Prepare for some science-times. Hoo hoo hoo I *really* hope you guys are as nerdy as I'm assuming you are.
PROMPT UPDATE, WOOo. Go team. Most humble thanks as always to all who reviewed.
Small note – I'm planning on re-uploading the earliest chapters without the hiccup of tom's shoe being missing. I've gotten a few readers along the way being like "…what." And all it takes is one conjuring charm to fix it, so. XD double thanks for the reminder to those who mentioned it.
-speech
"All that really belongs to us is time; even he who has nothing else has that."
- Abraham Lincoln
Hermione woke up warm and comfortable beneath a soft blanket.
She blinked a few times, the ceiling coming into focus. She remembered the Timeglass twisting in her stomach. She remembered landing on something soft … then nothing. She must've passed out. Unsurprising, given the agony.
Where was she now, then? In the same place?
It took one glance to the side for her to recognize her surroundings, although frankly, it qualified as unrecognizable. When last she'd seen the cottage in the middle of the field, "destroyed" would have been a generous description for the place. "Rubble" seemed a more appropriate moniker.
Now, a fire glowed in the hearth, and several warm torches flickered around the wholly intact walls, which were decorated with two paintings, both – to Hermione's disappointment – landscapes rather than portraits. A thick woven rug lay atop the clean stone floor, and the furnishings were cherry wood, red and brown cloth, cozy colors. Something smelled delicious, like buttered bread, although Hermione had no idea if her stomach would hold anything down even if she did find the source of the scent.
But her stomach didn't hurt anymore, the ache of hunger excepted.
She sat up feebly and pushed the blanket down to her feet with one hand, the other darting to her navel. Somewhat to her alarm, she found she no longer wore the thin robe from the Crown; instead, a soft woolen shirt the color of cream was draped over her, loose black sweatpants swallowing her legs. Hermione ran her hand over her abdomen, searching for the lump she remembered so vividly, like a tumor or perhaps a weapon embedded in her flesh.
"Not there," said a voice. Hermione jolted in place, twisting around at once.
Behind the sofa, Alengurd Bansherwold stood beside a tall, black stove. He wore plain Muggle clothes, dark jeans and a grey knit jumper that reminded Hermione uncomfortably of one of Molly Weasley's. As he prodded his wand toward a cast-iron pan, its contents sizzled, sending a fresh wave of buttery scent rolling through the air. Hermione's mouth flooded. For three weeks, she'd been eating the same stale, tasteless conglomeration of God knew what nutritional ingredients. This smell was torture.
"Go ahead and check your stomach," Bansherwold said. "I should apologize. It was hasty."
Hermione pulled up the hem of her shirt. Near the bottom of her sunken stomach curved a long white scar, as if someone had given her an overenthusiastic appendectomy. She stared at it numbly. It seemed someone else's skin, someone else's injury.
"It shouldn't hurt anymore. Does it?" he asked, giving her an oddly worried look.
She shook her head slowly, narrowing her eyes.
"Good," he said. "I was just getting this." He held up a small pouch that Hermione could only assume held the Timeglass. "It's a shame, you know. If it were just a bit smaller, you might've been able to vomit it up. As it is, I had to cut it out and do some mending."
Yes. A shame.
Replying with one of her most pointed silences, Hermione gave the cottage's interior a second look. On the floor in the far corner lay a lumpy-looking mattress. Hermione imagined it could hardly be big enough to fit Bansherwold's body, tall as he was. An icebox lay in the opposite corner, above which dangled various kitchen implements and what looked like cured meats.
Upon closer inspection, she saw that the clock on the wall beside the icebox was not, in fact, a clock at all. It matched the contraption on Bansherwold's wrist, a glass face with graduated notches, filled up about a sixth of the way with dark red liquid. The sight of it made her palpably uncomfortable for a reason she couldn't place. She looked back to Bansherwold, who had turned back to his griddle on the stove, whistling genially.
Listening to the cheerful tune, Hermione felt the depths to which she mistrusted him sinking even further.
She tried to stand up, but her legs trembled and gave way almost instantly, blades of grass beneath the fragile husk of her torso. She landed back on the sofa hard. Merlin, when had she last eaten?
"Give me five minutes," Bansherwold said, as if hearing the thought. "It's almost done." He glanced back over his shoulder at her. "And yes, it's safe to eat, and no, I haven't poisoned it, and yes, it was cooked entirely without the slave labor of House Elves."
He smiled cheekily at her, receiving an instinctive frown before she wondered how the hell he'd known to make that disclaimer in the first place. In any case, she liked to believe she wasn't foolish enough to eat something he'd cooked.
But she was starving. The hunger gnawed at her stomach like a determined rodent. She thought she might actually start drooling; really, the only thing keeping her from attacking Bansherwold for the food – well, besides her apparent inability to stay on her feet – was self-preservation. He was dangerous, she reminded herself sternly, and not to be trusted, regardless of mouthwatering foodstuffs near his person.
As he turned back to the stove, sudden dizziness slammed into Hermione. Biting back a vocal reaction, she keeled over onto the sofa, staring at the ceiling. Her eyes shut, and the teetering wobbling motion of the room settled, replaced by the wet taste of nausea.
A voice spoke into her darkness. "Where are you from, Ms. Granger?"
"England," she said instantly and irritably, not opening her eyes.
He chuckled. "I assumed. I meant which part, but no matter. Since you bring up country of origin, I myself am from the United States, originally."
It was hard to care about anything but the lack of food in her mouth, but luckily, Hermione's mind was still in the habit of drinking in information. She found herself listening somewhat numbly.
"I was born in 1859," he said. Hermione winced – that was staggeringly long ago. "I was a Civil War brat," he continued, "orphaned in the war's last year by one of many pointless battles. I'm still not sure which, not that I particularly care. All I remember is that the second my mother found out about my father's death, she jumped off a bridge, and, as you might imagine, did not return. Not that she was particularly present before that point, having been institutionalized once or twice for believing in magic. She wasn't crazy, of course, just perceptive – although the asylums themselves did their best to change her state of sanity. Dreadful places." He sighed. "In any case, because we lived out in the countryside, it took a while for anyone to notice I was the only one still living in that house. I had no idea what to do or where to go, or what exactly it meant that whenever I cried, the kettle would boil, or various objects would crumble to ash, or birds would flock to the windows screaming. Neither of my parents were of magical blood, so I was completely in the dark."
Bansherwold is a Muggle-born? Hermione digested the thought as she heard an egg cracking. She'd assumed he was Wizarding because of his name. If he was really Muggle-born … had he been adopted by a wizard family, maybe?
When Bansherwold continued, his tone remained light and conversational. "I was seven when I found my way to New York through a sequence of events involving dumb luck and pretending to be various people's children. I was eight when I smuggled myself across the pond on a massive fishing vessel and landed myself in London. I was nine when I started using sorcery in earnest, and redubbed myself how I thought a sorcerer should be titled. Hence my rather unwieldy name, about which I'm sure you've wondered by this point."
Ah. So that was why.
More hissing and crackling came from the griddle. Hermione gulped back an ocean of saliva, opened her eyes, and peered over her shoulder. Bansherwold was conjuring a plate and levitating some sort of bready eggy concoction from the stove onto it.
"Here," he said, carrying her plate over. "You must be hungry." Eyeing her suspicious expression, he sighed and forked a bite into his own mouth first. "The ever-practical Hermione Granger," he mumbled through the food. "Relax, for once. I already told you it's safe." He swallowed it, and Hermione's resolve shriveled. The second the plate touched the sofa beside her, she wolfed it down so quickly she could feel it burning all the way down her throat. Then the fork was clattering back to the plate. She wasn't even sure she remembered chewing.
"More?" he asked, giving her a glimpse of his white teeth in a genuine half-smile.
"Thanks," she croaked.
He took the plate back to the stove and continued his odd little monologue. Hermione had no idea why he was divulging the information, exactly, but if it meant anything she could use as leverage, she wasn't going to pass it up.
"London, 1868. Not a pleasant place, to say the very least, so all things considered, I was quite lucky to last as long as I did. I found a spot in an abandoned building, happened across a worn black overcoat that became my best friend, and somehow, as if by magic," he said wryly, "never got caught stealing anything. Even in the dead of winter, I didn't freeze, another happy survival tactic probably attributable to rudimentary warming spells, though at the time I almost believed I had the Second Industrial Revolution to thank for it. Everything was belching ash, spewing cinders, humming with the roar of machinery. It never turned off, it seemed. Everything was trying to fool you into thinking you were warm enough, safe enough, alive enough, but really the city was just spilling poison out its infernal cracks. I'd walk over corpses most days, completely unfazed after a point. They stopped mattering after a while."
More eggs cracking.
Hermione pulled the blanket back up, and wrapped it around herself. She settled against the sofa's cushy armrest and turned shrewd eyes back on Bansherwold.
"I turned eleven on February 9th," he said. "Got a letter from Hogwarts that day, which … I mean, in retrospect, the idea that they sent me a letter is frankly hilarious, given my childhood illiteracy. I used the thing to start a fire. The two that arrived the next day, and the four the day after that, received the same treatment. I began to suspect something was amiss when I woke up blanketed in letters, but what was I supposed to do? It wasn't as if I knew anyone who could read. Didn't know anyone at all, in fact. A couple of other street children had once tried to rob me of my coat, so I'd broken a few of their legs. No one dared come near me after that."
Bansherwold paused to whistle a light tune, stirring the pan again. "By the way, did you know that until 1889, Time magic was classified as Dark magic? It's all rather arbitrary."
"Yes," Hermione said, watching his narrow back, his easy movements, wondering about the air of calm that rested over him. "I did know that." She thought privately that she would almost rather he be making his usual infuriating cryptic statements about life and the future than divulging his entire sordid past. The blasé attitude he seemed to have about discussing it was twice as disconcerting. It was more than blasé, though; it was … "Sorry, but why do you seem so happy?" she said.
He looked back at her, looking surprised but amused. His eyes were warm. "You're here."
Hermione sputtered loudly, turning redder than the fire's old coals. "Excuse me, what?"
"Anyway," Bansherwold said, completely ignoring her reaction, "eventually, my Hogwarts letter was hand-delivered and read aloud to me. At that point, I was sleeping in a gutter rather near Big Ben. And actually, at that point, it was only a week until term began."
Hogwarts was cutting it a bit close on the delivery, there, Hermione thought, settling further down into the sofa as the splotchy redness slowly faded from her cheeks. Bansherwold scooped another helping onto her plate and placed it into her waiting hands. This time around, Hermione took the effort to chew, to taste the salt and the texture of it. She carefully kept her eyes fixed on her food.
"In prompt fashion, I was whisked off to Diagon Alley," Bansherwold said. "There, I was given a room at the Leaky Cauldron and money to purchase my supplies. The deliverer returned on September the first to guide me to King's Cross."
After a ruminative pause, he perched on the other end of the sofa and said quietly, "You know, I don't believe a single human being has ever been as blissfully happy as I was that day. There's something about having nothing at all, and suddenly having a world before you. A train is a magnificent thing."
Hermione glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, and for a split instant saw a lost boy looking down at his knees.
She blinked, and he was gone, replaced by the young man with unreadable features.
"King's Cross had been open sixteen years at that point, and Platform 9¾ was still relatively new," Bansherwold said. "I boarded with all the others, was sorted into Ravenclaw, and the rest is as they say."
"History, yes." Hermione set down her fork, finished all too quickly once more. "When did you start using the Dark Arts, then?" she asked cautiously.
"Soon after arriving. The world was rather different back then, Hermione. Physical discipline was common; practically expected, even. Detention? Our detention was being shackled up in the dungeons for a couple days, although admittedly, it would take a rather impressive stunt to deserve that rather than a simple beating." He rubbed his chin, seeming distant. "Anyway, yes, a darker world altogether. And from the start, everything interested me. Everything was my favorite subject. School was a luxury that hardly anybody could afford to complain about, least of all me, so I considered it a personal obligation to learn everything available. It helped that the so-called "Restricted Section" did not yet exist, although it took a while for me to need the library, as I naturally had to learn how to read first." He chuckled.
She stared at him, aghast. "If you didn't know how to read, how did you do any of your schoolwork?"
"I learned quickly."
"Right." Hermione tried to keep her eyes from narrowing. "And when did you start plotting world domination?"
"Oh, I didn't. It was thrust upon me, as these things go," he said vaguely, waving a hand.
Hermione opened her mouth to say that no, these things usually do not go that way at all, but she closed it again, frowning. Harry's destiny to save the Wizarding World had been thrust upon him, after all … well, to save it temporarily. The damn place seemed determined not to be saved. In fact, Hermione found herself glumly wondering how it had managed complete isolation as long as it had. Memory charms and wards did the trick up to a point, but she supposed even without Bansherwold's little stunts in Rome and Paris, something would have tipped the Muggles off eventually, especially with this "internet" business.
"Going to tell me why you're intent on destroying the Wizarding World, then?" she mumbled.
Bansherwold sighed, standing from his spot on the sofa. "It's not destruction. I'm accelerating a process through its paces. Necessary groundwork."
"What?"
"You'll understand later."
Her brown eyes blazed with anger. "Bansherwold, if I hear one more version of that bloody phrase from your mouth, I swear to Merlin I'll –"
"I've already asked you to call me Alen. But yes, sorry, go on, what will you do?"
"… hurt you," she finished lamely, glaring up at him.
"How, exactly?" he said, looking genuinely puzzled.
"I will punch you in the teeth, that's how."
"I mean, in reality, I think you'd find that rather difficult," he said, holding up his wand, "but feel free to try, I suppose."
"Speaking of which," she said, "what the hell have you done with my wand?"
"All in time."
That's it. She catapulted off the sofa, lunging at him. He laughed and caught her by the upper arms, pinning them to her sides as he held her at arm's length. "Good Lord, Hermione. Please, this is extremely ill-advised. You're recovering. As much as I appreciate the unintentional comedy –"
She gritted her teeth. "I hate you."
Something in his eyes faded, his smile with it. He released her, and she stood there a foot from him, looking up into his strange multicolored eyes, still seething.
"Tell me about the Timeglass," she said through her clenched teeth.
"As you wish."
Tom Riddle stared at the space where she'd been. He felt adrift.
It was strange to feel anything in reaction to her disappearance, he mused. But he really hadn't realized how accustomed he'd grown to her simple presence, the mindless squabbles and debates during the day, the discussions of how they'd get out and when. Even the sudden lack of disapproving stares at his death threats to these Muggles, Bansherwold, et al felt amiss.
Tom Riddle preferred aloneness, of course. He had only ever been honest when he was alone.
Well, no, that wasn't true. He'd been honest when Dumbledore had come to visit him in his childhood, though the air of disapproval washing from Dumbledore had been overpowering, like a too-strong perfume, suffocating. He'd learned rather quickly not to be that honest with anyone again.
He didn't understand the problem. So he liked causing pain. Was that really so bad, or even surprising? He'd grown up around pain. He'd seen everyone in power cause pain, the matron at the orphanage and her discipline, the bigger kids at school and their gleeful bullying, the war generals in the papers and their daily orders for murder. Power and pain went hand in hand, and Tom went hand in hand with power. That was simply the state of things.
At first he'd simply assumed everyone in the Wizarding World would be the same way. What an unpleasant surprise, learning that they followed the example of men like the fuddy-duddy Dumbledore, like the hilariously incompetent Dippet, like the gullible and slimy Slughorn. Not an ounce of backbone in the lot of them.
Of course, the second he'd learned how one was supposed to act, he'd adopted it seamlessly, an intricate disguise. He turned from quiet childhood terror to equally-quiet beacon of model behavior. A new leaf just for Dumbledore, though the man never bought the act, of course.
Actually, now that he thought about it, he'd been circumstantially forced to be rather honest with Granger, hadn't he?
Well. Be that as it may, she was gone, and now there was no one who could understand his particular panic, his dread, at being stranded here. Worse, he had to force himself to confront the possibility that Bansherwold would leave him to rot in the Crown. Tom knew he himself was far more of a wild card than Granger, far more dangerous, volatile, capable, independent. The fact that Granger was gone meant … well, it could mean many things, each possibility more unpleasant than the next.
But he had to get back. He actually had to; history had already been mapped out and he'd already arrived back to overtake the Wizarding World.
Well. For a time.
What troubled him intellectually – beyond the blinding, mouth-drying, gut-deep fear of his apparent death – was that the world seemed already to have forgotten him. Tom didn't know quite how to feel about it. He had intended to be a daily presence for the rest of time, never forgotten for a moment, even if his plan for immortality somehow failed.
And yet he'd seemed in the end to be simply an inconvenient hiccup for the Wizarding World, which itself seemed to be heading toward destruction. With every wizard locked up, with wizard breeding apparently controlled, according to that Glen woman …
Well, at least they weren't allowed to intermarry with Muggles. That was nice. Apparently Muggles had gotten something right.
Riddle couldn't help but wonder, though, about the wretched Muggle-born population. They'd know about magic, but they'd have to disguise it, suppress it. He couldn't imagine his own childhood if he'd had to do the same. If the Muggles at the orphanage had recognized his talents for what they were, had tried to beat them out of him …
He dreamed about it. It was nothing good.
These days, of course, his dreams were nothing but nightmares. In them, he was a Muggle. He was a Mudblood under the power of some faceless ruler. He was a wizard strapped down by Muggle torturers. He was never himself.
Tom Riddle wondered if he was losing his mind. He kept catching glimpses of shadowy figures hovering around his peripheral vision, figures that looked oddly like his father, his grandparents, that Myrtle girl who'd been killed by the Basilisk. He would twist around to face them and they would disappear. Sometimes his eyes would slide out of focus and he could see blood or water dripping down the shimmering walls of his cell. Maybe that was it. Maybe he'd go mad in here.
Every so often, he found himself muttering words under his breath. Incantations, sometimes. Curses. Sometimes just names of students he'd known from the Hogwarts of over a century ago, but mostly it was spells.
One night he woke up in a cold sweat, screaming, "EXPECTO PATRONUM –"
But of course he was thinking of nothing at all.
Bansherwold picked up the velvety pouch and sat down on the sofa before Hermione, whose hands waited on her hips.
"Have you heard of antimatter?" he said, weighing the Timeglass' pouch in his hand.
"In passing."
"It is comprised of antiparticles," he said. "Each one is essentially a subatomic particle that's the opposite of any given particle. Opposite charge, opposite spin. Elementally, hydrogen has antihydrogen, helium has antihelium, et cetera. They discovered in 2018 that antimatter also operates under antigravity." He eyed her firmly uncomprehending expression. "Falls upward."
"So?"
"Well, that bit isn't actually relevant. It's just fun."
She glared at him.
"Anyway, the question for a long time was why all the matter in the known world is made of matter as opposed to antimatter. Why do particles have this particular type of quantum spin, as opposed to the opposite type? What was the reason? Why was it not half and half, maybe, or mostly antimatter with a tiny bit of matter instead?
"Then there's the mystery of dark matter," Bansherwold continued. "From an earthly standpoint, it's invisible, seemingly intangible, and yet it comprises twenty-seven percent of the known universe, and dark energy takes up another sixty-eight."
"What are they?"
"You may want to sit down."
She did.
"Dark energy," Bansherwold said, "is energy created in instantaneous, massive bursts by miniscule openings in the fabric of space."
"What?"
"Just listen," he said. Her mouth snapped shut, and he continued slowly. "The energy washing through those pinprick openings is something of a friction between one universe and another. The openings are, again, largely instantaneous – they vanish as soon as they're created, and the friction dies, like a spark. It's all highly transitory."
He folded his hands. "Dark matter, on the other hand, can be one of two things. The first is a specific type of mass that builds up between universes. Think of a stone caught between two pieces of paper. You can detect the stone because it causes a bulge in the paper, but it can't be seen. The universe is riddled with the stuff; it's a byproduct, a buildup of dark energy's frictional forces if they don't disperse instantaneously enough. Essentially, as the opening in the fabric closes again, this matter doesn't get trapped in one universe or another; instead, it hangs between the two like scar tissue, thus invisible to both. That's one type."
Bansherwold glanced at Hermione, presumably to make sure she was still with him. He needn't have bothered. She was stunned, wide-eyed, and fully attentive. "The other type is simpler," he said. "It's an opening in space that isn't instantaneous. These openings have a duration of maybe several seconds at most. The "matter" in that case is the doorway itself, and the gravitational effect that all the mass in the universe beyond the opening has. And this "matter," naturally, is destroyed when that opening eventually shuts."
Hermione's mouth was slightly open. All she could manage was, "Other universes?" in a voice so faint she could hardly feel the words form.
"Yes. Now," Bansherwold said, levitating the Timeglass from its bag with his wand. "This little object. That point of light in the center – what do you suppose it is?"
Hermione rifled through the mental stack of information she'd just been handed. "I … I suppose antimatter of some sort?" she said numbly.
"The opposite of dark matter, to be specific. And what do you suppose the opposite of dark matter can do, if dark matter is the result of a closed door in space?"
"Open the door again?"
Bansherwold's grin grew wider.
Hermione's world flipped several times and did a tap dance for good measure. She realized she wasn't breathing. She forced herself to do so. "What does this have to do with time?" she squeaked, and cleared her throat.
"Well, time is something we've created. It's really just an ongoing process of expansion, and we humans are caught in it quite incidentally. To magically move back and forth within it? Not really that impressive, when the proper sort of spellwork gets involved – you are shifting along a somewhat wobbly thread like a bead. Which is why magic like Time-Turning was discovered relatively early. It doesn't require anything … well, anything universe-shifting. Time-Turners are delicate objects, I'm sure you know; they have all sorts of finicky charms and such. Meant to keep the thread stable as you slide back along it. The Timeglass, on the other hand, uses blunt force to pop your bead off the thread entirely. Touch the Timeglass, and you are hit with a blast of energy sufficient to dissociate yourself from the process of universal expansion. Fun, isn't it?"
He looped his wand around, and the Timeglass landed on the sofa cushion next to Hermione. She flinched away as if it were an Acromantula.
Bansherwold said, "The Timeglass is unique in that when it is properly used, it opens a door in the world itself. You pop through that door and find yourself in another universe entirely."
"Another …" Hermione found her mouth suddenly dry. "Is that where we are now?"
"Yes. Don't bother looking outside; nothing will seem ostensibly different. Universes, Hermione, are twisted up somewhat like a colossal braid with infinite locks of hair. Picture each of those infinite locks having infinite hairs, universes that are exceedingly similar to each other. For instance, our specific lock consists of universes practically identical to ours, but with infinitesimal changes. In one of these threads, you were probably never born. In another, perhaps there was a star millions of light-years from Earth that experienced a solar flare at a time that it did not in your universe."
"But … but what are the odds that universes like this exist?"
"Exactly the same as the odds that there will be a universe as different from yours as you could ever imagine. But since they all do exist, odds are irrelevant. Every universe conceivable has already been conceived – and realized. The possibilities are infinite, which is why the megaverse's expansion is infinite."
"And this particular universe, the one we're in …?"
"Virtually identical to ours, packed tightly into the same lock. Here, we are still 2,057 years after the birth of a rather important man named Jesus Christ, or at least, a version of him. Here, a version of you has probably visited an older version of yourself and witnessed your own murder at my hands. Well, it wouldn't actually have been me, here. A version of me, rather. I'm quite remarkable, yes, but I don't have the time to hop around to every imaginable universe killing you all day. Sorry." His eyes twinkled merrily. Hermione wanted to hit him.
"I would've been surprised," he went on, "if you'd brought yourself anywhere significantly different, as you've never used the thing properly before. To move to a different lock, to jump all the way to a universe with sizable differences – or even slightly less miniscule differences, like if humans had perhaps never evolved – would take time, practice, and a lot of control. Although this does show progress, as you had to have made some sort of effort to do anything except blast yourself forward in time again."
"Why only forward?"
"Going with the expansion's current. Moving backward requires concerted effort, much as swimming against a current would."
"And how will we get back to our proper world?"
"With ease."
"Why?"
"Because I know how to use my own invention," he scoffed.
Hermione swallowed, her mind filled with a roar of white noise. It's not real, her brain told her, refusing to make the leap. He's making it up.She couldn't reconcile the concrete world around her with the concepts he was suggesting.
"Are you all right?" he asked quietly.
"I just ... I need a moment."
"Take your time." He looked down at his folded hands and waited.
A few minutes passed in furrowed brows and closed eyes. Hermione's thoughts raced and tangled, chased each other, and eventually started to catch up with themselves. Other universes. Infinite versions of myself in all potential situations. Infinite versions of everyone. All right.
She shook her head, as if to dislodge her voice, knock it back into place. "Erm," she said, "so how in God's name did you invent this in the 1800s? Was dark matter even discovered in the 1800s?"
"I told you. It was thrust upon me."
She took in a sharp breath. "… a version of you? Another version of you? Visited you and gave it to you?"
"Exactly." He twirled his wand idly. "You know, I'll tell you, finding you in this universe was a bit of a pain in the arse. Had to use an extension of Jackson's New Apotheosis Theorem to figure out which doorway you'd created."
"You can track someone's passages through universes like you track Apparition?"
"Of course. Apparition is the most similar comparison your current Wizarding World has to the Timeglass, actually. When you Apparate, you're burrowing through your particular thread, through its particular microscopic fibers. But no wizard could ever have enough natural energy to jump from thread to thread. Thus, my Timeglass, created as a helping hand." He looked fondly at it.
Hermione was certainly glad she was already sitting down. She looked down at her feet and found herself wondering about her physical composition, the odds of it, how there could conceivably be an entire universe built around her missing a toe or being an inch taller or having lost a tooth a day earlier or any number of possibilities.
The word "infinite" was terrifying her more by the moment.
"We should probably go back and rescue your friend now," Bansherwold said, glancing to the odd contraption on the wall. Hermione opened her mouth to ask what that was, but hell, she didn't think she could digest any more new information at the moment. She certainly wasn't digesting the Timeglass information as efficiently as she'd hoped she might.
Instead, what fell out was, "He's not my friend. The opposite, in fact."
"Really?"
"I thought you knew everything," she mumbled. "No, he's something of a nemesis. I've spent the last year trying to kill bits of him." She glanced up at Bansherwold. He wasn't looking at her. "You did know that already. Didn't you."
"Yes. I preferred to hear it from your mouth, though."
"And should I even bother asking how you already knew?"
"I know everything about you," he said, giving her a curious look somewhere between a wistful smile and pained recollection.
"And yet …?" Hermione said.
"And yet what?"
"I got the feeling there was an unspoken 'and yet' at the end of that sentence."
He laughed aloud, the jumbled expression clearing, and pushed his fair hair out of his eyes. "Yes. I know everything about you, and yet you never cease to surprise me, in a way, Hermione."
She tilted her head, examined him closely in something of an attempt to understand what she was seeing. "Alen," she said carefully, testing the word, "are you really a Dark wizard?"
"In many senses. Are you asking if I am an evil person?"
"Yes."
"I'm afraid –"
"Don't you dare tell me I'll just have to wait and see."
"I wasn't going to," he said with a wry smile. "I supposed that would endanger my safety. No, I was going to tell you I'm afraid I don't know, and I'm not really sure I will ever know. I have a lot of plans, you see. I have a lot of ideas and a lot of things that I want." After a long moment of seeming consideration, he said offhandedly, "But I also have some things to come to terms with, I suppose."
A pause. Hermione shifted, looking over at the Timeglass on the sofa again. She stared at its bright spot, captured like a bug in amber, frozen in what she was now utterly sure was not glass at all.
"I'm not lying about any of this, by the way," he said. "I lie a lot, but this is not one of those multifarious instances."
"Thanks," Hermione said, "but if you're as good at lying as that seems to imply, it's not like I'd know if you were lying to me now about not lying."
He chuckled. "True."
"When are you from, exactly, by the way?"
"1878."
"So you're nineteen?"
"No, no. I've spent a while in transit. Some years, not sure how many. And I'm sure it'll be many more before I return."
"So you do return to your proper time?"
"Yes. I need to be back in 1878 ten minutes after I left, and I need to stay on the thread until 1945, which, as you know, is when I die."
"Disappear," she corrected.
"Well. You've met him, you've seen where he goes when he disappears. And Alengurd Bansherwold doesn't come back to 1945. What do you think happens to him out here in the future?" At his own words, a flutter of unease crossed Bansherwold's features, which seemed odd to Hermione. He didn't seem like the type to be particularly bothered by the idea of death. Not after all that talk.
"So," he said, flicking his wand at the Timeglass. It flipped up into his lap. "Shall we go retrieve your fr – your enemy, then?"
"Doesn't really matter when we go, does it? You have a time in mind for when we're going to reappear."
"True. We could stay here. You look tired; you could rest." He sighed. "It will hurt, going back. Bringing someone along, it always hurts. When you use it correctly by yourself …"
"A warm sort of feeling," she murmured.
"That's right."
Hermione shook her head. She didn't particularly want to stay in some parallel strand-universe for any longer than necessary. "No, let's go. But before we do, would you just tell me why it's me? Will you tell me why I can't go home?"
"You have a long way to go before then," he said, his eyes serious. "There's a lot for you to learn."
She half-smiled.
He smiled back. "Thought that might make you happy. Come on." He stood, levitating the Timeglass before himself. He reached out a hand, and she placed hers in it, an odd sort of tingle lighting in her fingertips.
His hand tightened, and he lifted her hand to his lips.
Hermione's mouth went dry again. What.
Then he tucked away his wand, took the Timeglass from the air, and with a high-pitched whine they split open the very fabric of the universe and squeezed through.
It didn't lessen the agony for Hermione to conceptualize it properly.
"Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."
- William Faulkner
Sciencey note for anyone interested:
I did a lot of roaming the NASA website (and space dot com articles and stuff) so I could fuse bits and pieces of actual science with Bansherwold's totally made-up "braid theory." (it was originally just going to be timelines in the braid, but then I was like … eh, go big or go home, let's make it a zillion universes instead, woo.)
As for what's real and what's not: all of the antimatter stuff is legit, albeit simplified because I didn't want to load up heavily on terminology. (the antigravity in 2018 thing is kind of a snide nod to a recent inconclusive test regarding antigravity and antimatter, I can't paste the link in but you can google-search it pretty easily if you're interested. I believe there's a CNN article.)
Most everything I said defining dark energy and dark matter, on the other hand – the scar tissue and the friction and stuff – is absolutely fictional, my own little magical-y interpretations. (save the percentages, 5 percent being baryonic matter, 68 being dark energy, 27 being dark matter; those are stats from NASA)
Though I mean fuck it, it *could* be true. We have no friggin' idea what dark energy and matter are thus far. It all could be the vestiges & byproducts of pinpricks in the fabric of space-time leading to infinite alternate nearly-identical worlds twisted together like locks in a braid. Shrug.
So … yeah! Hope you liked it, and as always please do drop me a note if you did.
-speech