March 5, 2013

They were testing her.

She'd been at SHIELD for a full month and while she occasionally met with Director Fury or Agent Romanoff, they still hadn't given her much information on the work she'd been brought on to do. They seemed to favour grilling her about a variety of nonsensical topics like the Avengers or the function of a Pepper-Up potion. Experience in curse-breaking, experience in spell-crafting, ward-crafting… advanced combat training – that's what the mission brief she'd been given by MID had said. And yet, all she'd been doing for the past month was weaving the simple magical inference protection wards into various pieced of SHIELD tech. They certainly did not need a witch as powerful as Hermione for this task, nor was it a task that would justify her leaving behind her whole life for "an indeterminate period of time, no less than THREE (3) months".

They were testing her, so Hermione let them. In a feat that her fifteen-year-old self would have thought impossible, Hermione kept her questions to herself. She kept her head down, focused on the menial tasks they assigned her. If it weren't for the fact that she had, in fact, actually been tortured, she may have likened the experience to torture. Hermione hated not knowing. Knowledge was, after all, power. Knowledge allowed her to be prepared, ready, able to handle whatever the world or the mission threw at her. Not knowing left her vulnerable.

When she reached her office that dreary Tuesday morning, a shiver raced down her spine. Something was wrong. Subtly slipping her wand out of its hidden holster, Hermione felt the comforting weight of the smooth length of wood in her palm. Closing the door behind her with a soft click, Hermione scanned the room with her eyes though nothing appeared amiss. Fingers tightening around her wand, Hermione let her magic reach out through the room.

As she had grown older, Hermione had gained a deeper level of understanding of her magic. While she still needed her wand for many spells, she had realized that some things were better done with innate magic rather than a precise incantation.

It took a moment for her magic to recognize what had made her hair stand on end. Someone magical had been in her office. The signature was faint, and strangely different from anyone she had previously encountered. There wasn't the same vague familiarity she felt with every other magical person she had met. Nothing in the room had been touched, taken, or disturbed.

Firing off a quick text to Director Fury informing him of what she knew – which was admittedly next to nothing – Hermione began to check her wards. While Hermione didn't ward her entire office per MID protocol, she did employ extensive wards to protect any information that could be used to identify who she truly was and what her powers truly were.

Her cursory scan showed no damage to or interference with her wards. Ever thorough, Hermione knelt before her filing cabinet to more carefully inspect the wards, wand in hand. Still nothing. Relief flooded through her. The twinge of anxiety however had her reaching into the drawers to double-check that nothing inside them had been touched. Mercifully, everything inside the drawers seemed to be in order too.

Hermione pulled out her phone to update the Director on the security of her files. Midway through typing out her message, the door to her office opened. Director Fury cut an imposing figure in her doorway as Hermione rushed to stand.

"Director, everything seems to be in place and the wards I placed on my most important files weren't tampered with or touched. Beyond the obvious concerns about how someone magical came to be here in the first place, I believe that everything is fine," Hermione quickly asserted.

Director Fury just looked at her – Hermione, despite her training, couldn't make out what he was thinking. "Come with me," he said, swiftly leaving the office, "We need to debrief."

H – H – H

It had been a week since the traces of a magical presence had been found in her office, and Hermione had no more information about what had occurred, how it had occurred, or why in fact she was truly working with SHIELD. She was approaching her wit's end and was very seriously contemplating marching up to the Director's office and demanding answers from them. For the moment though, her common sense was holding up (who truly thought it would be a good idea to demand information from a top-secret organization?) as she meticulously ran her wand over the latest SHIELD-issued gun she'd been asked to ward against magic inference. She only had a few more items left in the box she'd been given to work on for the day.

Her phone buzzed on the desk, but Hermione was too focused on the intricate movements of her wand to notice. What she couldn't ignore was the message blasted across the building's PA system just moments later.

"AGENT GRANGER TO THE ARMOURY. AGENT GRANGER TO THE ARMOURY."

Well, shit. Hermione finished the last swish of her wand before grabbing her little beaded bag and her phone before rushing out of her office.

The armoury was located in the fourth basement level of the building, carefully hidden away and protected by SHIELD's most robust security measures. Hermione had become well acquainted with the guards who operated the armoury sign out desk during her month at SHIELD as every batch of tech to be warded was picked up from and subsequently dropped off at the desk. Getting summoned like this to the armoury, however, was… new. And after a few years at MID, Agent Hermione Granger knew that new was rarely good.

A/N: This story is cross-posted to AO3 where I've included an illustration for this chapter, if you'd like to check it out. AO3 is also where the chapters are first posted and where the fun adult content will be when we get to that stage... just saying ;) You can find me over there as HelloMyFriends1

A/N 2: Formatting errors have been fixed on the last couple chapters, sorry about that. (I hate ffn's system.) 21/02/2022