disclaimer: I don't own them. I'm poor. The people who do own them are rich. Don't sue.
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Life & Loyalty
by MarbleGlove
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Time
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Hermione was pale with shame.
She could feel the hard knot in the pit of her stomach. All she wanted to do was ignore it, pretend she hadn't been so thoroughly wrong, and in such a way as to hurt a person who was already hurting. She was supposed to be one of the good guys. And yet, she had thrown Sybil Trelawney's failure into her face, consistently disrespected the woman, and never stopped to consider who that woman was. She had learned over the years as a regular student that the professors were not infallible, but, it was only in her apprenticeship that she was beginning to realize that they were real people. If tickled, they laughed; if cut, they bled; if killed, they would die.
She shivered and kept her eyes downcast.
"Miss Granger." Professor Snape was possibly the last person she wanted to see. The Headmaster had already rebuked her for leaving Professor Trelawney alone in the presence of the man who had set off her hysterics. She didn't think she could feel worse about herself, and she really didn't want Professor Snape to prove her wrong about that. None the less she turned to face him.
Oddly enough, he didn't speak immediately. Instead he placed two fingers under her chin and raised her face to his. She almost flinched. But he just looked down at her for a long moment before speaking.
"You do realize that nothing has changed, don't you? Sybil is still the woman who uses an excessive amount of incense. She still routinely foretells the death of a student every year. Her past does not change those facts. Nor does my friendship with her make her any more competent in her chosen field."
"But, she, the Headmaster told me, she used to be ..." Hermione trailed off, unsure how to complete her sentence.
"Whatever the Headmaster told you is indubitably true, but it hardly matters. She is who she is regardless of how she came to be that way."
Hermione looked at him with wide eyes. "But..." Again she trailed off, she didn't know what to say. She just wanted him to continue to talk.
"Feeling pain doesn't make you innocent, nor does feeling pleasure make you guilty. Don't feel shame for having been disrespectful to her. It is up to a professor to demand respect or not. But if you look at her and start to judge her on nothing but her past rather than who she is right now, then you should feel shame."
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Looking at the class offerings for her third year at Hogwarts was a delight. Having to pick some of them and discard the others was pure misery. In a world of magic where everything was possible Miss Granger decided that she would find a way to take all the classes. None the less it rather amazed her when it was less than a day before she learned of the magic item she needed. A Time-Turner.
She researched the theory and the regulations for a further week before requesting an interview with the Headmaster.
"As you know about Time-Turners, I feel sure that you've researched all the restrictions placed on their use."
"Yes, sir."
"Then I'm sure you already know that they are not to be used by minors."
"Yes, sir. However, that regulation is not part of the laws regulating the use of Time-Turners. That rule is based on the more extensive law stating that children under the age of seventeen are disallowed from reaching seventeen years of age before such a time as seventeen years have passed since their day of birth."
"Which a Time-Turner used by an underage student would cause. Since you know this, why are you asking me about a Time-Turner?" It was not a rhetorical question. Professor Dumbledore was honestly curious to know what this bright-eyed girl was thinking. She looked rather smug when she answered.
"But sir, I spent nearly three weeks in a petrified state this term during which period I did not age. Thus I am technically four hundred and sixty-three hours younger than my time of birth would signify. I have calculated that if each elective class meets twice a week for two hours over a period of thirty-seven weeks, then each extra course I might take with the use of a Time-Turner will take up one hundred and forty-eight hours. Thus, I can take three extra classes without aging beyond my calendar age, and in fact having a full twenty-four hours to spare." She was sitting at the edge of her chair and visibly refraining from bouncing.
Dumbledore couldn't stop himself from laughing. Miss Granger joined in with excited giggles.
"Miss Granger. Come by my office at the beginning of next year. You may sign up for as many classes as you like, though no more than three that overlap."
"Yes, sir"
The very old man and the very young girl grinned at each other.
It was a year later that they next discussed the Time-Turner, and the circumstances were much more serious.
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"What we need," said Dumbledore slowly, and his light-blue eyes moved from Harry to Hermione, "is more time."
It took a moment for what he was saying to sink in, but then Hermione felt her eyes open wide. "Oh."
As Dumbledore continued to speak, thoughts raced through the thirteen-year-old girl's mind. There were rules about the use of Time-Turners, but Hermione had learned over the course of her friendship with Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, as well as the beginning of an understanding of the Headmaster, to view rules with a certain amount of contempt. What was significantly more important was the theory behind those rules. The theory said that the past could not be changed.
Thus, "Harry, I don't understand what Dumbledore wants us to do. Why did he tell us to go back three hours? How's that going to help Sirius?" It didn't make sense. She knew exactly where Sirius had been for those three hours. Absolutely nothing she did was going to change those facts. Wizards had tried to change the past using Time-Turners before but in each case some really nasty things happen to everyone even remotely involved. While not everyone died, no one ever remained in a condition to tell what happened.
In the library, reading about the theory, it had delighted Hermione that the most important thing about a time-traveler was what facts they knew. If a time-traveler knew a fact about the future, that fact was impervious to all attempts to change. On the other hand, anything not known, could have happened any which way, and so the time-traveler could perform it any which way and that is the way it would have happened.
Being the most important person in the world because your knowledge alone keeps the future stable is a heady sensation for a young girl studying alone in the library, pariah amongst all of her peers.
It was not nearly as pleasant a situation when you have a headstrong friend with you in the past trying to change the past.
At least neither of them had actually seen Buckbeak die. So as long as they heard a thunk of an ax and Hagrid howl something or another, Buckbeak could survive.
Hermione raced after Harry. Hopefully they could save Buckbeak, remain unnoticed for three hours, and then hand off the hippogriff to Sirius Black, all without doing anything too horrible, like cause a paradox that would result in the messy deaths of all those involved. There were times when she wondered exactly how sane the Headmaster really was.
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After watching the Headmaster walk off down the corridor with a bounce in his step, Hermione turned to Professor Snape.
"Is he insane?"
The words were out of Hermione's mouth before she had consciously thought them. She braced her self for whatever insult Snape responded with. She didn't bother apologizing, as she would have with any other professor. Even if she had thought it through, she probably would still have asked. Snape always made her feel inferior and whiney, but somehow in the months since she had become an apprentice, he had also become something of a guiding light in the labyrinth of knowledge that Dumbledore was sending her through. She felt a little less lost every time she talked to him.
Snape snorted. "Sanity is the knowledge that the world works in certain ways. As you may have noticed," the tone of voice was scathing, "the world doesn't -- not when you have magic. In the wizarding world, if you are sane, then you aren't paying attention."
Snape set off towards his dungeons and Hermione assumed that was all he was going to say. But then he paused and appeared to contemplate a shifting staircase for a moment. "Of course, if you don't understand the way the world should work, then you won't know how to change it. The most powerful people in existence are those people who have a firm grip on reality which allows them to hang over the abyss of insanity and stare down into the dark." Hermione was suddenly aware of Snape having shifted his attention to her. "How firm is your grip on insanity?"
"That's not a very comfortable thought."
Snape snorted again. "If you wanted to feel comfortable you should have stayed in the muggle world. You had your chance when the letter offered you a chance to go to Hogwarts. And then you had a second chance when Albus offered you an apprenticeship. All you have ever had to do is say, no'."
"I couldn't do that," Hermione objected.
"Knowledge is power, and power is dangerous, little girl."
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"I don't know if the legends are true, but if you are Cassandra, then you should know. I just talked to the Headmaster of Hogwarts. My cousin, Sybil, has seen a man you wrote about. The man you labeled Master."
Cassandra wrapped her arms around herself and tried to control her shivers. One of the current Trelawneys had just left the woods after recounting to her the news from Hogwarts. A descendent of Terrence had seen Methos at Hogwarts Castle.
The gathered members of the Wizengamot look down at her and pass a judgment of guilty. Her husband and son are warned against speaking of what they know.
Cassandra knew that she could not abandon one of her own to the nonexistent mercies of her previous master. She could not. But any action would mean entering the wizarding world to which she had sworn never to return.
Tears. Sweat. Mucus. Blood. Cassandra gasps for air as she comes back to life one more time inside the increasingly filthy prison cell. Visions of death beat at her. Once she catches her breath, she digs her fingers into her own flesh once again.
She tried so hard to forget those eight months of hell. Eight months of flashbacks to every time she'd ever been tortured or betrayed. Eight months of prophesizing wars and violent deaths. Eight months of starving herself and killing herself with her bare hands before she had been weak enough that she had not healed before being discovered and her body tossed into the rubbish heap outside the walls of Azkaban.
Despite the sounds that came from a busy camp life, silence seemed to surround her, as Cassandra was pushed in the direction of Kronos' tent. Methos stood in plain sight, but his eyes were averted and he did not speak.
She tried so hard to forget that time. The memories were all written down, there was no need for her to remember that time. It was darkly funny that it had been Methos himself who had taught her that keeping a written record could sometimes ward off the flashbacks.
Methos' arms were hard and constraining around her, his breath came shallowly through gritted teeth, but he made no move and no sound in his sleep. It was one of his bad nights. When he woke, he would kill her without any recognition in his eyes, but when she woke, he would be writing in his journal and for the rest of the day would be gentle with her. As she waited for his to wake, she thought it was worth it. He prized her above all others.
She tried to turn off her emotions and think about events logically, but all her thoughts turned to the idea of evil. Dementors may or may not be intrinsically evil, but to use them as a device for punishment was certainly evil. They punished in relation to how much you had already been hurt, rather than in relation to how much harm you had caused.
Her husband was dead, and in the tradition of his people, she was given a drug to dull the sense and sat upon his funeral pyre. Her immortal healing washed the drug out of her system within minutes. Her grief kept her apathetic for a further few minutes. Then there was just the fire and the pain and the healing and the dying.
Azkaban was evil.
Some prisoners shouted out their innocence. "Question me with veritaserum," they cried out. Their crimes had been enjoyable, Cassandra thought and laughed. They could no longer hold onto such memories before the dementors sucked them away.
Thoughts of evil swirled in her head.
The skull and snake swirled in green fog above the house. It was soon blotted out by the rising clouds of black smoke. None of the neighbors looked up anyway, their eyes drawn to the brilliant and roaring flames.
Methos was evil. She knew he was evil. The knowledge seemed settled into her very bones. The memories of half a dozen tortures rose to mind, seared into her memory. The passage of time did nothing to soften the memories.
"He's changed, Cassandra. He isn't the monster you once knew."
MacLoed had tried to convince her that Methos had changed. What he didn't realize was that that made it worse. If Methos was peaceful now, then it meant that he could have been peaceful then. If Methos were merely a vicious creature, then Cassandra would want him dead like any rabid animal. But if he had chosen to do what he did, then he was truly evil.
"You will call me Master."
And she knew that for all of her terror, for all of her inability to stop herself from trembling even alone in her cabin, she would enter the wizarding world. For her family, she would face down her demons and triumph over them.
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A/N: This chapter proved surprisingly difficult to write, and I'm still not sure how happy I am with it. Hermione variations kept on popping up with their own incompatible backstories and futures. Halfway through working on this chapter I had to stop and write down outlines of two different fully-plotted Hermione stories just to get them out of my head, so that I could focus on this one. The real world also had me besieged for a bit, but I eventually beat it back.
Thank you to everyone who has reviewed.
To Cattibrie393: Yeah. Anyone else might have thought better of leaving Trelawney with Methos, but Hermione is already exasperated with Trelawney's behavior.
To King Henry the V: No, this is not going to be a slash story. The only romantic interest that I see at all, such as it is, is going to be a growing fascination between Hermione and Severus.