"You know, Harry, as first dates go, this is pretty much perfect. You really do know the way to a girl's heart!"

Harry curled his eyes up at Hermione in a quirky look as she laughed lightly at his side. Behind her, tottering shelves of books and parchments rolls disappeared into the misty gloom of a high ceiling.

"I don't know about that, but maybe it's the way to your heart ... Arch-bibliophile as you are!"

"I like that ... Arch-bibliophile ... maybe that can be my new name."

"I thought we already decided on your new name ... I mean, isn't that why we are here?"

Hermione blushed adorably and threw Harry a radiant look. She wasn't confident enough right now, and their relationship wasn't quite there yet, but she was desperate to reach over and give him a little a kiss ... a chaste peck, a demure lip touch, a full on snog ... either would do. Hermione's loins mewled in frustration that this wasn't moving anything like as quickly as they wanted it to be.

So she pulled more books and parchment files towards her and took to her task with renewed aplomb. The Hall of Records, here in the bowels of the Ministry of Magic, may not have been most girls' notion of an ideal date location. But, for Hermione Granger at least, books were old friends, shields from her social awkwardness, a library the place she felt most comfortable and herself ... and besides, the smell of parchment was her most powerful aphrodisiac.

It was only a lack of courage that stopped Hermione from re-enacting her Australian de-flowering of Harry right here on the messy, book and parchment strewn kidney-shaped desk in front of them. That was a fantasy she'd indulged in on more than one occasion in both timelines that she'd lived.

But they were here to take their first steps towards getting their relationship to that level or, as Harry reminded her with his mind-bending words, back to that level. Hermione had to remember and console herself with that fact, though the whole situation was difficult to hold steady in her mind, even a mind a powerful as hers.

The best strategy, she decided, was to be playful, to pretend that the other timeline was actually the real one and that the life she remembered was simply some kind of fanfiction written by Rita Skeeter, as part of some revenge-fuelled wish fulfilment vanity publishing project or something. Hermione liked that idea, and saw her task now as a sort of homework assignment, to disprove Rita's nonsense that Harry and Ginny had any sort of romantic compatibility, that herself and Harry were platonic only, and that a big, happy Weasley family was viewed as an ideal endgame.

Purging the world of such lunacy would require a complete destruction of Rita's 'canon' ... and Hermione was determined to find cannons of her own with which to blow the idea into a million useless pieces.

And her motivation was fuelled by focusing on all the beautiful things her future self had told her about the real timeline. So she turned to Harry with a teasing expression to talk to him about it some more.

"You know, of all the amazing things that happened in our other life, I still can't believe that it was you who proposed to me!"

Harry chuckled and looked up from the file in front of him. "Why not? I'm well known for my bravery!"

"But would you have been scared that I'd say no, do you think?"

"Terrified."

"Well, there you are then! I must have left you in no doubt. So I made it easier for you which, if you look at it a certain way, means I was the one who proposed, really!"

"If that's how you look at things, I suggest getting your eyes tested!" Harry laughed. "I wouldn't have been scared that you'd not want to marry me, but you might not have wanted to get married at all. You're a modern girl, so maybe outdated ideas of bonded relationships are too archaic for you."

"Pfft! Don't be absurd!" Hermione cried. "I'm a traditional girl as well as a modern one. I don't see why one box has to be exclusive of another. I'd have wanted to commit to you, wanted everyone else to know it, and wanted to make sure other vacuous witches would stop swarming around you. It's rather annoying, but you are quite dishy, Harry!"

He felt the room heat up at the sound of that, but he revelled in the blush that swept his cheeks. Harry found that each little flirt, each bit of something that hinted at a more-than-friends relationship that came from Hermione acted like an antidote to whatever spell or curse was affecting their timeline. It was as if their very affection was a shield against the machinations of Molly Weasley.

"However it happened, we got married in the end," Harry conceded. "Right now, what I'm more interested in is how that has been taken from our own future."

"And how the past relates to putting it right," Hermione agreed.

"Precisely. So, who exactly was Hector Dagworth-Granger?"

"I don't know, but one thing we can be certain of is that he is connected to me somehow," Hermione frowned. "The other me was quite explicit about that. And another thing we can rule out is that he is part of my Muggle heritage."

"How can you be so sure?"

"My father's brother, Jack, once did an extensive family tree," Hermione explained, fishing for a paper document from her bag. "He traced the family back right to the English Civil War, and beyond to our French origins. But I had a look at the time around the turn of the century up till 1945, when Dumbledore defeated Grindelwald, and there is no mention of a Hector Dagworth-Granger on the tree.

"Now, that doesn't mean we aren't related, of course. Only that he probably disappeared into the magical world and was never heard from again by the Muggle side of the family. The bigotry and persecution of anything arcane at the time would account for that. Alternatively, he might have been on the family tree, but these timeline changes have erased him."

"Which means we have to move fast while his records still exist in this world," Harry nodded. "So, what do we know for sure?"

"Very little," Hermione huffed. "There is no mention of Granger, Dagworth or any derivative on the list of Ancient and/or Noble houses, or even as part of the ancient Sacred Twenty-Eight. And it's like he didn't even exist before 1945. The first mention of him is as one of the three Judgementors of the Wizengamot during the time of Grindelwald's rise in Europe, but how he got there without being a prominent member of wizarding society is, frankly, baffling to me."

"Judgementors?" Harry quizzed. "What are they?"

"Senior members of the Wizengamot responsible for handing out judgements against the worst of criminals," Hermione read from a piece of parchment in front of her. "They decided on, and handed out, sentencing, were well versed in all aspects of magical law and were considered the highest legal authority in the land."

"And if Hector was active at the time of Grindelwald, then what the other you told us makes sense," Harry nodded. "He would have handed out the sentences against any traitors who supported the invasion. I found this, look ... it is a list of families punished by the Wizengamot for collaborating with Grindelwald and his regime at the time. The press called the trials The Bloody Sympathises."

"The Weasleys ... Crabbe, Goyle ... The Diggorys! That's interesting," Hermione read from the sheet Harry passed to her. "All bound by a powerful curse to never allow them to have daughters."

"It's worse than that for some," Harry pointed out to her. "Some were cursed to never have more than one child of any gender. The Diggorys being one ... Cedric would have been the only child the law permitted that family to have ..."

"You aren't to blame for that, Harry," Hermione consoled gently, reaching over to squeeze his forearm. "Cedric's death was not your fault."

"Try telling that to his father," Harry muttered sadly. "Amos refuses to forgive me, even to this day. He made that clear in remarks he made to the Prophet, when they ran stories about my defeat of Voldemort and made me into a national hero. He says they've overlooked a lifetime of indiscretions by me. He's even started a campaign to include details of my role in Cedric's death on my Chocolate Frog card, when they announced that you and me were getting our own ones next year.

"I can see my card now ... Harry Potter, famous for the defeat of the Dark Lord Voldemort, basilisk slayer, most powerful Patronus cast in the history of Hogwarts, Triwizard Tournament Champion ... oh, by the way, he had to get Voldemort to kill his main rival to win that one (detail insisted on inclusion by Mr. A. Diggory). Hardly something to be be a collector's item, is it?"

"Then that resentment hints at a darker side to his family, one that was prepared to side with a wizard like Grindelwald sixty years ago," Hermione scoffed back. "Such a person is not worth losing sleep over, Harry. Let him wallow in his grief and be done with it."

"That isn't kind, Hermione."

"To hell with kind!" Hermione cried. "Amos Diggory harbours resentment against my future and once-was husband. Screw him and his grief if he thinks badly of you, Harry! And that goes for the rest of the world, too."

Harry smiled weakly at her animated expression. "You know, I wish you'd told me you felt this passionate about me before now. We've lost out on so much time together."

"Don't remind me ... it makes me angry with myself to think about that," Hermione huffed. "But still, we have the time now to make it right. So, Hector Dagworth-Granger? What can we surmise, especially in relation to Molly?"

"We have to assume that he cast the Curse on the Weasleys specifically," Harry mused. "The history books confirm he was in place to do so, and your future self suggested that he had."

"Which gives Molly motive," Hermione agreed crossly.

"For the worst kind of revenge," Harry nodded.

"Bitch."

"Quite!"

"But then what might she have done?" Hermione pondered. "How would she have altered the timeline?"

"Well, getting back is easy enough," Harry replied. "After all, we've done a bit of that, ourselves. But it's what she did when she got there that we have to work out. And it seems the attack was two-pronged -"

"- allow herself to have a daughter and turn the No-Girls curse onto Hector," Hermione scythed. "Not only does she create a child who she could train to seduce you, but she would eliminate me entirely, either by preventing my existence in the first place, wiping out my family line, or even turning me into a boy, thus preventing any attraction between us."

"Yeah, that makes sense," Harry agreed. "Sorry, I know I should be all fluid, as is the popular trend, but it's girls for me all the way. I'd no sooner fancy you if you were a boy than I would Ron or Neville or Draco Malfoy."

"You and Malfoy might be cute ... a haters-to-lovers sort of thing," Hermione teased. "We could call it Drarry or something ... Draco slash Harry. It has a certain ring to it."

"Same goes for you and him ... Dramione!," Harry volleyed back with a scrunched brow. "Aren't girls supposed to like the whole bad boy thing? It's exciting and dangerous and something to reform! It'd be no weirder than, say, Anne Frank getting the hots for Heinrich Himmler, would it?"

"A tasteless, if accurate, analogy," Hermione frowned, narrowing her eyes. "Besides, there's a difference between bad and evil ... and we both know which side old Draco falls on, don't we?"

Harry nodded bitterly. "Yes, we do. I knew that from the moment he said he hoped the basilisk would kill you first, when those attacks happened in our second year at school. My hatred of him was fixed from that moment on. It lasted right up till the Battle of Hogwarts, when he was still trying to tell the Death Eaters that he was on their side. Part of me wishes I'd never saved him."

"That's more about who you are than any concern for him," Hermione argued. "It makes you the better person, even if it was a shame that a random curse didn't bring a wall down on his head or something."

"Mmm, but all this fine talk about yet another alternative version of our lives isn't helping us to solve the problems in the ones we know about already. What could Molly have done, do you think? What would have killed two birds with one stone?"

Hermione's eyes went round in her fright. "She could have killed Hector Dagworth-Granger! Gone back, trapped him, and done away with him before he could place the Curse! It would have been easy then to Polyjuice into him and gave a different verdict at the Weasley trial!"

"Then Hector just vanishes without a trace ... Molly fakes his retirement, on stress grounds or something, then returns to the present and waits for the timelines to change." Harry muttered in his horror. "I mean, there's no trace of him in the historical record after 1945. It's like he just drops off the face of the Earth."

"Oh, Harry! That sounds so possible!" Hermione yelped. "What are we going to do?"

"You know more about the magic of temporal causality than me," Harry urged. "Is there anything you were told, when you were given the Time-Turner by McGonagall, that could help?"

"I'm trying to think," Hermione fired back, wracking her brains. "If Molly has tampered with the timelines like that, then it's obviously been successful in some regards. St. John Weasley has become Ginny, we don't remember the actual first time we met, thinking it was just at Hogwarts.

"But not everything that she might have planned has happened yet. I'm still here, for example, and we still remember all the experiences that bonded us and made us so close ... our relationship still has all its foundations. If she'd erased them, things would have changed already between us."

"That's why the other you has been hopping around through time!" Harry exclaimed. "To make sure that everything that made our relationship so strong still happened between us. If those events, so loaded with emotion, hadn't happened, we wouldn't have been drawn so close together, would we? Our bond wouldn't be nearly as potent."

"Exactly. It'd be as if we met later in life, or if I'd gone to Beauxbatons and only met you during the Triwizard Tournament or something," Hermione agreed. "We'd be totally different people, for a start, as a product of different environments. We might not be compatible at all. We might not even like each other."

"And we wouldn't be bound by all those experiences," Harry went on. "No troll at Halloween, no getting my first hug from a girl in the undercroft of Hogwarts ... I wouldn't have been so fundamentally shaken by seeing you Petrified by the basilisk -"

"- no saving Sirius, no riding Buckbeak," Hermione took over in a hurried mumble. "No cosy walks round the lake as your only supporter when your name came out of the Goblet, no Rita Skeeter stories, no denying rumours to Viktor and Cho that there was something going on between us, no thinking we were going to be Prefects together -"

"- no surrogate parenting for Grawp, no teaming up to outsmart Umbridge, no losing my mind when I thought you'd been killed by Dolohov -"

"- no backing away from you when I thought I'd let you down by nearly being killed by Dolohov."

"What? You thought what?" Harry demanded, turning his head to her sharply.

Hermione just shrugged. "I did, okay? I'd mistranslated my runes ... eihwaz means partnership, not defence. I thought I should partner you at first, then I fell at the Department of Mysteries, so I convinced myself I should defend you instead, because I clearly wasn't strong enough to be your equal partner. Even though I knew the translation was wrong, I went for it anyway. There was a cosmic clue in my Hogwarts exam, but I trained myself to ignore and forget it."

"Hermione! Really?" Harry groaned. "Is that what you did ... or ... or is that where Molly's timeline effects started to kick in! Is that where she intervened in your life? Made you mistranslate the rune in your exam ... or changed the rune entirely, from eihwaz to ehwaz? It would be such a subtle change to make that you wouldn't really challenge it!"

"No, Harry! Do you really think that could be true?" Hermione hissed, aghast at the suggestion. "The two runes could be easily switched, couldn't they?"

"They could," Harry mused angrily. "Especially as you still see that as the time when you purposely drew back from me. Because up till then, if you think about what we just said, there were a lot of indicators that we could have been more than friends. And they are just the first ones that come to mind ... I'm sure there are others if we look even closer."

"So Molly has made those changes," Hermione sniped bitterly. "Just as the future me is trying to keep big events between us the same, Molly is trying to change other things, ones that might make either of us jump from friends to more. Changing my perception of what I could be to you, turning one of her sons into a daughter, anything that might stop either of us from focusing on each other romantically."

"And at the same time the effect of removing Hector is getting stronger all the time," Harry added. "I'm going to make a guess here and say that the closer we get to the time that Molly went back, the more of these timeline changes we are going to see."

"I think I get where you're going!" Hermione cried. "So first the effects hit his ancestry in the Muggle world, then they come here. There's no record of his future and soon there will be no record of his past, either. Because time is not linear ... it's circular. If she erases him not only will his future cease to be, but all the events and people that led up to his creation will vanish too ... the effects will travel right back to the first ever Granger and stop that person being born at all!

"Oh, Harry! What are we going to do?"

"We go back ... back to the time of the Weasley trial," Harry announced suddenly.

"What? We can't!"

"We can," Harry disagreed vehemently. "We are in the depths of the Ministry of Magic. The Time room is down in the Department of Mysteries not far from here. I'm sure I can still remember where it is. We go in there, steal a Time-Turner, then go back to the moment all this started."

"And do what?"

"Find Molly, stop her from ever making that initial change," Harry replied. "We get to Hector and protect him until he can deliver his guilty verdict and set the Weasley Curse. Then we come back and complete the cycle, by going back to the final battle with Voldemort. We'd need to find a way to get my Holly and Phoenix wand into the hands of my other self, then my parents will return and do the rest."

"Or better still, replace him with you!" Hermione cried. "And me with me. Those versions of us are ignorant of all that we've discovered about each other in the last two months. They need to stop existing!"

Harry grinned at that, and had to restrain himself from outright kissing Hermione there and then. "After that, we just have to taunt Ginny into a fight, coax out the shadow of Voldemort that she carries inside and destroy it. Then everything will be well again."

"Unless Molly has hurt our daughter in the future," Hermione snarled through gritted teeth. "Oh, I really hope I got there in time to stop her. I've never met our little girl, but I already love her so much that I know I'd kill for her!"

"Me too," Harry agreed. Then he looked down in horror at the parchment in front of him ... horror because the name of Hector Dagworth-Granger was slowly fading, as if the ink was being removed a drop at a time. It struck Harry as if he were watching a sand-filled hourglass draining away a few grains at a time, each second taking away his dream of this most beautiful promised life.

So it was time to find an hourglass of a very different sort to put it right.

"Hermione, look!" Harry breathed in a shaky voice. "We don't have much time."

"Then let us get some more," Hermione cried resolutely. "Come on. We have to forget the future for now ... our business lies in the past, and I'm going to make Molly Weasley regret the day she ever heard the name Hermione Jane Granger."