Hermione barely had time to herself in the next few hours. Wherever she went, she was surrounded by ecstatic Gryffindors trying to claw their way to Harry, who's fame seemed to quadruple in the span of a few hours. She tried to break away from him, but every time he would give her puppy eyes so pitiful that she couldn't leave him.
Hermione simultaneously wanted to roll her eyes and ward people away from him out of sheer pity. He looked like he was getting sensory overload from all the people who wanted his attention, and only Fred and George asking him to open the golden egg gave the room any semblance of silence. It gave an almighty SCREEEECH, in what Hermione knew was Mermish above water.
"Blimey, that's worse than Percy singing in the shower!" yelled Fred, hands over his ears.
George, who had done the same, agreed. "Or like Snape'd be, confronted with shampoo!"
And just like that, the magical silence was broken, chaos resuming as everyone roared with laughter at the twins. She sat back in a comfortable leather chair and surveyed tbe chaos. At eleven, the Gryffindors were finally winding down from their party, and Hermione had been curled up, reading, for the last three hours. Harry collapsed next to her, smiling wearily.
"Did you have fun?" She said blandly.
Harry snorted. "Mione, I think dealing with the dragon was easier. At least I knew someone could contain it after I finished the task."
Hermione stifled a giggle. "Oh come on, they weren't that bad."
"Not that bad- Hermione, you saw them! I like a party as much as the next bloke, but not when they keep cheering and toasting me. I'm not even a real champion! That win was a fluke." He looked so earnest, sitting forward in his seat emphatically. She looked at him with sympathy; honestly, she would have enjoyed the whole thing a lot less, and probably refused to put up with it. Harry seemed to manage the crowd a lot better than this time around, but this Harry hadn't met their disbelief and scorn just hours before the first task.
All in all, Hermione considered the whole ordeal a job well done. If only everything were as simple as helping Harry in the tournament.
She fiddled with the golden chain of the time turner around her neck (it never left her sight, and she only took it off to shower). She knew she'd have to turn back time to talk to Draco, but she was tired. She went upstairs and fell headfirst into a much-deserved rest.
She woke with a start, a feeling of dread snapping her out of the arms of Morpheus and into the cold tower. Hermione had fallen asleep in her robes, and felt quite mucky as she was. It was morning, just before 7, and everyone was asleep.
Hermione grabbed a quick shower and tidied herself up: if she knew anything about Draco Malfoy, it was that he'd take any physical untidiness as a weakness. Until the end, he tried his damndest to look stunning. She cast her typical hair neatening and defrizzing charms, and donned her nicest robes – to anyone else, she may appear to be dressing to impress. Draco, though, he would see it as what it truly was: battle armor. She had no idea how Draco would approach this situation, what the visions of their future had done to him. She didn't even know if she was meeting an enemy or a friend. Mission accomplished (she looked as stunning and dangerous as her sixteen-year-old self could,) she marched out of the common room and down the stairs.
In the safety of her abandoned classroom, Hermione turned back time twelve hours.
It was now 7:31, just thirty minutes after her doppelganger joined all the Gryffindors in celebration upstairs. She sat down at her desk, the ancient teacher's desk that she'd taken from another abandoned classroom in September, and spread out her parchment.
It was time for some Arithmancy.
Hermione wrote out some equations. Her experience plus Draco's knowledge of the future, against her survival rate, was a very comforting 99.9%. The same situation, her experience plus Draco's knowledge, against her survival rate in provoking him, was still a very comfortable 99.8%. So she wasn't going into certain death. Hermione had concluded a long time ago that the 0.1% of the time was about as likely as she was to slip on a trip stair and fall to the first floor, or perhaps that Dobby left a banana peel on the floor of Shell Cottage and slipped, cracking his head open as he went.
Hermione had to assume that this Draco was as knowledgeable as his future self, but had watched it as if it were a movie. He hadn't really gone through all the same struggles as her Draco had. He had clearly decided to let sleeping dragons lie and continue to act out the situations he'd seen in his dreams.
She would survive this meeting, that was as certain as she could be. Without really understanding him as he was right now, in this timeline, she had no way of knowing if the knowledge had affected him, if he changed at all after he started getting dreams in first year.
But then, there was someone who knew if he had changed! Dobby had still been the Malfoy's slave at that point. Hermione's lip curled in distaste as she remembered the abhorrent way they had treated him. She already felt bad enough for the elf for having gone through that. There was no point in drudging it up again, especially since she already had him working hard enough.
Hermione waved her hand lazily in the air to cast a tempus, and saw that it was 7:53. She sighed, set her desk to rights, and smoothed her hair back (it always got bushier when she did Arithmancy, for some reason).
The halls were surprisingly quiet, considering the event that had just finished. Everyone must either be in their common rooms, or perhaps had stayed outside to celebrate – or to commiserate, as the case may be. She didn't mind the quiet walk to the old portrait of Barnibus the Barmy and his trolls, but it gave her too much time to think.
Would Draco be happy to see her? Why had he waited so long?
There was an old oak door on the patch of wall down the seventh floor. The worn wood and cast-iron fit right in with Hogwarts décor, but Hermione was left gaping.
This was the exact door at the entrance of their hideout. The last safe-haven for muggleborns and blood traitors, the headquarters of the Resistance, and where Hermione and Draco had lived for three long years.
She knocked, using the code they taught all their agents. If the knock was even one beat off, you'd be denied entry, and the alarm would blare. That way, even if someone caught on to the number of knocks, they would still set the alarm (one of the Resistance's better ideas, she thought. Although it backfired on Lavender, who had absolutely no sense of rhythm.)
The door opened, and she was greeted by a sneering Draco Malfoy.
"So, Hermione Granger. You decided to show up." He stood squarely in front of the door, and Hermione was surprised by just how very small he was.
She strode into the room, knocking shoulders with him when he didn't move out of her way. Not a friendly visit, then. She thought to herself. What a shame. She had to keep herself from giggling at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation.
"So, Draco Malfoy. You decided to show yourself." She quipped back. "What do you want, Draco?"
Draco's face twisted in distaste. "Don't call me that, Granger," he spat. "We're the only ones with this curse, as far as I can tell, and now I learn you've been mucking it up!"
"What do you mean, I've been mucking it up? What curse?"
"You… you're disrupting the timeline. Salazar's snake, Granger, I thought you were intelligent." She frowned. Disrupting the timeline? She was saving the timeline.
"I assure you, Malfoy, my intelligence far exceeds yours. What the bloody hell are you on about?" She turned away from him angrily, pacing across the lush study the Room of Requirement had created for them.
Draco followed her, and grabbed her arm angrily. "You've got the same dreams I have, I saw them! And you're just destroying their usefulness!" She snatched her arm out of his grip, her two years of training making her much stronger than him. From the corner of her eye, she saw Draco's hand drifting to his hip, where she knew he kept his wand. Faster than a bolt of lightening, Hermione leveled her wand between his eyes.
"Don't. Even. Try." She said dangerously. "I don't know what you think you know, but you're clearly missing something, whether that's between the ears or part of the story, I'm not sure. Unless you tell me exactly what's going on in that bigoted head of yours, you can get ready to kiss all those memories goodbye."
Something in her eyes must have convinced Draco she meant business, for he put his hands out. "Listen, Granger, we wouldn't be having this conversation if you hadn't started ripping apart my most valuable source of information. I told you I had visions of the future. When you performed Legilimency on me, I learned that you have visions of the future, too. I saw them in your mind. But all my memories of this year have changed in one way – just one way – and that's you."
Hermione processed this quickly. So Draco thought she was just like him, only with vague visions of the future instead of having lived through it? She didn't know whether she could trust this Draco yet, however, so she wasn't about to correct him. Instead, she asked, "can you blame me? If you've truly seen the same future I have, wouldn't you want to change it too?"
"I have changed it. Just by acting today, I changed it. And in other ways too, but none so utterly public and stupid as you've done." He flopped into a black armchair by the fire, a picture of aloofness that was belayed by his words.
Hermione reeled back in shock. Who was he to call her stupid? This fourteen-year-old Draco, barely past puberty, with none of the battle experience that she had and none of the sacrifices haunting him. She calculated all of her decisions, sometimes literally with Arithmancy.
"Then you're a fool," she said, anger tightening in her gut. "If you think you can sit back and relax, and keep the future from repeating itself. You don't get it, do you? The chance to save the world just fell in your lap, and you're just going to sit back and let it happen?"
"Like you're doing any better! Prancing around in a costume, protecting bloody Saint Potter from anything bad that could ever happen to him – don't you know what you're changing? I don't see the future anymore, not with certainty. Since you've started changing things, some remains the same and some changes. If you do enough, I can't do anything to get it back on course. We'll just get dreams of a future that won't happen."
Hermione growled. "I'm saving our world, Draco. I, for one, don't want that monster to keep returning time and time again. I've gathered half of the horcruxes already, and I'm going to end him."
Draco's face flashed with concern, confusion, and something else she couldn't identify. "H-horcruxes?"
Hermione rolled her eyes. "Yes, Draco. Horcruxes. Y'know, the thing that made Voldemort so powerful the third time around?"
"You're lying." He looked ashy; shell-shocked, even.
"Why would I lie? What could possibly motivate me to joke about this?"
"I never dreamt of that, Granger. Either you've got a sick sense of humor, or we've got different futures."
Hermione froze. Different futures… if she had come back, was it possible that this wasn't a trickle of her Draco through the veil, but a different Draco Malfoy altogether? From a different timeline?
From the timeline she was creating now?
She shook the thought from her head. That wasn't possible. The memories she saw were too similar, the touches he did to the door and the code too specific- wasn't it?
She needed to know. Her arm, still limply holding her wand, snapped up again. She looked into Draco's icy gray eyes, and for a moment saw a fear that she'd seen far too many times before. "Legilimens!" she cast coldly.
Instead of simply listening for Draco's surface thoughts, Hermione dug into his mind. The mindscape of a fourteen-year-old was chaotic, under-developed. No matter how much Snape had trained him in the mental arts, he was simply too young to have a full mind palace. So instead of searching through a system, like her public library mindscape, she was sifting through fuzzy rooms and hallways, half-developed buildings, and walking on a path with less definition than a cloud at sunset.
It was jarring, turning to see that the wall behind her wasn't truly a wall, more of a red blob in her mental vision, but she moved past it.
She dug. Deeper, deeper into Draco's mind. Past the sensory experiences, past the many whirring thought processes, deeper still until she found what she was looking for.
The subconscious mind. It was a dangerous place to invade for even the most masterful legilimens, because any misstep could lead to extreme memory issues in either the invader or the invaded. The subconscious mind wasn't a very understood concept by any means (although they knew a fair bit better than Sigmund Freud, the muggle psychologist).
So it was with great gentleness that she ghosted over the content of his subconscious mind, careful not to tamper with anything. She wasn't quite sure what she was looking for, but she knew she would know it when she found it.
Finally, she saw what she was looking for – a messy corpse of something… something different. It looked nothing like the murky, underdeveloped world of Draco's mind. It was sharper, more defined. Doing what any diligent researcher and careful Legilimens would do, she poked it.
The entire mindscape rippled, like water disturbed on a still lake. Hermione screwed her eyes shut, waiting for the dizzying spectacle to end. When she had opened her eyes again, however, she saw that it had only gotten worse. She backed out, as quickly as she was able, and went back to Draco's conscious mind.
What the bloody hell was that?
She looked around the mindscape, sure she would have been panting from the effort of running to his conscious mind if it had been reality. Around her, the whole world seemed to be crumbling; the building in which she had found his subconscious bubbled up like molten lava. The fuzzy path she stood on soon followed, and a dark tower was erected where the old building stood.
Fuck. Bloody, buggering fuck, Hermione screamed mentally, unable to form words in this mindscape. The rest of the world started bubbling too, rippling in and out of stable form. She turned around, and the other building she had seen – what she assumed was his sensory experiences – was nothing but clear grass and a bubbling brook. But as she watched, brick by brick a cottage appeared, the stones laying themselves down out of nowhere. Vines appeared over the newly laid stones, and grew over the cottage before her eyes.
She was out of here. Whatever was happening, it was affecting his entire mind, and Hermione shook with the effort of breaking herself free from the mindscape.
She took a shuddering breath, and blinked furiously. Suddenly, she was back on her feet, in the deafening silence of the Room of Requirement. Draco sat still in front of her, in a pose that might even look serene if it weren't for his guileless open eyes.
What had she done?
AN: What are your theories? I'd love to hear them!