A/N: Please see part one for disclaimers and other info.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ginny was shaking in the chair beside him, huge, silent tears falling down her freckled cheeks. Harry felt like he should reach over and comfort her somehow, but he felt strangely uncomfortable doing so with Lupin watching, and so he occupied himself by staring at a stain on the rug beneath his feet.
Lupin, having told Ginny the batch of bad news concerning her brothers, had resuming pacing, which Harry could not help but think very irritating. He again wished that he had lessons to distract him, but when he had gone to fetch Ginny from the common room he had received word that Nearly Headless Nick would be teaching Transfiguration, and though he quite liked the ghost, it seemed rather a waste to toil away the hours learning Transfiguration from a being that could not technically Transfigure anything.
So he sat, watching Ginny cry and Lupin pace, feeling terribly helpless, when all of a sudden a burst of green flame erupted in the fireplace, billowing smoke and ashes into the air. Professor McGonagall, or rather her head, stared up at them from upon the logs.
"Yes, Dumbledore said you would be here," she said, her tight bun somewhat disheveled from her spin in the Floo powder.
Lupin knelt before the fire. "What have you found, Minerva?"
"Not a great deal," she said, and Harry felt his heart sink. "I have found one spell, but it is complex, and it will take awhile to work out the kinks."
"How long?" Lupin asked.
McGonagall sighed. "Two weeks. Perhaps more."
"Two weeks!" Harry and Ginny shouted together. They knelt down alongside Lupin and attempted to protest. "But, Professor, we can't wait two weeks!" Harry exclaimed.
"You may well have to, Potter," she replied sternly.
"Actually, Minerva, I think Harry is right," Lupin said. "I think we may have located Ron and Hermione..."
He explained his sudden onslaught of fresh memories regarding the pair, and as she listened McGonagall begin to look characteristically sour, pursing her lips so tightly that her whole face went white.
"You see the problem, then," Lupin concluded. "Ron and Hermione are interacting not only with myself, Minerva, but with James, Lily, Sirius, Peter Pettigrew..."
Lupin trailed off meaningfully, but if McGonagall responded right away, Harry did not hear her. A rush of envy had suddenly filled his stomach.
Why Ron and Hermione? he thought. James and Lily were his parents and Sirius his godfather. He should be the one there with them, not Ron and Hermione, who both had perfectly lovely families of their own. Now that he had a moment to think about it, Harry realized he was actually quite bitter at the unfairness of it all.
"Hermione is a clever girl," McGonagall was saying. "She knows how time travel works. There is no way she would purposefully jeopardize history by saying or doing something foolish."
"Do you think this is about cleverness?" Lupin asked. "I see it more a problem of love and loyalty than cleverness. If either Hermione or Ron thought they could save the Potters and give Harry his parents back..."
"Or prevent what happened to Sirius," Ginny added.
There was an uneasy silence. Lupin and McGonagall wore matching frowns.
"We must simply hope that Hermione and Ron will not succumb to that temptation," McGonagall said.
"But..." Harry begin. He stopped talking as soon as the others turned to look at him, knowing what they were going to say and not wanting a lecture. True, you were not supposed to change the past, but if his best friends could somehow save his parents and Sirius...the laden bitterness was replaced by a wriggling sense of hope.
"Are you listening?" Ginny asked.
"No," he admitted.
McGonagall rolled her eyes. "No, of course not, Potter, or you perhaps would have answered my question. Where did Ron and Hermione get the Time Turner?"
"Malfoy," Harry replied, unable to suppress a grin, so pleased was he to rat out Draco to McGonagall.
"I see. I will certainly be speaking to Dumbledore about that," she sneered. "Then I must be off. I will begin work on the Temporal Charm. I can summon Flitwick to assist. In the meanwhile, you stay at the castle, Remus, and you two," she turned her head toward Harry and Ginny, "watch yourselves. And stop skiving off lessons!"
Pop. McGonagall disappeared. Lupin stood.
"Temporal Charm?" Harry asked.
"A spell that, when done right, folds time," Lupin answered. "If we can implement it correctly, we should be able to reach back in time and retrieve Ron and Hermione. The problem, of course, is doing it right."
He seemed rather concerned about the matter, but Harry did not wish to push for the reasons why, and neither, it seemed, did Ginny. If anything, Harry was relieved when it was time to head to the Great Hall for lunch, so tired was he of hearing bad news.
Ginny walked alongside him down the staircase. She was still sniffling quite pitifully, and in her emotion she neglected to jump the trick step that Neville always forgot about; her leg sunk into it with a nasty creak.
"Ouch," she said.
"Here you go." Harry seized her under the arms and lifted her carefully out of the step. "Right as rain."
But things were not all right; Ginny was crying openly again. She soon flung herself forward, burying her face in Harry's robes and wrapping her arms tightly around his waist.
"I'm just so worried!" she sobbed. "Charlie...Ron...Percy..."
Harry was feeling horrified; he never knew what to do when girls acted like this. He finally did the only thing that seemed to make sense and hugged her back.
It was odd. Even though she was crying, and even though they were standing in plain view of the entire school, it felt okay holding her like this. It was quite like she fit.
Ginny ducked away a moment later, not looking back at Harry as she hurried into the Great Hall, where he distinctly saw her meet up with Dean Thomas.
Oh, a dull inner voice reminded him. Ginny goes out with Dean Thomas.
Not that it bothered him. Why would it? He had a thousand more important things to think about at the moment. Why should he spend a single second worrying about Ginny Weasley?
He found himself wandering back to the dormitory, which was quite deserted at the dinner hour. He crouched down beside his bed and retrieved his Pensieve; Dumbledore had provided him one at the beginning of the year in an attempt to expedite his progress in Occlumency.
Harry most often used the device to store the most disturbing thoughts swirling in his mind; those of the murder he knew his life was leading to. Now, however, he extracted the sudden rush of thoughts about Ginny. Perhaps Dumbledore did not intend him to use the Pensieve to relieve his frustrations with girls, but Harry thought it too much of a convenience to overlook.
He took a moment to examine the thoughts swirling around the stone basin. A Dark Lord to conquer, a murder to either commit or suffer, friends to save, and girls to deal with, all at the same time?
Harry sighed. "Bloody hell."
* * *
The remainder of Divination passed uneventfully, though Professor Corner seemed to think that Hermione and Ron should be able to answer any question posed to them, no matter how obscure. Though Ron was stumped, Hermione was generally able to fumble for the correct answer, and by the end of the hour had decided that Divination was much more tolerable when not held in the stifling heat of the North Tower.
After Professor Corner dismissed them, Hermione insisted on going straight to Transfiguration, as she wanted to speak to Professor McGonagall about getting textbooks.
"What does it matter, Mione?" Ron sighed. "We already know everything!"
"Oh?"
Ron puffed himself up proudly. "Yeah."
"Tell me then, Ron, the ingredients of Confusing Concoction?"
Ron fumbled for a moment before deflating with a resigned shrug. Hermione shook her head. "Exactly."
The door to the Transfiguration classroom was slightly ajar; even from a slight distance they could hear the familiar sound of McGonagall shouting at a student.
"...no idea what you could possibly be thinking!"
Hermione and Ron paused, exchanged a look, and then leaned in to eavesdrop.
"That sort of behavior is absolutely forbidden in this school and if I ever see so much as a hint of it in the future, young man, I will personally escort you to the train home!"
Hermione and Ron stepped back as the door burst open and a sallow young man emerged from the classroom. He glared at them from behind a curtain of dark hair.
"Bugger off," the boy snarled, roughly slamming into Ron as he passed. Hermione gapped after him while Ron massaged his shoulder.
"Do you know who that was?" Hermione breathed.
"Some greasy old prat, is who," Ron answered. "A bit like..."
He was interrupted by an explosion of noise down the hall. A burst of red sparks soared into the air as a scuffle broke out between a group of students.
McGonagall came flying out of the classroom. "Potter! Snape!" she fumed, easily breaking through the swarm of onlookers surrounding the dueling students.
"Snape?" Ron repeated. "That was Snape?"
"Yes," Hermione replied. "I wonder what he did to earn that verbal lashing from McGonagall."
"Dunno," Ron shrugged as they strolled into the classroom. "But you know what Sirius told Harry last year. Snape was always up to his eyeballs in Dark Arts."
Hermione tried to give Ron a sharp kick to shut him up, but it was too late, and the sentence was already out of his mouth before he realized that Lily and Pettigrew were sitting in the classroom, staring up at them.
"Er...hi!" Hermione said brightly, hoping that, somehow, the pair had not heard what Ron said.
Lily smiled, though Hermione saw the suspicion in her eyes as she watched them take their seats, and she cast around for something to say to distract from the odd statement hanging in the air.
She settled on commenting on the textbooks both Lily and Pettigrew were tucking away into their school bags. "You take Arithmancy?" she asked.
"Oh, yes, and I just adore it," Lily said, though her suspicion still lingered.
"Me too," Hermione said. "Or at least I did, when I took it at Beauxbatons. Unfortunately the class here was full this year. We got stuck in Divination."
"Rubbish," Lily said.
"I think I m-may transfer courses," Pettigrew interjected in his squeaky, wobbling voice. "Arithmancy is just s-so difficult."
"I told you I would tutor you, Peter," Lily said kindly. "Really, it isn't any trouble."
Pettigrew stared at Lily with his watery eyes. Hermione did not like the way he looked at her; if her better judgment did not propel her to hold her tongue, she most certainly would have shouted at Pettigrew to leave Lily alone, once and for all.
A flood of students suddenly entered the classroom, all chattering excitedly about something, looking frequently over their shoulders at the source of three raised voices heading their way.
"I don't care who started it, Black!" McGonagall shouted, charging into the room with the bluster of an angry rhinoceros. "There is simply no excuse for jinxing another student!"
Sirius and James charged in after her. James had a nasty looking welt near his left ear, but neither he nor Sirius looked the least bit frightened of McGonagall, despite her towering temper.
"Snape jinxed Remus straight to the hospital wing, Professor!"
"Yes, though as far as I can tell, Potter, he was aiming at you, and after what you did..."
"He started it!"
"...I hardly blame him. Now you two," she pointed her finger right at the steaming pair, "sit down and be quiet before I make it a round fifty points from Gryffindor!"
Sirius and James threw their bags nosily to the floor and slammed their bodies into their seats. Lily rolled her eyes at the display and returned her attention to the notes she had spread out before her.
"Well, what are you all waiting for?" McGonagall snapped. "Books and wands out! Granger! Weasley! Come and and get your textbooks!"
Hermione and Ron hurried to the front of the room. McGonagall pointed to the small pile of spell books on her desk.
"Dumbledore arranged these for you," she said brusquely. "And he sent your belongings to the Gryffindor dorms."
"Belongings?" Ron repeated.
"Of course, Weasley," she said, glaring at him meaningfully. "You certainly did not transfer schools without any belongings?"
"Oh," Ron sputtered. "Right."
He and Hermione fumbled for their books and hastened back to their desks. McGonagall waved her wand and the properties of a basic Vanishing Spell appeared on the blackboard.
"Today we will work on Vanishing snails..."
Sirius leaned in close to James. Hermione strained to hear as they whispered back and forth. "Are we going out again tonight?" Sirius asked.
James nodded. "Yeah. Should we bring Peter?"
"I suppose. The full moon is over so Moony can baby-sit him. You and I need to focus. I really think we can get it right..."
"Black! Potter! If you two do not stop talking and pay attention this instant, I will not hesitate to put you both in detention for the rest of the year! NOW BE QUIET!"
* * *
Hermione endured suspicious glances from Lily for the rest of the evening; all through dinner and as they dressed for bed she felt Lily staring at her. Then, just as Hermione was pulling the curtains closed around her bed, Lily cleared her throat from across the room.
"Hermione, I could not help but overhearing earlier," she begin, and Hermione felt her heart fall straight to her knees, "but you and Ron were talking about a friend of yours. Harry, I think you called him?"
Hermione muttered noncommittally.
"Who is he? How does he know Sirius?"
Hermione stared up at her canopy. The four other girls in the dorm were either sleeping or studying, though their ears all seemed to prick at the mere mention of Sirius.
"I...I think their parents know each other...something," Hermione answered lamely, forcing a loud and obvious yawn, hoping that Lily would think her too tired to answer straight.
"I see," Lily said, her voice edged with doubt. There was a pause, and then Lily muttered, sounding genuinely sleepy, "I always like that name, Harry."
Hermione relayed this to Ron over breakfast the next morning. Ron was not overtly concerned.
"Maybe she suspects something, Mione," he said around a mouthful of bacon, "but what does it matter? There's no way she'll guess what's really going on. Who would ever believe it?"
"Perhaps," Hermione said.
"We just have to watch what we say from now on."
"You mean, you need to watch what you say, Ron," she snapped, watching him pour himself another mug of coffee. There were dark circles under his eyes, and when she asked how he slept, he shook his head dramatically.
"Hardly a wink," he replied. "The other boy in the dorm, Bryan or Byron or Bushie or whatever his name is, offered me a sleeping potion but I refused. Stupid of me, turns out."
"Why is that?"
Ron glanced down the table at James, Sirius, Lupin and Pettigrew. "They were up half the night. They snuck out around midnight, once they thought Bushie and I were asleep. Came back a few hours later all worked up about something."
"Maybe they finally accomplished their transformations," Hermione suggested.
"Yeah, I think they may have. They were rather excited. I pretended to sleep for awhile but eventually..." he trailed off and went bright red.
"What?"
"Well, they, er, woke me up. Wanted to have a chat."
Ron was going redder still. Hermione raised an eyebrow. "About what?"
"About, er, you, actually. Wanted to know if you and I were...er...you know..."
Hermione continued to stare at him. Ron was now positively crimson.
"Shagging," he finished.
Hermione spit a mouthful of pumpkin juice across the table.
"WHAT?"
"Sirius was doing most of the questioning, though Lupin seemed pretty keen to hear the answer, come to that. I think maybe he fancies you," Ron scowled slightly. "Which..."
"What did you tell them?" Hermione interrupted, mopping up the mess in front of her, glaring at Ron out of the corner of her eye. "You did tell them the truth, right?"
"Course I did," Ron muttered, and though Hermione was not entirely sure she believed him, she said nothing more. She did not want to admit that she did not want Sirius thinking she was with anyone else. And Lupin? The mere notion that he would ever be interested in her was almost comical. He was her professor...or at the very least he would be.
"Well, there is only one thing we can do," Hermione said, regarding James and the others, as Ron continued to glower. "I think we just need to avoid the lot of them from now on. This is just too risky."
"Yeah, you're probably right," Ron agreed. "I just hope Harry hurries up getting us out of here. I'm good and ready to get back to the future, if you know what I mean."
Hermione nodded, though as the hours passed and they remained, she begin to doubt whether or not Harry would be able to get them back. She was trying desperately hard not to think about it, but she had a nagging feeling that if Harry were able to rescue them, he already would have.
She did not dare speak these fears to Ron. She needed him to stay calm to preserve her own sanity.
As it would turn out, however, her own sanity was quite at risk anyway, as avoiding James and his friends proved impossible over the next few days. They had every class with James, Sirius, and Lupin, and Lily and Pettigrew were in nearly as many. They ran into them at meals, in the common room, in the dorms...
Even more problematic was the fact that, with the notable exception of Pettigrew, Hermione liked the group a great deal, and knew Ron did as well. James and Sirius were as entertaining a duo as Fred and George, and spent nearly as much time in detention, while Lily and Lupin were both bursting with kindness and intelligence. Hermione knew she and Ron could have whiled away hours talking to the both of them, or laughing with James and Sirius, but it was much too risky, and she struggled to remain aloof.
And then there were the nightmares. She was dreaming of Voldemort every night, and more than once was awakened in the early hours by Lily, who told her she was thrashing about and moaning in her sleep.
"What is taking Harry so long?" Hermione hissed through clenched teeth. It had been nearly four whole days since they had traveled back in time and there was no hint that a rescue was coming.
Ron had been dozing atop his History of Magic notes by the fire. "Maybe it has something to do with the professors all being gone," he mummered, not bothering to lift his head or open his eyes.
"That did occur to me," Hermione sighed. "What if..."
"What if what?"
She dropped her voice to barely above a whisper. "What if Voldemort has made a move to take Hogwarts?"
Ron bolted upright. "Dumbledore would never let that happen," he said, though he looked suddenly stricken.
"No, of course not." She sighed again. "I just hope nothing bad has happened..."
She stopped talking as Sirius and James entered through the portrait hole. James made a beeline for Lily, who was hidden behind a mountain of library books, and attempted futilely to distract her from her studies. Sirius, however, came straight over to Hermione and Ron.
"So, Hermione," he said, plopping into the chair beside her and kicking his legs up onto the table. "Are you coming to the banquet for Dumbledore tomorrow evening?"
Hermione and Ron looked at each other. Sirius did not acknowledge that Ron was there; he stared intently at Hermione with his endless black eyes.
"I suppose so," she said.
"Tomorrow?" Ron said. "Tomorrow is your birthday, Mione!"
Hermione frowned. She had quite forgotten that fact, with the mess they were in, and the reminder made her feel sad to be here, away from the world she truly knew.
"Your birthday, is it? Than you have to come," Sirius said. "I promise it'll be worthwhile."
He swept his legs off the table and stood in one graceful movement, and then, right before he turned away, he winked at her.
Hermione and Ron were quiet a moment. Then Ron sputtered, "Did he just...wink at you?"
"Yes," Hermione said, her voice a bit higher than usual, as she watched Sirius join James, who had just been rebuffed once again by Lily, on the other side of the common room.
"What did he mean, he would make it worthwhile?"
"Dunno," she squeaked, though she was curious to know herself.
Ron was scowling but Hermione hardly noticed. Her hand was beginning to shake, and so she set down her quill and shuffled her notes into a pile. "I think I'll finish my homework tomorrow," she said, her voice still dangerously squeaky.
"But you never leave your homework for tomorrow, Mione," Ron said in amazement. "You always finish your homework right away."
"Yes, I know, but I feel really tired." She wished she would stop squeaking. She gathered her things and started for the stairs. "Goodnight then."
Her temples were beginning to pound as she entered the dormitory, which was mercifully empty at this still early hour. She flopped onto her bed.
She knew, if she was brutally honest with herself, that there was a time last year when she found herself taken with Sirius. It was during that summer spent at Grimmauld Place that she developed the nagging tickles of a school girl crush. He was hopelessly reckless, and she despised him for it, but it was distantly attractive all the same.
"What is it," she asked the ceiling, "that makes girls fall for the bad boy?"
Hermione gave herself a good mental shake. What did it matter if she was, once upon a time, smitten with him? It was foolish and impossible then and it was foolish and impossible now.
Except, and this was what made her go all squeaky, it was not impossible right now. Right now he was just another student.
But then she remembered what she had said to Ron about his leering at Lily, and she knew her feelings were just as inappropriate. She would not allow herself to get swept up in the moment only to do something she would regret later on...would she?
Hermione crawled beneath the covers, still fully clothed, and sighed, "Harry," she muttered, "get us out of here."
* * *
A dark shadow seemed to be spreading over the castle. Though students had initially been thrilled that the professors were gone, the harsh reality was quickly setting in, and Harry knew they were beginning to worry about what it meant. Something horrible must be happening, the students reasoned, to draw Dumbledore and the others away for several days.
Classes were dragging; it may have been well and good for the ghosts, Madame Pomfrey, Madame Pince and Professor Sprout to do lessons with the underclassmen, but the N.E.W.T level students were suffering. Most hours were little more than glorified study halls.
Lupin was in constant contact with the Order, and he filtered most of the information he was privy to unto Harry, though questions about Dumbledore were always deflected. There was little to be done from Hogwarts; even the task of returning Ron and Hermione to the present had been delegated elsewhere. In her communiquĊ½s with Lupin, McGonagall sounded as though she and Flitwick were making progress with the Temporal Charm, but Harry found a mysterious lack of information about the spell in the library, though he suspected he would have had more luck had he been able to access the Restricted Section.
Word that Ron and Hermione were missing had begun to travel. Members of the Gryffindor Quidditch team wanted to discuss the upcoming season, and they came to Harry when they could not find Ron. Harry decided to say Ron was attending to family business, though this was a less than satisfactory answer for several of his classmates, as anything serious enough to draw Ron away from school for so long surely should have affected Ginny as well. But really, Harry thought, what else could he say?
With his classes rendered inconsequential, his best friends gone, and no Quidditch strategy to learn, Harry spent much of his time focused on his work for Dumbledore.
The day the Headmaster gave Harry his Pensieve, he also gave him an assignment, one that he was not to speak of with anyone. He chose to call it an independent Divination project because it sounded boring enough that no one would ask unnecessary questions about it. That would not have been the case, Harry knew, if he called it what it was, and told them that he was studying the Avada Kedavra curse with the intensity of someone who one day meant to use it.
It seemed to Harry a pointless task; what hope did he have using the Killing Curse against Voldemort? Surely the most powerful dark wizard of all time would be able to deflect whatever feeble spells Harry sent his way.
But Dumbledore was convinced that he should know all there was to know about the curse, and so Harry had delved headfirst into studies of how it worked.
It was depressing, taxing work, but it was, at least for today, suitably distracting from everything else that was going on. Harry was in the library, reading a very tedious account of the role the Avada Kedavra curse played during the goblin rebellions of the 17th century, when Ginny came looking for him.
"Professor Lupin wants to see us," she said.
Harry looked up at her, feeling unnecessarily stunned by her presence, and he realized that he hadn't spoken to her since that day on the stairs. Indeed, now that he was thinking of it, his thoughts concerning that encounter were still swirling away in his Pensieve, untouched.
"Harry?" Ginny jostled his shoulder. "Are you coming?"
He nodded, though he really wished she had not just touched him, as suddenly his mind was filled with a fresh onslaught of thoughts he would need to deposit in the Pensieve.
They walked in silence to the stone gargoyle, where Harry dully recited the password, and hopped onto the moving staircase.
"I hope everything is okay," Ginny said. "Lupin seemed sort of shaken when he asked me to find you." She sighed. "I just don't think I can take much more bad news."
Harry glanced over at her. When had she started to look so...mature? Last time he checked she was a mere child. Now...
The staircase deposited them in front of the office door, which Harry heaved open with tremendous effort. Lupin was standing rigidly behind the desk.
"You wanted to see us?" Harry asked.
"Yes, Potter, we did."
Harry spun around. Professor McGonagall was seated near the fireplace, her traveling cloak still draped over her shoulders, looking rather displeased about something.
McGonagall rose to her feet with a heavy sigh. "Potter, Miss Weasley, I am afraid I have some bad news for you."
Ginny let out a moan.
"Charlie?" Harry croaked.
"Percy, actually," McGonagall said. "Professor Snape saw him last night. At a meeting of Death Eaters."
Ginny moaned again, and, whimpering, slumped against Harry as if she might collapse if left to stand on her own volition.
Her voice wavering a bit, McGonagall continued, "I wish I were not the one to tell you this, but Percy received the Dark Mark from Lord Voldemort himself. While it is possible that he is under the influence of the Imperius Curse, Professor Snape does not believe that to be the case." She sighed again. "And frankly neither do I."
Ginny was once again weeping on his shoulder, but this time Harry could do little but try and keep his wits about him, as his strongest instinct at the moment was to sob right along with her.
Ginny was shaking in the chair beside him, huge, silent tears falling down her freckled cheeks. Harry felt like he should reach over and comfort her somehow, but he felt strangely uncomfortable doing so with Lupin watching, and so he occupied himself by staring at a stain on the rug beneath his feet.
Lupin, having told Ginny the batch of bad news concerning her brothers, had resuming pacing, which Harry could not help but think very irritating. He again wished that he had lessons to distract him, but when he had gone to fetch Ginny from the common room he had received word that Nearly Headless Nick would be teaching Transfiguration, and though he quite liked the ghost, it seemed rather a waste to toil away the hours learning Transfiguration from a being that could not technically Transfigure anything.
So he sat, watching Ginny cry and Lupin pace, feeling terribly helpless, when all of a sudden a burst of green flame erupted in the fireplace, billowing smoke and ashes into the air. Professor McGonagall, or rather her head, stared up at them from upon the logs.
"Yes, Dumbledore said you would be here," she said, her tight bun somewhat disheveled from her spin in the Floo powder.
Lupin knelt before the fire. "What have you found, Minerva?"
"Not a great deal," she said, and Harry felt his heart sink. "I have found one spell, but it is complex, and it will take awhile to work out the kinks."
"How long?" Lupin asked.
McGonagall sighed. "Two weeks. Perhaps more."
"Two weeks!" Harry and Ginny shouted together. They knelt down alongside Lupin and attempted to protest. "But, Professor, we can't wait two weeks!" Harry exclaimed.
"You may well have to, Potter," she replied sternly.
"Actually, Minerva, I think Harry is right," Lupin said. "I think we may have located Ron and Hermione..."
He explained his sudden onslaught of fresh memories regarding the pair, and as she listened McGonagall begin to look characteristically sour, pursing her lips so tightly that her whole face went white.
"You see the problem, then," Lupin concluded. "Ron and Hermione are interacting not only with myself, Minerva, but with James, Lily, Sirius, Peter Pettigrew..."
Lupin trailed off meaningfully, but if McGonagall responded right away, Harry did not hear her. A rush of envy had suddenly filled his stomach.
Why Ron and Hermione? he thought. James and Lily were his parents and Sirius his godfather. He should be the one there with them, not Ron and Hermione, who both had perfectly lovely families of their own. Now that he had a moment to think about it, Harry realized he was actually quite bitter at the unfairness of it all.
"Hermione is a clever girl," McGonagall was saying. "She knows how time travel works. There is no way she would purposefully jeopardize history by saying or doing something foolish."
"Do you think this is about cleverness?" Lupin asked. "I see it more a problem of love and loyalty than cleverness. If either Hermione or Ron thought they could save the Potters and give Harry his parents back..."
"Or prevent what happened to Sirius," Ginny added.
There was an uneasy silence. Lupin and McGonagall wore matching frowns.
"We must simply hope that Hermione and Ron will not succumb to that temptation," McGonagall said.
"But..." Harry begin. He stopped talking as soon as the others turned to look at him, knowing what they were going to say and not wanting a lecture. True, you were not supposed to change the past, but if his best friends could somehow save his parents and Sirius...the laden bitterness was replaced by a wriggling sense of hope.
"Are you listening?" Ginny asked.
"No," he admitted.
McGonagall rolled her eyes. "No, of course not, Potter, or you perhaps would have answered my question. Where did Ron and Hermione get the Time Turner?"
"Malfoy," Harry replied, unable to suppress a grin, so pleased was he to rat out Draco to McGonagall.
"I see. I will certainly be speaking to Dumbledore about that," she sneered. "Then I must be off. I will begin work on the Temporal Charm. I can summon Flitwick to assist. In the meanwhile, you stay at the castle, Remus, and you two," she turned her head toward Harry and Ginny, "watch yourselves. And stop skiving off lessons!"
Pop. McGonagall disappeared. Lupin stood.
"Temporal Charm?" Harry asked.
"A spell that, when done right, folds time," Lupin answered. "If we can implement it correctly, we should be able to reach back in time and retrieve Ron and Hermione. The problem, of course, is doing it right."
He seemed rather concerned about the matter, but Harry did not wish to push for the reasons why, and neither, it seemed, did Ginny. If anything, Harry was relieved when it was time to head to the Great Hall for lunch, so tired was he of hearing bad news.
Ginny walked alongside him down the staircase. She was still sniffling quite pitifully, and in her emotion she neglected to jump the trick step that Neville always forgot about; her leg sunk into it with a nasty creak.
"Ouch," she said.
"Here you go." Harry seized her under the arms and lifted her carefully out of the step. "Right as rain."
But things were not all right; Ginny was crying openly again. She soon flung herself forward, burying her face in Harry's robes and wrapping her arms tightly around his waist.
"I'm just so worried!" she sobbed. "Charlie...Ron...Percy..."
Harry was feeling horrified; he never knew what to do when girls acted like this. He finally did the only thing that seemed to make sense and hugged her back.
It was odd. Even though she was crying, and even though they were standing in plain view of the entire school, it felt okay holding her like this. It was quite like she fit.
Ginny ducked away a moment later, not looking back at Harry as she hurried into the Great Hall, where he distinctly saw her meet up with Dean Thomas.
Oh, a dull inner voice reminded him. Ginny goes out with Dean Thomas.
Not that it bothered him. Why would it? He had a thousand more important things to think about at the moment. Why should he spend a single second worrying about Ginny Weasley?
He found himself wandering back to the dormitory, which was quite deserted at the dinner hour. He crouched down beside his bed and retrieved his Pensieve; Dumbledore had provided him one at the beginning of the year in an attempt to expedite his progress in Occlumency.
Harry most often used the device to store the most disturbing thoughts swirling in his mind; those of the murder he knew his life was leading to. Now, however, he extracted the sudden rush of thoughts about Ginny. Perhaps Dumbledore did not intend him to use the Pensieve to relieve his frustrations with girls, but Harry thought it too much of a convenience to overlook.
He took a moment to examine the thoughts swirling around the stone basin. A Dark Lord to conquer, a murder to either commit or suffer, friends to save, and girls to deal with, all at the same time?
Harry sighed. "Bloody hell."
* * *
The remainder of Divination passed uneventfully, though Professor Corner seemed to think that Hermione and Ron should be able to answer any question posed to them, no matter how obscure. Though Ron was stumped, Hermione was generally able to fumble for the correct answer, and by the end of the hour had decided that Divination was much more tolerable when not held in the stifling heat of the North Tower.
After Professor Corner dismissed them, Hermione insisted on going straight to Transfiguration, as she wanted to speak to Professor McGonagall about getting textbooks.
"What does it matter, Mione?" Ron sighed. "We already know everything!"
"Oh?"
Ron puffed himself up proudly. "Yeah."
"Tell me then, Ron, the ingredients of Confusing Concoction?"
Ron fumbled for a moment before deflating with a resigned shrug. Hermione shook her head. "Exactly."
The door to the Transfiguration classroom was slightly ajar; even from a slight distance they could hear the familiar sound of McGonagall shouting at a student.
"...no idea what you could possibly be thinking!"
Hermione and Ron paused, exchanged a look, and then leaned in to eavesdrop.
"That sort of behavior is absolutely forbidden in this school and if I ever see so much as a hint of it in the future, young man, I will personally escort you to the train home!"
Hermione and Ron stepped back as the door burst open and a sallow young man emerged from the classroom. He glared at them from behind a curtain of dark hair.
"Bugger off," the boy snarled, roughly slamming into Ron as he passed. Hermione gapped after him while Ron massaged his shoulder.
"Do you know who that was?" Hermione breathed.
"Some greasy old prat, is who," Ron answered. "A bit like..."
He was interrupted by an explosion of noise down the hall. A burst of red sparks soared into the air as a scuffle broke out between a group of students.
McGonagall came flying out of the classroom. "Potter! Snape!" she fumed, easily breaking through the swarm of onlookers surrounding the dueling students.
"Snape?" Ron repeated. "That was Snape?"
"Yes," Hermione replied. "I wonder what he did to earn that verbal lashing from McGonagall."
"Dunno," Ron shrugged as they strolled into the classroom. "But you know what Sirius told Harry last year. Snape was always up to his eyeballs in Dark Arts."
Hermione tried to give Ron a sharp kick to shut him up, but it was too late, and the sentence was already out of his mouth before he realized that Lily and Pettigrew were sitting in the classroom, staring up at them.
"Er...hi!" Hermione said brightly, hoping that, somehow, the pair had not heard what Ron said.
Lily smiled, though Hermione saw the suspicion in her eyes as she watched them take their seats, and she cast around for something to say to distract from the odd statement hanging in the air.
She settled on commenting on the textbooks both Lily and Pettigrew were tucking away into their school bags. "You take Arithmancy?" she asked.
"Oh, yes, and I just adore it," Lily said, though her suspicion still lingered.
"Me too," Hermione said. "Or at least I did, when I took it at Beauxbatons. Unfortunately the class here was full this year. We got stuck in Divination."
"Rubbish," Lily said.
"I think I m-may transfer courses," Pettigrew interjected in his squeaky, wobbling voice. "Arithmancy is just s-so difficult."
"I told you I would tutor you, Peter," Lily said kindly. "Really, it isn't any trouble."
Pettigrew stared at Lily with his watery eyes. Hermione did not like the way he looked at her; if her better judgment did not propel her to hold her tongue, she most certainly would have shouted at Pettigrew to leave Lily alone, once and for all.
A flood of students suddenly entered the classroom, all chattering excitedly about something, looking frequently over their shoulders at the source of three raised voices heading their way.
"I don't care who started it, Black!" McGonagall shouted, charging into the room with the bluster of an angry rhinoceros. "There is simply no excuse for jinxing another student!"
Sirius and James charged in after her. James had a nasty looking welt near his left ear, but neither he nor Sirius looked the least bit frightened of McGonagall, despite her towering temper.
"Snape jinxed Remus straight to the hospital wing, Professor!"
"Yes, though as far as I can tell, Potter, he was aiming at you, and after what you did..."
"He started it!"
"...I hardly blame him. Now you two," she pointed her finger right at the steaming pair, "sit down and be quiet before I make it a round fifty points from Gryffindor!"
Sirius and James threw their bags nosily to the floor and slammed their bodies into their seats. Lily rolled her eyes at the display and returned her attention to the notes she had spread out before her.
"Well, what are you all waiting for?" McGonagall snapped. "Books and wands out! Granger! Weasley! Come and and get your textbooks!"
Hermione and Ron hurried to the front of the room. McGonagall pointed to the small pile of spell books on her desk.
"Dumbledore arranged these for you," she said brusquely. "And he sent your belongings to the Gryffindor dorms."
"Belongings?" Ron repeated.
"Of course, Weasley," she said, glaring at him meaningfully. "You certainly did not transfer schools without any belongings?"
"Oh," Ron sputtered. "Right."
He and Hermione fumbled for their books and hastened back to their desks. McGonagall waved her wand and the properties of a basic Vanishing Spell appeared on the blackboard.
"Today we will work on Vanishing snails..."
Sirius leaned in close to James. Hermione strained to hear as they whispered back and forth. "Are we going out again tonight?" Sirius asked.
James nodded. "Yeah. Should we bring Peter?"
"I suppose. The full moon is over so Moony can baby-sit him. You and I need to focus. I really think we can get it right..."
"Black! Potter! If you two do not stop talking and pay attention this instant, I will not hesitate to put you both in detention for the rest of the year! NOW BE QUIET!"
* * *
Hermione endured suspicious glances from Lily for the rest of the evening; all through dinner and as they dressed for bed she felt Lily staring at her. Then, just as Hermione was pulling the curtains closed around her bed, Lily cleared her throat from across the room.
"Hermione, I could not help but overhearing earlier," she begin, and Hermione felt her heart fall straight to her knees, "but you and Ron were talking about a friend of yours. Harry, I think you called him?"
Hermione muttered noncommittally.
"Who is he? How does he know Sirius?"
Hermione stared up at her canopy. The four other girls in the dorm were either sleeping or studying, though their ears all seemed to prick at the mere mention of Sirius.
"I...I think their parents know each other...something," Hermione answered lamely, forcing a loud and obvious yawn, hoping that Lily would think her too tired to answer straight.
"I see," Lily said, her voice edged with doubt. There was a pause, and then Lily muttered, sounding genuinely sleepy, "I always like that name, Harry."
Hermione relayed this to Ron over breakfast the next morning. Ron was not overtly concerned.
"Maybe she suspects something, Mione," he said around a mouthful of bacon, "but what does it matter? There's no way she'll guess what's really going on. Who would ever believe it?"
"Perhaps," Hermione said.
"We just have to watch what we say from now on."
"You mean, you need to watch what you say, Ron," she snapped, watching him pour himself another mug of coffee. There were dark circles under his eyes, and when she asked how he slept, he shook his head dramatically.
"Hardly a wink," he replied. "The other boy in the dorm, Bryan or Byron or Bushie or whatever his name is, offered me a sleeping potion but I refused. Stupid of me, turns out."
"Why is that?"
Ron glanced down the table at James, Sirius, Lupin and Pettigrew. "They were up half the night. They snuck out around midnight, once they thought Bushie and I were asleep. Came back a few hours later all worked up about something."
"Maybe they finally accomplished their transformations," Hermione suggested.
"Yeah, I think they may have. They were rather excited. I pretended to sleep for awhile but eventually..." he trailed off and went bright red.
"What?"
"Well, they, er, woke me up. Wanted to have a chat."
Ron was going redder still. Hermione raised an eyebrow. "About what?"
"About, er, you, actually. Wanted to know if you and I were...er...you know..."
Hermione continued to stare at him. Ron was now positively crimson.
"Shagging," he finished.
Hermione spit a mouthful of pumpkin juice across the table.
"WHAT?"
"Sirius was doing most of the questioning, though Lupin seemed pretty keen to hear the answer, come to that. I think maybe he fancies you," Ron scowled slightly. "Which..."
"What did you tell them?" Hermione interrupted, mopping up the mess in front of her, glaring at Ron out of the corner of her eye. "You did tell them the truth, right?"
"Course I did," Ron muttered, and though Hermione was not entirely sure she believed him, she said nothing more. She did not want to admit that she did not want Sirius thinking she was with anyone else. And Lupin? The mere notion that he would ever be interested in her was almost comical. He was her professor...or at the very least he would be.
"Well, there is only one thing we can do," Hermione said, regarding James and the others, as Ron continued to glower. "I think we just need to avoid the lot of them from now on. This is just too risky."
"Yeah, you're probably right," Ron agreed. "I just hope Harry hurries up getting us out of here. I'm good and ready to get back to the future, if you know what I mean."
Hermione nodded, though as the hours passed and they remained, she begin to doubt whether or not Harry would be able to get them back. She was trying desperately hard not to think about it, but she had a nagging feeling that if Harry were able to rescue them, he already would have.
She did not dare speak these fears to Ron. She needed him to stay calm to preserve her own sanity.
As it would turn out, however, her own sanity was quite at risk anyway, as avoiding James and his friends proved impossible over the next few days. They had every class with James, Sirius, and Lupin, and Lily and Pettigrew were in nearly as many. They ran into them at meals, in the common room, in the dorms...
Even more problematic was the fact that, with the notable exception of Pettigrew, Hermione liked the group a great deal, and knew Ron did as well. James and Sirius were as entertaining a duo as Fred and George, and spent nearly as much time in detention, while Lily and Lupin were both bursting with kindness and intelligence. Hermione knew she and Ron could have whiled away hours talking to the both of them, or laughing with James and Sirius, but it was much too risky, and she struggled to remain aloof.
And then there were the nightmares. She was dreaming of Voldemort every night, and more than once was awakened in the early hours by Lily, who told her she was thrashing about and moaning in her sleep.
"What is taking Harry so long?" Hermione hissed through clenched teeth. It had been nearly four whole days since they had traveled back in time and there was no hint that a rescue was coming.
Ron had been dozing atop his History of Magic notes by the fire. "Maybe it has something to do with the professors all being gone," he mummered, not bothering to lift his head or open his eyes.
"That did occur to me," Hermione sighed. "What if..."
"What if what?"
She dropped her voice to barely above a whisper. "What if Voldemort has made a move to take Hogwarts?"
Ron bolted upright. "Dumbledore would never let that happen," he said, though he looked suddenly stricken.
"No, of course not." She sighed again. "I just hope nothing bad has happened..."
She stopped talking as Sirius and James entered through the portrait hole. James made a beeline for Lily, who was hidden behind a mountain of library books, and attempted futilely to distract her from her studies. Sirius, however, came straight over to Hermione and Ron.
"So, Hermione," he said, plopping into the chair beside her and kicking his legs up onto the table. "Are you coming to the banquet for Dumbledore tomorrow evening?"
Hermione and Ron looked at each other. Sirius did not acknowledge that Ron was there; he stared intently at Hermione with his endless black eyes.
"I suppose so," she said.
"Tomorrow?" Ron said. "Tomorrow is your birthday, Mione!"
Hermione frowned. She had quite forgotten that fact, with the mess they were in, and the reminder made her feel sad to be here, away from the world she truly knew.
"Your birthday, is it? Than you have to come," Sirius said. "I promise it'll be worthwhile."
He swept his legs off the table and stood in one graceful movement, and then, right before he turned away, he winked at her.
Hermione and Ron were quiet a moment. Then Ron sputtered, "Did he just...wink at you?"
"Yes," Hermione said, her voice a bit higher than usual, as she watched Sirius join James, who had just been rebuffed once again by Lily, on the other side of the common room.
"What did he mean, he would make it worthwhile?"
"Dunno," she squeaked, though she was curious to know herself.
Ron was scowling but Hermione hardly noticed. Her hand was beginning to shake, and so she set down her quill and shuffled her notes into a pile. "I think I'll finish my homework tomorrow," she said, her voice still dangerously squeaky.
"But you never leave your homework for tomorrow, Mione," Ron said in amazement. "You always finish your homework right away."
"Yes, I know, but I feel really tired." She wished she would stop squeaking. She gathered her things and started for the stairs. "Goodnight then."
Her temples were beginning to pound as she entered the dormitory, which was mercifully empty at this still early hour. She flopped onto her bed.
She knew, if she was brutally honest with herself, that there was a time last year when she found herself taken with Sirius. It was during that summer spent at Grimmauld Place that she developed the nagging tickles of a school girl crush. He was hopelessly reckless, and she despised him for it, but it was distantly attractive all the same.
"What is it," she asked the ceiling, "that makes girls fall for the bad boy?"
Hermione gave herself a good mental shake. What did it matter if she was, once upon a time, smitten with him? It was foolish and impossible then and it was foolish and impossible now.
Except, and this was what made her go all squeaky, it was not impossible right now. Right now he was just another student.
But then she remembered what she had said to Ron about his leering at Lily, and she knew her feelings were just as inappropriate. She would not allow herself to get swept up in the moment only to do something she would regret later on...would she?
Hermione crawled beneath the covers, still fully clothed, and sighed, "Harry," she muttered, "get us out of here."
* * *
A dark shadow seemed to be spreading over the castle. Though students had initially been thrilled that the professors were gone, the harsh reality was quickly setting in, and Harry knew they were beginning to worry about what it meant. Something horrible must be happening, the students reasoned, to draw Dumbledore and the others away for several days.
Classes were dragging; it may have been well and good for the ghosts, Madame Pomfrey, Madame Pince and Professor Sprout to do lessons with the underclassmen, but the N.E.W.T level students were suffering. Most hours were little more than glorified study halls.
Lupin was in constant contact with the Order, and he filtered most of the information he was privy to unto Harry, though questions about Dumbledore were always deflected. There was little to be done from Hogwarts; even the task of returning Ron and Hermione to the present had been delegated elsewhere. In her communiquĊ½s with Lupin, McGonagall sounded as though she and Flitwick were making progress with the Temporal Charm, but Harry found a mysterious lack of information about the spell in the library, though he suspected he would have had more luck had he been able to access the Restricted Section.
Word that Ron and Hermione were missing had begun to travel. Members of the Gryffindor Quidditch team wanted to discuss the upcoming season, and they came to Harry when they could not find Ron. Harry decided to say Ron was attending to family business, though this was a less than satisfactory answer for several of his classmates, as anything serious enough to draw Ron away from school for so long surely should have affected Ginny as well. But really, Harry thought, what else could he say?
With his classes rendered inconsequential, his best friends gone, and no Quidditch strategy to learn, Harry spent much of his time focused on his work for Dumbledore.
The day the Headmaster gave Harry his Pensieve, he also gave him an assignment, one that he was not to speak of with anyone. He chose to call it an independent Divination project because it sounded boring enough that no one would ask unnecessary questions about it. That would not have been the case, Harry knew, if he called it what it was, and told them that he was studying the Avada Kedavra curse with the intensity of someone who one day meant to use it.
It seemed to Harry a pointless task; what hope did he have using the Killing Curse against Voldemort? Surely the most powerful dark wizard of all time would be able to deflect whatever feeble spells Harry sent his way.
But Dumbledore was convinced that he should know all there was to know about the curse, and so Harry had delved headfirst into studies of how it worked.
It was depressing, taxing work, but it was, at least for today, suitably distracting from everything else that was going on. Harry was in the library, reading a very tedious account of the role the Avada Kedavra curse played during the goblin rebellions of the 17th century, when Ginny came looking for him.
"Professor Lupin wants to see us," she said.
Harry looked up at her, feeling unnecessarily stunned by her presence, and he realized that he hadn't spoken to her since that day on the stairs. Indeed, now that he was thinking of it, his thoughts concerning that encounter were still swirling away in his Pensieve, untouched.
"Harry?" Ginny jostled his shoulder. "Are you coming?"
He nodded, though he really wished she had not just touched him, as suddenly his mind was filled with a fresh onslaught of thoughts he would need to deposit in the Pensieve.
They walked in silence to the stone gargoyle, where Harry dully recited the password, and hopped onto the moving staircase.
"I hope everything is okay," Ginny said. "Lupin seemed sort of shaken when he asked me to find you." She sighed. "I just don't think I can take much more bad news."
Harry glanced over at her. When had she started to look so...mature? Last time he checked she was a mere child. Now...
The staircase deposited them in front of the office door, which Harry heaved open with tremendous effort. Lupin was standing rigidly behind the desk.
"You wanted to see us?" Harry asked.
"Yes, Potter, we did."
Harry spun around. Professor McGonagall was seated near the fireplace, her traveling cloak still draped over her shoulders, looking rather displeased about something.
McGonagall rose to her feet with a heavy sigh. "Potter, Miss Weasley, I am afraid I have some bad news for you."
Ginny let out a moan.
"Charlie?" Harry croaked.
"Percy, actually," McGonagall said. "Professor Snape saw him last night. At a meeting of Death Eaters."
Ginny moaned again, and, whimpering, slumped against Harry as if she might collapse if left to stand on her own volition.
Her voice wavering a bit, McGonagall continued, "I wish I were not the one to tell you this, but Percy received the Dark Mark from Lord Voldemort himself. While it is possible that he is under the influence of the Imperius Curse, Professor Snape does not believe that to be the case." She sighed again. "And frankly neither do I."
Ginny was once again weeping on his shoulder, but this time Harry could do little but try and keep his wits about him, as his strongest instinct at the moment was to sob right along with her.