1944
.
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The drawing room was still there. The same furniture; the same wooden floor; the same creamy walls; the same shadows cast by the moonlight that streamed in through the big windows behind her. But, at the same time, it was different... There was no broken glass, the chandelier was still hanging on the ceiling, casting sparkling lights across the room and there was no noise; no screams; no sounds of explosions. Also, the only person in the room was the girl lying on the floor, almost unable to move due to the pain that was still haunting her body.
Hermione let a shuddering breath escape from her lips as she looked around, feeling panic rising inside her chest. She was inside the Malfoy Manor but... When? It was obvious that she had time-traveled by accident, the broken time-turner by her side being proof of that, along with the unharmed drawing room, but to when did she go? A few hours ago? A few days? Or, worse, a few years? The mere thought of traveling back more than a couple of days already made the Gryffindor feel sick and almost want to faint but, fighting this urge, she managed to get up, staying on her feet while gripping on the dark velvet curtain.
There was no sign to tell her how far back she had gone... Or at least none that she could see. Breathing deeply, Hermione let go of the curtain and took a step, only to fall due to her weakened legs. She grasped a small table to keep from falling to the ground, but ended up knocking down a couple of portraits that were on it. Oh, that was new. That table wasn't there before. It was now on the same spot where Draco had stood a few minutes ago. Cursing under her breath, the witch picked the portraits up and organized them on the table before standing.
She raised her left hand, where the silver chain was entwined, and stared at the broken time-turner while trying to hold back the despair that was taking over her. Her attention was taken from the object when she heard a sound coming from the corridor... Footsteps; specifically, the sound of the heels of boots hitting the floor. Hermione panicked, imagining Bellatrix bursting through the door at any second with her wand pointed at her, shooting the Cruciatus curse.
"Abraxas, dear, is that you?" a female voice called. The footsteps stopped and the Gryffindor heard fabric rustle before they started again. "Abraxas?"
Hermione looked around; her breathing quickening at each step the woman outside took. There was nowhere she could run to and it wasn't as if she could run... No, not with that broken body of hers.
"Think, Hermione, think!" the girl whispered, hearing the footsteps getting even closer to the drawing room's door.
There was only one thing she could try and the possibility of it going wrong was huge... Not only because the house could be protected by an Anti-Dispparition Jinx, but also because she was exhausted and to apparate in that condition was almost the same as asking for a beautiful splinching. But it was the only thing she could do.
"Darling?"
Destination.
"Could you please answer me...?"
Determination.
"Abraxas?"
Deliberation.
"Abraxas, stop that right now!"
A blonde woman opened the door and stared at the empty drawing room while clutching to her furry overcoat and asking herself if, by any chance, she was starting to imagine inexistent sounds inside her house.
Hermione yelled as she felt her face hit the pavement but stayed still for a few minutes before rolling onto her back and staring at the dark, cloudy sky above her. The girl groaned as she felt pain shooting up through her body and asked herself if she had gotten splinched. She moved her toes, kicked her legs, stretched out her arms and flexed her fingers. Everything was in their proper places. Her hands reached her face, feeling up her bruised features and making sure that everything was there, even her eyebrows. No splinching. That was good. At least one good thing.
The witch remained on the ground for a while, just listening to the sound of people talking a few meters away from her, or a car driving down the nearest street... There was also a song being played somewhere in the background. It sounded so happy, a smile almost appeared on her bloodied lips, but, instead, made her realize that she was in a public place and the best thing to do now was to get up and walk away. And that was what she did: Hermione got up on her feet, balancing her weight on her wobbly legs and putting her hands on the brick wall of the building next to her. Her head was spinning now that she was in an upright position and the witch was sure she would faint or vomit as she closed her eyes tightly and took a deep breath.
The voices on the background were growing louder, and were ringing in her ears. She couldn't really distinguish if they belonged to a man or a woman. The only thing the Gryffindor knew was that whoever it was, they were getting closer to her... And they could be anyone: a random Muggle tourist, a good wizard, a dark wizard, a burglar... And she couldn't defend herself.
"I told her it was madness," one of the voices said. "But she said it was impossible to prevent Tommy from enlisting..."
"You know she's right. He's of age already; that means he can get into the army if he wants to..." This voice was stronger and deeper; maybe it belonged to a man.
"But he's only a child! He's eighteen, for God's sake!"
"I know, but if he wants to..."
"Oh God."
"What?"
Hermione turned her head but was only able to see the blurred image of two people standing a few meters from her, in the mouth of the alley she was in. One of them was tall, with broad shoulders while the other was shorter, with a slim silhouette. The smaller one gasped and hurried in her direction and, in a second, the girl could see a better, but still somewhat blurred, image of the person's face... It was a woman with blonde, curly hair and warm blue eyes that was now looking at her with a terribly worried look on her pretty face. Granger opened her mouth to say something but nothing useful came to her mind.
"Are you alright?" the other person, who she could now see that was a man, asked.
"Of course she's not alright!" the woman said, cupping Hermione's cheeks with her gloved hands. "What happened to you?"
"I..." 'I was tortured by a madwoman just a few minutes ago.'
"How old are you?" the man asked.
"Alexei, not now...!"
"How old are you, girl?" The witch finally noticed how his voice carried a strange accent that was clearly not from anywhere inside England. "Please, answer me."
'What else did you take, what else? ANSWER ME! CRUCIO!' Bellatrix voice echoed in her head and she shook her head violently but was soon stopped by the woman, who was still holding her in place.
"My dear, please, don't do that! We won't hurt you!" she shushed her, letting her fingers caress Hermione's face. "Please, tell us how old you are..."
"Eight-Eighteen..." the girl stuttered, feeling the tears she was holding back until now finally running down her cheeks. "I'm eighteen..."
"Did someone do it to you?"
"We need to help her, Alexei. We need to take her..."
The man, Alexei, nodded before approaching them and putting his arm around the witch's waist to help her to stand. The nameless woman backed away a little before going to her other side and entwining her arm with hers, guiding the girl. That way, the couple managed to help her to walk without tripping or making too much effort.
Hermione didn't pay attention to where they were taking her. The only thing she knew was that she was mad enough to trust two complete strangers and these two said strangers were, at least, helping her – or making her think they were helping. Her head was too dizzy and her body was so exhausted, that this was the only information she could register because before everything turned dark.
When the girl opened her eyes once again, she saw a grayish ceiling. Moving her head slightly in order to look around, Hermione noticed the rest of the room she was in had the same grayish tone, making it look rather old and unclean. This effect was increased by the flickering light that illuminated the place from a malfunctioning light bulb. As she examined the place with her eyes, the witch noticed it seemed to be some kind of hospital room or, at least, a small infirmary if she took notice of the fact that there was a cabinet filled with what looked like medicine bottles and medical instruments in the room.
Hermione didn't move more than that, afraid that, if she did, the pain would come back. So, she just waited for someone to appear and tell her exactly what was going on and where she was... It didn't take too long for that to happen, as, after a few minutes, the door opened and a tall man in a white coat walked in.
"Ah, you're awake." The accent in his voice was the same one she had heard on the street before passing out. So he was one of the people who helped her. "We were worried..."
"What happened?" she asked in a hoarse voice.
"We found you on the street," he explained. "My wife and I. You were hurt and we decided to take you to a safe place so we could treat you but you passed out before we got here."
"H-Here...?"
"You're in an orphanage, my dear." The man gave her a sad smile. "My wife and I work here."
Hermione stared at his face for a while, trying to get to know his features. The man had dark red hair and light green eyes, there were a few freckles on his nose and cheeks and his thin lips were now pressed in a line, making a worried frown appear on his face. The girl's examination of his face was interrupted when the door opened once again and a woman walked in. Even if the witch had only had a short time to look into the face of the person who helped her at the alley, she recognized the woman's blonde hair and gentle face.
"Oh, she's awake!" A relieved sigh left her lips as she placed her hand on her chest. "Thanks goodness... We were worried about you." She approached them and sat down on the edge of the bed. "You're safe now. You're in an orphanage and I can assure you we'll take good care of you here... By the way, my name is Martha and this is my husband, Alexei."
"What about you?" the man asked. "What's your name?"
"Hermione..." The witch stopped talking, trying to think of what to say. She had no idea of where and when she was... The girl could not risk giving herself away. "Hermione Elston." She picked the first surname that came to her mind.
"Hermione Elston?" the woman repeated, looking at her husband for a while. "Alright, I have to tell this to Mrs. Cole. Oh, yes, Mrs. Margareth Cole is the matron of the orphanage. We talked to her and she accepted having you here even if you're eighteen..."
"M-Martha...? May I call you Martha?"
"Of course."
"Which... Could you tell me which day is today?" asked Hermione, biting her bottom lip as she braced herself for the answer.
"Can't you remember?" Alexei arched an eyebrow.
"Come on, dear, it's not surprising. Not after being in the state we found her... It's the third of August of 1944."
The girl stayed still, restraining the evidence of her panic. She had definitely traveled back in time but not just a few hours or days... She had traveled fifty four years in the past and now Hermione Granger was alive before her own parents were ever born. She had escaped from a war just to fall in the middle of another one... Or, worse, in the middle of two wars: World War Two and the First Great Wizarding War. She was lost in a different time, away from home, away from her parents and away from her friends. She was all alone.
"Are you all right?"
Hermione had to do something. She couldn't stay in the Muggle world if she wanted to go back home. The girl needed to get back to the wizarding world, back to the only place where she knew she would be safe from both wars and where she might find the help she needed to go back to her original time.
"Hermione, are you all right?"
The witch shook her head and looked at Martha, who was watching her with worry.
"Y-Yes, I'm sorry, I must have dozed off..." the girl whispered, finally lifting herself up so she would be sitting on the bed and looked at the couple. "You said the matron would allow me to stay here, even if I was eighteen..."
"Yes. You see, we do not have much money, especially now with the war, but we agreed that we couldn't let you rot on the street," explained Martha. "And as we had one of our older children leaving last week, we have a free spot for you..."
"No, you said 'even if you were eighteen'." Hermione tilted her head to the side and furrowed her eyebrows. "I'm... I'm not eighteen."
"But you said, when we found you..." mumbled Martha, looking confused and making the girl regret lying to her, even if it was a necessary lie that would help her to get where she wanted.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I must have... I must have said it wrong..."
"Don't worry about that, dear." The woman put a hand on her arm, as if to comfort her, and smiled gently. "So... You're seventeen and not eighteen, right?"
"Exactly."
"Good. I need to tell this to Mrs. Cole." Martha bit down on her bottom lip before getting up. "I think you should get some more sleep, my dear. As long as you're here, you can be sure we'll take good care of you."
"Thank you, ma'am." The girl nodded her head as she watched the woman smile back to her before leaving the room, sharing a long look with the red haired man.
"She's right, you know?" he whispered. "You should get some sleep. In your condition, sleeping will help you feel better."
Hermione watched as the man smiled down at her and, like Martha, left the room. Now she was alone once again... Only her and her confused thoughts. The witch lied back on the bed and closed her eyes, feeling how heavy her eyelids seemed to be due to her tiredness. She really should sleep but there was so much about which she should think about... What was she going to do now? Should she contact the Ministry? No. The Ministry will stay out of this, she thought, remembering about how, in the future, the Ministry of Magic hadn't hesitated to judge her friend and mislabel him a liar just to defend its own image... Not to mention about how weak the institution was; she knew it, after all; she saw how easily it fell into the hands of Lord Voldemort. But she had to get in touch with the wizarding community somehow... Maybe she could take a walk to Diagon Alley as soon as she recovered, and, there, send an owl to someone at Hogwarts; Dumbledore, most likely, as he was already a teacher at the school during the forties.
A messy mental draft of what she would write in a possible letter to Dumbledore started to build up in her head but it was not very filled before her conscious silently slipped away from her once again.
When she opened her eyes, it wasn't the ceiling that she saw, but the white wall and the cupboard with its bottles and instruments that stood against it. The pain in her body had faded nicely and now was more subtle ache than the excruciating pain she was feeling before. Also, the dizziness in her head had vanished, and she could now pay attention to her thoughts. Stretching her arms above her head, Hermione yawned and turned around on the bed, taking a better look at the room, and saw things she didn't manage to the first time she woke up there. Now the girl could see that there was another bed on her left side and two more on the other side of the room but they were all empty and tidy. She also noticed that the door through which both Martha and Alexei had came through before actually led to what seemed to be another part of that small infirmary as, now that it was open, she could see that the room on the other side of it also had the same white walls and a old table that looked like a hospital gurney.
"Then, if I, let's say, apply any pressure on one of these, I'll feel pain, right?" A male voice came from the other room. It sounded smooth and interested, and, surely, didn't belong to the man she met before... It was the voice of a younger male and the different accent present in Alexei's voice was not in this one; this voice had a Londoner accent.
"Yes. Just think about when you hit your elbow... When you do it, you press the ulnar nerve. That's why you get that shock sensation." Now, this was Alexei's voice.
"Hm, and... In a hypothetical situation where, let's say, all the nerves of the body are under some kind of pressure, what would happen?"
"That's impossible. I mean, there's no such force that could put all the nerves under the same amount of pressure..."
"I know." The younger voice cut him off, sounding slightly irritated. "As I said: it's a hypothetical situation."
"Well, then... The person would be in pain, terrible pain, I must say." The man's voice was quiet and uneasy as he answered. "The body has a whole net of nerves going through it. Almost everything is innerved, so, if you harmed all those nerves together, the person would feel a horrible pain in every part of their body." Hermione shuddered at this explanation. If she didn't know it was a Muggle talking, she would think Alexei was actually talking about the Cruciatus curse by the description of the pain in this 'hypothetical' situation.
"This... pressure, what would it do? I mean, how would it make the pain appear?"
"It'll stimulate the nerves. Nerves are long filaments of neurons, you see... And information travels across neurons like an electrical current. If I pinch the back of your hand right now, I'm stimulating your nerve and creating an electrical current that travels from the skin there to your brain... That's how you'll be able to feel it."
"I see..." She heard the rustling of paper, as if one of them were browsing through the pages of a book. "There are a lot of them."
"Indeed."
"Do you know all of them by their names?"
"Most of them, yes." A small laugh came from the older person. "One or another always slips away from me, though. Do you want to keep it?"
"Hum?"
"The book. I have another copy of it. You can keep this one if you want to."
"That would be interesting, doctor."
"So you can take it." Hermione heard one of them getting up and, soon, Alexei was standing on the door that led to her room. "Oh, you're awake." He turned around once again to speak to the younger man. "We'll have to leave our talk to another time, if you don't mind..."
"Don't worry, doctor."
Alexei smiled and walked into the room, closing the door behind him before the other could walk out and, if he wanted to, take a look at her.
"How are you feeling today?"
"Better," said Hermione, sitting on the bed.
"It's a good thing to hear." He smiled to her, pulling a chair next to her bed and sitting down. "Miss Elston, I need to ask you something..." The girl nodded, quite worried about what the man would try to discover. "What happened to you?"
"I... I don' remember." She lied, feeling bad for doing so.
"Can't you remember anything?" The doctor furrowed his brows, staring at her.
"No."
"Hermione." The man sighed. "Are you Jewish?"
"No," she answered, confused. "Why?"
"Because... Well, God knows how crazy people are getting nowadays, with Hitler stirring the hate against the Jewish people. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that London had some of those Nazi freaks..." The man shook his head. "I thought that... I thought you were. Jewish, I mean, because of... Because of what they did to your left arm. It's the kind of thing I see those madmen doing."
"What they did to my...?" the girl whispered, looking down at her left forearm and finally noticing it was wrapped in white bandages. The doctor looked at her with what seemed to be pity, before raising his hands to the bandage and, soon, removing it. Hermione gasped as she saw the result of Bellatrix's handiwork. The cuts were still bright red and the skin around them was also reddened as she would expect, be but what she didn't anticipate was the fact the cuts actually had a defined form: small letters spelling the word Mudblood. The witch took a deep breath while staring at the cuts before running a finger over them, hissing at the burning feeling she felt as she did so.
"Come on, don't do that." The man took her hand away from her bruised forearm and wrapped the bandage around it again. "Are you sure you don't remember anything?"
"Yes, I'm s-sure..."
"I think... I think I'll call Mrs. Cole. I believe she wants to talk to you."
Hermione nodded and, as soon as Alexei left the room, looked down at her injured arm, feeling the tears prickling at the corner of her eyes. Bellatrix Lestrange couldn't be happy with only torturing her, obviously; she had to make her remember the torture for the rest of her life... Now, every time she looked at her own body, she would remember that awful woman. Not to mention the fact she would always carry a mark of the prejudice the wizarding world had against people like her and her parents.
The girl closed her eyes and breathed heavily, trying to make the tears dissipate from her eyes, only opening them again when she heard the sound of someone entering to neighboring room.
"Hello, Ms. Elston."
A tall, serious looking woman was standing on the door now. Her brown hair was speckled with various white strands and her face looked old, tired. She wore a grey dress that made her figure appear even more faded, matching the place.
"I'm Margareth Cole, the matron of this place," she spoke, approaching the bed. "I've been informed of your... situation... And I can't help but agree with you staying in here for the time being. Dr. Mazarovsky told me you can't remember what happened to you. Can you remember about your parents? Where can we find them?"
"N-No..."
"I see." The woman nodded. "Any other relatives?" Mrs. Cole sighed as she saw the girl shaking her head. "I see; so, the orphanage really is the only place for you. Luckily enough, one of our eldest girls left last week. This means you have a place to stay, and you're sharing your room with only one other girl." The matron gave her a tiny smile. "Oh, yes... Martha and Dr. Mazarovsky found a few belongings of yours last night too."
Hermione watched as the old woman put her hand into the pocket of her dress and drew out a silver chain. Her heart almost skipped as she recognized the time-turner in the Muggle's hand. Mrs. Cole must have noticed how desperate she was for the object, as she didn't hesitate in handing it to her.
"I have no idea of what this is," said Margareth, watching as the girl examined the object with care. "But I know how meaningful those strange things can be to children like you... Also, this." She lifted a small, purple handbag. "I think the clasp must be damaged because we tried to open it to see if there was anything useful to identify you in it and... We didn't manage to do so."
Mrs. Cole put the bag next to her on the bed and Hermione, putting the time-turner on her lap, held it in her hands.
"Thank you, ma'am."
"No need to thank me, Ms. Elston. You'll be moved to your new room as soon as possible, so... When you think you're able to leave the infirmary, tell Alexei and we'll put you in your right room."
A/N: Another chapter for you guys. This one, just like the previous one, was beta read by RipperShadow6116.
1- Muggle characters: Mrs. Cole, as you know, appear in the books... I have no idea of why I chose Margareth to be her first name. Martha is also a canon character, although she doesn't show up, but is only mentioned by Mrs. Cole. Alexei is mine, he was created for another fanfiction and as a "tribute" to a friend of mine {AnaStrakovinch}, it was she who helped me with his surname, Mazarovsky, which means "masters of the truth"... He is, as it may be quite evident, russian.
2- Hermione Elston: Elston... Well, it came from Prince Felix Yusupov, Count Sumarokov-Elston, aka, one of the guys who killed Rasputin. I was reading his book, Lost Splendor (btw, if you have the chance, you should read it... you can find it in English on internet, just search for its title on Google), and ended up giving the "Elston" name to Hermione.
3- I know the whole "Mudblood cutting into Hermione's arm" didn't happen in the book... But, I'm sorry, I simply loved this change in the movie.
Miss RSS, SaffronDaise and julesrose, thank you for your reviews, they're really important to me (: Hope you guys liked this one and, as always, tell me what you think of it.