The Time Traveler's Dilemma
Chapter Two: Fast Forward

"Ow," whispered Hermione, her eyes fluttering open and taking in the high vaulted ceiling and walls hung with blue and gold tapestries of an unfamiliar room. She seemed to be lying on her back, but could not recall exactly how she had gotten there. She brought her hand to the back of her head; it was throbbing.

Candles stood in brackets all along the walls of the room, casting a pleasant glow on her surroundings, which consisted of chintz armchairs interspersed with shelves stacked high with books, a simple fireplace set into the wall at the far end of the room, and several straight-backed wooden chairs at what looked to be study tables. On each table there sat additional candles, all of them burning low. It appeared to be nighttime.

Where am I? This can't be the Burrow...

Hermione winced as her temple gave another almighty throb. She could feel a lump forming on the back of her head. She must have fallen ... How long was she knocked out?

Slowly, she raised herself into a sitting position, trying again to remember how she got here, and suddenly remembered the time-turner.

Her hands, now empty of any sign of the time-turner, scrambled at the stone floor beneath her, her pockets, the sleeves of her robes-her normal black robes, not the dress robes she wore to Bill and Fleur's wedding-and she gasped.

Oh no, no, no ...! She'd only had the time-turner for what, five minutes? And she'd already lost it. What was Harry going to say? If it was in fact his last gift from Dumbledore, one that was bound to be truly useful, was gone, then it was all her fault ... And if was from a Death Eater, here she'd gone and landed herself in trouble ...

"About time you showed up!" came a voice from behind her, and she turned to find Harry and Ron jogging over to her. They, too, were no longer in their dress robes.

"Harry!" she said desperately, jumping to her feet, her hair flying in her face. "Oh, Harry, I don't know how it happened! One moment we were ... we were at the Burrow with the time-turner, and I was checking it for curses and ... There's something dodgy about that thing!"

She paused for a breath, glancing from Harry's face to Ron's. "How did we get here anyway?"

Wherever "here" is, she thought.

Harry and Ron looked at each other, comprehension seeming to dawn on their faces. "I don't think she knows yet, mate," said Ron slowly, looking remorsefully at Harry.

Harry's eyes widened slightly, and he nodded, taking a tentative step towards her, a concerned look on his face. "I think you're right, Ron. It's probably her first time."

Her first time? Her first time doing what? What didn't she know? Why were they being vague now, at time like this? She nearly stamped her foot in impatience.

"Hermione," he continued, looking at her intently, "I can't explain fully now. Strictly speaking, we're not supposed to be in here. C'mon, we mustn't be heard."

And he drew his wand out of his pocket and proceeded to walk the length of the rectangular room, keeping close to the tapestry-lined walls.

"Harry," began Hermione, "what on earth-?" but he held up his hand to gently silence her. He seemed to be listening intently for something. She looked over at Ron, who was looking uncharacteristically solemn and watching Harry as though his behavior was quite soundly within the realm of normalcy.

Just then, Harry stopped abruptly and reached out to a richly colored tapestry depicting a particularly large and smug-looking beaver seated on plush pillows. It appeared to be snoring.

Drawing the tapestry away from the wall, he muttered, "I think ... Yes, this must be it ..." and motioned for Ron and Hermione to follow him. They hastened to do so, and Hermione's mind worked furiously to understand the meaning of all of this. It was as if Harry and Ron were in on a secret she knew nothing about ...

But Hermione felt one thing for certain. Wherever they were and whatever they were doing, there was only one thing Harry and Ron would be this solemn and secretive about: this had to be something to do with a Horcrux. At this thought, a chill went down her spine.

When she and Ron arrived at Harry's side, Hermione let out as small gasp.

There, behind the tapestry and inlaid into the sandy stone of the wall, was a faint outline of what was unmistakably a hidden portal. All three of them pushed experimentally on it; it wouldn't budge, but remained as solid and unmoving as the wall on either side of it.

Hermione drew her wand, ready to try alohomora or dissendium charms to open the doorway, but Harry stopped her. "No spell will work on this. Voldemort doesn't work like that. We have to give the doorway something. It was the same with ... with Dumbledore when we retrieved the ring."

Voldemort? Give the doorway something?

"That time it was a blood offering. This time, it's something else, something more ..." Harry trailed off, looking uneasy. "Ron, do you have it?" He gave Hermione an oddly fleeting look as he said it, but before she could press him, he had outstretched his hand towards Ron, who was fishing a tiny vile out of the inside of his robes. Through the clear glass, Hermione could make out a bundle of fine gossamer strands that glowed an incandescent blue. The vile clearly contained a memory.

With an unbidden sense of foreboding she could not suppress, she wondered whose memory was stopped inside the vile ... not to mention what sort of memory was needed to open the door to where one of Voldemort's horcruxes was hidden.

Ron handed the vile to Harry, who uncorked it and, and with a look of distain, used the tip of his wand to prod the memory out of its glass container and apply it to the stone portal outlined in the wall in front of them. He kept the memory applied to the stone for several seconds, then withdrew his wand and lowered the fine strands back into the vile. Hermione noticed they were a more startling shade of blue now, and wondered fleetingly if the wall had wrought a change in them ... She caught Harry's eye and could tell he was thinking the same thing.

All three of them stared intently at the stone in front of them.

For a second, nothing happened. Then, quite suddenly, the outlined section of the wall slid inward several inches, then moved sideways, revealing a shadowy passageway, its walls lined with candles in brackets just like those in the room they left, only these were unlit and smoking slightly, as if they had just been blown out.

"Wow," breathed Ron.

"Quick, in here." said Harry in a harsh sort of whisper, and she and Ron hurried into the darkness of the passageway, the tapestry falling back into place behind them, hiding them from view.

"Harry, Ron" she began, drawing herself up to her fully height and lighting her wand tip. Beside her, Harry and Ron did likewise. "Are you going to tell me exactly what we're doing here or am I going to have to--"

"Yes," said Harry earnestly, "calm down, I am going to tell you everything. We'll be safe in here for now. I don't think we'll run into trouble until we've reached our destination, I just didn't want anyone to discover that we were sneaking around the Hufflepuff Common Room."

"We're in the Hufflepuff Common Room?" said Hermione, flabbergasted. None of this made any sense, we were all at the Burrow not twenty minutes ago .

"Well technically," chimed in Ron, "we're in the secret passageway off of the Hufflepuff Common Room that probably no one else knows about except You-Know-Who. Doubt even Dumbledore knew. I mean blimey, it's not even on the Marauder's Map."

So it was a Horcrux they were after ...

"Ron," said Harry. "That's not helping, we need to start at the beginning."

"That would be advisable," said Hermione through gritted teeth as Ron shrugged in agreement.

"Hermione, do you remember Bill and Fleur's wedding? You and Fleur found a time-turner meant for me? I thought it was from Dumbledore "

"Was it?" interjected Hermione quickly.

"We don't know," said Ron, who was looking increasingly uneasy. "We don't know who it came from, all we know is that it ... well, something happened to you when you tried a spell on it."

Well obviously, thought Hermione, but she remained silent, pins and needles seeming to fill her stomach.

"Hermione," said Harry, "tell me. You do remember being at the Burrow, don't you?"

"Do I remember? Of course I remember!" she snapped, starting to feel truly desperate now. "How could I not remember? We were there this very afternoon!" Dimly, in the glow of their three wand tips, Hermione could see a stricken look cross each of their faces and her sudden anger faltered. She had to remind herself to breathe.

"Hermione, Bill and Fleur's wedding was months and months ago. When you tried to reveal any curses on the time-turner, something ... something went wrong, the time-turner broke. It literally shattered all over the place. No one can really figure out how it happened. Lupin, Mad-Eye, no one ... We think there must have been some sort of curse on it, but it definitely didn't work properly; it just shattered the time-turner."

Harry looked at her through the glow of his wand, his green eyes unusually bright. "It's January now, six months after Bill and Fleur's wedding. You've been time-traveling all this time, yo-yoing back and forth to different times and places. You've been sort of stuck ... you know, stuck out of time."

Hermione, wide-eyed and taking shallow gulps of breath, started to feel faint. She felt as if the floor might be disappearing underneath her feet.

This can't be happening this can't be happening oh my god oh my god oh my god ...

Her mouth worked, but no words came out. Finding her knees terribly unstable, she settled for merely sinking to the ground, Harry's hand familiarly on her shoulder blade as if afraid she'd tip backwards. Ron hovered uncertainly above her, for some reason looking a touch sullen, but she didn't pause to think on it.

So that's what had happened! That's why she didn't know where she was when she awoke or how she got here, why she felt like Harry and Ron were in on a secret she was not privileged to hear, why they were all on the way to find a Horcrux when she had been no part of the process of discovering it, why she woke up wearing different robes and no longer had the time-turner around her neck ... she had time-traveled.

And not only that.

She had time-traveled to the future, something she had never heard of before. Time-turners were only meant to send a witch or wizard back in time, never forward.

"I'm sorry, Hermione," said Harry, breaking the silence. Ron nodded next to him, a deeply sympathetic look on his face, and reached out to pat her arm awkwardly.

With this, she seemed to come out of her trance. "So," she said slowly, "I shattered the time-turner and arrived in my future ... your present, obviously." Harry and Ron nodded solemnly and she paused, thinking. "Are you sure I just haven't had a bad case of amnesia all these months?"

Harry gave her one of his rueful little smiles she'd come to know so well. "That might have been better, but no. You've definitely been time traveling."

She took a steadying breath, and Ron said, "It's been pretty crazy for you, actually."

"Yes, I'm starting to realize that ... " She gave Ron a shaky smile which quickly faltered. "And you said this isn't the only time that I've time-traveled?"

"No," said Harry, now rubbing her shoulder and kneeling before her to look at her face properly. He seemed physically closer to her than he'd ever been before, and wondered vaguely what had happened between them in the past six months. Had they become closer friends?

Harry continued. "You ... well, you tend to be mostly in the present, your present, but you've traveled to the future and the past a fair few times. It ... it seems that you can't really control it; it just sort of ... happens."

"It's been dead useful, though, to tell you the truth," said Ron bracingly, and Hermione shot him an incredulous look and Harry made sush-ing noises.

"Well, it has been!" he pressed on, now indignant. "How else would we have known that Hufflepuff's cup was hidden at Hogwarts if Hermione couldn't come back from the future to tell us? How else would we know that we would need a memory of You-Know-Who's to get into the passageway in the first place? How else would we know that Sna--"

"Shhh!" said Harry quite suddenly, and the three of them strained their ears. Hermione thought she could hear a soft shuffling coming from the Common Room. "Come on, we can't linger here any more. We've got to get a move on. This way..."

Eager to remain undetected and yet desperate to understand more about her time-traveling and everything that had happened between last summer at the wedding and this point in time some half a year later, Hermione crept quietly after Harry and Ron, her wand held aloft to illuminate the long, drafty passageway ahead of them.

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