, and it would be quite unfortunate if his mind were left to rot; it might even garner some attention from unsavory sources, and put us both in danger. I do insist you tell me the whole picture when you do bother to inform me of events, Miss Granger. Even Albus is skilled enough at Legilimency to recognize the symptoms, if he knew the situation."

"So you'll help him?" Hermione said hopefully.

Snape nodded. "I will."

AN: As always, thanks for reading and reviewing. Sorry my updates have been slower, real life took over for a while. This is the longest chapter ever for this story, just around 3000 words! What do you guys think, is it better to get longer chapters less often? I am planning to finish the fic by late August, when I go back to college. But I also intended the story to be only fifty chapters, and we're not even at the Yule Ball yet. Thanks for sticking with me while I work this stuff out!

Credits to Duj for the ideas on other medications for chronic muscle pain.

I looked up the actual length that time turners can go back in time. According to Pottermore, it's five hours, and then a bunch of time anomalies pop up. It was actually pretty cool, apparently a witch aged five centuries when they sent her back for four minutes, and then time unraveled slightly and the misuse of magic office had to cover it , erm, Hermione was really clever and was able to alter the time turner to work for 24 hour periods, in her third year… yeah, that sounds good. She was a genius and should probably go and work for the Unspeakables after all this is over.