AN: Now that I've started writing for this story again I'm excited about it and feeling very inspired! Please drop a review if you like it, I can't wait to hear your feedback!

Hermione tried to take in the information Sirius had just given her. Was he trying to be funny or was there some truth to his situation?

"When you say the last man on earth…"

"I mean no one else is in this house, in this neighborhood, in London, anywhere else in the world I've looked. I tried paying a visit to Diagon Alley, but when I arrived at The Leaky Cauldron there was no one there," Sirius explained. "I haven't seen anyone at all. Not my family, not my friends, hell running into a Death Eater would almost be welcome at this point," he joked. She quirked an eyebrow at him, knowing he'd hardly be averse to meeting a Death Eater in a dark alley.

Hermione furrowed her brow and pondered this information. "How long has this been going on?" she asked. Sirius considered. "Honestly… I don't know. I don't even remember when it began, it almost feels like it has always been this way, except I know that it wasn't," he answered perplexed.

Hermione began to piece together the information she knew. The Sirius in front of her was only 19, the Sirius she had known was 38 or 39 when he died, he would be have been 41 or 42 if he were still alive. 12 Grimmauld Place had been abandoned as a headquarters and a residence shortly thereafter, with Harry and Hermione each acquiring their own flats after the war was over. A magical pendant had been hiding in plain sight that somehow connected her to young Sirius, first through dreams and then through… whatever this was. Had she travelled in time? Or was she in some type of magical alternate dimension?

Thinking logically, Sirius had a historical timeline of his life. He clearly knew his identity, relationships with people in the world, and had memories of his life up until this point—whatever one might call this point. His solitary existence in the world, combined with his lack of awareness of his position in time or the passage of it, indicated something else was going on here. Hermione suddenly wasn't so sure that she had travelled in time when she put on the pendant—she suddenly had a hunch she may have travelled in space.

"Sirius—I think I have an idea of what might be going on," she finally said after at least a minute of ruminating on the situation. She gave him a hard look, knowing that no matter how she revealed her theory, difficult information would have to be shared. "Can we start with some word association before I go further?" she asked tentatively. She needed to understand where his memories stopped so she could evaluate how to present the facts.

"Sure?" he answered, clearly not confident in her ability to explain the situation.

"Harry," she began.

"Uh, godson?" he answered. Okay, she had now established that Harry had been born in his timeline of memories. He'd already confirmed in their previous conversation that he did not know about Voldemort's initial defeat. That meant that Lily and James were still alive in his timeline of events.

"Peter," she tried next.

"Good mate," he replied readily.

"Dumbledore."

"Bad at wizard's chess," he answered cheekily. She rolled her eyes, earning a grin from him.

"Remus," she put forth, wondering if Sirius was aware of his friend's activities as a double agent or if there were tensions with the necessary distance Remus needed to create to carry out his missions.

"Best mate," he responded, though she sensed an amount of trouble from him.

"Okay, I have enough to go off of." He stared at her intently, waiting for her to explain what the hell was going on.

"I don't think that I've time traveled to be here with you, Sirius," she began. "I do know you from a point in your timeline that would technically be considered your future, but I don't think that I've traveled along a time continuum, I believe I've accidentally reached you through space." She watched his face nervously, awaiting his reaction to this news.

"What does that mean… exactly?" he questioned slowly. She could see worry play across his face, mixed with an amount of skepticism.

"I met you when I was 13 years old," she continued. "You would have been… 36 or 37 at the time of our meeting. You're my best friend's godfather," she explained. "Harry's godfather," she emphasized, so that he understood their connection. His face was unreadable, she could tell he was absorbing the information she had just imparted. Understandably this would take some time for him to fully process.

"When I was 14 years old, Voldemort returned to power—"

"You're not afraid to say his name?" Sirius interrupted her, curiosity piqued.

"A wise man who is reportedly bad at wizard's chess once said that fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself," she replied giving him a soft smile. He returned it with a twitch of his mouth, clearly still taking it all in.

"Right. Voldemort returned to power after having been incapacitated for a decade. His powers and life force had been so weakened that almost every wizard alive believed him to be dead, even his followers. When he returned to power, no one at the Ministry or society at large believed it for over a year. Anyone that did believe was subject to a massive smear campaign, bullied by other students and even some teachers. I believed in his return because… because Harry was present the night of his bodily resurrection." She paused to allow the information to digest. Sirius adjusted his posture, agitated, eyes alight with anger.

"My godson—my Harry—he was?" he struggled to articulate the words. "Was he—is he okay?"

"Yes, yes! Harry is alive and well. More than well now, he's training to join the force as an auror, he's part of a recreational Quidditch club—he was the youngest Seeker in a century for Gryffindor, you'd be so proud, you are so proud—he has a great girlfriend. Harry's brilliant," she reassured him. His intensity waned, she saw his shoulders visibly relax, her words had set his mind at ease.

"It's… it's so strange to hear all this. I know that Harry will grow up, he won't always be a baby, but knowing about it for certain is… it's a lot," he marveled. She smiled, his love for Harry was so strong and pure, she wished that he'd been able to be the father figure he should have been all the years he was locked away.

"What I don't understand," Sirius queried, "is Voldemort returns, yeah? But that means he is defeated. What happened? How does a wizard, even one as powerful and dark as that wanker, return from the dead? Assuming he was killed and not captured, yeah?" This is the first of many questions that Hermione dreaded answering. As soon as she mentioned that James and Lily were dead, he was going to respond in a very strong fashion. Any mention of Peter's betrayal would also set him off. His attempted murder of Peter and subsequent incarceration would also certainly press his buttons. How did she explain the events that transpired without all of this?

"Well, dark magic was involved, obviously," she answered. Well, that was a truthful and relatively neutral start at least.

"Voldemort concealed parts of his soul in magical relics as part of his backup plan for immortality. Six different artifacts to be exact."

"Horcruxes? That son of a bitch," Sirius muttered to himself.

"Exactly. No one, not even his inner circle, was aware of the existence of these Horcruxes. Over time, Dumbledore started to wonder of course, when Voldemort made quasi appearances at Hogwarts during mine and Harry's first and second years," Hermione explained. Omitting Ron's name from their friend group made her heart twinge with guilt, but she didn't want to make the events even more confusing for young Sirius to understand.

"Harry and I didn't have a seventh year at Hogwarts. We spent the year on a quest to find and destroy all of the Horcruxes, making Voldemort mortal and vulnerable to defeat once and for all. We were aided of course, by certain members of the Order and eventually were successful in our mission. Voldemort was defeated, he was killed by a killing curse he cast with his own wand, deflected off of a disarming spell. A poetic end, I think," she mused. His initial and obvious sentiment of skepticism had faded away, he considered the information she had given him seriously.

"This is all very interesting, and I have more questions. I want to go back to your theory about time travel though. Everything you've told me sounds as though you're a visitor from the future, I don't necessarily see why you don't believe that to be the case," he reasoned. She took a deep breath. She didn't like where the conversation was headed, though she supposed she either had to tell him the truth eventually or lie to him altogether.

"It's true, I know an older version of you—" she began.

"Am I still good looking in the future?" he interrupted, catching her off guard. She blushed.

"As I was still an underage witch when we met, I'll refrain from answering that," she retorted.

"So I was, understood love, thanks," he winked at her, devilish smile on his face. She felt the heat she'd only known in her dreams fill her stomach, he was so handsome right now in the firelight, she was having a lot of trouble not touching him in a casual, affectionate manner. In her dreams they had been so comfortable with each other, what if she slipped up? She interlaced her fingers on her lap in a deliberate effort to prevent this from happening in the immediate future.

"Anyway," Hermione cleared her throat. "I know an older version of you, and that version of you has lived through this timeline of events. But think about the inconsistencies. I have not stumbled through the past to find you at a point of your personal history that I'm familiar with. In fact, I seem to have found you outside the stream of time altogether. There's no one else besides yourself; the passage of time is nonexistent," she elucidated rapidly. He just raised his eyebrows at her in a way that either communicated that he was impressed with her theorizing or the exact opposite.

"It seems much more likely to me that you're trapped in a time pocket, as a 19 year old version of yourself, isolated from the movement of time and future events that will transpire and the actors that perpetuate those events," she repeated gently, hoping to elicit an answer from him.

"Okay, say that I believe you, which I'm tempted to do because I don't understand half the shit you just said," he leaned close to her, scrutinizing her with his eyes. She felt tingly from her scalp to her toes under the intensity of his gaze. "How, why, would that have happened? What could have possibly have caused that sort of thing to happen?"

These were the questions Hermione was less sure about, though a theory had already begun to form in the back of her brain. He wasn't going to like the answer, perhaps it was the most disturbing information she could reveal to him at this stage. What was her moral obligation here? To be honest, or to protect him from the truth?

"Well, I think some part of it is connected to an extremely ostentatious piece of jewelry I found in your house," she began. "An enormous sapphire pendant." He mulled this over.

"I might know what you're talking about, no one has seen that piece in some time though. My father paid a fortune for a necklace like the one you've described from Borgin & Burkes when I was just a boy, it was rumored to have belonged to Morgana herself. As far as I could guess though, it's been secreted away with the rest of the hoard of Black family priceless treasures in our Gringotts vault."

"Well… I found it in a box with your name on it. And putting it on is what caused me to wake up here, with you. I don't know why or how but that pendant is connected to this... this time pocket you're trapped in. And I suppose I'm now trapped in too…" she trailed off.

"Don't you know better than to touch anything in my house?" he asked incredulously.

"It was bewitched, obviously! As soon as I laid eyes on it I was fixated on wearing it. I resisted for an entire day, but the enchantment was very powerful," she replied defensively.

"What were you doing in my stuff anyway?" he asked.

"Let's not get off track," Hermione replied hurriedly, hoping to distract him from this line of questioning that could only lead to her embarrassment.

"If you say so," he answered, the twinkle in his eye making it clear that he did not intend to leave the subject alone forever.

"I don't want to have to tell you this, but I don't see any way around it," she confessed bluntly.

"Those certainly are words every man wants to hear, darling," he responded in a light tone, while reclining to brace himself for the bad news. Breathing in deeply, she decided to just tell him without any sugar coating or softening. He would respect it.

"Sirius," she hesitated. "You're dead."