Shattered
Granger had mentioned withdrawal symptoms once in one of her intermittent ramblings. It felt like those. He smirked, coming back to the present, and leveled his wand at the skeleton swooping through the gaping doorway. Time for his fix. HGDM…er, ish?
She watched Merope Gaunt hold her newborn son even as death claimed her. Deep in the haze in her slightly crossed eyes the love of a mother was struggling to break through. It was a love the Boy-Who-Became-Voldemort would never know. The young witch wondered if the Dark Lord's mother might have fought harder and won the battle against heartbreak and blood loss, if she had known the path he son would take without her to guide him. Surely a woman able to look past blood and even magic would never have allowed her child to begin this horrible war. Surely if there had been someone, anyone, there to offer love, it would never have come to—
"Granger!"
She gasped as her head was wrenched out of the chipped and hastily caulked pensieve. A hand chapped by harsh lye soap released her lank, tangled braid. Her shoulder crashed down onto the broken, uneven concrete. With one ear pressed to the ground, she shivered to hear the deep screams of the earth as it was blown apart. Another bombing run from the States, another wizard raining down fire to wipe out Muggles from the face of London, who knew; the screams were the same. He parents had been evacuated, she was grateful for that. Her dad with his cousin in Illinois, her mum in a quarantine center. The States still hadn't decided what to do with the carriers. They were still arguing about what to do with the children. How many of those children's mothers were dead? How many would go Dark? Would the world survive long enough to fear their hate?
"Granger!"
She glanced up at the tattered pair of dark slacks. The jeans fit him better, the choosy beggar.
He hauled her to her knees and shook her until her brain rattled. Her eyes snapped into focus. "I'm here." His hand took her chin. She stayed quiet as he turned her head from side to side. It took an act of extreme will to keep her eyes focused on him. She wanted nothing more than to forget him and focus on something interesting like the first contact overtures between the Muggle States and the American Magic Confederation. The Voodoo High Priestess had threatened to sever all—
She gritted her teeth and forced herself to stare into those stormy, skeptical, utterly boring eyes. After eternity, he nodded. "Granger, the ceiling collapsed—don't look!" He wrenched her head back down. His uninteresting eyes bore into hers. "The wards had to kick in to keep us from being crushed. They'll be locking in on my magic signature any second. Is it ready?"
She looked to the corner of the bomb shelter. He let her. Drawn into the one patch of unbroken concrete floor were thousands of tiny, ancient runes. He had done most of it. She could never hold her interest long enough to do much more than correct his mistakes. Humming, she lurched almost out of his grasp. He reasserted his grip as she shuffled over to the massive swirling design. The grease pencil and dampened rag were pressed into her limp hands. His one arm wrapped around her waist, and he wrapped her braid around his hand. He could never decide whether he wanted to lop her hair off or keep it to use as a tether.
They knelt and she bent over the runes. The mistakes stuck out at her. They looked so interesting. The phantom taste of mineral spirits clung to the roof of her mouth as she rubbed out the marks and wrote her own symbols in the emptied spaces with the grease pencil. "Just a few more," she murmured. His surprised glance was lost on her as she began to mark in a circle of runes around the entire design.
His breath caught, not because it was almost complete, not because she was penciling in dozens of the most ancient, powerful runes known to Wizardkind without even needing a book for reference, but because the shelter's steel door had just been blown off its hinges. The rubble shored up against it went flying into the far corner. Thankfully not the design's corner.
Granger, for a miracle, hadn't noticed the commotion. When he released her, she fell to her knees and, unblinking, continued filling in the outer circle. His fingers dove into a pocket curled around the base of a wood stick, the wand he hadn't dared to touch for eight months. He could still remember the way his blood had sang as he laid down the protective wards for this little Muggle hovel of an underground shelter. All through the ensuing crazed dash through London with the Death Eaters on his heels, he couldn't stop thinking that he had never felt so alive. But the following months of scuttling around like a Muggle cockroach had been unbearable, and being buried alive, surrounded by walls of crumbling concrete and his beautiful, shimmering, dormant magic was a Hell of the most diabolical design. Granger had mentioned withdrawal symptoms once in one of her intermittent ramblings. It felt like those.
He smirked, coming back to the present, and leveled his wand at the skeleton swooping through the gaping doorway. Time for his fix.
Her hand stilled.
The skin graft went warm as the first Death Eater crumpled. He barely felt it. The heady warmth of magic flooding through his veins almost made him miss it when Granger began to aimlessly hum. He whirled back to face her. The circle was finished. The entire design was complete, but inert. Their eyes chanced to meet. She stiffened. "Finish it!" he screamed right before a curse banished him into the wall.
Granger glanced down at the runes with a troubled look marring her face. She didn't see the slight hesitation of the figure in the skeleton mask. The fallen wizard clutching at his ribs darted anxious glances into the dim in search of his fallen wand. The witch swept her arm forward, a wood stick held awkwardly in her hand.
Only a pencil.
The Death Eater whipped his wand toward the diving wizard.
The pencil touched the center of the design.
Two curses hit the Death Eater's unprotected back.
The skin graft itched as his fingers closed around the fallen wand.
A lanky figure leapt into the bomb shelter, then froze, mimicked a moment later by its twin. "Hermione?"
Paying them no heed, Granger finished the symbol's final loop.
Light flooded the darkness.
She fell to the ground, her ear on the concrete. Another bombing, another wizard's rain of fire, who knew; the earth's screams were the same. This time, though, there was harmony. She listened to the wail of the sirens and to the sobbing surrounding her. Children? The States didn't know what to do about the children.
"Lu—lumos."
She glanced up at the sudden glow. Light spell. She knew the casting. Simple. It was the voice that caught her attention. She peered through the light to study the haggard wide-eyed face. Red hair. Weasley. Ron. No, George. Or was he Fred? She frowned at the mystery.
The other twin appeared in the small sphere of light. "M…Mione?" this one asked. Then they were both crushing her in their arms. Which one was which, she wondered. Did they know, or had they been mixed up as infants?
It grew quiet for a time. The unseen children and even the earth stopped crying for a time. Only the sirens remained vigilant. A pale ghost flickered at the glow's edge. "Granger?"
The twins reacted for her. One spun her away into a protective embrace. The other reared up and leveled his wand. "Malfoy."
The ghost's arm whipped up.
The twin snarled a syllable. "Av—"
"No."
Three faces glanced sharply at hers. Only one of the wizards understood the reason for her gritted teeth as she fought for lucidity. "He took care of me," she finally managed to force past her lips. The standing twin's wand arm went slack. The one with his arms around her went rigid. Even though they looked identical, they reacted differently. With a little time, she would be able to tell one from the other, though she still couldn't be sure which was Fred and which was George. As her concentration on the moment slipped, her head nodded.
The angry one drew her cheek to his chest and raised his still-glowing wand. "What did you do to her, you sick—"
She snapped back into reality and swatted down his hand. "No!"
Draco Malfoy closed his eyes and said one word before he crumpled to the ground, spectrally pale and bleeding. "Azkhaban."
And without her knowing why, she sobbed.
Hmm. It's sort of a beginning to a timefic, I guess, but I don't know whether I want to go through with it or not. I was just playing with the concept and tried to come up with something different. As far as I know, Draco has never used an insane Hermione to get him to the past so he could raise the Dark Lord as his own before…nor have the twins ever bungled their way into a serious timefic…so I guess I succeeded.