Chapter 2

Furious, Hermione had gone straight to the Auror Headquarters, where she browbeat a new Auror trainee into telling her Nobby's address whilst avoiding Harry and Ron. They would have wanted to come with her, or worse, tried to keep her from going. Odds were they'd end up at Nobby's home soon anyway. She had to act fast. And she couldn't believe she'd let Snape distract her with the archives!

With a pop Hermione arrived in Bristol, in a suburb that, like most of England, was mainly Muggle: St Andrews. Verifying identification landmarks, Hermione at first didn't notice the rising voices around her.

"Did you see that?"

"She came out of nowhere."

"Are you sure? It's dark over there."

"I'm sure, she's one of them!"

"Witch!"

The loud cry made Hermione turn and see the group of people beginning to gather. A young man a couple years older than her was pointing right at her.

"Let's get her before she does something!"

There was a rising rumble of assent, and the group further up the sidewalk began to march toward her, as did as a couple people down from her. The commotion had brought the attention of a customer in a book shop, and he stepped out between her and the larger crowd. Hermione couldn't quite hear what he said, but his body language indicated to her that he was trying to talk with them.

"She's a witch!" the same young man shouted, pointing. Hermione eyed them and the two men on her other side warily. She pulled out her wand and cast a Disillusionment charm on herself. The larger crowd gasped and cried out.

"She is a witch!" One of the men on her other side yelled.

Hermione didn't run. If she moved fast, her shimmer might be more visible. Heart pounding, weight on the balls of her feet, Hermione moved toward the two down from her. The one who had yelled was turning his head this way and that, searching for her. Hermione eased to the right, passing by his companion instead. She held her breath; the space between him and the parked car on the street meant she would have to get close. She had nearly made it, when the second guy turned and his arm knocked into her.

Startled, he stared right at where she stood and then made a grab. He barely caught the edge of her sleeve as Hermione turned and ran for it.

"She's here!" he cried. "She's invisible, but she's here!"

Hermione didn't look around. She kept running and heard the footfalls behind her. She thanked Merlin that at least she was pointed in the direction she needed to be to get to Raglan Rd. Hopefully, she could get to Nobby's house before they saw another trace of her.

As she turned the corner, a hand covered Hermione's mouth and she was pulled backward. "Careful," was hissed in her ear.

Not again! Hermione thought as for the second time that night, she was held captive by Severus Snape.

The crowd chasing after her ran by. There were fewer than she'd left behind, only six. They split, three continued, and three turned onto the road where she and Snape stood quietly Disillusioned.

He held his body stiffer than he had in the archives. She felt less like she was with a friend this time, even though he was once again helping her out.

The three Muggles on the road were moving closer, but then one stopped and shook his head. He turned around, muttering something. A second followed him, but the third Muggle didn't want to give up. When the other two kept walking away, the third Muggle seemed to realize he was all alone and chased after them.

"I can't believe I let you do that to me twice in one night!" Hermione hissed at him when the last one chasing her was out of sight and Snape had released her.

"I beg your pardon?"

Hermione poked a finger into Snape's invisible chest, wishing she could make eye contact as she glared at where his head ought to be. "Talking me into the archives, distracting me from trying to get here, when all along you had pickpocketed me!"

Hermione felt a swish motion near her head, accompanied by the word Muffliato. "Miss Granger, clearly you've assumed I'm someone else. Either you've lost what little intelligence you have by jumping to conclusions, or you're under the influence of a Memory Charm. Forgive me my vanity, but I refuse to believe you don't recognize my voice."

"I know right well whom I am talking to, MasterSnape. Now where is Nobby's wand?"

"If you are referring to the recently-deceased Minister Leach, I assume his wand is either with his body or with the Aurors who retrieved him."

"You know very well that Harry and Ron didn't ask us for his wand, which is unfortunate, as I would have discovered earlier that you had stolen it from my robes."

Snape's tone declared his lost patience. "I did no such thing, Miss Granger. Memory Charm it is."

Hermione took a deep breath, attempting to calm the urge to shout at him. "No one has messed with my memory. But I'll play along. What are you doing here if you weren't planning on using Nobby's wand to get past his wards?"

"The wards around his house are already down. See for yourself."

Startled, Hermione did so. Directing her wand two houses down, she detected no protection wards up at all. "In the time that has passed since you left me in the archives, you could have just as easily disabled them yourself. What I don't understand is why you grabbed me instead of making your escape. You must have known I'd come after you."

"Miss Granger, do desist in assuming that I have any idea what you are talking about in regard to the archives."

Hermione inhaled through her nose and pursed her lips. "Well, unless you're going to show me you've already taken what Nobby sent me to get—unlikely—I am going in. The Aurors will be here any minute after all."

Hermione started to move toward the house, but Snape's words stopped her. "If you were truly playing along, then you should be wondering who else might have disabled Nobby's wards. You'd be taking in the possibility that someone else is inside his house."

Hermione looked over her shoulder, remembered that they were both invisible and she was about to step out of the Muffliato zone, and returned. With the same swishing motion she'd used to cast the charm, Hermione made herself visible again. "One simple way to find out. Follow me, if you please."

Once in front of Nobby's house, Hermione pointed her wand and whispered, "Homenum Revelio."

Two markers appeared inside on the second level. Immediately, they both began to move. Hermione heard rapid pops of Apparition, the first from Snape at her side, the next from inside the house. Hermione immediately went running in, searching the entryway wildly for the direction of the stairs. Recognizing a vaguely similar set up to her aunt's house Hermione rushed up the stairs and to the room the markers had indicated. "Snape!"

Apparating without a clear visualization of where you were going was highly dangerous. Hermione had no reason to believe Snape had been inside Nobby's house before. She could be wrong, or Snape could be on the floor, splinched.

When she came to the room, she found Snape blocking the entryway. He was upright, not at all leaning against the jamb for support, so he didn't seem to be hurt. But he was also stiff, holding himself unnaturally, and didn't acknowledge her approach in any way.

"Snape, are you alright? What is it?" she pressed when he didn't answer.

Slowly, as if only just coming to himself, Snape turned toward her. "I believe, Miss Granger, I have just discovered why you are so convinced we ran into each other earlier this evening."

"Oh?"

Snape gave her a long look, his gaze moving down over her and up again. "The two people I just saw Apparating out of this room were none other than you and me."

"Excuse me?" Hermione thought she must have missed some words.

"While you and I were out here on the street, we were also inside this house. Apparently we have an interesting journey ahead of us." Snape's voice was absolutely neutral. His gaze stayed on her face in a way she found very unsettling.

"Are you talking about Time-Travel? That shouldn't be possible; all the Time-Turners were destroyed six years ago. Ugh, Polyjuice?" Hermione shuddered at the thought.

"Use that highly-lauded brain of yours more quickly, Miss Granger. It is possible that in the last six years more Time-Turners could have been made. Also, that others might have been located elsewhere at the time of your misguided adventure in the Department of Mysteries."

Hermione crossed her arms. "What's your answer to the possibility of Polyjuice then?"

Snape turned away and said quietly, "I know that I saw myself." He turned back toward her as he stepped in, giving Hermione her first visual of the room. Picking something off the front of his robes, he dangled it in front of her. "While your hair can and does end up everywhere, I am certain since it was definitely me I saw, it was also you."

Not knowing how else to handle it, Hermione took the strand of her hair from Snape and shoved it into her pocket before stepping into what was clearly Nobby's bedroom. It was slightly messy, but tasteful. It held a dark mahogany four-poster bed, with matching nightstands, armoire, desk, and chair. The nightstands had a handful of books piled on each, while the desk had still more. A few were on the floor, open. One of them seemed to have had an awkward landing, rather than been deliberately placed. Snape bent to pick it up.

"What did you see us doing in here?" Hermione asked him.

"There was not time to see what we—they—were up to before your spell swooped over them." Snape turned through a few pages of the book he held. Hermione left that area of the room to Snape while she moved over to one of the nightstands. There was a glass of water with only a few sips remaining. Nothing of interest.

Hermione frowned at the armoire. Then she rushed over to it and flung its doors open.

"Let me guess, you've thought of something." Snape's sneering voice carried across the room to her.

"Nobby mentioned his armoire when he gave me the wand. I hadn't understood it at the time, but now that's clearly what he was saying. 'My bedroom armoire. Fix it all.'"

Snape moved to look over her shoulder. The interior of the armoire held robes to the left, four small shelves to the right, and two wide drawers on the bottom. Nothing stood out as particularly revelatory to Hermione: hats, polish, moccasin slippers and very indigo shoes. One shelf held nothing but parchment. She started to reach for a scroll, but stopped. On the bottommost shelf, barely noticeable against another roll of parchment, was a wand.

"Is that the wand taken off you earlier this evening?" Snape asked.

"I don't know. I never saw it, only held it in my hand." Hermione very carefully reached for it. "It could be a spare, I suppose."

"You don't know that it's safe. We could have…" But Snape didn't finish.

Hermione looked over her shoulder at him. His face was shuttered, but she had a good idea what he was thinking. "We could have laid a trap to hex ourselves? Perhaps someone else needs to be thinking a bit more quickly before he speaks." Hermione didn't know what gave her the nerve to tease him so familiarly. Maybe it was the awareness that now they were essentially partners in figuring out this mystery. Or maybe it was because he seemed a little less condescending than she was expecting. Either way, Snape said nothing, though the look he gave her made her feel like she'd just whispered advice to Neville in potions class.

Turning back to the task, Hermione's fingertips touched the wand on the shelf.

Nothing happened.

Grasping it, she lifted it from the shelf and maneuvered it into her palm. "It does feel like the same. Oh!"

Once the base of the wand touched her palm, a blue string of light emanated from its tip. Snape smirked at her. The string, though slack in the air, seemed to be tethered on the other end by something inside the top of the two drawers in the armoire. Bending, Hermione made to open it, but Snape's hand halted hers. "Allow me."

Hermione straightened to let him, still holding on to Nobby's wand. The interior of the drawer held socks, rather haphazardly organized by color. Snape pushed the socks aside, moving carefully around the edges of the incorporeal blue string. The other end disappeared into the base of the drawer.

"Hmm." Snape used his long fingers to feel around the piece of wood, and then switched to running his palm over it. Finally, he paused. Hermione saw his knuckles rise gracefully before Snape pressed his fingertips against a groove. A section in the bottom of the drawer popped open. Snape tried to lift it one-handed. Then he tried with two hands.

"Maybe its password protected," Hermione offered.

"How are we supposed to guess Nobby's password for his sock drawer?" Snape said irritably, straightening up. "Did he say anything else to you other than 'My bedroom armoire. Fix it all'?"

"'Take it. Stop them.'"

"Stop who?"

"Whoever murdered him, I don't know." Hermione frowned at the wand, which still glowed at the tip, waiting for her to get into the secret compartment. "But if future-you took the wand and left it here for us to find, then I'd say we were the ones to create the password."

"Unlikely. How would we have gotten into the compartment in the first place?"

Hermione sighed. "Do you know anything about Quidditch snitches?"

Snape glared at her. "Yes."

"They have flesh memory in case there's a dispute about which Seeker caught it first. Dumbledore used this to his advantage to hide the Resurrection Stone for us to find inside the snitch Harry caught in his mouth first year."

"Resurrection Stone?"

"Oh, um, right. Sorry, I thought you already knew about that. I wasn't thinking straight. If you had known, you would have known why Dumbledore put on the Horcrux ring."

The skin around Snape's mouth had tightened. "I know about the Horcruxes, but not about a fabled object from the tales of Beedle the Bard. That ring was an heirloom of Slytherin, as far as I knew."

"And Slytherin was the heir of… oh, never mind, we're getting off topic. I'll fill you in later if we have time. Time!" Hermione's gaze returned to the blue light disappearing into the drawer. "That's what else Nobby said! He told me there wasn't much time, and then he shouted 'Time!' That was before he gave me his wand and told me to fix it all. I bet that's what's inside the drawer. A Time-Turner! One that, as you said, he possibly had before they got destroyed. Our future-selves set us up to find it!"

Snape's lip curled. "Miss Granger, slow down before you pass out from lack of air. You've just jumped to three or four different topics at once. If I am understanding you correctly, you think that the future-you put flesh memory on Nobby's wand so that it would activate when you picked it up here and now, and direct you to a hidden Time-Turner."

"Yes, exactly!" Hermione couldn't help it. She beamed at him. "Oh, it's so nice not to have to explain that out step by step."

Snape at looked her as if he didn't know how to react to his former student congratulating him on not needing something explained.

"So we know the password because we set the password," Hermione rushed in to fill his silence. "Nobby asked us to fix it all. Maybe he wanted us to fix more than just his death? Maybe we can undo what happened 4—no, now 5 days ago. Wow, there really isn't much time." Hermione turned toward the sock drawer. "Vanity Burbage!"

Nothing happened.

"Miss Granger, we can't undo what we know has already happened. We can only follow the footsteps of our future-selves, which so far means only that I'll have to be in the archives with past-you after Nobby gave you his wand, and together we end up here."

Hermione was struck anew by a thought she'd suppressed earlier. "Snape, if you weren't with me when Nobby died, then how did you know to come here? How did you know he was dead?"

"Word travels fast, Miss Granger. I came here to observe and gather information as to why Nobby Leach was killed. I certainly didn't expect you to show up, the object of Muggles on a witch hunt."

"Yes." Hermione looked sad. "It did seem to be very similar to that, didn't it? I hate to think about the dangerous changes that lay before all of us now."

"And is that why, perhaps, you hoped we were supposed to go back and prevent it from starting?" Snape's words were gentle, and she locked gazes with him in surprise at receiving anything close to compassion from him. His expression revealed nothing, though, and Hermione looked away again, uncomfortable.

"Well, it looks like I was wrong about preventing the Muggles from finding out. 'Vanity Burbage' is not the password."

"Her name is Verity Burbage." Snape said.

There was a click, and they both turned to see the compartment lid rise up. The light from the wand Hermione held disappeared. Together, they peered into the hidden space.

There was a Time-Turner inside.

(Two)