A/N: Thank you for your patience and reviews. Your reviews literally keep me going so THANK YOU. Here's a glimpse into the "future" before we settle back into the "past."

A/N 2: ctrl-F "*placement" to get to the bottom to see the placement/set up for the ritual if you get confused when reading.

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Time Twisters

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INTERLUDE 2

Miscalculation

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"You've got a rather large number of wrackspurts trying to find their way into your ears today. Too many to count, really."

Hermione doesn't understand how Luna can still look at her, let alone settle comfortably onto the worn couch next to her. Hermione absolutely cannot comprehend how Luna can chat affably with her, after what she... after what happened.

'How can you stand to be near me?' Hermione wonders.

"Blaise is grieving, please try to forgive his anger. He didn't mean what he accused you of."

'Yes, he did.'

"I don't blame you, Hermione."

'You should.'

"I know you did your best to protect us." Her blue eyes are emptier than they were before… before what happened. But they were still kind. "I forgive you."

'How? I was wrong again and…

… and a child died, again.'

-x-{X}-x-

Balance.

It was a necessary – although easily overlooked – aspect of powerful magic. Potions Masters, expert diviners, renowned rune makers; they all carried a healthy respect for the concept, and understood how vital the principle was to facilitating formidable feats of magic.

And yet, Hermione feared it.

Because the feeble remains of the Order were acting out of desperation. This ritual could have been the most powerful accomplishment in contemporary magic, if only they had longer to prepare, and review, and consult experts, and, and…

And if only they had more time.

(But that was just it, wasn't it? The whole reason for their gamble. They needed time.)

She's yanked out of her thoughts by a stormy grey gaze. Her face is pulled up by his cold hands as he hisses out, "get your head out of the fucking clouds Hermione, we need you."

And wasn't that just the problem? They always needed her. She was needed left and right and forward and backwards. She was constantly giving pieces of herself to fix the holes in the others. The fabled Golden Girl of Gryffindor was a mere lattice now, held together by guilt and vengeance. (And by a steady icy grip that refused to let her collapse.) She isn't quite sure what she would have done without his metallic gaze anchoring her to reality. (Only she does know. She knows because it's a nightmare thats been creeping into her days... that once she loses him she will be pulled adrift into the insanity brushing against her edges, unmoored and sinking sinking sinking into the depths of the losses, and the deaths, and the Crucios, and the pain, and the repeated cackling of 'ickle little Mudblood', and then she'd be drowning drowning drowning until her last–)

"We're done," whispers a dreamy voice.

Luna's quiet admission draws the attention of the other seven occupants in the shadowed room in the Department of Mysteries. Hermione abandons Draco's tempestuous eyes, and she shivers as the last living Malfoy's hands drop from her face and settle onto her waist. A dozen or so paces away from the couple, Luna sits calmly, having just finished tracing a bloody octagram around the Veil. Hermione's gaze meanders around the foreboding monolith, and instead latches onto Blaise Zabini. The dark-haired wizard rises from his position at the other end of the eight-pointed star, and walks towards his wife to help lift her from the floor. Hermione watches on blankly as Blaise carefully wipes the blood off of both his his wife's fingers with his sleeve, before leaning into the blonde and whispering words of encouragement into Luna's hair.

(It was all part of balance. Husband and wife, each drawing one half of the base of the rune.)

Then the 'you did so well' and 'it will be okay' Blaise whispers into Luna's ethereal strands morphs into reciprocated hoarse goodbyes and I love you's, and all the other heartbreakingly sappy things she never expected a stoic like Blaise Zabini to ever vocalize publicly, even if quietly.

(Their world is ending; Hermione supposes maintaining one's pureblood polis persona is no longer deemed a priority.)

Blaise reluctantly returns back to his assigned position on the opposite pinnacle of the star to his wife, and gives a nod in Draco's direction. Not in Hermione's, though. He doesn't acknowledge her at all. She had lost his friendship after her mistake had led to Luna's premature delivery of a stillborn daughter… and what Hermione had used the dead infant's blood for after. Luna had understood, nodded in agreement even as her eyes hollowed out, but Blaise had looked at Hermione with a vicious glare that hissed you planned for this, didn't you? She hadn't, of course, but Blaise wasn't the only one who had doubted her innocence on the matter...

Harry Potter, her once best-friend, steps up from his place on the other side of Draco. The Boy-Who-Lived takes in a deep steading breath before he starts his part of the ritual preparation. With firm concentration, the green-eyed wizard uses the spell Hermione taught him to unravel the threads of his ancestral invisibility cloak. With careful movements of the elder wand, the threads of the Hallow layer themselves again and again over the lines drawn by Zabini and Luna until the last fibre settles into the red rune on the ground. If they were still best friends, Hermione supposes she would reach out to him and lay a supportive hand on his back as he gently unwound the last connection he had to his deceased father... but they aren't best friends, not anymore. Not since...

'Not since what I did.'

Harry steps forward, and Hermione entirely expects for him to go to take his spot at the head of the octogram without a word or glance towards her. Only he stops three steps away from his assigned spot, turns around, and makes his way back to her. She has just enough time to widen her eyes before she is ripped from Draco's arms and engulfed in a once-familiar hug.

"For what it's worth now, Hermione." He speaks slowly, and she feels his tears on her neck. "I'm sorry for everything I did to you. For everything I said. I didn't mean it, not really. I forgive you. I did even then, I was just angry and stupid but I love you; you're my family. You always have been."

She wants to forgive him, but she knows he still hates her. She knows that he's only saying this now because this ritual will only send one (if any) of them back, and he knows it will probably be him. He's saying pretty words to help ease his conscious, and Hermione hates him a little for it, even if she loves him more than she could ever hate him. Even if… even if a part of her suspects the pretty words he whispers into her neck were fed to him by Draco.

(It's the sort of thing ex-Death Eater Draco Malfoy would do. Meticulous, overly cautious bastard. He probably told Harry they needed to minimize possible distractions, and pulled on Harry's heart strings with can you really live with yourself knowing your last words to her were words of indifference? Especially to her - the girl who stood unwaveringly by your side since you were eleven? Draco was good at identifying and exploiting weaknesses, Hermione was rather intimately aware of that penchant of his.)

"I love you too, Harry." She responds gently, tightening her grip on the green-eyed boy she would still unreservedly die for. "I love you more than anything." She says the last words just loud enough for Draco to overhear, out of spite more than anything.

'I hate it when you try to manipulate me, Draco.'

"In case you've both forgotten, we're a bit pressed for time." Despite his meaning, the blond's words slide from his lips in a controlled, slow drawl.

Her grip on Harry tightens. For half a moment, Hermione is once more a giddy second year racing down the Great Hall amidst the warm aroma of pumpkin juice and stray crumbles of Cornish pasties. For half a moment, she is a child with uncontrollable hair jumping into Harry's scrawny arms in thanks after discovering that he and Ron had slain the Basilisk and she had been so proud.

Harry's hold loosens.

The Chosen One walks away from her to stand at his place on the octogram, leaving her back in the present. She feels Draco's hand softly encircle her outstretched wrist, watches as his cool, calloused fingers slide between her own.

"I didn't mean it." She whispers, choked up now that remorse and regret replace her vindictiveness. "I didn't."

"It's okay if you did. It doesn't change anything."

This isn't the first time Hermione suspects she is a horrible person. And she could blame the stress of the situation, or her experiences in this never-ending war, she supposes. She could blame the loss of so many loved ones, of being forced into being Order leadership when she was still just a child, of bearing the responsibility of the deaths in all of their plans and contingencies.

She could blame a lot of things, but really, Hermione knows she has been a spiteful thing since Hogwarts (she sees the image of teary eyes below a forehead blemished with boils reading snitch in angry, swollen letters; she hears the shrill sounds of a thin-armed beetle clawing at a glass prison).

Draco doesn't let go of her hand as Justin, Susan, and Padma finish their parts of the rune preparation. After settling the pieces of glass, sand, and metal from broken time turners into alternating segments of the octogram, respectively, they take their spots.

Muggleborn, Halfblood, and Pureblood.

Balance.

(only, not quite)

Hermione had looked over the design so many times. Equal number of male to female (four and four), equal number of each house (two and two and two and two), as well as equal number of Pureblood and Mixed-blood (four and four). She arranged for all opposites and parallels to be accounted for, had Harry (the youngest) to stand across from her (the oldest). She placed husband and wife across from each other, even though it meant Blaise wouldn't be able to see Luna past the stone arms of the Veil in their last moments. She placed Padma (who had lost her younger twin) across from Justin (who had lost his younger brother). She places Draco beside her because…

Well, because she is selfish. And then she justifies it to the others by claiming it places Susan and Draco (both Gemini) on opposite pinnacles of the octogram. Hermione normally isn't so impulsively careless, despite the lion that was once stitched into her breast. See, Hermione is pretty certain she is about to set them all up to die with this farce of a ritual spun together from bits of old tomes of Dark Magic, but she will force herself to lead this insane ritual anyways because they need her to. But, for once, she decides to take into account her own needs, and she needs Draco to keep her standing when the rest start falling.

'Sacrifice is another tenant of powerful spells.'

This concept is embraced not just by the eight young soldiers here, but also by the remaining Order members fighting (dying) outside the locked room. Hermione glances towards the only entrance, where she sees green and red lights shining silently from underneath the magically barricaded door.

(It was a good idea from Padma, Hermione thinks offhandedly, to silence the room so that they would not be distracted by the sounds of their remaining friends giving their lives for this last ditch plan.)

Hermione thinks on Neville Longbottom, and remembers the wide-eyed pudgy eleven year old who had been so shy all those years ago when he had nervously stuttered out,"umm h-have you muh-maybe seen a toad?" The chubby-cheeked echo vanishes. In it's place, a broad-shouldered man grows. War had turned him into the sort of leader who volunteered to head the suicide squad currently keeping Death Eaters out of the room with the Veil. (She wonders if he would have been so ready to die had Hannah not been killed last month, having saved Luna even if her sacrifice hadn't been able to save Luna's child).

Hermione then thinks on Theodore Nott and Astoria Greengrass, fighting side by side after watching Daphne die in agony from a particularly cruel curse crafted by Dolohov. She thinks on Fleur and Angelina, fighting side by side to kill the villains who ripped their lovers from this world. She thinks on her remaining classmates: Cho, Katie, Lee, and Dean – who had each been robbed of their best friends. She thinks on Professors Flitwick and McGonagall, protecting what was left of their old students, after having watched so many of the minds they fostered die early deaths.

A particularly neon yellow shade erupts between the red and green. And, like a sixth sense, Hermione knows it is the Weasley matriarch ferociously duelling.

Molly Weasley, a widow and woman who had lived through the death of each of her seven children. A woman who was strong enough to keep fighting in the face of her personal tragedy.

'Unlike me.'

Draco drags Hermione from her morose thoughts once more, after shoving his mouth onto hers. "There will be time for guilt when we're dead, Granger." He whispers onto her lips as he leaves their quick kiss. He makes to leave, to begin his part of the ritual, and Hermione's heart seizes.

'No, not him. Please not him.'

(She had already lost everything, why did she have to lose him too?)

She reaches for his sleeve in a panic, and roughly pulls him back to her. "I love you." She says brokenly, pleadingly. Because if they're going to die, can't he shed his skin the way Blaise had? Can't he tell her, just this once? She doesn't want to hear his equivalents or know through his actions. She doesn't want to infer and justify all the ways she knows he loves her – she wants him to say the words. Can't he admit them, just this once, even though she knows he doesn't believe in them anymore?

"It's okay if you don't," his eyes soften in understanding and she hates them. ('Bring back the storm.') "Hermione, it doesn't change anything."

She hears what he doesn't say: I'll still always choose you.

She hears his doubts: even though I don't think you'd do the same, even though I wasn't your first choice.

He kisses her on the forehead gently, uses his thumbs to wipe the silent tears marring her cheeks. And then she loses his cool touch, watches with a thudding heart as he steps away to crush the gleaming third Hallow and sprinkle the shining powder equally into each segment of the star that surrounds the Veil.

Hermione can't breathe, but it doesn't matter. Seven sets of eyes look upon her and she knows they need her. So she steps towards her place and starts whispering the words to the incantation for the dark ritual she created using old tombs from Grimmauld Place, Malfoy Manor, and Castello Zabini. She leads the ritual even though Blaise thinks she let his unborn child die, even though ever-prescient Luna warned her that the balance for the spell was off, and even though Harry still hasn't truly forgiven her. She waves her wand smoothly even though Padma begged for Hermione to choose someone else so she could avenge her dead sister and fiancé in the halls, and even though Susan told Hermione she suspected it was not just their lives but their souls they were martyring. She summons her magic easily even though Justin drunkenly divulged to her that he wished he had followed his brother to Eton, and had never opened the odd letter addressed in shimmering green ink, and asked her with glazed over eyes. "It haunts you too, doesn't it? How we killed our families by trying to carve a place in a world that never wanted us."

Hermione lets the Latin smoothly glide from her lips even as tears run down her face.

She will see to their deaths, even though Draco suspects her last words to him were a lie.

'They weren't.'

Hermione Granger will sacrifice herself and her friends - she will lead this insane, rushed, imbalanced ritual because the world needs her to.

(And because just maybe... just maybe it could work.)

-x-{X}-x-

Blaise and Luna fall first, blood dribbling out of their eyes and ears.

Hermione keeps chanting.

Padma, Susan, and Justin fall together, silently convulsing and leaving the octogram unequal. Harry remains at the head, visible to Hermione through the haziness of the Veil between them. Draco remains at the spot by her side, eyes half on her and half fixed on the dead body of his best friend.

Hermione keeps chanting.

Harry grips his head, falls to his knees, and screams.

(The others' deaths had been painless, and even though Harry's form is fuzzy through the Veil, Hermione can still vividly hear the vicious sounds of his tortured wails.)

She keeps chanting even when Harry goes silent, even when the body of the Boy-Who-Lived thuds onto the stone floors.

But then Draco falls, and she almost stops, but his eyes meet hers.

Keep chanting. The storm commands her. Keep chanting.

And even when he starts writhing on the floor in pain, he tries to keep meet her gaze. We need you. I need you. Finish this, Hermione. Save us all.

Draco finally breaks when the blood starts gushing from his eyes and ears and mouth. His screams sound like he's drowning.

But Hermione keeps chanting... even after Draco goes still.

The star on the floor glows, and the threads from the invisibility cloak (drenched in the blood of her almost-godchild) start crawling over the corpses of the others and slither up her own legs, searing into her flesh.

'Eight orphans, eight points on a star.'

She keeps going, even as her friends and her lover are dragged across shards of broken time turners, towards the hungry emptiness of the Veil.

'Seven souls sacrificed, so one soul can go back seven years.'

She keeps chanting, even when she realizes the tears on her face are red. Even when the pieces of glass and bloody thread start carving themselves into her skin.

'Balance and sacrifice.'

She keeps chanting, even when the doors blast open.

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A/N: Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed, please leave a review and tell me your thoughts! How are you guys liking these interludes? Yay or nay?

*placement for the ritual (they are in an octogram around the Veil, which is in the centre).

Susan - Harry – Justin

Blaise – [V] – Luna

Padma – Hermione – Draco