THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR PATIENCE!

Had to take a break after that last chap, really took a toll, to be honest. But I'm back now! Committed to a better regularly scheduled release. And for PART 2!

Here we go my dears, thanks for all your support 3

PART 2

PEGGY CARTER

Peggy Carter lost so much in the War.

After the disappearance of Steve Roger's plane and then the vanishing of Erik Lehnsherr from SSR holding, Hermione's abandoned body was found in what looked like Johann's main office. Her skin was pale and cold, her eyes delicately closed, and Peggy's heart had stopped in her chest at the sight of her crumpled form. To hear the news from the Captain had been one thing, but to actually see Hermione's body, the conclusion of such a bright, vivacious flame snuffed out like she was nothing … It was wrong. Unnatural. The image of her limp limbs and unraveled hair was nightmare fuel and sure to haunt Peggy for the rest of her life.

But somehow, by the grace of whatever gods were out there, Hermione wasn't yet 100 percent dead. Thankfully. Mercifully. Upon further inspection and to the extreme surprise of everyone around, Happy Sam had discovered a faint breath moving her chest, inhales so slight it was nearly a twitch of her lungs. He'd nearly dropped her in surprise and then screamed at the medics across the hall for assistance. When that was uncovered, Peggy hurriedly knelt by her friend and put a hand to her neck, detecting a series of feeble, irregular heartbeats that echoed the triumph of her rebellious survival. It was no accident and not a twist of anyone's imagination, Hermione was alive.

Good God, she was alive.

Peggy's eruption of overwhelming joy was fierce and consuming, but it did not last for long. As the hours passed and the doctors came and went, Hermione did not move. Her sleep lengthened into days and then suddenly into a week. She did not twist in her slumber, nor yawn or turn over, and her eyes remained stubbornly closed. Peggy's elated spirits plummeted.

Later, an answer came."I'm sorry to say, but Agent Granger is in a coma," an SSR doctor revealed to Peggy after Hermione's body was moved back to America. "Brain activity seems natural if not elevated, but her physical body isn't responding to stimulus. I've seen some cases like this before. The swelling of the brain that she suffered untreated for the first several hours … well, ma'am, I wouldn't get your hopes up."

Peggy could not even pretend to be surprised at that point. She had already seen that unless a reflex was intentionally choreographed, Hermione's body remained unnaturally still. Whatever injuries she'd sustained from her time within the Hydra base had somehow managed to heal from the blast mixed with energies, but they had also condemned her to the near lifeless state she was currently in. Peggy left the hospital with her head ringing from the diagnosis and then cried herself to sleep that night, as there was no 'muggle' cure for a magically induced coma. Without Hermione, there never would be.

When the announcement was made and all there was left to do was to make Hermione comfortable, Colonel Phillips turned over all of Hermione's medical options and current wellbeing to Peggy as her previously listed beneficiary, and now power of attorney. She was ordered to keep Hermione either in an SSR base to observe and study the tesseract induced coma, or keep her somewhere far far away from the public. Peggy of course chose the latter, and Howard footed the bill to get Hermione private hospital care in New York. He was very staunch in his belief that Hermione would one day open her eyes. He sneered at anyone who said different, and he ignored the SSR doctors council by building Hermione a treatment center a couple of blocks from his own home. He had her tested, kept, and studied by his own personally trusted team. If she was ever going to get better, it would be there with him.

As time went by the small burning flame of hope for their friend to ever wake started to dim for the both of them. Weeks turned into months. Months into years, and still nothing changed. Life went on, the world kept spinning, and Peggy made herself continue.

She wanted to make a better world for those leftover now. A safer world for all. So that this- this terrible series of events would never happen again to anyone else. It created a hole where her heart ought to be and it left her nothing but focused determination and simmering anger for all things Hydra. All things evil and corrupt.

A month after the disappearance of Captain America was publicly revealed, in April of 1945, the Howling Commandos and Peggy were sent to Austria to the last known Hydra facility located. They captured Hydra General Werner Reinhardt, his troops, and an Obelisk that was then classified as an 0-8-4, an item of unknown origin. It was the same object Hermione had found information on from her Hydra warehouse mission back in December of the year previously. Another check marked for the dismantling of the Nazi party.

What Peggy hadn't intended to find was the human experiments abandoned in the research labs. The body parts strewn over tables or frozen in glass containers on the wall. Most definitely, she had not been expecting the blue-skinned body of something else hidden there too. Clearly not human - frozen in some sort of Hydra stasis pod, and if Peggy hadn't already met someone from not of this world, she would have balked at the usage of the word 'alien'.

But there it was, and somehow, someone in Hydra had been experimenting with the body and fluids of the dead alien. For reasons unknown, and for an unknown amount of time. Who knew what they were doing and for what purpose it helped Hydra?

She didn't let any of the soldiers or Howling Commandos know about the blue body and managed to keep it under wraps as everything was shipped back to America. It didn't stop her from staying up late at night, staring into the stars and wondering what other threats were out there. The tesseract… the obelisk… the blue alien… She knew finding the body wouldn't be the end of it, and powers outside of her world were becoming more and more common. Earth was going to have to start preparations for what it could all mean.

On April 30th of that same year, Hitler committed suicide. It was the beginning of a very long ending and she only wished that Hermione was there with her to celebrate.

Then, on May 8th, the Allies of World War II accepted Germany's unconditional surrender of its armed forces. The European theater had ended. Only Japan still remained, and it was all coming to a close.

Later that month, within the world's celebrations and the rushed decisions for the future, Peggy fought hard for Operation Paperclip to be dismantled, just like Hermione had wanted. She wrote reports, outlined discussions, telegrammed superiors, lettered senators, and argued like hell to do right by her sleeping friend, but by the end of the month decisions had been made. Peggy's insistence and opinions had been thrown out the window, barely given a second glance. Operation Paperclip commenced, and Zola, Arnim blistering Zola, was given U.S. sanctuary. Confined to prison for the rest of his life, but still. He would most likely be used in the American think-tank for future maneuvers, evidence be damned that everything he touched he rotted to the core.

She wanted to rip her hair from her scalp at the frustration of it all.

By August, after two atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan, they too surrendered. World War Two was officially over. The Allies had won. The SSR had triumphed. And it was now five months after the greatest people Peggy had ever met were lost. But still, her work was not yet done and she felt no satisfaction.

The SSR Headquarters in London was dismantled soon after, and Peggy was sent to live full-time in America. She left her family home with a renter, tucking all her past carefully away within the boxes she left behind and then requested to work in the New York office to remain close to Hermione

In 1946, she met Agent Daniel Sousa again, and together, they remembered their friends and comrades who had fallen and fought to make the world a better place within the SSR. Missions came and went. She put up with the inherent sexism, using her brains to outsmart not only the enemies but her peers in this new-made world; people died, relationships were tested, information was gathered, new friends were made, and new enemies too.

The Black Widow program, apparently, was very real despite all rumors to the contrary. She got an up-close view of what the Soviet-trained women could do and would have a scar on the back of her neck for the rest of her life because of it. The Widow had escaped, but the experience lived on in Peggy's mind. Something would have to be done about that awful program, she knew, and she kept that thought in a careful list of things accumulating to approach on a later date.

The Midnight Oil that Hermione and Howard created together made another appearance because Howard didn't destroy his work and a cinema full of people died. Peggy discovered the man who stole the recipe, named Johann Fennhoff and figured out that he was originally a Soviet scientist whose greatest accomplishment stemmed from placing people in a version of mind control just by talking to them. He was another specially powered person and had a great deal of hatred against Howard. His brother had died in the Battle of Finow where Midnight Oil had been used without Hermione and Howard's permission, and he wanted Howard to have a taste of his own bitter medicine by destroying America's trust in the millionaire.

Fennhoff was arrested before he could go through with his plan of unleashing the Midnight Oil to the majority of Times Square, and the SSR destroyed his work before they figuratively threw away his key. When the conclusion of the mission was wrapped and she read through all of the reports afterward, Peggy found that the now gagged Fennhoff had been placed as cellmates with none other than Armin Zola. She didn't think that having the mind-control man and Hydra's top scientist together was a good idea, but her opinions were overruled and her worries dismissed.

Peggy added it to her mental list and trudged onwards.

Ever so slowly, as years passed and more missions went under her belt, she became a force in her own right. "Becoming what you were always meant to be" Daniel had once told her. She was no longer 'Captain America's Assistant' or 'His Majesty's Little Agent', callously thrown monikers she'd been bestowed when she'd first arrived in the New York chapter, but Agent Carter.

A name sought after instead of silenced, respected instead of ignored. She became very very good at what she did, and she helped the world to grow a little safer, just as she'd promised herself.

By 1947, she agreed to a single date with Daniel Sousa, her friend, and trusted peer. Long talks turned into quiet kisses, winter strolls through the park turned into impromptu dances beneath the lamplights, and her deep respect for the man Hermione had introduced her to turned into exquisite admiration, and then deep abiding love. After three years, on one sunny afternoon of no particular importance at all, they invited a few people to a church down the street from their office and got married. And for the first time in years, Peggy felt at peace.

She visited Hermione before she'd left to become a wife and laid a rose at her bedside from her bouquet, wishing that her friend could have been there to see the beginning of the rest of her life. Agent Carter-Sousa. Bit of a mouth full- but she wouldn't change it for the world. She was deeply loved by a man that would move heaven and earth for her and was becoming esteemed in her career all around the world.

Then, by the beginning of 1950, five years after the end of the War, Howard and Colonel Phillips invited her to change her path in society in a bigger way, and she accepted before they'd even laid out the whole idea. Colonel Phillips pulled in his government contacts and built the structure of the agency, Howard threw money, resources, and his genius brain into bringing everything to life, and Peggy did everything else. Together the three of them founded the 'Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division'. Another word for SHIELD, she'd smiled. An organization dedicated to protecting both national and global security. Protecting the people of all countries from all outside threats. A stepping stone utilized to continue fulfilling her promise to herself and to Hermione.

She held her friend's hand after the very first day of her brand new job, telling her of all she'd accomplished as she normally did whenever she came to visit Hermione and watched as Hermione continued to sleep on, completely unaware of the world around her.

If she ever woke up, Peggy promised, Hermione would wake to a world she could be proud of.

HOWARD STARK

Howard was not a stupid man; ask any Sam, Dick, or Sawyer in any town across the US. His name was revered, his presence in any room worshiped nearly like a god, and his PHDs and inventions spoke for themselves. However, he'd also been alive on this planet long enough to know how to navigate difficult things that his brilliance couldn't immediately come up with a solution for.

Take Peggy Carter for example.

The woman was a gift to all of mankind - let no one say otherwise in front of him or he'd have them ruined before they could make it down the next street- but god was she a ballbuster. Especially to him.

Their most recent argument in SHIELD, the acronym of their new organization which wasn't really sticking to a lot of the oldtimers yet, surrounded the topic of one Armin Zola. A disgusting human being of the highest caliber, but a grade-A genius nonetheless. The type of person that the American government couldn't let just sit around. God forbid the Soviets somehow get their hands on him- then who knew where the world would be.

It was in America's best interest to take Zola on in SHIELD and let him work towards building a better future with them, but saying so to Peggy was like saying that he wanted to bathe in the blood of murdered orphans. She'd looked at him in disgust and had said, "No" so severely that he still felt the goosebumps down his arms several hours later as he tucked himself into his dinner prepared by Jarvis.

Christ the woman could scare him.

Unfortunately, Zola was something that both Howard and Chester agreed on for SHIELD. They needed his brain to deconstruct Hydra and its remaining alliances around the world, and when it came to a decision between the three of them, Peggy had been outvoted.

In retaliation, she had told them some of the information Hermione had passed on before she- well before she left , but Chester was adamant that their two dimensions were separate for a reason and should always be treated as so. Decisions couldn't be made specifically here just because things had happened the same way in Hermione's previous world. It made sense for Zola to work for them, to pay off some of the bad karma he'd accumulated within Hydra, and it wasn't as if he wasn't watched by everyone 100% of the time. The man couldn't take a shit without them knowing about it, he would be kept under control! They just had to somehow change Peggy's mind of it.

By the time the Korean War had begun, Peggy hadn't necessarily been convinced, but she was accepting of Zola's medical and technological advances. SHIELD and therefore America had a leg up in the next war because of him. They used him to save American lives. It was worth working with Hydra scum for that reason alone. So, then Zola was part of the team, and SHIELD grew. Time passed. His visits to Hermione got a little longer in-between rendezvous as the world just gave him piles of bigger shit to deal with every year, but he always made sure that she was taken care of.

She had the best doctors money could buy for people in her situation. Her brain activity was monitored constantly, her physical needs attended to daily, and was given the highest medical care available every minute of the day just in case she decided to wake up one morning and shock them all to hell.

He also continued his search for the body of his friend, Steve Rogers, as well. A love interest rival at one point, true, but Steve was still the best man that Howard had ever had the pleasure of knowing. He didn't deserve the ending that he got- no one did, but especially he and Hermione. For whatever reason, Howard was still alive when people like them were taken away and he'd be damned if he let that obvious second chance at life slip through his fingers. By 1953 after a visit to Hermione's treatment center, and then a very long talk with her doctor, he noticed something even more.

She didn't look to be aging.

Granted, maybe it was because of all the stress of Stark Industries that Howard looked to be aging faster, but he could tell that in the nearly ten years Hermione had been lying asleep, nothing else had changed about her. Not a grey hair had sprouted, not a wrinkle had formed. Her curls got longer and had to be cut just like her fingernails, but nothing else led to any sign that she was physically getting older. It took them another five years to confirm his theory, and by that time, he knew that the United States government couldn't be trusted.

Fearful of anyone else finding out about Hermione's new immortal condition, the three founders of SHIELD made the decision to completely wipe Agent Hermione Granger from history. Her name and relationship to anyone in the War were redacted. Her missions were buried, communications burned, and all of her accomplishments covered up. Whatever had remained in any government files were removed and converted into SHIELD storage. No one would be able to ever find out about who she was, where she'd come from, or how to find her.

It hurt Howard to do so, and he knew it killed Peggy because taking away their history with her made it feel like she truly was dead, but it was the only way to keep her safe. They had to make it look like she had never existed in the first place so no one had reason to look for her until she decided to wake back up. It was all for her. Hell, it always probably would be.

ARNIM ZOLA

Armin Zola grinned from beyond the glass window outside of the sealed lab. His experiments had worked, and the subject was more than just responding to stimulants. It was up and awaiting orders. Aware, but under complete control of its handler. He had done it.

The body of an enemy had been repurposed for Hydras' will, and the origination of mind control he had learned from Johann Fennhoff was paying off in delicious ways. Hydra now had a supersoldier. A perfect weapon. The first of his kind, and the beginning of a new Era, right under the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division's own nose.

He wanted to laugh and delight in their ignorance, but it would do no good for him to celebrate too early. He still had too many eyes on him, and he couldn't give away the insurrection of Hydras power just yet.

He grinned even further, twisting his thin lips wide across his teeth and he hit the intercom button for communication within the room beyond. "Put zhe soldier on ice. We will recall him when we have a greater purpose."

Later. When Armin could fully stretch his potential within America's spy program, and when Hydra had the perfect moment to destroy their enemies. In the meantime, former US Army Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes would be put to sleep until his talents were needed. Just as planned.

HERMIONE GRANGER

The energy wrapped around her. An anaconda with millions of arms that sledgehammered her from every side, pulling her up from the ground by her chest and filling her with blistering lightning. The energy - the mix of tesseract and her own magic - attacked her, razing every neuron in her body, overloading every atom. She was dying. She could taste blood, hear her own heartbeat, and her own screams. She was dying, and it was pulling her apart by the foundation of her very being.

Nothing else mattered except for the pain. The pulverizing excruciation that enveloped everything she was. She was dying.

Gods, Merlin, whatever there was, just let her die.

Hermione opened her eyes.

She blinked several times because no, this couldn't be right, but after several attempts of clearing her vision and finding it the same, her eyebrows came together in confusion. The medical equipment items around her, the blankets she was covered in, and the hospital bed she rested against looked real, but also misty. Like nothing around her was actually solid. She was - here, she knew. Awake- alive- sane, probably. But nothing felt real. Like the cotton of the hospital bed blanket under her hand was not actually touching her. A centimeter away from reality. The feeling of life.

She snatched her hand away and looked around the hospital room frantically. What was this? Shouldn't she be dead? Bleeding out- brain dead even, from - pain, excruciating, agonizing pain, scorching her bones, filling her throat with blood, blocking her- she shook her head to clear the aftertaste of the tesseract's power.

What in the world had she woken up to? Why was the world almost hazy?

Better yet, where was Steve?

Her mind tumbled through several scenarios and explanations until one horribly horrible thought occurred to her, and it knocked the air right out of her lungs. What if the tesseract had sent her to a new world again? What if this world looked different because she wasn't even there to begin with?

Someone opened the misty door, cutting off her drowning thoughts, and like everything else here, the image of the nurse came in with wispy lines of what could have been a crisp uniform. She was solid but hazy at the edges; here, but not really here? As Hermione stared, the nurse stepped into her room, blurring in her movement. Hermione's eyes widened. The nurse was at the door, then suddenly at the foot of Hermione's bed with a clipboard in hand, then again suddenly at her side messing with a needle beneath Hermione's arm - like she had jumped and appeared into place, moving too fast for Hermione's eyes to follow. Like she was perpetually on fast-forward.

Hermione jerked up and away at her abrupt arrival before her, but the nurse's eyes stayed downcast at Hermione's arm and Hermione's followed the incredibly fast movements with widened eyes and-

Hermione's arm. The one she had clutched to her chest from the jump scare. She was aware of the fact that she had retreated from the nurse's touch, but the hazy-lined nurse didn't seem to notice. In fact, the woman stayed focused, hurriedly moving and continuing with whatever tasks she was doing, unaware of Hermione's conscious and incredulous stare. Like Hermione wasn't even there.

With a sinking feeling that reached down to her toes, Hermione looked down at her arm curled protectively close, and then lower still. Her eyes widened. Her brain came to a screeching stop, and bile rose up the back of her throat. Below the sight of her arm, a suddenly ghostly looking appendage against herself, a firm image of Hermione's sprawled body lay in the sheets beneath, under, and behind Hermione's current upright form. A very real, and familiar body.

She didn't feel the shivers down her back as she threw herself forwards and twisted around on the bed to look behind her, but the picture of her quickly unraveling situation struck her like a freezer's icy fingers down her spine and she swallowed down the feeling of wanting to vomit and shake at the same time. For behind her, where Hermione had woken up and had previously been laying… was Hermione. Curly hair carefully brushed out and longer than she had ever worn it before down her sides, dressed in a hospital patient's uniform, with closed eyes against the world, deep in an unmoving sleep. Clearly herself, even if Hermione couldn't immediately recognize her.

Her jaw fell open. Her eyes widened, and a wave of lightheaded daze flushed through her head. The explanation of what she was doing there while her body was right there started to spin through her thoughts. What did this mean? How had this happened? How did she- she didn't even know how to phrase the question, but get back?

Was she a ghost?

No- no- that wasn't possible. She rejected that idea almost as soon as it passed through her thoughts. Ghosts had to be severed from their living mass to invoke a spectral form, and her body was clearly living- hooked up to several advanced-looking monitors and unmoving- but alive. Somehow Hermione was something else. In a hazy, misty way.

Astral Projection perhaps? But then that seemed even more improbable. She had never dedicated herself to learning the meditations it took to accomplish. A very specific transfer of energy was impossible to replicate and she was-

She had no idea what to think about anything, actually. More questions than she'd ever had before filled her mind, and she was teetering between feeling frustrated, fearful, and heartsick. Where was she? Where was Steve?

"So you're truly awake," a pale, toneless voice stated.

Hermione jerked at the voice and turned back around to the end of her bed. There, standing serenely with her arms crossed behind her back, even more hazy than the nurse and translucent, and somehow looking to be hovering in the air, was the Ancient One. The woman she had met some years previously who had claimed to be a type of magic-user. She wore the same strange layered Tibetan robes as Hermione had seen her last, her head still completely bald, and addressed Hermione like it was she who was the one surprised in this situation instead of the other way around. Hermione's jaw dropped again.

"What-"

"I have been keeping you in my thoughts since your disappearance from our plane of existence and managed to create an alarm for myself that would sound should you ever wake. My experiment seems to have been successful, and I am glad for it," she smiled gently as if the words out her mouth made any sort of sense at all, and Hermione nearly choked on her own breath in answer.

Plane of existence… Should ever wake… the tone of which the Ancient One spoke suggested several things at once, and Hermione paled at the implications.

"You-" she broke out and stopped. "How-" Her thoughts whirled around, and she was unable to firmly grasp any one idea for long, she had so many questions.

The Ancient One seemed to understand, and her thin lips curled into a patient smile. "Tell me what you last remember and I will help where I can."

Some day, we will meet properly when your soul is broken by this world… Hermione couldn't help but remember what the Ancient One had said the last time they'd met. She felt tears come to her eyes. Had she seen this coming? All that had happened to her? The loss of Bucky, the battle with the Red Skull, whatever this was… had she known?

"I was dying," Hermione whispered her answer, her voice soft and resigned to her own ears. "The tesseract and my own magic had come together violently and it was thrown back at me before I could move to escape. It … filled me. Every part of what I am, I could feel it in my heartbeats and knew that it was with me as if I could feel my own atoms." She remembered the pain of it vibrating her bones, the desperation, and anguish that still sat sour on her tongue. "And it was tearing me apart," she confessed in a lower whisper, eyes far away. "Ripping me to pieces from the inside, unmaking and remaking what I am." She shuddered.

"And then?" the Ancient One said without an ounce of emotion on her face.

Hermione wasn't sure if she hated it or was immensely grateful. "And then I woke up," she answered. "And the world was... this. My body was not my body, and I realized that somehow time moves differently here."

"Yes, it does," the Ancient One said, and the corners of her mouth turned down. "So let me put your mind at ease. You are not in a different universe as the tesseract had once moved you before but in a different dimension. Parallel to the one we both live in, a thin distance between the fabric of reality."

Hope hit Hermione like a punch in the stomach as her mind fumbled over the older woman's words. "I am not… displaced again?" she asked.

The Ancient One shook her head once. "Just beyond its present limits."

Relief and joy swept through her, blinding her eyes as tears filled them. She was not alone again. She was still home, just- "Then what is this place?" Hermione asked, gesturing to the haze on everything around them. "How do I get back? How am I like this? " she then pointed to the sleeping Hermione still lying motionless in the bed behind her and her own see-through hands.

The Ancient One settled her hands within her long robes just below her chest, and answered the younger woman down her nose, neither in anger nor in comfort, but soft apathy. "You are physically still settled in our reality. I have seen your body laid unmoving, and have watched the breath in your chest. However, your consciousness, what you might even call your soul, was flung a dimension length away after the events that caused this. We are currently in what is called the Astral Dimension, the one closest to our present reality, but severed from it. The time aspect you had mentioned is part of this reality. Everything here either moves slowly or very fast depending on the energy created to breach here, and yours has thrown time forwards."

Outside, the day had fallen into night, city lights suddenly appeared beneath and out across her window. She could see not that she was on a high level of a tall building. In a different dimension, weird, but not so far as she had feared. Thank Merlin. "And how do I get back to ours? Are you here to help me?"

She paused. "I can help to get you back, but only to a certain extent, and only if your body allows me to." Before Hermione could ask what that meant, the Ancient One continued on. "When your own internal dimensional energy, what you call magic, mixed with the dimensional energy of the tesseract - one of the six singularities from the birth of Creation, they reacted violently against the other and threw you out of the very fabric of the universe. It did this as the backlash from both energies warred within you."

A shiver passed down Hermione's spine. "You're talking about the pain." Burning, tearing, breaking, and unmaking, heat like she's never known, acid down her throat, and the thump of her own heartbeat in her ears-

The Ancient One nodded and Hermione leaned back unintentionally away from the other woman. "Both energies originated from different universes. They attacked each other, changing what was. They could not live peacefully together within you as a conductor of dimensional energy as you were made to, but had to determine which was stronger. As you said, the pain seemed to be even in your very atoms- and I believe that was exactly what was happening. You were being remade from the simplest part of what you were and changed into something else, something made for this place."

Another shiver passed through Hermione. She didn't need an abbreviation of the situation to understand that it meant how close to death she had been. The fundamental energy that represented this universe had quite literally chewed her up and spat her back out.

The Ancient One's words seemed to vibrate between them. Dimensional energy… As you were made to… Remade.

"How do you know this?"

Her pale eyes flicked down. "I am the Sorcerer Supreme in this world, and it has always been my mission to understand and negate any threats that might come to Earth."

"I'm not a th-"

"Perhaps not," her eyes snapped back up, calm and cool, "but the tesseract has always been. Johann took what was not meant to be used for human desires, and while I had foreseen many different outcomes to that day, I did not know which direction the future had unraveled for. I made sure to visit before you were sent to America so I could see for myself. I can feel the energy within you- both halves of it working together and against for something else."

Hermione swallowed. "Does that mean my body still wars with itself then? Am I stuck here until the dimensional energies even out within me?" She looked over her shoulder to the solid representation of herself. Her body looked to be in a dreamless sleep.

"Yes. Your consciousness won't let you return to your body until you are remade. Think of it as a biological reaction to protect your sanity."

Something leadened sank in Hermione's stomach. "How long will that take? I have people waiting for me!" Steve. Peggy. Howard. ... oh Merlin, Erik.

"One cannot calculate the cosmic energies inside your body, be grateful that it's only been this long and not countless centuries," she answered, and Hermione froze. A thick, terrible feeling slid down her back and chilled her.

"How long..." she started and stopped, her mouth going dry. "How long have I been here? In this bed- asleep?"

The Ancient One seemed to sigh.

Hermione felt as if she was freestanding on a razor blade's edge. Frozen and waiting for the push over the precipice.

"It is currently the year 1965," she answered slowly, and Hermione felt the world drop out from beneath her. "Just over 20 years."

20 years.

It echoed in her head. Two decades. Four Presidents. Another war started and ended, and then started again.

20 years.

"...What?"