So that, when my mother died, and I was left the responsibility of a damaged sister and a wayward brother, I returned to my village in anger and bitterness. Trapped and wasted, I thought! And then, of course, he came.

— Albus Dumbledore


Albus sat by the window in his private quarters trying to read the new edition of Transfiguration Quarterly, an unlit fire at his back doing nothing to temper the chill drafts. He was finding concentrating on the publication more difficult than usual (despite some unusually fine contributions, including one of his own).

He was thinking, as he so often did, of his sister. The Forbidden Forest was dotted through with the browns and golds of the scattered autumn-turned deciduous trees, standing out against the dark, dull green of the pines. Ariana's hair had been an autumn red-brown, darker than his own. He sighed, heavy with regret. If Ariana had been autumn-haired and grey eyed (and how ghastly blank had her eyes been lying there) then he had been spring and summer, with hair like ripe wheat and fierce summer blue eyes and soft, warm lips that belied their cruel twist.

Hallowe'en, as they called it now but which had always been called Samhain in traditional wizarding families, was the night in which the souls of the dead were said to visit their former homes. It was a singularly uncomfortable thought, and every year on this day he was beset by fresh waves of regret over the terrible events all those years ago. Had it truly been forty-five years? He had been preoccupied with that time a great deal since he had looked on Gellert again, no longer a beautiful youth but a man ravaged with his own cruelty, but fewer of his thoughts had been trained on Ariana than on the man that had turned his life, heart, soul inside out and upside down until he had not known himself.

He was being quite unacceptably self-indulgent and stood, knees protesting at the sudden movement, to prepare the hearth. How long had he been sitting in the cold?

Hermione would be arriving soon for her lesson. She always brought a warmth with her; even when she was trying her very best to restrain her fire she was as unsuccessful as she was at containing her unruly hair. He was becoming genuinely fond of the young woman: her courage and composure under what he imagined were stressful circumstances were quite extraordinary.

He did wonder why she was keeping Tom Riddle at arm's length. Was there something in the boy that made her fear him? Albus knew of no one else who mistrusted Riddle, and he longed to ask Hermione outright why, to look into her mind and find out what if there was truly something to fear in the pale, dark eyed boy with the beautiful face and hidden motivations. What secrets did she hold the key to? The temptation flared up, but he pushed it away. Nothing good could come of such an action.

He had hoped that asking Horace to pair them up would lead to more information and he had hinted so much to the girl, but so far it had yielded nothing. He wondered if he should speak to the girl more directly. She was strong, and he had never seen Tom so interested in one of his peers before - however hard the boy tried to hide it. In an odd way, he pitied the boy. He was clearly very intrigued by, and probably attracted to, Hermione, but Albus wondered if Tom would ever recognise that. Insofar as the Professor was aware Tom had never been romantically linked to anyone at Hogwarts before. Perhaps his upbringing, so starved of affection (how Albus shuddered at the memory of that dreadful Muggle institution) rendered him incapable of recognising or acting upon such things?

Still, it seemed too good an opportunity to waste - he didn't expect her interest in Marcus Blishwick to last for much longer. He would wait for the opportune moment and then broach the subject with her. She was old enough, and experienced enough (from what he guessed) with difficult circumstances - and didn't that make his ageing shrivelled heart sink with fear - to cope with a small assignment and spend a few months getting close to Riddle and delving into his secrets.

Yes. She was not like he had been at the same age - where he had been drawn by Gellert, Hermione seemed very wary of Tom Riddle and surely that proved her suitability for the task? She would not - like he had - make all the wrong choices. He was sure of it.

.

.

Hermione arrived for her lesson with Professor Dumbledore five minutes before she was due, as usual. She liked to be early. Late people, in her opinion, were both unproductive and rude. She'd spent the morning finishing the (quite frankly infuriating) Wuthering Heights and it had put her in a dark mood. Why, she wondered, would anyone bother writing a novel about two such ridiculous people? Did anyone ever feel anything like that - especially for someone else who was quite clearly an awful person! She had decided that she either completely didn't understand that sort of overblown Victorian aesthetic (and indeed, she had always disliked the Pre-Raphaelite paintings as well) or the book was just awful.

Still, each to their own. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Healthcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.

It was just so illogical. How could any one person be assumed to feel so much? Even love was not that irrational. And surely if you loved someone that much you would just be with them? She couldn't understand it. It was anathema to her ordered mind. She had been in love, after-all, and it hadn't been anything like as... as melodramatic.

That had taught her to read melodramas anyway. She would avoid them in the future. Even in this strange and lonely place, she was still - somewhere, surely - the daughter of two sensible, modern dentists and didn't have time for such silliness.

She was still Hermione Granger.

Even in 1944.

She knocked politely, as she always did, the anticipation of learning something genuinely interesting overcoming her irritation. The door swung open of its own accord, and she was surprised to see Professor Dumbledore sitting by the fire, with the curtains drawn over the windows.

"Hermione, come in and have a seat my dear," he said, rising politely. "Would you like a drink? It is perhaps a little early, but it is Hallowe'en."

"Thank you," she replied, nodding. They often sat and had a drink - sometimes a glass of Elfin Wine, or a hot chocolate - but usually after the lesson.

He handed her a simply enormous Firewhiskey, and she stared in slight surprise. Her Professor (and perhaps even friend, almost, in a way, if that was not too daring) looked, to say the least, somewhat the worse for wear. There were purple shadows underneath his blue eyes, and nary a twinkle in sight. She hadn't seen him look so drawn and pale since the night she had arrived in the past.

"Is everything quite alright Albus?" she asked cautiously, accepting the glass. His first name never tripped easily off her tongue, but he insisted.

He sighed and paused for a moment, as though mulling over his answer.

"They say that on Samhain the souls of the dead may return to our world, to their homes in fact. What do you think of this?"

Her immediate reaction was don't be silly, but she swallowed it. Afterall, did not ghosts walk the Hogwarts halls? And Harry, Harry who had died and come back to life because of a man's fractured soul, had spoken to this man after he had died. Spoken (he had confided only to herself and Ron and perhaps Ginny) of things he could never have known if the conversation hadn't actually occurred...

"Perhaps," she said eventually. "Or perhaps it was a way in which Muggles could explain the presence of ghosts?"

"Muggles cannot see ghosts," he replied.

"Some say they can." This was something she would have rejected but for the evidence of her own eyes. She thought of Wuthering Heights again, and felt an uncomfortable chill creep down her back. What was it? Her photographic memory provided the answer:

Why, she's a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there—not in heaven—not perished—where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!

"I think," she added, uncertain, and for the first time thoroughly glad Ron and Harry couldn't hear her, "I think perhaps it is true. For some. Perhaps there is some magic that allows the dead to touch the world of the living. I don't know. Or perhaps not - perhaps they are very far away. Muggle Christianity would have them in 'a better place' but someone very wise once said that death is but the next great adventure. Afterall, some do choose to linger on here, and some choose to go on - perhaps there are those that hover between those decisions?"

Xenophilius Lovegood could eat his hideous collection of hats, she thought uncharitably. And then she realised that Hermione Granger would never have said what she had said, and was struck with a odd pang off grief that tempered the triumph.

"My sister, Ariana, died forty-five years ago. It is hard not to wonder, today."

Wonder, what? she wondered. But she didn't ask, because she knew, really, knew that he was wondering if his spell had killed his sister, and if it had not was he not still to blame regardless?

Instead of a platitude she leant over and rested her hand on his for a moment. It was an action that would have been beyond her daring not long before, but it seemed only natural now. His grief, which seemed so fresh, terrified her: she had longer than that to wait before she would see her own loved ones again, before she could take back her life. Would she be haunted by them for the next five decades, trapped into bouts of grief, unable to move on and create a life? And if she wasn't, if she did move on, was that not just as terrifying?

"Would you like me to leave you alone?" she asked, wishing she had stayed in her tower bedroom, curled up on her sofa with a hot chocolate instead of staring down half a century of dark loneliness.

"No, child. I have had quite enough solitary contemplation for one day. Here, you will enjoy this article in Transfiguration Quarterly - it draws a great deal on Cerdic's work."

He handed her the magazine and stood to draw back the curtains, remarking that the room had been so cold earlier he had drawn them. She didn't believe his reason, but took the magazine. While she read, he marked essays until she had finished reading the article he had marked out, and then they sat and discussed the afternoon away, determinedly sticking to theory, until it grew dark*.

.

"It is Samhain now, Hermione," Dumbledore said, gesturing to the darkened sky, his blue eyes serious. "Are you going to light a fire?"

Yes, she thought. Yes I will yes. What better night for sacrifices and the creation of fire?

"Here?"

"No. We should be outside. Come."

He lead her in silence, through the halls and down the moving staircases, past doors to the Great Hall, and out of the castle into the dark grounds, passing the Hufflepuff Quidditch team returning from a late practice (they always had the worst slots). Hermione eyed their thick winter cloaks enviously; the wintery wind was biting through her best warming charm and with only a nod to Diggory she followed Dumbledore, whose swift stride had a mark of urgency about it.

She hoped they didn't go too far: the Hallowe'en Feast was later than the normal suppertime, and she was suddenly hungry as well as cold and not a little scared.

What if she couldn't do it? she wondered. And what else could she give that she hadn't already? What act of goodness was there, here, in this place? This had always been Harry's sort of thing, he was the hero after-all and she had never wanted to be a hero (and thought it not a very sensible or indeed pragmatic occupation, to be honest. You ended up doing stupid things like hanging about to save people's sisters from a death-by-drowning that wasn't actually a real threat and dying and being generally hard-done-by). She hadn't even got herself into this mess...

And yet it was Gubraithan Fire. A fire so pure and good that it would burn eternally. Or did it? She wondered if it could just be very long lasting fire - how could anything be said to be eternal until after whatever end there was had happened? Shaking off that philosophical trough of horror as she stumbled over a rock, she recast her warming charm and then hurried on after the Professor.

They walked on and on, lit by wand light, following a path along the edge of the forest as it rose up gradually at first and then climbed all of a sudden steep to the mountains. She looked back, and saw the dark outline of the castle against the dark grey clouds, the lit windows marking its position more clearly but doing nothing to make it seem homely and friendly. They were higher than she'd thought, a deceptive curve of the landscape bringing them to the top of a steep but small cliff-face, and then the were walking down again and when she looked back the castle was out of sight.

At last he stopped, well out of sight of the castle, in a tiny, steep glen, with a swift stream rushing through, down to the lake, about half an hour north from Hogwarts.

"Choose a branch, Hermione."

It was so dark, and her lumos could only do so much, but she found a twisted and weathered branch of some hard wood that seemed as good as any.

He laid it on the ground, and took a seat on the damp rocks a few meters away, extinguishing his wand's light so that he vanished into the shadows. It was quite unusual for him to be so silent and uninstructive, so she took a deep breath and thought about all the lessons she'd had, and sent four small fires burning together, tightly controlled, around the glen. One blue, one red, one purple and one of dancing multicoloured flames that sent off such a great heat it almost banished the clammy chill. Focussing on the magic to clear her mind, she felt the essence of the fire (Luna would have a field day if she ever got to tell her about this, she thought, and the quashed the intrusion of her past-future and all its associated heartbreak to focus on the task at hand). She extinguished the fires, immediately regretting the loss of their warmth and looked towards the dark hollow where Albus sat.

What was she supposed to do? He'd said that it had to come from within you in her last lesson. So, she had to, what, go inside herself?

Hermione turned her back on the Professor and gazed at the outline of the darker mountains against the dark sky and tried to allow herself to just feel for a moment, to gather herself. Initially, she felt awkward and a bit self-conscious, but it faded as she concentrated on everything she was repressing and at last a rage rose up in her like a great wind until she was shaking with it and with the cold breeze whipping down the slope from the north, and somewhere in her she released the horrible anger she felt at she position she'd been thrown into, and a furious surge of loss and hopelessness came with it, bursting up through her until the tears streamed down her face and fire began to stream from her wand - uncontrolled, angry fire that could easily turn to Fiendfyre she realised and pulled herself together, grabbing at her jagged breath until it evened and the fire stopped pouring. What had Albus said?

A sign of hope in dark times... it requires a great sacrifice from the caster... it is a gift to give warmth and light to the darkest places while consuming nothing in return.

What could she give? There was nothing she had left to lose now, and so could she not give everything? And the rage of injustice became a rage against the petty evils she saw on a daily basis, the small acts of cruelty that separated Muggleborns from Wizarding-born and cast them out as something lesser; rage against a society that had never considered progress, or democracy, or equality. Rage at a dark, wild-haired woman who had chosen her first because she mattered least, who had heedlessly spent hours torturing and humiliating Hermione into repeated unconsciousness, a woman whose face still haunted her sleep and who had hardened something deep within her forever, whose face had stared back at her own from a mirror only days afterwards.

Against the future Ministry, that would stand by and do nothing while its subjects were killed and imprisoned, against the conditions of society that allowed a man like Voldemort to rise up, to try to kill a one-year old boy, at a school that taught Magic without ethics, that taught you to create and destroy but not to judge, against a pale-haired boy that had sneered and called her Mudblood and the father who had formed him, against a world that rejected everything about the one she had come from without knowing anything about it, against every witch and wizard that stood by and didn't comment when they saw a child treated as an outcast because of their birth, rage at a house that would torture its own for losing a Quidditch match. Rage at a teacher that would reject an orphaned child as untrustworthy, at a world that damned everything it didn't recognise.

Rage that she had been cast back and rendered impotent; that all the future wrongs she had lived through and heard of could not be altered or righted, that anyone could be so cruel as to send her here and oh how she hated Albus Dumbledore for that, for sending her away from everything she knew and loved and the life she had fought for and nearly died for again and again, a life that had been ripped away from her for ever and ever because she had seen in that same man's face only that day that forty-five years didn't change the love but they changed you and everything you were and nothing nothing would ever be the same. She would never be the same, she was lost and changed and irrevocably altered.

She felt until she sobbed, and promised the dark and faceless and ungrateful Mountains that she would survive until she could change those things. That she would watch and wait and work against that society until it crumbled to confusion in her past and its future when Harry Potter destroyed the pale faced boy in the castle long after that boy had destroyed himself and all he could have been.

Napoleon stepped in at the ruins of a revolution, a country racked by wars, and rebuilt a Empire in his own image. She would do the same and until then she would wait and plan and learn. She would let Tom Riddle bring the world to its knees because she had no other choice, because it had always happened, but she would seize the opportunity he would leave behind him to rebuild the world anew.

Hermione promised everything in herself to the fire, holding her wand out, no longer desperate but aware and deliberate, and her magic flared up in response and rushed through her, raw and uncompromising and agonising, until the branch burst into flame, warm and golden and gently burning in the cold dark night. She sank to her knees, exhausted, too overcome to revel in its extraordinary glow.

.

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*sundown in the Highlands is about 5pm at this time of year. Probably just before if you're on the east side of a mountain (Hogwarts probably faces south/south west over the lake, so it would get a decent sunset. We've seen what's there in the books but JK doesn't ever take us out into the mountains behind the castle and my Scottish mind can't not imagine that.

The title of this chapter draws on a poem by Maya Angelou. All her work is just as important now as it has ever been and which everyone who hasn't read should go and buy immediately. I'm not going to quote her again directly, because I think quoting that particular poem in this context would be cultural appropriation and, just, tbh unforgivably insulting, so go and read her work.

I'd like to thank you all for the amazing support I've had for this story - especially for my characterisation of Hermione - I'd have stopped a long time ago but, yeah, this is for all of you. And a special thank-you to WhenasInSilks (again) for being amazing (again) and helping me with this chapter.