The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall.
–Augusten Burroughs

CHAPTER TWO: TEMPORARY AMNESIA IN MOTEL ROOMS

19 JUNE 2000

KRISTA

Krista returned to consciousness with a painful groan and immediately curled up on her side, and both hands instantly raised to grab at her aching head. Her stomach took turns clenching and rolling as she took deep breaths through her open mouth, and every single inch of her seemed to throb in pain. She also realized, after a moment of attempting to just breathe normally, that she was shaking all over. She could practically feel the heat pouring off of her and grimaced as she realized her shirt was soaked through with so much sweat that it was sticking to her skin, and she tried to think back. Had she gotten sick? Summer flus weren't that uncommon, but she couldn't remember feeling sick. The last thing she remembered feeling was annoyance, which wasn't common for her. She rarely felt annoyed, so what had set her off? Besides the usual chirping birds that liked to wake her too early in the morning. There had been…no towels? Right, she had left her laundry in the dryer and thus took a shower without a single clean towel in the bathroom. She had also dropped her hair dryer, shattering the old thing, and then the sugar bowl in the kitchen had been completely empty. Those were such little things though.

To The Morgan Family

"That's right! Ow!" The sound of her own voice filling the room caused her head to pound and ache, and her eyes clenched shut against the feeling of something sharp digging into her brain. Ugh, it was so much worse than her usual headaches. Most of her headaches were in her temples, occasionally pounding behind her eyes, but this pain seemed to shoot up from the base of her skull.

Pain or not, she vividly remembered getting that awful invite now. Who sends a family invite to a person whose entire family has died? A community of insensitive fucks, that was who. That damned invitation was what had tipped her into full blown annoyance, and she had stormed out of the cabin after burning the invitation. Carefully, over the sink, because she didn't want to accidentally burn the cabin down. The Morgan family was cursed, after all, and she didn't want to make it easy for the family curse to kill her. Except, she had decided to take down the Christmas lights hanging above the front of the cabin after they'd been merrily swinging there for over three years. She had climbed a ladder, tugged at the string of lights, and had slipped. She could remember falling, that awful feeling in the pit of her stomach as she became detached from anything solid, but then there had been warmth and darkness instead of pain.

Krista's eyes cracked open as she remembered falling, and her eyes widened despite the dull light in the room causing her head to somehow ache even more. A fall from that height would have required a hospital visit, assuming that she had been found. Maybe someone from the community had come by to drop off another grief casserole and found her lying unconscious on the ground. The more she looked around though, the more she realized that she was wrong. This wasn't a hospital room. No bright lights, stiff sheets, paper-thin gowns, or beeping machines. The sheets tangled around her ankles were thin and scratchy, and the only light came from a lamp on the small table next to the small bed she was lying on. The strong scent of pine-sol over cigarette smoke combined with the ugly peeling pale green wallpaper suggested that she was in a motel room, a very cheap motel room, but that didn't make any sense.

What if the fall had knocked her into some kind of fugue state? Some temporary amnesia that had left her confused and lost, so that she wandered off without remembering who she was. If so, her fugue state had horrible taste in sleeping accommodations. The only other option was that someone had discovered her unconscious body and decided to kidnap her, and she was honestly hoping that she had just bumped her head and wandered off in confusion. Because with the constant pain and roiling nausea, there was no way that she was going to be able to fight off a kidnapper. She carefully rolled over onto her back, closed her eyes as her stomach clenched painfully, and then wrinkled her nose as her shirt clung wetly to her skin. After a moment to steady herself, she opened her eyes again and lifted her head to look down at herself. The loose cotton shorts weren't hers, neither was the thin tank top she was wearing and turning into a darker gray with her sweat, and either her fugue self had stolen clothes for her to change into or her kidnapper had changed her while she was still unconscious.

"Focus, Morgan, focus," she muttered under her breath. Her arms shook as she pressed her palms flat against the lumpy mattress, and it took several eternity-filled seconds for her to push herself upright. Her left hand felt odd, but she didn't bother to check it until after she was sitting up and actually supporting herself. Only then did she raise her left hand to eye-level and look at the back of her hand.

"Kinda looks like an S, or maybe a backwards Z," she thought as she looked at the red mark against her skin. If the mark had been a fresh cut, she might have believed that it had been from the fall. The lines were too precise though, and the skin was raised like a blister. Like someone had burned the mark into the back of her hand, and that just upped the probability of her being kidnapped.

As she stared at the dark red mark, the back of her head started to pound in rhythm with her increasing heartrate. She could handle pain, but the ache in her head was making her thoughts scatter. She knew that she needed to focus, that she needed to figure out how she had gotten into a motel room and then probably find a hospital, but it was so hard for her to think with the constant throbs of pain. Her left hand lowered to press against the mattress, she tried to ignore the tight feeling of her skin stretching around the new burn, and she lifted her right hand up. It looked perfectly normal, and she locked her jaw before reaching back and pressing her fingers against the back of her head. She started at the crown of her head, fingers gently probing, and prayed that she wouldn't find any fresh blood as she started to press lower down her skull. She hissed as her fingers moved across the base of her skull, right where the worst of the pain was, but she didn't feel a bump. As her fingers moved to trace against the raised wound on the back of her head, her breathing sped up until she could hear herself gasping audibly. Under her hair, she traced out an X that was bubbled up across her skin. Like the burn on the back of her left hand.

Panic slammed into her, caused her breath to stutter in her lungs, and she started to frantically kick against the sheets around her ankles. As soon as her feet were freed, she gripped the edge of the mattress and drug herself over the edge. Her feet touched the floor, bare feet with no shoes or socks, and she lurched forwards. Towards the door next to a curtained window. Pain pierced through her head as her stomach rolled, and she swallowed down bile as her vision went fuzzy around the edges. Her knees shook as she took another couple of steps, and she could feel her heart beating in her throat as her head started to swim. She saw a chair, the same ugly green color as the walls, and tried to aim for it as her knees gave out. Her aim was clearly off due to her fuzzy vision, and her arm pressed against the seat of the chair as her ass dropped to the hard ground. Her back was braced against the chair, and she crossed her arms over her stomach as her eyes shut.

She was still focusing on her breathing when she heard the motel door open, and her legs instantly raised so that she was curled in on herself. She forced her eyes to remain open as she looked to the side, and she watched as a young woman closed and then locked the motel door. Krista was sitting at the wrong angle to see the woman's face, but nothing really seemed to stand out about her. Average height, a little thin, messy hair in a ponytail, and a plastic bag was hanging from her fist. She was standing frozen just inside the room, looking at the messy bed that Krista had fled from, and Krista gripped her knees as she leaned forwards to get a better look at her possible kidnapper's face. Her cheeks and nose were red, like she was suffering from a sunburn, and she looked so familiar. Actually, she looked like-

"Hermione."

All she did was think the name and then everything came flooding back. Waking up in the dark woods, talking to a Hermione who had lost the war along with everyone else, and the extremely bizarre conversation they'd had. The pain had been disorienting then too, but it didn't affect her memory. There'd been rapid fire questions about Harry Potter's life, and his life had been exactly as Krista had read and watched up until the end. The Hermione Granger who summoned her, as she had said, was a Hermione who had lost. Lost the war, lost her family, and lost everyone she cared about. She'd talked about a spell, time travel, and that she needed Krista for it to work. The spell required her to accept of her own free will, which she had given. Then she'd seen Hermione's wand, felt the magic burning through her, and the pain had knocked her out.

"Holy shit, magic is real," she whispered. Her quiet words were enough to catch Hermione's attention, and she felt herself starting to shake all over as Hermione's eyes met hers.

"You're still here." Hermione's voice was just as quiet, and Krista tried to stop shaking as her eyes quickly looked her over but didn't quite manage. It was possible that her shaking actually increased in intensity.

"My legs were too unstable for me to run away," she admitted. Hermione flinched, like Krista's words were a physical blow, and she realized how the other woman had taken the words. So she rushed to reassure through her now chattering teeth, "I didn't remember meeting you when I first woke up, so I thought I might have been kidnapped. I remember everything now though, and I don't want to run away."

Hermione nodded, jerkily, and the plastic bag slipped from her fingers to land on the thin carpet. Krista watched with wide eyes as she darted across the room, and it was still so surreal to watch a fictional character mutter under her breath as she dug through a tiny bag. A moment later, she pulled out a lot of fabric and then dropped the very small bag onto the bed. Krista was still gripping her knees and pressing her legs against her rebellious stomach when Hermione dropped to her knees across from her, and she had to lean forward as she held out a sweater. Despite actually being able to feel the heat coming off of her skin, Krista took the pale blue sweater with her shaking hands and quickly pulled it on. It was loose and baggy on her, so she didn't think that it had originally belonged to Hermione. She didn't question it though as she tried to pull the sleeves down over her hands, because she was still shaking, and she took the thin blanket that Hermione offered her next with a small grateful smile.

"The spell had adverse effects that I hadn't anticipated," Hermione told her once the shivering had eased off. She knew she hadn't been shaking so much because she was cold, even now she could feel herself starting to sweat through the sweater she'd pulled on, but there was something comforting about wrapping the blanket tight around her shoulders. Trauma blankets were finally starting to make sense.

"The unconsciousness?" she guessed. Because she vividly remembered the pain and then everything going dark, and her next clear memory was waking up in the motel bed.

"I got you out of the woods and back here, and your fever became dangerously high. I couldn't use magic to ease the fever, too traceable, so I got you into the shower. I thought the cold water would wake you, but it didn't. The fever went down, and I changed you into dry clothes before putting you on the bed," Hermione explained. Krista thought that most people would have apologized for the slight invasion of privacy, but she didn't need an apology. The woman had done what she could to help, and Krista wondered if the ongoing fever was a result of the spell. Of the magic that had been used on her. Against her will, the fingers of her right hand started to massage the skin around the burned mark on the back of her left hand.

"Thanks, for that," she remembered to mumble. Her grandmother had raised her with manners, after all, and Hermione nodded again and then looked down at the way her own hands were clenched into fists over her knees. The air between them was tense, bordering on awkward and full of uncertainty, and Krista pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders.

"You said you remember everything?" Hermione asked her after a moment. Krista licked at her dry lips, wished desperately for something to drink, and then slowly nodded.

"Yes, everything, but I do have some questions." Some questions was putting it mildly. Krista had so many questions that it was a miracle that they weren't just spilling out of her, and Hermione sat up a little straighter but remained kneeling.

"Of course. Anything you want to know," she said while looking directly into Krista's eyes. Well, first things first.

"Am I ever going to be able to go back home? Once this is all over, when you've won, do I get to go home?" Krista asked. Hermione seemed to stop breathing, but she held eye contact as emotion started to show across her face. A little guilt, sadness, but no regret. It answered her question and told her a little more about this Hermione as well. She was never going to return home, and Hermione might feel sad for her but didn't regret her choice.

"If the spell is successful and we get sent back, we'll both have to remain there. It's a consequence of the spell, you see. It can only be used once," Hermione admitted. The woman started to say something else, possibly an apology going by the dark look in her eyes, but Krista quickly shook her head and stopped her from saying the words.

Krista didn't need an apology. Disoriented by pain or not, Krista had agreed and put herself into this situation. She thought about her home, about the log cabin where she had lived her entire life with her grandmother, and remembered how much she hated walking in the rooms that held so many memories. How much she hated living in the family home when all of her family was dead. She thought about her best friend, lying dead against white tiles, and how she had avoided close friendships ever since. She had lost contact with the people she'd known in high school even before graduating, and the few casual friends she had made in college wouldn't look for her. Maybe one of her two exes from college would wonder about what had happened to her, but even those relationships had had so much emotional distance in them that she doubted either of them would truly mourn for her. At sixteen, she had closed herself off with the hopes of never having to mourn for anyone again. Now it looked like she had made sure that no one would mourn for her.

Somehow, knowing that she wouldn't be missed, made this easier. She wouldn't have to make smalltalk with classmates and turn down invitations with fake smiles. She wouldn't have to enter rooms in the cabin and immediately look around for her grandmother, only to remember that she wasn't there anymore. She wouldn't have to visit the Sheppard family at Christmastime and attend Mass with them, just to light a candle for her best friend. She wouldn't have to dread her birthday or take flowers to her parents' grave instead of celebrating surviving another year. This could be like a clean slate for her. She would still mourn for everyone that she had lost, but no one was going to miss her.

"That's alright. I didn't have much of a life to return to," she admitted with a dry laugh. She really needed some water, but there were a few things that she still wanted to know first. "Tell me about the spell, about how it works. I want to know what to expect."

"It's called Sanguinem Tempore-"

"Bleeding Time? That doesn't sound even a little bit pleasant," Krista interrupted. She watched as Hermione's brows furrowed in confusion, and she tipped her head to the side as she waited for Hermione to continue with the explanation.

"You know Latin?" Hermione asked instead.

"My grandmother wanted me to learn a different language, and I got to pick the third one. I was going through a bit of a rebellious stage, so I picked a dead language." She never talked about her grandmother's bizarre learning goals, Tabby had always laughed and told her that she was a little bit strange for having so many extracurricular lessons, but the words had just slipped out.

"What other languages do you speak?" Hermione looked truly curious, so Krista decided to answer instead of insisting on learning more about the spell that was actively using her as some kind of incubator.

"Started with Spanish and Italian. After Latin, I learned Russian. I was planning on learning Chinese in the fall," she listed off. Her grandmother had started teaching her other languages when she was young, she had entered kindergarten with the ability to speak Spanish and Italian as well as English, and it helped that she had an eidetic memory. She'd really been looking forward to learning Chinese too.

"That's quite impressive," Hermione said quietly.

"So is successfully brewing Polyjuice Potion in your second year," she countered. Under her sunburn, she flushed a darker red and ducked her head. The quiet push of air she made might have been a laugh, but it was too quiet and quick for Krista to be sure. Besides, Krista had always felt like having a photographic memory was a bit like cheating. "We can go over our academic accomplishments later though, especially if I'm remembering our timeframe right. It'll take the spell a year?"

"The spell, right. The core of the spell has to be someone that's pure," Hermione picked up. Krista thought about her highschool boyfriend and their awkward fumble in the backseat of his car, briefly remembered some of the more enjoyable tumbles during her college relationships, and couldn't stop her quiet strangled laugh. It caused Hermione to pull back, like she was startled, and Krista couldn't tell if she was blushing since all of her skin was already overheated.

"I'm not, uh, all that pure? Definitely not a virgin," she rushed out. Hermione's eyes widened as her mouth dropped open, and Krista worried for a moment that having premarital sex had ruined all of Hermione's plans.

"Sorry, not that kind of, uh, purity. Someone pure and untainted by magic, someone from a reality without magic," Hermione said just as quickly.

"Oh, yeah, I remember you saying something like that last night. So all you had to do was summon someone from a different reality?" she asked. Her tone was far too casual for this kind of conversation. She should not be talking about magic and other realities like she was talking about there being a chance of light rain, but she couldn't deny what she had seen and felt. She'd seen magic, felt magic, and it was either go with this or completely freak out.

"Basically. The more difficult part was the spell's intuition. Once I started the summoning, I marked myself as the guide for the spell. It can sense me, read my subconscious in a sense, so I had to focus on who I wanted to summon. Finding someone in a reality without magic that still had knowledge of my life seemed like a longshot, but it worked," Hermione said and met her eyes again. She had managed to summon someone from a non-magical reality that had read books and watched movies about her life, but the books and movies had had a happy ending. Why was Hermione's reality so much worse? Was it because books and movies were meant to have happy endings? While real life rarely worked out that way?

"Okay, so I'm the core and you're the guide for this spell. Why has it never been used before?" she decided to ask. She'd read enough fanfiction as well as fan theories to know if this spell existed within canon, and she'd never heard of it. It seemed far more complicated than using a Time-Turner, and any kind of spell with the word bleeding in it couldn't be good.

"It's dark magic, ancient, possibly forbidden magic. I read about it in a very old journal, that's written in a mixture of Ancient Runes and codes, and I'm still deciphering some of the notes on the spell." Her rising alarm must have showed on her face, because Hermione hurried to explain further. "I've translated everything about how to do the actual spell. There's just some notes that still need to be translated."

"Then tell me what you do know," Krista decided. What if one of those notes that had yet to be translated was about how the spell killed the core in the end?

"The spell stores the magic needed inside the core, and it takes a full year for the magic to be ready to send both the core and the guide to the time that the guide chooses. The spell will send us both back, because it requires a non-magical core and a magical guide to activate, and it's really quite fascinating. I'd never even heard of it before finding the journal, and I don't know if it's because the wizard who created it wanted to keep it secret or if because the spell itself is forbidden. I was honestly worried that it would require some kind of blood sacrifice to summon you here, the text wasn't too clear on that part, but it worked without me having to kill anyone so I think it's safe to assume that it will activate in a year without a sacrifice as well."

While Hermione had been talking, Krista had slowly nodded along and took everything in. The spell itself was incredibly powerful, had to be if it was going to send two people back a few decades in time, so building up the required magic for a year made sense. She wasn't quite sure how she felt about that building magic being stored inside of her, but she was definitely comforted about the fact that both of them would be sent back. If the spell was going to send her back as well, she doubted that it was going to kill her. At least not immediately. According to what Hermione was saying, the spell itself was largely unknown and possibly forbidden. Who knew what the effects were going to be? Because it sounded like Hermione wasn't very sure of the effects, which pushed her into slight concern. The Hermione that she knew, through books and movies, would have researched every little facet before doing a spell. This Hermione though had gotten what she needed while possibly saying to hell with the consequences. She needed to remember that this Hermione was someone who had lost everything and was clearly desperate to fix things.

"…some kind of blood sacrifice to summon you here…"

Hermione's eyes had an almost dazed look to them the longer that she spoke, like she was getting lost in her thoughts but still speaking aloud, and Krista suddenly felt cold despite the extreme heat trapped under her skin. Hermione hadn't sacrificed anyone to summon Krista into this reality. (A part of her mind made note that Hermione didn't sound adverse to sacrificing a person, which meant that she was willing to go to extreme lengths to accomplish her task, but that was something for her to think on later.) Hermione hadn't sacrificed anyone, but Krista had been falling when she was pulled from her reality. Falling…or had she already fell when she was summoned by magic? She'd fallen from a pretty great height, definitely from high enough to kill her if she had landed in the right way, so did that mean she had been the sacrifice? Was her dying enough of a sacrifice for the spell to start to work? Did she actually fucking die?

She realized that Hermione had stopped speaking at about the same time she realized that she was shaking all over again, practically vibrating as she clutched desperately at the blanket she had draped over her shoulders, and her thoughts were spiraling. Her breathing was starting to increase, lungs burning from working overtime, and did she die? Magic, fictional characters, stuck in a reality separate from her own. She could deal with all of that. Because in some ways it didn't feel real, maybe she'd freak out about it all later when it really started to sink in, but this was the first time that she had really started to panic. Risking herself for a spell still seemed kind of abstract, but dying from falling off a ladder while trying to take down Christmas lights in the summer? That was something horrifyingly real, and it meant that the damned Morgan curse had gotten her after all. She was just another Morgan who had died a tragic and stupid death. Church fires, drownings, car accidents, shower slippings, and ladder fallings. All the things that had ended the Morgan family.

"How are you coping with this?" Hermione asked her. Her head was crammed full of circling thoughts, so Krista did the only thing that seemed rational in the moment.

"Shit!" she yelled and pulled the blanket over her head. She pressed the thin fabric over her face and forced her breathing to slow, but she could still hear her own gasping breaths as she struggled to calm herself.

Krista had been in stressful situations. Someone had broken into the cabin when she was eleven, wielding a large hunting knife, and her grandmother had been stabbed in the shoulder before Krista went after the guy with a baseball bat. She'd stayed calm, waited for an opening, and then had a breakdown two weeks later after passing by the baseball field at school. When she was sixteen, her and her best friend walked into a gas station while laughing and were trying to pick out some road snacks when someone came in with a gun. Instead of just robbing the place, the guy panicked and started shooting. The cashier was shot in the arm, Krista was grazed on the hip, and she had watched as her best friend was shot in the neck. The would-be robber had fled, and Krista had held herself together and put pressure on the side of her friend's neck while assuring her that everything was going to be fine. It hadn't been fine, Tabby had bled out and died right there in the small gas station, and Krista had still been sitting next to the body when the paramedics arrived. She hadn't cried at the funeral, hadn't cried for the first six months, and had only let herself fall apart after attending Christmas mass with Tabby's family for the first time. She was the one who found her grandmother's body, slumped down in the bathtub, and she had covered her grandmother with a towel before calling 9-1-1. After her grandmother's body was taken away, she cleaned the blood out of the bathtub and then went to sleep so that she could call the funeral home the next morning.

The blanket slipped off the top of her head, some hair clung to her forehead and cheeks, and she pushed out a breath. The shaking had died down, but she thought the heat inside of her had increased. It sort of felt like she was boiling inside, but she was starting to feel a bit more calm. A little more centered. She had survived stressful situations; it was possible that she had died yesterday, but she had survived that too. She was still here. Pulling breath into her lungs, blood rushing through her veins, heart beating a strong rhythm in her chest, and able to think for herself. If anything, the pain throbbing throughout her body let her know that she was alive. She felt the blanket slip down to lodge between her shoulders and the chair that was still keeping her upright, and she met Hermione's eyes as she took another slow breath.

"Sorry about that," she said as she exhaled.

"You're allowed to feel overwhelmed," Hermione assured her. Which was kind of her and everything, but Krista still needed to explain why she had decided to suddenly freak out. Just in case it turned out to be important to the plan later on.

"I'm sure that I will have a complete breakdown at some point, but we will worry about that when the time comes. This little moment was because of what you said at the end," she said in an attempt to explain. In an attempt to start to explain.

"I didn't sacrifice anyone, so I'm sure that we won't have to sacrifice anyone when the spell is complete either," Hermione said quickly. She seemed relieved about that, which just made what Krista needed to tell her a little more difficult to do.

"About that." Now that she wasn't holding onto the blanket, her hands gripped restlessly at her raised knees. Squeeze, release, inhale. Squeeze, release, exhale. "Before I woke up in the woods with you, I fell off a ladder. So, there's a slight chance that I might have died just as you summoned me."

"Well, that could complicate things," Hermione said slowly.

"Complicate things by having to sacrifice someone?" Krista questioned. Different realities, time travel, magic. Whatever, she was handling it. Human sacrifice? That seemed like a bit much. Unless they could find a serial killer or something. Was it still morally wrong to kill a serial killer?

"I'm not sure." Hermione looked unsure as well, looking down at the floor and biting at her bottom lip, and that really didn't bode well.

"We'll worry about it a year from now," Krista sighed and let her head fall back. The ceiling was ordinary, nothing special, and she felt her brows pulling together as she realized that they were going to have to spend a year waiting for this spell to end. So she lifted her head and asked, "What's our plan moving forward?"

"This is already my third day in this room. We'll need to leave tomorrow," was Hermione's immediate answer. Wasn't really the answer that Krista had been looking for, but it was a start.

"After that? What do we do for the next year?" Krista clarified. Hermione got a sort of faraway look in her eyes, as if she was just now starting to plan, and Krista pulled her knees in tighter against her body.

"We need to get farther away from here, and we'll have to stay hidden," Hermione said slowly.

"Then we'll head north and live like muggles," Krista suggested. She was pretty sure that she was still a muggle. Magic might be building up inside of her, but she didn't feel like she could suddenly pick up a wand and start doing spells of her own.

Hermione was looking down at her knees, apparently lost in thought, and Krista let her head fall back again. She was still hurting all over, deep throbbing aches, and she wondered if that was because of the fall or because of the magic. The fever had to be because of the magic, because falling off a ladder wouldn't give her a fever. She really hoped that the fever would calm down soon, the sweat drenching her was really starting to get on her nerves, and she carefully crossed her arms over her stomach. A different reality, fictional characters, possible human sacrifices…how had everything turned upside down so fast? All she had wanted to do was take down some Christmas lights, and now she was sitting across from a Hermione Granger who was both exactly like the character she'd watched in movies while simultaneously being absolutely nothing like the character at all. It was enough to make her stomach rumble. No, wait, that didn't make any sense. Why was her stomach growling?

"The food!" Hermione whispered and started moving. Krista looked up to see the other woman crawling across the floor, over to where she had dropped a plastic bag when she had first noticed Krista, and she carefully moved back to where Krista was still sitting by walking on her knees.

Hermione sat down properly across from her, close enough that Krista could reach out and touch her if she wanted to, and she pulled her legs in as tight as possible as she watched her dig around inside of the crinkling plastic bag. When Hermione offered her a sandwich wrapped in cellophane and a bottle of water, she smiled in thanks and reached out with both hands to take what was offered. She balanced the sandwich on her knees and quickly twisted the cap off of the water, and she drank down half of the bottle in one go. It still didn't seem like enough, but she lowered the bottle anyway and replaced the cap before sitting the bottle on the floor next to her. Her hands were steady as she picked up the sandwich and started to unwrap the plastic, and her eyes scanned the sticker serving as a label as she worked at freeing the sandwich. It claimed to be a turkey and cheese sandwich, and her eyes scanned over the sell-by date and then quickly did a double take.

06/24/00

That couldn't possibly be right. There was no way that this sandwich was twenty years old; she couldn't eat a sandwich that was the same age as she was, and the sandwich was only halfway unwrapped when she looked across the small space at Hermione. She was already biting into her sandwich and hadn't died on the spot, so the sandwich wasn't old. Then as she continued to look at Hermione, it finally hit her. The Battle of Hogwarts had been in '98, and Hermione said that had been two years ago. So not only had she been summoned into a different reality, but she had also been transported back twenty years. Reality travel, time travel, and magic building inside of her? It was no wonder that she felt like she'd been hit by a truck, and it explained why her body was so out of whack and overheating.

"What's the date?" she decided to ask after a moment. Hermione hurriedly finished chewing her bite of food and swallowed, and Krista tapped her fingers against her own partially wrapped sandwich as she waited.

"June nineteenth." Krista raised a brow in question, because she needed the full date. Not just the month and day. Hermione must have realized that because she answered without Krista having to explicitly ask. "2000."

"Two…thousand," Krista whispered slowly and then sighed.

"What year are you from?" Hermione asked her. Krista's fingers were shaking a little as she finished unwrapping her sandwich, and she held it up in front of her face as she answered.

"Twenty-twenty," she said and then immediately took a large bite. The sandwich was dry, but it tasted like turkey so she could overlook that. Focusing on the sandwich was also easier than focusing on Hermione's wide eyes, but the other woman looked away from her after a moment and didn't say anything.

The two of them ate in silence, so that the only sound in the room came from their quiet chewing and the crinkling of plastic water bottles. Krista tried not to think, tried to shut her mind off so that she could just eat and worry about everything else when she was a bit more clear-minded, but stopping her own thoughts wasn't that easy. She kept getting stuck on the date. June nineteenth, a few months before her first birthday. Was there a baby version of her out there somewhere? Was her best friend still alive and waiting to meet her in kindergarten? It was too late for her parents, but could she send her grandmother a postcard and tell her to be careful in the shower? She thought and she chewed, she chewed and she thought, and all of her questions started circling as she finished the first half of her sandwich.

"Is there a baby version of me in this reality?" The question seemed to slip out of her as she raised up the second half of the sandwich, and Hermione's brows pulled in tight as she chewed a little slower. That meant she had to know the answer and was stalling, but Krista waited patiently as she took another bite of her sandwich.

"The spell was actually very clear about that. You can only exist in one reality at a time. You are here, so another version of you can't exist in this reality," Hermione explained quietly. That made sense, she supposed. It wasn't like she could take the risk of running into herself.

"When we go back, will it be the same for you?" she asked. Hermione's eyes were wide and dark, and her sandwich was completely gone. So there was no way for her to stall.

"Yes." It was a simple answer, but there was no way that it could feel simple. Hermione was basically choosing to erase her original existence, just to ensure that Voldemort would be defeated and that everyone else would survive. How would Harry and Ron survive without a Hermione to keep them in check? Then again, if Hermione succeeded (if they succeeded), Harry and Ron wouldn't be in constant danger after reaching Hogwarts.

The pounding in her head increased with a vengeance, like her headache was pissed at her for focusing on anything other than the pain, and she had to squint to focus on rewrapping the last quarter of her sandwich. Because as the pain became worse, her stomach soured to the point where continuing to eat seemed like a horrible idea. So she wrapped her leftovers, drank down the rest of her water, and then leaned her head back against the chair again. She slumped down a little, it felt like her body was starting to give out on her, and the pain was steady now. Just waves of agony starting in the base of her skull and spreading out across her entire body. The only good thing about the pain? She couldn't think of anything else, and there was some relief to not thinking about the crazy situation she was now in. So she gave into the pain, accepted it and nearly welcomed it, and closed her eyes as she slumped fully against the chair.

HERMIONE

Across from her, the young woman sagged bonelessly against the chair and groaned low in her throat. The water bottle on the floor next to her was empty, she had eaten most of her sandwich and what was left of it was wrapped in plastic, and Hermione took a moment to study her while her eyes were closed. She didn't fully understand how the woman was going along with all of this; she had been yanked out of her own life and was now trapped in a reality that she probably thought of as a fictional world, but she was somehow staying calm and going along with everything. The closest she had come to breaking down was when she thought she might have died, which was perfectly reasonable, and that was a realization that Hermione was worried about. What if the woman had died, and that was the sacrifice that the spell accepted? Did that mean she would have to sacrifice someone in a year? Once they got somewhere safe, she would need to start reading the journal again.

The woman groaned again, quietly but still full of pain, and Hermione listened to her knees pop as she hurriedly stood up. She gathered up their trash and then disposed of it, placed the woman's mostly eaten sandwich back inside the plastic bag, and then stood next to where the woman was sitting. The hair at her temples looked black, darkened by the sweat visible on her skin, and she trembled every few moments. Her fever was still too high, but Hermione wasn't sure what she could do to lower it. Magic was a possibility, but she wanted that to be a last resort. The woman also looked exhausted, and Hermione quietly cleared her throat to get her attention. Her eyes cracked open, and she looked up at Hermione with dull dark eyes for a long moment before a bit of clarity entered her gaze. Hermione extended a hand towards her, and she couldn't ignore the heat of the woman's hand or the way her hand continued to shake even after their hands locked.

Hermione pulled the woman to her feet and then immediately moved closer when the woman started to slide back towards the ground. It was lucky that they were nearly the same height, she thought she might possibly be an inch or so taller, but it was easy to get the woman's arm around her shoulders so that she could support her. The woman tried not to put too much of her weight on her, and they stumbled across the room towards the bed. Hermione's bag was still lying at the end of the bed, so she carefully helped the woman sit on the edge of the bed. Before she could move her bag, the woman started to fall backwards. Hermione reacted on instinct, grabbed the woman's shoulders and held her upright, and she helped her to turn so that she could lay her head on the pillow. She was twisted awkwardly at the hips, so Hermione moved down and lifted the woman's legs up onto the bed.

"I hate asking, but would you mind helping me?" the woman asked in a quiet whisper. Before Hermione could ask what she needed help with, she noticed the woman pulling at the bottom of the sweater. "I just can't seem to cool off."

"I think that's just your body reacting to the magic. It should ease off soon," Hermione told her. The woman managed to lift herself in intervals so that Hermione could peel the sweater off of her, and the tank top under it was darkened with sweat. She dropped the sweater at the end of the bed, made a mental note to wash it in the motel sink before they left, and then slowly lowered herself down to sit on the edge of the bed next to the woman.

"Sure hope so. I don't want to be the gross sweaty person in the room for the rest of my life," the woman said and then laughed quietly. Just that little bit of movement and sound caused her to wince in pain, and Hermione felt guilt for hurting an innocent stranger but still couldn't seem to feel regret for what she'd done.

"Can I ask you something?" Hermione tried not to think about how some people would have responded to that, and she only managed to succeed because the woman forced her eyes to open again. Hermione couldn't tell the exact color, just that her eyes were dark and a little glassy from the continuous fever.

"Anything," the woman said and smiled a little.

Why did you agree to this?

How are you staying so calm?

When will you hate me for stealing your life from you?

"What's your name?" she asked instead of all the other questions that she wanted to ask. The woman smiled again, just barely, and kept her eyes open as she answered.

"Krista Morgan," she whispered and then let her eyes close. Her body sagged and went completely limp, unconscious again, and Hermione remained seated on the edge of the bed and watched as the woman breathed in quick pain-filled gasps.

"Thank you for helping me, Krista Morgan."

I meant to update this sooner, this has been written for quite a while, but life got in the way. I am still working on this story, and a huge part of it has already been extensively planned out. It's a bit ridiculous how many future scenes have been written, but I'm so excited to keep writing this story. Next up, there's going to be some Krista and Hermione bonding as they wait a year for the spell to be ready. I'm not sure how many chapters that will take, sometimes I write more than I plan to, but they'll time travel after that.

For this chapter, I just wanted the two of them sitting across from each other and talking. If Krista seems a little too calm about what's happening, please remember that she is still grieving her grandmother (the person who raised her) and that she's in a little bit of shock. It's also important to remember, from this point on, that this isn't the exact same Hermione from the books/movies. So she will occasionally do things that seem out of character, but all of her actions are perfectly in character for what she's been through. More of that will be explained during the bonding chapter(s). If there's anything you have a question about, please ask. I always love talking about my stories and I especially love talking about Harry Potter.