Chapter Twenty-One: Who was left?

Day Four Hundred Three

When Severus woke up, he felt no obvious differences. But that did not stop the roiling in his gut, did not stop him from remembering Hermione's excitement from the day before and the light in her eyes as she kissed him. He showered and dressed for the day as if everything were the same. Because, really, it was.

It wasn't until he went out into his office that he began to suspect that something had changed. To be completely honest, it wasn't until he sat down at his desk and stared at the wall, debating whether or not he should bother with the third years' essays.

There was something pinned to his door.

Curious, Severus stood and crossed the room, studying the bit of parchment with frank curiosity. It had been attached to his door using a knife, an ominous gesture if Severus hadn't recognized both the handwriting on the parchment and the knife from a certain Gryffindor's set of potions supplies. He read the two words scribbled on the parchment over and over, unsure as to what Hermione was trying to tell him.

Change nothing.

Pulling the knife out of the door and running his finger over the new hole, he continued to stare at the note, now in his hand. If Hermione had intended to confuse him, her goal had been accomplished.

Because, after all, wasn't that the source of his frustration? The fact that he could change nothing?

Severus did not fancy himself a fool; he knew exactly what Hermione meant. She was telling him not to actively attempt to change anything. He was mystified, however, as to what she thought that would do.

But he had nothing better planned for the day, and at the end of it all, he could get spectacularly drunk, which was better incentive than not.

He would play along, then.

And he did, quite well, in fact. After all, no one knew his lines better than he. He asked Albus where the marmalade was at breakfast, he stalked to his first class with all of the righteous fury of the oppressed and grilled an ignorant first year Gryffindor to tears, mocking him in front of his classmates as he failed to answer even the simplest of questions.

He even watched Thomas Ashcroft deliberately trip Graham Pritchard, sending him reeling into his workbench and causing him to knock over half a dozen potions ingredients, including the ubiquitous armadillo bile. Watched and said nothing, even as Pritchard crawled about on the floor, picking up shards of glass and slicing his fingers to ribbons. Although he violated Hermione's command slightly when he handed the boy a rag to assist in his efforts, he rather thought she wouldn't mind.

And now, he stood at the chalkboard, writing up the seventh years' assignment, wishing that he had lecture notes to shuffle. Malfoy came into the room and seated himself lazily behind Potter. Instinctively, Severus took a step forward, to do what he did not know. But, in that same moment, Hermione cleared her throat loudly, shooting him an obvious warning look.

Class progressed, then, in its normal fashion. He went through his lecture by rote, subtracting points from Potter when he answered incorrectly and implying that Longbottom had his textbook open in his lap when he answered correctly. By the time he set them to brewing, Potter's expression was already murderous, and he sent bits of mandrake root flying in the air as he savagely chopped at his sample. Malfoy said something that Severus could not catch, superior and drawling, and Severus saw Potter's hand tighten around his knife.

He leaned over Mandy Brocklehurst's cauldron, keeping one eye on the methodically brewing Longbottom. The boy was consulting his text as if it held the wisdom of the ages, one finger skimming the page and his ladle suspended in the air in his other hand as he read. Pronouncing Brocklehurst's work sufficient, he moved on to Hermione.

"Miss Granger," he said, giving her a curt nod and looking down into her cauldron. She was nearly done, as he'd expected — by this point, she had brewed the Restorative Draught nearly as often as he had. All of them had, really, but of course she was the only one with any real memory of it, although Potter still had moments where he looked more confused than usual.

"Professor," she replied demurely. "I forgot my watch. What time is it?"

Blinking, he turned his head. "What are you on about, girl?" he hissed. "Have you taken even further leave of your senses?"

"I'm going to stop it," she whispered, determination in her eyes. "At 2:34, if everything has happened exactly as it should, I'm going to stop it. See?" Flashing him a quick grin, she pulled something out of her pocket.

Severus recognized the Time Turner and did his best to hold his ground. "I don't understand," he said in an unexpected rush of honesty.

"Do nothing until the time comes, but when the time comes…" She smiled at him again, and Severus hoped no one was watching. "Help me."

Still baffled, but aware that he had spent an inordinate length of time at her cauldron, he merely jerked his head in assent. "All right, Granger," he said in a normal tone of voice, walking past to a nearby Hufflepuff's workbench.

Potter's anger was worsening; Severus could see it, even from his position across the room, examining Terry Boot's work. Every now and again, Malfoy would speak, and Potter's reaction would be subdued, but noticeable.

He itched to know what time it was. But he kept his watch in his pocket.

Sooner, of course, than not, it happened. As if in slow motion, Severus saw Potter spin around, abruptly calm, and place both of his hands on Malfoy's chest, lips curling in an unconscious snarl as he pushed.

Tumbling backward, Malfoy's hands scrabbled for purchase on the top of his table. With a shouted curse that probably would have scandalized his mother, he managed to pull himself upright before he toppled over completely. Still shouting, although it was barely intelligible at this point, he picked up a very familiar container and hurled it at Potter's head.

Potter, of course, leapt out of the way as if he'd been trained to do so his entire life, launching himself at Malfoy with a wordless battle cry. Severus turned away from the pair, now exchanging blows — he was concerned with other things.

The jar flew through the air, spinning, and landed with an audible splashing sound in Longbottom's cauldron. If anyone noticed that both Severus and Hermione had been staring at the cauldron the entire time the jar was in flight, no one commented. Severus took an unconscious step forward.

The cauldron emitted a loud belching sound, smoke puffing out in terrible quantity. "S-sir," Longbottom stammered, looking both resigned and afraid.

"Step back, Longbottom," Severus replied firmly. "Just step back. Carefully. And if you can, get–"

On cue, as Longbottom scuttled away from the thing, the contents of the cauldron exploded, torrents of red potion flying through the air.

A good number of students, Malfoy included, screamed. Most of them — the ones with even an ounce of good sense — threw themselves to the ground and covered their heads with their arms.

Hermione, of course, stood quietly in her corner. Expecting to see sadness in her eyes, Severus was shocked to see that same steely determination as before. Even as scalding potion rained down on her, covering her face and soaking her robes, her expression did not change.

The force of the impact sent her reeling back into her table, and Severus winced as her hip made contact with its edge. He could not hear it, but he was certain the Time Turner was broken. Especially given the faint smile that crossed Hermione's face as she stumbled.

He did not expect for her to begin tearing at her robes, however, and instinctively moved forward to help her.

She'd asked him to, hadn't she?

"They're…" she muttered as he stepped close. "My arm…"

"Hang on," he said, grabbing the collar and giving them a quick jerk. There was a ripping sound, and she was free, standing in the middle of the classroom wearing nothing but her underthings and a pair of shoes, liberally splattered with the red potion.

With a sudden shout, Severus noticed that the robes in his hands had caught fire — Time Turner dust, he reminded himself ruefully — and he dropped them to the floor, glaring at them as they continued to burn.

"Severus," Hermione whispered, running her hands up and down her bare arms. "What time–?"

"Oh, my God!" Potter shrieked, watching the robes smolder. "Hermione!"

Flinging himself to his feet, he took a few staggering steps in her direction, ignoring Severus's angry shout of, "Potter! Stay the hell back!"

In his eagerness, he tripped over Malfoy's left leg, falling against a nearby workbench and somehow managing to send a textbook flying through the air. Something creaked, loudly and ominously.

Severus watched the book and was suddenly overtaken by a mental image of Hermione, still on the stones as blood seeped from a wound on her temple. "No," he yelled, wrapping his arms around her and dropping to his knees, pulling her with him and using himself as her shield as they went down.

The book went harmlessly over their heads, and Hermione, eyes wide with fear, sighed with obvious relief. "What–?" she began.

He knew what she was trying to ask. He knew because it was the same question floating in his own head. "I–" he tried to reply.

There was the creaking noise again. Louder.

Confused, he looked down at her and saw the same puzzlement in her eyes. "Do you hear–?" he started to ask curiously.

But there was no time.

Deafening pops and creaks filled the room. Panicked, students began screaming once again, and, not knowing what was going on or how to begin stopping it, Severus pulled Hermione even closer, covering her body completely with his own.

An inhuman groan, and then all Severus knew was pain and darkness.

Time Unknown

He did not want to wake up. If he woke up, he would have to deal with the fact that there was something very large and very sharp digging into his back.

But the voice was insisting that he get up. "Severus?" it was saying. "Severus, are you all right? Please, Severus, answer me." It sounded worried and female, and he eventually decided that if he answered it, it might shut up and he could go back to sleep.

Moaning ever so slightly, he tried to move, realized he couldn't, and then woke up completely. "Wha–" he said, shocked when his voice cracked on the single word.

Underneath him, Hermione sighed. "Oh, thank God," she said in a rush. "I thought you were dead."

"Impossible," he grunted, wriggling experimentally — no, he was definitely pinned down. "I haven't died today yet. Not once." While he could just make out the outline of her face, it dawned on him that they were lying in the dark. "Why is it dark?"

In the dim light, her teeth flashed in a quick smile. "I, erm, I think the ceiling caved in on us."

He felt his mouth drop open. "You're joking."

"No, I'm pretty sure," she replied. "At least, I think that's what they shouted at us through the debris. They're trying to get us out, by the way."

Severus groaned and allowed his head to fall into the crook of her neck, as it really had nowhere else to go and he was tired of holding it up. "No wonder I feel as if I've been hit with a pile of bloody great rocks," he muttered. "Are you all right?"

"My shoulder feels a bit… off," she said. "And I think I got burned pretty badly when Neville's potion hit me, but other than that, I'm fine. What about you?"

"Well, my legs are tingling like hell because I think the bit of the ceiling that's currently lodged in my spine has cut off my circulation, but otherwise–" Her words finally sank in and he felt his eyes widen. "Wait, you're… okay?"

Her body shook slightly underneath him and he took that to mean laughter. "Not even a bit dead," she said in a voice rich with humor. "At least…"

He did not want to look into her eyes, but he pulled his head up anyway, accidentally banging it on a nearby rock so hard that he briefly saw stars. There were unshed tears in Hermione's eyes, glinting in the faint light.

"What time is it, Severus?" she whispered.

Frustrated, he made a face. "My watch is in my pocket and both of my hands are pinned under you," he replied.

"Which pocket?" she asked, wiggling around — he felt her hands brush his waist and tried desperately not to think about the fact that she had no clothes on.

"Left," he said, closing his eyes and thinking about Voldemort and Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore wearing a pink tutu as her hand crept into the pocket in question and began fumbling around.

An indeterminate number of seconds later, he felt her hand close around his watch and pull it out. Both of them sighed with relief, but Severus was quite prepared to ignore this and he was glad to see that she appeared to be as well.

Hermione flipped the lid off his watch and bit her lip.

"Well?" he demanded, fidgeting in his impatience and whacking his head against the rocks again.

Her smile was radiant. "Severus, it's two minutes until three."

Not caring that he'd lost control, Severus bent his head and pressed his lips to hers.

Later that evening

"Start from the beginning, please," Severus said, leaning backward in his chair, feeling a bit safer now that they were both back in his office, "and leave nothing out. Like one of those hatefully long essays you insist on writing."

Hermione rolled her eyes and seated herself on top of his desk, allowing her legs to dangle freely. "Well, I told you before. You said that Graham's vial always breaks. And I already knew that the Time Turner breaks, and that I die."

"I fail to see what that has to do with anything."

"If you want me to tell you everything, you can't interrupt me constantly," she said crossly, but she was smiling.

He wanted to kiss her again, but instead he contented himself by saying, "Five points from Gryffindor."

Huffing, she shot him an indignant look, and he raised an eyebrow, daring her to say something. In the end, she simply shrugged. "Somehow, everything that happens today leads to those three consequences. Which means that if everything happens as it should, those three things must happen."

She looked down at him from her position perched on top of his desk, but he remained silent, waiting for her to continue.

"Clearly, then," she said, obviously irritated with him for not asking whatever question she'd been hoping for, "if even one of these consequences does not come to pass, then causality has been violated."

"So…" he drawled, furrowing his brow.

"Exactly," she said triumphantly, "if p, then q. Not q–"

"Therefore, not p," he interrupted, smirking at her exasperated expression. "You're hoping, then, that violating causality for at least one of the three consequences will cause the loop to break."

"Because nature hates paradoxes," she said with a wide grin.

Cocking his head, he studied her. "So you're telling me that if I had managed to prevent Pritchard from breaking his vial, or if you had kept the Time Turner from breaking…"

"The loop would have, in all likelihood, snapped back," she said, nodding. "Of course, I probably would have died in either of those cases. Which, naturally, I was hoping to avoid."

Something tightened in Severus's chest, but he dismissed it as indigestion. "Naturally," he echoed neutrally.

"I also thought that my death would be the easiest thing to prevent," she continued. "Once I figured all of this out. Oh, don't give me that," she said to his clearly dumbfounded expression. "Of the three events, my death is the only one that has a clear-cut time stamp. I must die at 2:34, no earlier and no later. Well, I hope no later. I was able to test the other."

Severus blinked.

Her tone was apologetic. "I didn't tell you at first because I thought you would be upset, and then I didn't tell you because I was angry and it was none of your business. But after that day when Malfoy pushed me down the stairs, I wondered whether or not it had to be 2:34. So I tried to kill myself. It didn't work, of course. I just made myself very dizzy from blood loss for a whole morning."

When Severus blinked again, he saw that he'd grabbed Hermione's hand in his own and was clutching it in a white-fingered grip.

"You're hurting me," she said mildly, wriggling her fingers in protest. "Anyway," she continued once he'd relaxed his hold on her minutely, "I figured it would be simpler to spend sixty seconds trying to prevent something than to spend twenty-four hours trying to prevent something. After all, we spent an entire day watching the Time Turner, and it didn't change a thing."

"That's why you said 'change nothing,'" he muttered, feeling vaguely stupid for not realizing any of this before. Although, he rationalized, it wasn't terribly likely that he'd be looking for solutions to their problem, as he'd given up and admitted defeat any number of todays ago.

"I wanted to make sure all of the causes were in place. If the whole point is to create a fallacy, then the day had to build as it was intended to." She wrinkled her nose and tilted her head to one side, looking down at her swinging feet. "And besides, I'm not entirely sure what causes correspond to what consequences. For all I know, Graham's vial is what causes my death. That doesn't make much sense, though — I'm pretty sure that his vial and my death are two separate results."

He did not like the increasing frequency with which she referred to her… end but could not think of a way that was both suitably caustic and appropriately understanding to tell her this. Instead, he reminded himself of what a silly, sentimental fool he'd become and left it at that. "And all of this led you to believe that, despite all of our early efforts, your… accident was escapable?"

"I hoped sixty seconds was short enough. Especially since I always die in an accident. Somehow, it wouldn't be sporting for me to just fall over, dead. I was hoping that the loop would allow it. It would keep trying to put me in an accident, and if I could avoid them for long enough…" She focused her attention on their joined hands and Severus thought he saw the corners of her mouth turn upward in a smile. "Besides, up until today, everything we tried was intended to prevent an accident before it occurred, which gave the loop time to alter the incident. Today, we dealt with each accident as it happened. It gave us the time frame."

"Forgive me for mentioning the inevitable pun concerning loops and holes," he said dryly. "It has been in my mind for whole minutes now, and I am afraid that I will be driven to using it if this continues."

Her fingers tightened around his in a gesture of unmistakable affection that he told himself to ignore. "I'm a selfish enough creature that I hoped the solution could involve my survival. Although I like to think that if it doesn't, if we come up with a different way that means I have to die, I'll do it."

I won't, he thought fiercely. Of course, all the Veritaserum in his stores could not have forced him to admit it. He contented himself by leaning forward in his desk chair and twisting his hand so that his palm met hers, their fingers twining unconsciously.

"It's entirely possible, though," she began in a voice that was far too cheerful to mean anything good, "that we've already done just that. If the loop snaps back, it may well snap back to the first day, when I do die."

"Don't," he said sharply, giving her hand a warning tug.

"But–"

"Don't," he growled, standing up in order to glower at her more effectively.

After a long pause, during which her expression hardened and then softened into something resembling acceptance, she sighed. "We won't know until tomorrow. We might just wake up today, like usual. Or we could wake up, and the loop would be broken. Or the loop could break, and, erm, I won't–"

Releasing her hand, Severus folded his arms over his chest, and Hermione fell silent. "We will see," he said levelly.

"In the meantime," she said, once again affecting obviously false cheer, "I have a whole nine hours or so that's completely new to me, if not you. What do they serve for supper?"

The subject change left him reeling. "I, erm," he began, thinking hard. "Damned if I know. I don't think I've ever made it that far."

She gave him a curious look and he felt oddly compelled to explain himself.

"I, well, Albus can't contact your family after… you know. What with the Floo and all. So sometimes I stay with him, because he's never understood the therapeutic qualities of getting pissed out of your skull. But mostly…" Trailing off, he looked down, not wanting to see her face as he told her.

"You're always alone," he said, hating the earnest note in his voice. "And you'd hate that, if you knew. So, usually, after Poppy goes to see to her other patients, I just… stay. Because you shouldn't be alone."

He could not look at her, because if he looked at her he would do something he would regret. His eyes felt ominously dry and scratchy.

"Oh," she said quietly.

Neither of them spoke, and Severus kept his head safely down, allowing the suspicious tingling in his eyes to pass. And then…

"Well, whatever they're serving has got to be better than lamb chops. If I never see a lamb chop again, it'll be too soon. Are you hungry?" she asked in a breezy sort of tone.

"Actually, I'd rather not go up there, if you don't mind," he said, still not meeting her eyes, entirely too grateful that she'd not pushed him.

Her response was hesitant. "I guess we don't have to. We could just stay here."

His head jerked up and he stared at her, not knowing what she was thinking.

"That is, if you're all right with it," she said, sliding off his desk and taking a step toward the door. "I-I can go if you'd–"

Rolling his eyes and realizing in the same moment that Albus was going to kill him, Severus sighed. "No, Hermione. You can stay."