Here it is! A bit earlier than expected, I can't promise to be this fast for the rest. I also still have The Hunt on the docket. Enjoy besties
Chapter 2. Through the Veil
They hit the pavement like missiles crashing through the crust of the Earth. Hermione felt a fire like no other travel through her limbs, in the hollow parts of her, through the meat of her muscles and the brittle marrow of her bones. She groaned in pain, unable to open her eyes, colours and sounds swirling in one ear and out the other, body limp and mind broken.
The sounds of a siren. Blue and red. And voices. Angry ones.
"Oi you lot, had too much to drink last night?"
"Reckon they're even alive, chief?"
A foot in her ribs. Hermione grunted.
"Yeah, just passed out. Call an ambulance, will you?"
Where the fuck were they?
"We're fine, officer. I'm sorry for any disturbance we might have caused." She recognised that voice. It was familiar, a distant echo from the past, both obscure and light, close and yet so far away.
"Fine? Is that why you're naked in the middle of the street, Sir?" The sound broke down in Hermione's ears, trickling through her brain. What on Earth was going on?
"Simple case of misfortune, officer. We were mugged just minutes earlier, and the thief asked for all my clothes. To humiliate me more than he already had, I suppose." The familiar voice was a steady stream, reassuring and strong. "He knocked my girlfriend out as he left. I'd rather just go home if that's fine by you." Girlfriend?
A grunt. Hushed tones. Hermione moaned, tilting her head to the side. She was dizzy.
"I suppose you'd better get some clothes on you. Come by the station later for a statement about that mugger."
"We will, officer. Thank you for understanding."
An onomatopoeia. Hermione couldn't be sure… humph, perhaps? It seemed like a disheartened agreement. "And you're sure she doesn't need an ambulance? She seems pretty out of it."
"I'm a doctor, I'll be able to take care of her. I'll make sure to get her checked out by my colleagues at the hospital if I see any sign of a concussion. Our car is parked just a few yards away and she has the keys." A doctor? Their car?
More hushed tones. A single string of words stood out—"but chief, we're due to go drink with those girls in just half an hour"—and the situation seemed to come to a resolution.
"Alright then, Sir." A click. Rummage, rummage. Metals and plastic and something else. The muffled noise of fabric. "Take these."
"Thanks for all the help, officers. We really appreciate it!"
Footsteps. Click. Slam. Screeching wheels. The feeling of gas being exhaled out of a car on her skin.
"Hermione, love, can you hear me?"
She groaned, her eyelids still firmly shut. "C-can't m-move. Ev-everything h-hurts."
"Do you have your wand with you?"
She didn't know. Did she? Had she used it recently? "I-I d-don't know." She choked on the words, a pressure building in her chest.
"It's alright, love. Let me check."
Strong hands trailing her, light as a feather, not daring to poke and prod too much, moving down her body—then, fingers trailing the bare skin under the hem on her shirt, just above her stomach, removing a piece of wood that was burnt into her skin. She hadn't even noticed it.
"This might hurt just a bit."
A hand in hers. And then—nothingness. A rubber tube tightening around her, pressing her ribs into her organs, and dragging her away.
The soft velvet of a thick couch under her skin—that was the first thing Hermione felt when she woke. Still in a daze, her eyelids fluttered, trying to reconcile the bits of the past, to make them fit into a whole picture. It was all wrong—round spheres trying to fit into square holes, triangles espousing trapezes, blue clashing with red, whites melting into blacks. Her anchor to reality had fallen prey to the depths of the sea, no longer visible to the naked eye, below the creatures of her subconscious, their tails and fins swirling through the currents of her mind, blurring her grasp on the logical and the rational.
"Alright there, love?"
Thunder zapped through Hermione. She jolted from the couch, her eyes now wide open, all matters of the curious and the strange shoved into the coloured files she kept on the shelves of her mind.
"Sirius?" she stretched out her hand, expecting him to be a hallucination. He wasn't. Warm skin, firm flesh. "You're alive." The amazement in her voice brought it down to a whisper; tears formed in the corners of her eyes. She pulled her hand away, ashamed by her impulse—Sirius did not react.
"I am, love. Don't ask me how, I wouldn't be able to tell you." There was something broken in his voice. A whisper of confusion, a dash of astonishment.
Memories came flooding down the neatly cut trenches of Hermione's conscious. "I-I resurrected you." Her eyes trailed the ground frantically as the reminiscence zapped through her in sudden and brutal movements—she saw an old carpet, discoloured by the years, a glass coffee table with knickknacks spread on top, an odd pile of magazines featuring Clint Eastwood and Robin Williams and Burt Reynolds, cherry floorboards. "I used a spell, an ancient spell, I… I called you from beyond the Veil. B-but," she closed her eyes, the image of their colliding bodies falling through the white fabric between the realms, "s-something was wrong. And you were going to fall back in, s-so I… I grabbed you. An-and w-we fell. Together." She lifted her eyes to meet his. "Where are we?"
Sirius did not answer. His grey eyes burned through her, peeling the layers of her, trying to dismantle the disconcerting truth she had exposed, guts and liver and all, out in the open. "You resurrected me? That's not possible, Hermione. There are Laws. A life—"
"—for a life, I know, I know. I think that's why it went wrong, why you had that… that… stain, on your chest." She didn't know whether she wanted to throw up or faint or cry. She was an imbecile.
Sirius raised the T-shirt he was wearing and pointed to his heart. "This one?"
The stain was still there—dark, darker than all the tattoos he had inked on himself, darker than the Azkaban prisoner number on the slump of his shoulder. But…
"It stopped growing!" Hermione exclaimed, reaching out to touch him, following yet another impulse. One more to her ever-growing deck of card.
She retreated as soon as her fingers grazed his skin, her face flushed. "S-sorry."
Sirius smiled. "It's fine, love." He pulled his shirt back down. "It has stopped growing. I do wonder why."
So did she. None of it made any sense. "Where are we?" she asked again.
"We're in an old shack. It was passed down to me by an uncle. Remus and I used to live here, years ago. We stayed here for a summer after Hogwarts, while we figured out what to do with ourselves after Hogwarts. Then we joined the Order, and he joined the werewolves, while I… mucked about, I guess you could say. We never came back here. I couldn't stand being here alone."
"There's not as much dust as I would have imagined for something abandoned for so long." It seemed anecdotal, pointless even. The dust was not the point—she wasn't sure what the point even was. Her eyes flickered over the furniture—it hardly seemed like it had been abandoned for twenty years. Granted, it was old—but it looked put together, like it had recently been brought in from an antique shop.
"That's… that's because I think at this point in time, it has only been abandoned for about a year. I sold it to a family in 1981, a few months before James and Lily…" he trailed off.
Hermione remained quiet, her eyes still flickering around, trying to make sense of what he had just said. When they landed on the magazines, she immediately understood what was off about them. The quality of the photos bore the distinct mark of the 1970s, but the paper—the paper was fresh, glossy. Like the magazines had just been printed a few months ago. She picked one up—it felt no different than an issue of last week's Witch Weekly (not that she read that trash voluntarily—Pansy simply forced her to, sometimes).
It then dawned on her.
"Are you saying that… that we're back in time? Sirius, that's not supposed to be possible. We fell through the Veil. We should be dead. We should be… we should… no." Hermione's body shook limb from limb, her insides pulsating and knocking against her ribcage, tremors flittering beneath her skin.
Sirius rose from his chair and sat next to her. He pressed a hand to her shoulder blades, massaging them slowly; his mouth closed in on her ear, whispering words of calm, breathing hot air against her hair. "It's alright, love," again and again, in a litany that danced through her, until she finally felt her breathing steady.
"I don't understand what is happening. Is this… is this what Death feels like?"
Her gaze was hopeful, eerily so—in truth, she already knew the answer.
Sirius was still leaning close to her, his arm wrapped around her shoulders. He wiped a tear from her cheek before looking away, his eyes focused on the wall at the back of the room. "No, I'm still alive. Well, if only just. But Death is… fuzzy to me, now. Like a dream I keep running after and can't catch. If we were dead, I'd remember. I think."
Hermione pursed her lips in frustration. She tilted her head—her curls covered the flush of her cheeks, the tremors in her lips, the tears at the corners of her eyes. She had fucked up—royally. In a matter of life and death, she had found a way to mess with both, at the same time.
"Hermione, I…" Sirius paused, his hand drawing circles absentmindedly on her back. "Why did you bring me back?" She could tell through the curtain of her hair that he was still refusing to look at her. She wondered for a moment if he hated her.
"For Harry." The lie slipped out of her as easily as if it had been made of silk, soft and smooth and supple. Worthy of an Unspeakable.
He finally turned back to look at her. "Is Harry not doing well?" The worry in his voice horrified Hermione.
"Oh, no, Harry is doing great! I should have told you, of course. We… we won the war. Voldemort died three years ago… well, nineteen years from now, actually. And… Harry's an Auror, Ron too. They love it. We still have lunch together every day, in fact, I… I was actually trying to set Harry up with a friend of mine before… before all this." She choked on the last words, shaking from limb to limb. She hadn't even thought of telling him about this—not even if the spell had worked properly.
Next to her, Sirius was beaming. He dropped his hand from Hermione's back, letting it fall to his side, and she felt a void grow inside her throat. "Harry's happy." His voice was distant—a whisper. "I'm relieved," he added, the corners of his mouth twisting themselves into a sad smile. He was looking away from her—again. Maybe he really did hate her.
Silence coated the room in cotton. Hermione felt like she was suffocating. She let the thick air strangle her—she did not want to be the one breaking it, for fear of saying something she might regret. Something true.
"But, Hermione, if Harry doesn't need me, then… why?"
She tried answering. She really did. Every excuse, every lie bubbled up her, hot magma burning inside and wrecking her. But nothing came out—she couldn't find it in her to lie to him, not again.
"I'm sorry, Sirius. It was reckless of me. I don't… now that it's real, I'm not even sure why I did it." Still a lie—but not entirely. "I'm so sorry."
She crumbled onto herself, sobs rattling her flesh, snot running down her nose, knees hitting the floor as she fell and shooting pain in her bones. "I'm so sorry." She repeated it through her sobs, again and again and again.
Sirius remained still, quiet. She felt his gaze burning through her but did not dare come back up. Out of embarrassment, or shame, or something altogether different. She was losing grasp of her sanity, waves of violent emotions just washing over her, drowning her.
"Hermione," he said after a while. "Please don't be sad. I'm… okay. I'm alive, aren't I? And you're alive. And we're in 1979. We'll find a way to get back. It's okay, love." He placed a hesitant hand on her back and gently soothed her, waiting for the exhaustion to take over and for the tears to dry.
After a moment, Hermione quieted down. Skin flushed and hair wild, she sat back on the couch. Embarrassed—that was definitely it. There were other things there too, vague and imprecise, but embarrassment took the cake and ate it whole.
"I should go wash up." Her voice came out in a whimper, and she grew hotter. "Is there uh… a bathroom around here?"
He nodded and pointed to a door on the left. Gathering what little dignity she still had, Hermione walked across the living room to the bathroom and locked the door behind her.
The mirror did not paint a pretty picture. It wasn't that Hermione was ugly—though, in all fairness, she also wasn't not ugly. She had grown used to that plain face of hers, to the way her freckles were sprinkled unevenly across her skin, to the odd shape of her mouth even after her teeth had been shortened, to the heavy hood of her eyelids, to the little bump of her nose, to the way her curls disobeyed her constantly, even if she had since learned how to keep them healthy and soft. No, the ugliness staring back at her had nothing to do with her features; it had everything to do with the mess of emotions painted on her by the red of her blush, the white glimmer of her tears, the custard yellow snot clogging her nostrils. The colours betrayed something dark in Hermione. She had torn someone from the beyond, someone who, by all accounts, only wanted one thing, something he had obtained, even if it hadn't been during his years on Earth. Harry was happy—Sirius had given up his life, quite literally, for his godson. He had achieved what he so dearly wanted. He had travelled the seas and fought treacherous land after spending years locked up to pursue a single goal. A goal that had long been accomplished.
Harry was safe, and fine, and happy. That was enough for Sirius. He was at peace.
Hermione had been greedy, hungry, nursing a flimsy crush that ate her alive. And that was what stared back at her in the mirror: the face of an insatiable woman. One who had torn to shreds the Laws of Nature, the morality of being and the duties of magic for her own self-interest. The reflection in the mirror stared back at her, smirking.
"This is what you wanted, Hermione. Aren't you happy?" The reflection wiped away the snot and tears with the back of her hand. "You're alone, with him. Okay, it's not home, I'll grant you that, and the place does look a little… well, let's just say it could do with some redecorating. But it's you. And him. And you're going to cry about that?"
Hermione stared back at herself, horrified. This had to be a delusion. It had to be. The product of a demon lurking in her imagination.
"It's not like you know how to go back, anyway. I think you should just stay here and enjoy it," continued the reflection, indifferent to the horror painted on Hermione's face.
Hermione couldn't stand it anymore. She felt a violent pressure rise from her stomach and punched the mirror, shattering it along with a few bones in her hand. She yelped in pain, only covering her mouth once she realised her mistake—but it was too late. Footsteps rushed to the door.
"Hermione, what happened? Are you okay?"
She rolled her intact hand into a fist and bit into it to release the pain. "Yeah," she managed, "I'm good. Do… do you happen to have my wand, by chance?" She needed to clean this mess up before he could see it—she was not in any state to answer more difficult questions she didn't not have the answer to. Not today.
"Yes, yes, I do. I'll just slide it under the door. Here." He sounded worried. She hated causing that in him.
She thanked him meekly and silently repaired both the mirror and the bones in her right hand before thoroughly cleansing her face. She hesitated before lifting her gaze, fearing the demon in the mirror. Her darkest desires morphed into her own reflection.
Not that there seemed to be any need to. The cold and calculating Hermione was gone from the reflection, replaced instead by the woman she was now. Torn, sad, skin red from being scrubbed too hard, eyes bloodshot and shining. It was her—maybe not a vision she was in love with, but one she knew and understood. And that was enough for her. She took a deep breath and unlocked the bathroom door.
When she retreated to the living room, she immediately took note of the tension in Sirius' posture. He was sitting on the couch, leaning forward, back straight and elbows digging into the flesh of his thighs, hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, the edges of his temples stretched beyond his hairline, stare firmly planted ahead of him. Rigid—a statue of Ares, if he had been a tattooed man in 1979. Upon approaching, Hermione realised he was not entirely immobile—his right leg was shaking uncontrollably, his chest rose in rapid bursts, and his eyes were flickering from one point to the next. She followed his gaze with her own and noticed two pictures hanging in the back. One of them depicted all four Marauders—Prongs, Moony, Padfoot and Wormtail—standing close to one another, in their Hogwarts uniforms. A snitch was flying above James, and Peter was staring at his friends while they all laughed. The other photograph had undoubtedly been taken in the Muggle world: James, Lily, Remus and Sirius, sitting around a small round table at a beer garden, pints of beers huddled close, like they were toasting. Both images were animated, like all illustrations and pictures taken with wizard apparatus were prone to be—an aura of happiness radiated from them, so strong Hermione wished she could melt into it.
"Thank you. For the wand," she said gently, sitting next to them.
"It's yours," he uttered in response, still lost in thought.
She lowered her gaze to his hands. It was wrong to be staring at him, in this moment especially. She knew that—she could feel the strings of her morality being tugged by her consciousness, but… she couldn't help it. She simply couldn't. She trailed the pulsing veins, rivers flowing blue under his skin, zigzagging and branching off right below his knuckles, each one a hill of bone acting as a frontier to his fingers. Hermione's breath hitched, caught in her throat. Long trails of skin and bone, the traces of time and pain secluded into calluses—the path to the end of the Earth, scorched and burned and fragile. The beauty held there brought heat to her skin. She lost herself in that burnt soil, imagining his callused hand wrapped around her throat, sinking her into the crust of the Earth, leaving a red print on her, marking her. She pictured his long fingers digging into her, pushing through her folds and forcing her to beg for mercy.
"Are you feeling better?"
She jolted back to reality, a blush spreading across her cheeks. "Oh, yes. I'm fine." She tried to wave the images out of her mind, blushing harder as she recalled the thoughts that had grabbed hold of her. She could only thank Morgana that he wasn't a Legilimens. "I'm sorry to be putting you through this, Sirius. I never intended to cause this much chaos."
He looked at her. "I know you only had the best intentions, Hermione. You were always so protective of Harry. I imagine he wouldn't be where he is now if it weren't for you."
The air was trapped inside Hermione's lungs. She was unable to decipher what he was feeling—his eyes told her nothing. He was only referring to her by her first name. He wasn't betraying a single emotion. The fear that he hated her, that he would curse her for doing this to him if given the chance, was eating at her. Viciously. Worms and maggots of terror digging into her flesh, poisoning her.
"Harry would have been fine without me," she lied. "But I am glad that I could help him. He's my best friend."
He gave her a small smile and her stomach churned. He had to resent her. He simply had to. "If I may ask, how did it all end?"
Hermione remained quiet for a moment, digging through the traumatic memories she had boxed up and shoved away in an effort to avoid them. "Harry and Ron and I spent a year looking for pieces of Voldemort's soul. Horcruxes, they're called. The last one was at Hogwarts and, that's… that's when he figured out what we were doing, where we were going. That's where the war ended. It was…" She paused, feeling a stammer at the back of her throat. "B-bloody. A-and h-horrific." She took a deep breath and pushed on. "W-we lost a l-lot of p-people. L-like F-Fred, d-do you remember him?"
Sirius nodded, a sadness seeping in his eyes. "Shame. I liked him." He looked away. "What then?"
Hermione dithered. She knew she couldn't hide the truth from him. She also knew he would be irate once he found out. She steadied her breathing and kept going. "We saw Snape being killed. He gave Harry his memories as he was dying. And Harry… Harry took them to the Pensieve. He saw that Snape regretted feeding the prophecy to Voldemort once he found out Voldemort would kill Lily. He asked Dumbledore for Harry's family to be protected and became a double agent. That's how Dumbledore knew to trust him. Because he still loved Lily." She could feel Sirius stiffen next to her and nearly stumbled on her own tongue trying to get the last words out. "The memories also showed Harry that he was the last Horcrux and that he had to die at Voldemort's hand for Voldemort to truly be defeated. So Harry s-sa…" Her stammer returned and she tripped on the word a few times before finally getting it out. "… sacrificed himself. But he didn't die—Voldemort just killed the last piece of himself. W-we all thought he was d-dea…" Hermione was growing frustrated with herself, with her body for rejecting the thoughts and the words. "… dead. But h-he wasn't, and his sacrifice ensured none of use d-died in the last battle. M-Molly killed your cousin, Bellatrix. And H-Harry killed Voldemort." Relieved to have gotten to the end, Hermione let a long breath out. She stared at the floor, unsure of what to expect—next to her, Sirius was eerily quiet. He was staring at the two photographs again.
"You seem lost in thought," tentatively said Hermione, hoping she wasn't poking the bear too hard.
"I'm just thinking that… we're in the past. We're here before it started. Before James and Lily died, before they were even married, before Peter was chosen as the Secret Keeper. Before Harry had to be raised by those awful Muggles and sacrifice himself to a war, to Voldemort."
Hermione nodded thoughtfully, the cogs of her mind already whirring and puffing. His tone worried her—like he was planning ahead, sorting out decisions. She refused to believe it—he couldn't possibly be suggesting what she thought he was suggesting. No.
"And I'm alive now, but this, this thing is on my chest. It could spread if we go back. But maybe not… not if…"
Hermione closed her eyes. She braced herself for his next words, the final blow to this flimsy castle of cards she had built through her impulsive decisions.
"If we took it upon ourselves to change the past."
She was fucked.
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