Author's Note:
BACK FROM THE DEAD, LOSERS!
Hermione gasped.
...wait, what?
No. No she didn't. She didn't gasp. Not yet anyway.
...she was about to gasp? Yes. That was it. She was a millisecond away from gasping. On the cusp of gasping and yet not quite to the gasp just yet.
Something had grabbed her wrist.
...had it though? No, it was about to grab her wrist. And then it never did. Or it was going to. It just hadn't done yet.
(But it tried to grab her wrist a while ago, hadn't it? Why hadn't it grabbed her yet?)
"You should stop."
Hermione heard a voice she'd never heard before.
"No, really, now, you should stop. That thing you're doing? Where you're trying to work out what exactly happened and where exactly you are? It's no help to you. You should stop. Conserve your energy."
Her eyes had been glazed over, her vision blurry. But then there was that voice, and it was like she had latched on to it and used it to pull herself to some sort of solid ground. Because now she could see where she was.
She was in a large room, or hall or chamber of some kind. There were mechanical markings and strangely pretty round-things on the walls, which lit up in harmony with a peculiar noise coming from behind the walls. A narrow set of metal steps were just in front of her, leading up to an elevated walkway running around the circumference of the room.
And here she saw something else. At the top of the stairs was an armchair, and sitting in this armchair was a man.
"You're still doing it." the man said. "Now you're trying to take in your surroundings. You really need to stop that."
"I can't help it!" Hermione retorted, before descending into a fit of coughing. "My throat!"
"Why does it hurt?" the man asked for her. "Same reason the rest of your muscles do. You haven't used them in months."
Hermione frowned at this. "What? What are you talking about? How did I get here? I was in my office. There was that stupid dummy of Terrance's, and it came to life? Reached out for my wrist and then... and then..."
"No," said the man. He stood up from his chair, and she tried to get a good look at his face but the lights on the walls behind him hid it from her with their glow. "There was no 'and then', Ms Granger. The dummy reached out for your wrist and it just kept reaching, and you just kept gasping, forever and ever. All of time ground to a halt and the Universe froze. Stuck, like something was clogging the wheels. You've been standing in your office with that dummy, doing nothing, for a very long time now."
Instinct urged her to deny this. And yet Hermione tried moving her arms, noticing how sluggish her muscles felt, like they had been asleep for months and were just now coming to life.
"Oh my god," she said, rubbing her weary eyes.
"Stay calm," the man ordered, starting to walk down the narrow steps towards her.
"Time stopped?" she repeated. "For everyone? For the whole world? How many people must've - ?"
"Okay, mother hen," said the man. "That'll do."
Hermione paused. "Excuse me?"
"Forget about the rest of the world. It's my job my job to worry about them, not yours. Besides, nobody will even really realise anything's happened. They'll just feel a bit weird, but I'll get all the radio stations to play some Beach Boys, it'll be fine."
"Yes, but how... wait. Did you say Beach Boys?"
The room gave a great lurch and then that noise from behind the rooms started to grumble as though waking up from slumber.
"No, no, no," said the man, and he hurried down the rest of the steps and then darted past Hermione in a huff. "Time is restless, it's been asleep too long and wants to start running again. But I need to keep you here just a bit more."
Hermione didn't reply. She'd turned to look around the room again. It was different, the colours were wrong and the place seemed colder, more mechanical, but she'd swear she'd stood in a room like this before. She looked at the man again. He had his back to her, tending to some sort of machinery in a way that was impossibly familiar.
"This place..." she said in a shaky voice. "This place reminds me..."
The man stopped working. He turned towards her sharply.
"No. No it doesn't."
And she saw his face for the first time. Old. Grey. Stern features and ruffled eyebrows. But those eyes. There was something in them; a protective nature, a exhausting determination; that she'd seen before. In another pair of eyes. On another man's face.
The noise of ancient engines roared to life, mechanics held within a central column started to rise and fall. The man sighed in defeat and then rushed to be at her side again.
"Listen closely," he said. "If normal events are to resume, then you need to be ready for them. Trust your gut, Hermione Granger. Be the clever one. Know when to stand by them and when to question. And most importantly, and this is the whole reason you're here so listen carefully... toss your wand into your other hand."
Hermione blinked in confusion. "...what?"
"The Auton, it's reaching for your hand and it's too close for you to move away but now you know it's coming it won't be a surprise so you just have toss your wand into the air with the hands that's been grabbed and catch it with the one that hasn't and then blast that dummy down to Level 3: Magical Accidents and Catastrophes!"
And while Hermione's brain tried to take in all that information at once, the man ran back to his controls. The noise was almost deafening now, the floor getting more unsteady by the second.
"But wait," Hermione yelled. "Who are you, how do you know my name?"
The man placed his hand on a big, important-looking lever. And then he looked over his shoulder, and for a second those seriously severe features softened, and he smiled at her like an old friend.
She gazed at him. "...Doctor?"
He pulled the lever. The room started to fill with light.
"Your wand, Hermione!"
"No, Doctor - wait!"
"YOUR WAND!"
There was blinding white and then blues and reds that went on for eternity or perhaps just represented them. And then five plastic fingers clutched around her wrist. Hermione's feet were back on the tea-stained carpet of the Ministry of Magic, and the dummy was wrenching her forwards.
Without thinking, like some sort of unconscious reflex placed in her head, Hermione tossed her wand into the air with her fingers, caught it with her free hand, then aimed it directly at the dummy's chest.
"Bombarda!" she cried.
And explosion erupted from the tip of Hermione's wand. Hermione and the dummy where shoved away from each other by the force, flying across the room in a shower of plastic and flaming uniform.
Hermione landed hard against someone else's desk. But she scrambled to her feet, wand at the ready, then halted at what she saw.
At the opposite end of the room, the dummy raised itself from the ruins of the desk it had collided with. Hermione had been working on the theory that the dummy was a person in disguise. But when it stood up straight, blank features staring squarely at her, she found herself gawking at the hole the explosion had made, through which she could only see the wall behind. No innards, no guts, just plastic. Whatever this was, it couldn't be stopped by conventional methods.
It raised a burnt hand in her direction, and Hermione watched in bizarre fascination as the top half of it's palm fell away from the rest of the hand, swinging down as if held on by a hinge, and in it's place was the unmistakable metal barrel of a gun.
Hermione raised her wand.
"Sorry," she said to the mannequin, casting an unimpressed glance at what was left of the prototype Ministry the dummy wore . "But I've already promised myself I'd die a death before I gave in to that horrible excuse for a uniform."
End of Chapter 8
