Summary: Hermione is wound up in Time, and tripping over her morals. When Dumbledore entrusts Hermione with her own mission in the summer between her third and fourth year, she finds herself caught in the shadows with the unlikeliest of men. AU after Prisoner of Azkaban. Eventual HG/SS.

General Disclaimer: I have no beta, so all errors are my own. All publically recognisable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended. This story starts relatively tame here, but I'm expecting serious and frank dabbling in the Dark Arts, and lots of moral quandaries, which is why the story is rated M. Expect to have profanity, discussion of domestic violence, rape, and sexually explicit acts. Please read at your own discretion.

Just as the human mind cannot comprehend time,
so it cannot comprehend the damage that will ensue
if we presume to tamper with its laws.

— Professor Saul Croaker, Unspeakable

CHAPTER ONE

LOOP

It was half an hour to curfew and Hermione was both working on the last of her Arithmancy homework for the summer in the Gryffindor common room, and running her fingers over the gold chain of her Time-Turner in the second-floor girl's lavatory. Last year, this was the cubicle in which she'd emerged with a tail and whiskers – perhaps one her greatest failures to date – where Moaning Myrtle had dragged Professor Snape and Madam Pomfrey to bear witness to such disaster. And because Hermione preferred to think of life as a palimpsest, to rewrite over entire sections until the trauma blurred into one grey murk, this was also the site she'd designated to be her Fiasco Room.

This was to be her final tinkering in time, she was certain of that.

In approximately five minutes, the Hermione she was would leave her homework and take her place in the cubicle beside her own, knock thrice on the dividing board, and she, the present version, would emerge after a minute's silence. The routine, the structure, was essential to her continued success – every lunchtime, in the minutes after lunch, and in the final half-hour before curfew Hermione would perform her Adjustments, sometimes saving a Hufflepuff from clutches of older Slytherins with jinxes thrown from the shadows, or leaving under her pillow rolls of parchments that detailed the contents of surprise quizzes in Arithmancy and obscure ingredients in Potions that she'd never heard of. Perfection came at the cost of her rudimentary moralities, but she, with her Time-Turner, was entrusted to locate the boundaries and skirt them should she wish.

Just this past month she had rescued Sirius Black from the clutches of the Dementors, saved a hippogriff from slaughter, and managed to get Outstandings in every single assignment for the year; even Potions, a subject in which she'd maintained a steady Exceeds Expectations, had finally succumbed – this was sometimes down to vast amounts of Time-Turning, the cost of which were migraines that lasted days, and a stomach that was always pumped empty. Despite Dumbledore's and McGonagall's warnings, she'd turn the maximum hours back, and then again when she arrived, maybe even a third time, turn after turn, rewriting her homework with the aid of Snape's acerbic red scrawl in the margins of her essays, and then carefully switching them in her bag before she handed them in; often she hid under disillusion charms in this same cubicle, until it was time to resume her place in her timeline. Myrtle paid her little attention, the ghost having relocated to the Prefect's Bathroom these days.

Hermione's fingers continued to stroke the chain, and she was once again attempting to count the specks of enchanted sand in the, flowing between the chambers. Once, on a particularly uneventful bout of Adjusting, she had witnessed that for every minute four grains of sand would pass, and thus all Ministry certified Time-Turners, contained 240 specks, and it would take 1200 (five complete turns) to max out one ride. But upon arrival, you need only wait until the nausea had passed to begin turning back again – at your own peril, of course, and Hermione was well-used to peril.

She heard her own steady footsteps, the sobs. 'Stupid, stupid, stupid. There's no need to be so sentimental. No need.' The latch of the door. Her weight falling atop the toilet, the clatter of the seat. Knock. Knock. Knock. 'Goodnight, Hermione!' she heard, her own voice sounding so alien and foreign.

'Good luck, Hermione!' she replied.

Morning came. It was the final day of term, an entirely blank canvas, and Hermione had an appointment straight after breakfast with Professor Dumbledore. She planned to return the Time-Turner, but Hermione woke to see a scrap of parchment peeking out from under her pillow, and she groaned loudly. Her roommates shuffled in their beds.

'Sorry!' it said, in her own loopy handwriting. 'It will all make sense. Turn after meeting.'

Hermione reached for her wand. 'Incendio,' she said, and she was holding soft ash.

In her fury, she jumped out of bed, the cloaked Time-Turner warm against her skin, and headed to the bathroom to sort herself out. When she entered the bathroom, Parvati Patel was already stood with her hair wrapped in a towel massaging some sweet-smelling lotion into her cheeks, and she smiled at Hermione but they did not speak. Parvati and herself had a muted sort of friendship that was shown in gestures like sharing shampoo and sometimes pouring one another tea at breakfast. Every September Hermione would promise herself that she would get to know the girls in her dorm, and every year she was bogged down with more homework, more existentially troubling circumstances than she knew what to do with. Perhaps the Time-Turner could be invested here, here where she was so woefully lacking in female comradery – she thought on this for the entirety of her shower, and then sighed knowing that it would probably remain another unfulfilled resolution.

Stepping out, pink-skinned and raw, Hermione almost walked into Lavender Brown, dressed in a cherry red bra and shorts, who sneered and pushed past her. Lavender had begun to menstruate this spring, and thus was firmly the alpha female of the dorm – which was fine with Hermione, for in her trio she was decidedly mother enough, period or no period, flat-chested or not; she glanced down at the front of her camisole where there seemed, for the first time in her memory, something identifiably breast-like.

'About time,' she said, knowing that she was ageing a lot faster than her classmates and would continue to do so. In the mirror, the girl who looked back was her but sickly. The pink flush from her shower had faded, her eyes were sunken and dark. The inner reflected the outer. She felt like a sheet of filo pastry her mother insisted on making at home, stretched so thin and fine, that she could probably read Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts through it – or, in her mother's case, The Guardian newspaper.

After dressing and packing up the remainder of her luggage, Hermione headed down to the final breakfast of her third year. Last night at the feast Gryffindor had won the House Cup, and the banners were still up – everything warm-toned and mellow, everything she would miss over the summer. She spooned herself a ladle full of porridge and ate, watching the students trickle in through the doors, dragging their feet, rubbing the sleep from their eyes. At head table sat Professor Snape, leafing through a journal; he met her eye immediately, and she grinned recalling her Outstanding, and he looked to incline his head at her in some form of greeting or acknowledgement, but was probably just getting back to his book. Professor Dumbledore was stood beside the ghost and History of Magic teacher Binns, the two talking loudly on the historic abuses of dragon by the goblins. Professor Sinistra, the Astronomy lecturer, had her head turned to the enchanted ceiling but her eyes shut, one hand stirred her tea, the other whizzing across parchment.

When she was about to help herself to a second serving of porridge Harry Potter and Ronald Weasley arrived, her closest friends, but Dumbledore smiled from head table, getting to his feet.

Hermione stood too. 'I'll probably see you two on the train,' she said. 'I'm meeting with Professor Dumbledore before I head down there myself.'

'About what?' asked Ron, dunking a slice of buttered toast into his tea. Harry lightly elbowed him, and nodded to Hermione, eyebrows raised. 'Oh!' said Ron, catching on, chewing the sodden bread. 'Do you have to? Can't you just—'

'We've talked about this, Ron. It was always the plan.' And then she waved and sped off to catch up with Dumbledore, the man moving rather quickly for someone who'd lived longer than a century.

'Ah, Miss Granger,' he said when she fell into step with him. 'Lovely day isn't it?' Hermione frowned, looking to the ashen skies, aware of her shirt sticking to her back in the muggy heat. 'I expect quite a storm.'

'Yes, Professor. I think so too.' And then, after a beat of silence and remembering the topic of his conversation with Binns, she asked, 'Do you think there may be uses for dragon's blood that you've not discovered yet?'

Dumbledore chuckled. 'Why do you ask?'

Hermione smiled, always a little self-conscious in the company of intellectuals. 'It's only that . . . I gifted my father a vial of Norwegian Ridgeback blood at Christmas—for the sheer novelty of it, you understand—and he . . . Professor, he suggested that the viscosity and scent was rather like petrol, which got me thinking.'

'Go on . . .'

'Well, I wondered whether you've considered dragon's blood as a potential fuel substitute . . . ? Their fire does not erupt from nothingness, and has more uses than oven cleaner, I feel.'

Dumbledore looked down at the girl, contemplative, and rested a hand on her shoulder as they came to the entrance of his office. 'Sesame Spindles,' he said, and gestured her to walk on up ahead. 'Miss Granger, that line of research may serve to be rather fertile. It's always seemed too obvious to take seriously, but it remains untapped.'

'It seems logical,' she said, 'they breathe fire, after all! And muggles use petrol and petrol derivatives for absolutely everything!'

'Miss Granger,' he said, taking a seat behind his office, and gesturing her to do the same in the opposite upholstered chair, 'you must understand that, unlike the muggle world, the wizarding world has entrusted fire to a select few: the alchemists, the potions masters, the persevering candle, and the Floo, dragons to their keepers in the East. Fire scorches, and good salve is hard to come by.' Fawkes chirped from his stand, and Hermione looked to the bird, wondering what strange magic tied the Dumbledores to such rare and entrancing creatures. 'Yes, the phoenixes. Their fire belongs to rebirth alone.'

'Professor,' she said, frowning, 'I have read something along those lines . . .'

'It would be most fascinating if you have.'

Oh.

An image of herself handling a book with her dragonskin gloves came to mind: she was sitting in the dark of the Restricted Section in a bout of curfew Adjustment last winter, hidden under the strongest cloaking spell she knew, and reading by a dim lumos. The book in question was The Nightshade Guide to Necromancy, not your usual third-year spell book – indeed, no book for a school at all; it detailed the arduous process of creating all manner of necrotic beings, some like the Inferi, corpses reanimated and mindless, dancing to the whim of any witch or wizard with enough mettle to conjure them. Voldemort, at the height of his power, had created a legion of Inferi that laid dormant and in his control to this day – or so was the rumour. Hermione had read in the introduction to The Nightshade Guide, penned by an ancestor of Professor Dumbledore named Belladonna, that the darkest magics known in the world were Horcrux-making—something Hermione had never heard mentioned in any book the School library held—and the harnessing of phoenix fire, 'for it belonged to their rebirth alone'. 'To suspend such an unpolluted and chaste creature in the amber of pain,' Belladonna wrote, 'was the greatest sin.'

'In the Nightshade Guide,' she said. 'It was written by your—'

'Five times great grandmother on my father's side,' he said, staring at her over his half-moon spectacles. 'A remarkable witch, by all accounts.'

'Was she not a dark witch, Professor?'

Dumbledore beamed. 'Miss Granger,' he said, 'Hermione'—she felt the heat rise in her cheeks at the grandfatherly ease at which he said her name—'the two are hardly mutually exclusive. Dark wizards do the most extraordinary things.' As Dumbledore spoke, several paintings in his office huffed and exclaimed, affronted. 'We live in the long shadow of their gall, and by the determination of those who stand against them.'

'Like you stood against Grindelwald?'

It was Dumbledore's cheeks that turned ruddy now, and he shuffled in his seat, rearranging his heavily embroidered lavender robes. 'Perhaps, perhaps. Have you decided on the fate of your Time-Turner, my dear?'

Hermione unclasped it from behind her neck and held the weightless hourglass in her hand. The sand lay unperturbed, unmoving. Logically, she knew that she'd somehow hold on to it – she had received that note from her future self, of course, but she'd yet to find out why. Surely, researching another use for dragon's blood was not enough. There must be something else.

'I keep it,' she said, looking up at the pensive man. 'I don't know why; it's brought me nothing but nervousness this year, I am positively barmy, Professor. But I keep it for some reason.'

'And how have you come to know this?'

'I left—will leave—myself a note.'

Dumbledore nodded but was still contemplative, the wringing of his hands the only thing giving away his frustration. 'Hermione,' he said. 'you're interacting with yourself. This is . . . unorthodox. We talked about the risk.'

Hermione shook her head vehemently. 'No, no,' she said. 'I, I never make mistakes. And I never really interact with myself.'

'But you do on some level?'

She thought to this morning. 'It's the self-fulfilling prophecy, Professor. I never go back in time and change events, acting for entirely different future – I don't know how to do that!' She had the acute sense that she had told a fib to the Headmaster, but she couldn't pin it down. When Dumbledore had asked her to save Sirius and Buckbeak, she had gone back in time with Harry to explicitly change those events. But she was always going to do this. She had caught a glimpse of her own hair. On that day, two Hermiones (and two Harrys) were conspiring against the Minister and the axe-wielder McNair – one in ignorant past, and one from the future. She hated thinking on the loops of time, on how many instances she had crossed her own timeline, and divulging this to Dumbledore was not an intelligent move. She wondered even now about what the future Hermione was doing in this timeline; she had left her the note this morning, but would she camp out until noon in Myrtle's bathroom? 'It's the self-fulfilling prophecy,' she said again.

'But you understand what's just happened here, child?' Dumbledore's voice raised the hair on her arms, made gooseflesh erupt on the nape of her neck. 'By telling me that you keep the Time-Turner, we are propelled towards realising that future. I cannot take it from you. You must keep it if only to go back and give yourself that note.'

'I know,' Hermione groaned, dropping her face into her hands, mortified. 'I understand.'

'And do you regret it?'

She looked up at Dumbledore, who was as serious as ever. His eyes belied no mirth. The portraits were silent. Fawkes was staring. The dull roar of the schoolchildren in the castle, stilted. 'Do I regret what, Headmaster?'

'Bearing the burden of Time?'

'Not at all,' she answered quickly. 'It's no burden.'

'So, you could stand more?'

'Of course,' she said, unthinking. 'Of course.'

'In that case,' he said, getting to his feet with a muffled groan, coming around to her side of the desk and offering her a handful of lemon sherbets, 'I have a proposition for you.'

Author's Note: Lots of timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly stuff in this opening chapter. I will attempt to upload as and when I can. I have plans for you readers! Oh, do I have plans!