Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, Iron Man, Avengers, or anything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Fourth Year, ending: The Third Task

Hell is a pit. Not a Hades-pit, a realm of embers and forget-me waters.

No, Hermione decides, watching the Third Task unfold—Hell is the ever-yawning pit in your stomach, the fathomless drop when your intestines warp and stretch, squeezed through a black hole into toothpaste.

Hell is watching Harry disappear—flash—and reappear—flash, form too still to be moving but he must be breathing, he must be breathing—

—scarecrow Harry and his busted up bloodied head, straw oozing from his lightning scar, flash and flash and flash—

Hermione is standing, the whole crowd is standing, and Hermione is too shocked to move: there's a body, flash, eyes frozen to the sky, next to Harry, a blonde-haired boy in yellow-and-black robes.

Cedric. Cedric Diggory, Hogwarts Champion. And Harry, facedown mannequin Harry, suddenly curls up—Hedgehog Harry—and wails, and he grips Cedric's body to him.

And Hermione cannot even mourn Cedric because all she feels is relief. She reaches for Ron—or Ron reaches for her—and mutely they grasp, blinking back tears, and acknowledge the overwhelming gratitude: Harry is alive. Harry is alive and that is all that matters.

Harry can sense Hermione and Ron's relief as they part for the summer, and their relief is equated only by his anger. Anger at Dumbledore, anger at Fudge, anger at not being quick enough to save Cedric, anger at not being smart enough to save Cedric, anger at the gratitude felt that it was Cedric and not Harry…

The trains take them home and this anger sits between them on the train like a third person, a dementor of betrayal, and Hermione tries to understand, she really does, but losing Harry is unfathomable to her lungs. Her heart skips beats thinking of it. And Ron has been so pale these last two weeks his freckles leap out.

Even with their battlefield of school years behind them, they've never had this close of a call. They had defeated Quirrell; Fawkes had saved Harry; time-turners had saved Sirius.

No one had ever died.

(A part of Hermione wonders if this third-person presence on the train, the anger simmering like a mirage between them, is Cedric's ghost. Unable to move on.

She liked him. Had liked him. Distantly, abstractly, because in her foreground was Ron, Viktor, Harry, and Fleur. But she had liked him.)

But Death changes things. Like time, or wormholes.

There really is no going back.

Fifth Year

Fifth year is a disgusting year. It's bleak and ugly. The weeks before school starts are spent at Grimmauld Place, the dusty shrine to pureblood fanaticism that's desolate as a cauldron bottom. Harry meets hormones and she has to remind herself to breathe deep. Unreservedly. Because cuckoobird Harry, with his cupboard room and absentee aunt and absentee uncle and distant Dumbledore, does not know how to communicate his pain. He never had family councils where they get out all their truths. So he yells and yells and yells, allcaps statements that wiggle exclamation points through her eardrums and shakes the doorframe.

Hermione listens through the static of emotion and tries to parse out Harry's truths: Harry feels scared. Harry feels at fault. Harry feels alone.

In the library, Harry is currently mid-rant, a rare anger not directed at Hermione or Ron but at Sirius and Remus. Hermione sets aside her book, gently. It's on the Goblin Rebellion of 1612, but she wasn't reading, not really. Sirius is a cuckoobird and Remus is a cuckoobird, but they're cuckoobirds of a different nest. They don't know how to help their green-eyed godson, not when those green eyes are slick behind broken glasses.

(She knows Harry knows how to fix his glasses—a simple Occulus Reparo. Sometimes she thinks he leaves them broken as a distraction, so people fixate on the glasses and not the eyes. Not the emotions floating beneath. Like how he keeps his hair long to distract from his scar.)

She wafts up behind Remus, inline of Harry's sight, and he is screaming but she is calm, cool, collected. So she thinks they all are surprised when she bunches Harry's shirt in her fist and shoves—Harry stumbles back, his mouth in an O.

Elbow slung across his chest, pushing tight against his breastbone, she backs him in into the wall and holds him there. He's taller than her, but she has the upper hand and he is looking down his nose at her, shocked, utterly. His neck bends as if getting close as possible to study her will reveal her intentions, her masterplan, and they are so close they could kiss.

She pushes up his broken glasses, all the way up his scalp and into his hair.

Remus and Sirius flutter, useless and concerned, in the background.

Jet hair obeys gravity and, bending, it brushes her brow. She stands on tiptoe, bringing her forehead to rest squarely against his own. They could tickle eyelashes.

But in this position, Harry cannot run. Harry cannot hide. To look anywhere other than her eyes will make him cross-eyed. He'll focus; he'll listen:

"M'not leaving, Harry," she whispers. "Not ever. And you're not going anywhere."

In this life, I'll go, too

And it's a good thing she has her elbow digging into his breastbone because Harry sags, face crumpling, and she catches his weight with all she has. "I've got you," she murmurs, over and over, until the words bleed together: I've got you, I'vegotyou, got you, got you, youI'vegot.

And Ron comes diving in, ears pink, and lifts Harry—the air floods back into her lungs, she hadn't realized Harry's weight was crushing her—and their little cuckoobird nest is, for the moment, whole.

Hermione gets Sirius. She gets the shadow of family.

She watches him watch the gnarled inked branches of his family tree. Just watch. He is still, eyes too dark to be unfocused.

He is haunted by those branches. By the sooty wand-blasted smudges.

Carter, Stark

Hermione gets this. The loss blankets her.

It's Halloween, and Harry, Ron, and Hermione sit together in the common room, cushions askew and tucked under elbows or slung over knees. Harry and Ron are playing Wizard's Chess, with Harry staring moodily into the fire during Ron's moves. Ron makes a noise of dismay and Hermione looks up over her Transfiguration essay, watching the firelight reflect in orange panes off of Ron's hair as he moves his queen, and satisfied, leans back into shadow.

No one else is up; everyone else is sleeping.

But Halloween has always been theirs—hers, and Ron's, and Harry's. Halloween has always been candelabras in the air, trolls and lies, nights in flame.

Halloween was the night Harry lost his parents. When Harry became the Boy-Who-Lived.

And Halloween, eleven years later, was the night the Boy-Who-Lived became someone's Harry: Ron's Harry, Hermione's Harry. And Ron is Harry's, Hermione's. And Hermione is theirs.

They own the night.

And perhaps it's the tension of this night, sticky and heavy and sullen and sacred, when Harry reaches over and touches Hermione's ankle, fingertips right on her anklebone. She stills, and Ron hushes, eyes wide.

Harry doesn't look at her, just at his three fingers on her skin, his thumb looping round. "You can keep your secrets, Hermione."

Hermione can't stop from shuddering from Harry's grasp—secrets? She's been so careful—how could they know? How could they see?

And it is Ron who quakes her most when he speaks up, gruffly, "Sometimes—sometimes you get a look in your eye. Like Harry."

Little orphan cuckoobird Harry.

"Like," Ron finishes, his voice being swallowed up by the crackle of the fire. "Like you think you're alone in the world."

"But we're not leaving," Harry echoes, firelight sparking both of their faces golden. He and Ron quirk into identical, humorless smiles as he repeats her earlier words: "Not ever. And you're not going anywhere."

She leaps from the couch so quickly, arms looping around Harry's neck and Ron's waist and she holds them, tighter tighter tighter, and when they finally release, Hermione feels weightless. She hadn't realized—hadn't realized how heavily, how tightly, how embedded she had been carrying Howard Stark and Peggy Carter beneath her skin.

"Guys," she breathes, "I have something to tell you."

Hermione blames Umbridge for many things—terrorizing the school, fascist bigotry, ruining the color pink for Hermione forever—but one crime Hermione wants to fasten to Umbridge is really all on her: it's November, and she hasn't thought of Peggy Carter or Howard Stark since Halloween.

Her boys took it surpisingly well—stories of Americans and soldiers with Ron's questions interrupting her faltering sorrow—"wait, does this mean you're American now? Hot."—and tales of another world and wormholing time—"well, we always knew you're brilliant, Hermione, but we never knew it was because you're an alien" which launched Hermione into a tirade about parallel worlds and parallel timestreams, using parchment and a quill to lecture about wormholes, until Ron rolled his eyes and launched a cushion at her face, starting a pillowwar which ended in dizzy laughter and floating feathers and Hermione realized that the past doesn't matter. Not now.

Are Howard Stark and Peggy Carter her past, she wonders? How can they be anything but, with the stones of Hogwarts vibrating from this tension. Umbridge. I must not tell lies. Harry's dreams. Trelawney gone. I must respect my elders. Sirius, antsy on Dumbledore's leash.

Christmas, with Ron's dad in the hospital—his torso all pale-bitten—and Ron and Harry at the Grimmauld Place, is the loneliest she's had. She's with her parents. Finally, she's with Mama and Daddy, in the house that has her Chronicles of Narnia stashed under Mama's newspapers and Daddy's eyeglass case (he needs eyeglasses now, imagine that).

Weaker eyes, cornea-driven eyes, and his temples have shoots of gray. And in Mama's hands, the veins stand out, blue-green compressed cords in pale. Five years ago, Mama's hands didn't look like that. (Hermione wonders too if underneath the perm and hair dye if Mama is also going gray or white or ashy.)

They're all getting older, and this Christmas, they feel it.

Christmas morning is unusually solemn. Hermione was never raised religious—far from it—and out of Mama and Daddy, Daddy is the one most inclined to smoky prayer, with Mama and Hermione cooling in the embers of their thoughts; Mama is Jewish only by blood but still through December she lights the Menorah for her family that Auschwitz took.

So their cuckoobird nest has never been religious, in the truest sense of the word. Religion is not faith to them. Faith is spangled shields and cold fashioned-iron and a world at peace.

Christmas they talk of peace and open gifts next to a real fir tree with blue electric bulbs. The lights are hypnotic, a blue so bright it is almost white, and looking at it, Hermione feels a stir—a blue so cold it shapes ice from air, and for a moment she almost believes in Divination—

But this must be a memory. A fragment flashback.

Maybe something at last—at last—from the years the whirlpool took.

But those sunspots of memory, reflected on the back of her eyelids, fade as soon as Mama sighs and fixates onto Hermione. Mama looks coiled, kneeling amongst the reds and greens and silvers of shiny wrappings and tissue paper, empty cardboard at her feet. Scattered around are piles of brightly colored woolen sweaters and hats, sugar-free sweets, and Hermione's top three wishlist books: von Clausewit's Vom Kreige, an autographed co[y of Reinventing Warfare 1914-1918: Novel Munitions and Tactics of Trench Warfare, and Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

Mama runs her hand over The Art of War's cover, but each finger is flexed, tense.

Hermione realizes then that she should have been more subtle.

"How bad is it in this wizard's world?" Mama demands. "The truth now."

Daddy twitches in his armchair, half moving forward in protest and half hovering for Hermione's answer.

The truth now. Now or never.

Her mouth dry of saliva, Hermione answers slowly, remembering Penelope and dead Cedric and poor Arthur. "Bad. It's bad."

Mama's face twists so suddenly into grief and back if Hermione hadn't been watching, she would've missed it. "Bad," she nods, repeats. "Bad." Mama's gaze goes to the menorah on the mantle. "How bad exactly, love?" She asks, and it is so quiet.

Hermione knows Mama is thinking of Auschwitz.

Each word coming in its own puff of air, its own exhalation, Hermione answers her hidden cuckoobird truth. "Not as bad as you think. But soon."

Umbridge wants Hogwarts but Voldemort wants the world.

Daddy is angry then, rising to his feet, shouting, "No!" His pupils are pinpricks. "We've escaped two wars already. Your parents gave up everything for just the shot at peace—they gave you to us—they ENTRUSTED YOU TO US!" He runs a hand through his hair, half of it standing on end, muttering about plans:"We'll go to Australia. Or America. Fuckin' Timbuktu. We'll hide, we'll live. You're not the center of it."

Hermione's breath catches—no. Harry.

"She's not," Mama realizes slowly, swallowing her own air. "But…the Potter boy must be."

Mama knows that for Hermione, there is no turning back.

This is the moment Hermione watches her parents lose her. Hermione-their-daughter becomes Hermione-the-soldier. 16-old Hermione facing soldiers in black facemasks and death in their blood. Their baby, Hermione.

Mama kneels in front of Hermione, head bowed, and Hermione whispers to the traitorous part of her soul that wants to weep and beg and apologize, apologize, apologize—think of Penelope.

Hermione meets Mama's broken heart with the courage that comes when one has everything to lose. But still—

I'm sorry, she mouths. She can't bring herself to voice it aloud.

"You are every inch your father's daughter," Daddy says then, and while there's pride floating to the top of his voice, it is weighted by absolute horror, and she knows he means Howard Stark.

"Her mother's daughter," Mama corrects. "Peg was the underdog's soldier. And Steve."

Steve, soldier of the free and brave.

"Your daughter," Hermione corrects, all air. "Your daughter, always."

It's the first time that statement has felt absolutely, utterly true.

Mama nods, once, short. "What do you need from us?" she asks briskly, and Daddy hangs his head in defeat.

What does Hermione need? Hermione needs them safe.

Mama and Daddy pause, heads slightly cocked, awaiting Hermione's orders.

Sirius is dead.

Sirius is dead, Sirius just died, yet Hermione cannot think on him and his loose stubble-grin.

No, Sirius is dead and Umbridge is gone but Harry lives and Hermione is in Hogwarts hospital wing, but Hermione can only think of the Department of Mysteries and the rows of bell-jarred time-turners, some as small as fingernails and one as large as an infant, but all sticky honey-gold and even now, Hermione's thoughts and mind feel stuck, snagged on a trail of taffy nectar and dust.

In that chamber, she had felt her own heartbeat and heard it echo, then echo, then echo, stuttered in between with the same heartbeat caught in a time-lag of half of a second ahead, half of a second behind, lapsing and leaping, sound and time and self caught in that time sludge.

"Do you hear that?" she had hissed to Neville. Neville and Harry had returned her look blankly.

"Hermione," Neville had blushed, blushing even though they had just committed illegal action at least five times over. "There's nothing to hear."

And staring at the time-turners, Hermione had felt the wormhole in her chest expand and answer—Hermione is wormholes, Hermione is gold fire, Hermione is time and flame and fury. Hermione is yours.

Then Dolohov had arrived and slashed her open with blueflame cannonballs, white-blue as the Christmas lights, and as her world had dimmed, Hermione reached across the void and touched and unraveled.

And all she can think about now in the midst of all this grief and death is that fathomless touch.

Author's Note: Thank you all—it's not long now before worlds collide.