Chapter One: The One-Way Trip
As she fell through an infinite dance of fading stars, Hermione resolved that she was never underestimating Luna again.
If she hadn't been so shocked and enraged that the ritual to appeal to the Founders of Hogwarts actually did something she would have been filled with wonder at the sensation of flying through the cosmos as an endless parade of stars twinkling in and out of existence streamed past. Boundless, and weightless, and for one shining moment she could see everything going right—people living, Voldemort stopped before his time, him surviving—but all too soon the stars winked out of existence and she landed with a thud.
She'd never expected a ritual where she was tossed into the Black Lake to go through the cosmos to end with the jarring jolt of landing in her childhood bed. After a flight through the infinite, landing on the periwinkle bedspread of her childhood home was an anticlimax. Hermione frowned as she observed her surroundings; she didn't feel cleansed of her past regrets.
She looked around at the bedroom of the Granger household and frowned more; somehow it didn't look right. Everything looked newer, and bigger, and she could have sworn she had replaced some of the furniture.
What was that ritual? She hadn't thought of it when Luna had been marking out ritual circles with salt and herbs in the full moonlight by the Black Lake, certain that nothing Luna did could ever be too harmful (or do too much, she thought, rather shamefully). She had been more focused on trying not to shiver in the cold January air, as Luna had insisted that she wear nothing but a thin cotton robe for the ritual with absolutely nothing on underneath. It was supposed to purge her of past regrets and help her come to terms with what had happened to her during the war, but, as she rose from her bed, and grimly observed her dimly lit reflection in the mirror of the white birchwood vanity that she had as a child, Hermione began to get a horrifying sense that something was desperately wrong.
Hermione didn't know whether to laugh or cry as she looked at the rounded cheeks of her younger self. She looked about ten, though she could not be sure. It was hard to tell in the dim nighttime gloom, the only illumination coming from the streetlights outside her house, as well as that of the full moon. She grimaced, and nearly gave herself a fright—it had been years since she had seen those buck teeth. Had they really been that large in the past?
Perhaps this was just a dream journey.
She looked at her small, child-like fingers, and the smooth unblemished skin of her left arm where her Mudblood scar had been. No purple scar from Dolohov peeked out from over her nightgown. A mild sense of wonder filled her.
On a hunch, she searched through her fuzzy pink diary, the one where she'd kept a daily record until they went on the run with the Horcrux.
It was July 26th 1991. A full moon. She was supposed to be eleven years old. It had been January 2nd, 1999 when they had done the ritual.
But there was no way Luna Lovegood, with the help of a few different kinds of herbs and ritual circles had sent her back in time powered by not much more than wishes and the full moon. Hermione had thought that something had gone wrong when the ritual picked her up and tossed her into the Black Lake—and then the subsequent journey through the cosmos but—
There was no way.
And her parents—still had their memories of her at this point. If this was a journey back in time. Unless this was some sort of spiritual journey, and she would wake up the next day back at Hogwarts, in her scarred and battered adult body, ready for another day of classes that had long lost their savour for her.
With that in mind, Hermione noted the time—just after midnight—and crept quietly out of her bedroom and down the hall to her parents' room.
She looked at the sleeping faces of Helen and Richard Granger, so much younger than she'd last seen them, their hair not quite greying yet, and felt her heart twist.
How was this supposed to help her get over her regrets of the past? This was a terrible spiritual journey. More than ever, she missed her parents, and regretted ever Obliviating them. There were so many other options that she could have taken in retrospect that didn't involve robbing her parents of their memories—of their very identity and connection to her—and soon, she found herself making tiny gasping sobs.
"Hermione?" Helen Granger drowsily murmured. "What's wrong, sweetums?"
Hermione found herself crying even harder at that. How long had it been since her mother had called her by those embarrassing pet names that she had been all too eager to grow out of?
"Hermione?" Her father was awake now, too.
"What's wrong?" her mum asked. Hermione's voice caught in her throat. She could not say "everything". But that was what she felt. She was tired of missing the dead and her parents and she didn't want to go to school anymore and didn't know what she wanted to do with her life and she wished that the war had never happened.
"There there," her mother said, getting up and drawing her into the bed. "It's just a bad dream," she whispered, while stroking Hermione's wildly bushy hair. Hermione had forgotten just how bushy her hair was before she had discovered how to tame it somewhat in her sixth year.
Hermione cried harder, because no matter that she was now in her eleven-year-old-body, she knew that it was very likely she would never see her parents again once she woke up. Spiritual journeys were rarely permanent.
"It's just a bad dream; don't worry about it. It'll all feel much better tomorrow morning," her mother said, hugging her close and pulling the blankets over her.
Hermione forced herself to stop crying, and tried to concentrate on the feelings of safety and care that she hadn't experienced for so long. She listened to her parents fall asleep, then found that she herself was exhausted. She had not cried that hard since before the end of the war. Before long, she was asleep.
Hermione was woken up early the next morning by her mother, and found that no, it was not just a bad dream, and things were not better. The 27th was a Saturday, and her parents had sent her off to weekend ballet and piano lessons while they ran errands. Hermione tried not to cringe as her ballet instructor dressed her down for forgetting her entire choreography—excuse her if she had better things to remember in the nearly ten years since she took lessons! And her piano tutor was perplexed when she struggled to play even simple scales.
Hermione had forgotten how different her life had been before Hogwarts—before the war. What was once simple and mundane had become strange and foreign; ballet and piano were not things that she had thought of for so long. There was something nostalgic and regretful about these lessons all at once; they were some of the last ballet and piano lessons she would ever have in her life.
She was very relieved when her parents dropped her off at the library in the afternoon; ballet and growing pains meant that her legs ached and she did not look forward to going through puberty again. Her periods had been terrible for years until they settled down.
She sat in a corner of the library, and wondered if it would be safe to write anything down in her diary, even if it was only a spiritual journey. She had no idea what kind of rules governed this reality. She had no wand, no way of warding things, and her parents had never given any indication they were the sort of parents to read her diary but she felt paranoid about writing down things about the wizarding world in full view of Muggles.
In the end she spent several hours in the mathematics and computing science sections of the library learning to come up with a decent cipher, and practising until she could read and write code in shorthand. She felt reasonably certain that no one in the wizarding world would be able to break her encryption, and that Muggles wouldn't bother—wizards were far too reliant on magic to get things done, and it was extremely unlikely anyone would think to spend any amount of time decrypting the fuzzy pink journal of an eleven-year-old Muggleborn.
After the library, Hermione helped out with dinner in a surprising act of volunteerism for younger self. She wanted to show her parents how much she appreciated and loved them, and brought out board games after dinner to spend more time with her mother and father. Eventually her parents had to stop to catch up with work, and Hermione spent the rest of the evening running Arithmantic calculations on what was going on with her situation in the past, as that was the only magic she could reliably perform without a wand.
At one in the morning she could barely keep her eyes open; she had far less stamina than she did as an adult, and she cursed being in her childish body. It had been strange, being small and short and treated like a child all day long, but heart-warming at the same time.
She tried to make sense of her Arithmancy equations, but it was hard to believe what she was seeing. According to her calculations, she had travelled back in time, and there was no way back. But she had never read anything about people travelling back in time longer than an hour—it was just unheard of. And if she had travelled back in time…
She now had a unique chance to prevent many deaths from happening, if her trip back was permanent. She remembered the devastation of the Weasley family, and her own loss of her parents. Harry had barely been able to go on after learning that Remus had died. It had been haunting to return to Hogwarts, and to realise how many students—mere children—had perished in the final battle.
And Snape, the man with possibly the most tragic life she had ever known After sneaking in to view Snape's memories after Harry had gone, her heart had broken for the bitter man who'd never had a chance to live.
If this was the past, Hermione didn't want to preserve the timeline; she wanted to break it and make it entirely anew. The war could have gone worse, that was true, but things could have been better. What she wanted to do was illegal but she had already meddled in time and came out fine in her third year, so she didn't care. The Ministry and their time travel regulations could go hang. McGonagall had given her clear warnings about the limits of making changes in time, but she knew it could be done. She had saved Sirius Black once; she could save more people.
But she needed help; there was very little she could do as an eleven-year-old child without a wand.
Hermione quietly snuck into the kitchen and made a cup of instant coffee—goodness, did coffee always taste that bitter? And then scribbled more in her fuzzy pink journal. She viewed her new equations grimly for all of the people who she could tell—she had tried Dumbledore, McGonagall, Snape, and all the known members of the Order and all of the faculty members of Hogwarts, as well as random Ministry members she had gotten to know post-war.
She didn't like the results. Of course, the best results came about when she told Snape, and only Snape. The only professor who had never liked her, the only person on her list who knew Legilimency aside from Dumbledore who would have no scruples about using it against her. It was not an encouraging answer.
It was nearly three when she finished, and she could not stay awake any longer. She would need to take care to not push herself for long nights, as she was still growing and needed adequate rest and nutrition.
Hermione wanted to scream in frustration but she was too tired to do so. Soon, McGonagall would take her and her parents to Diagon Alley to pick up her school supplies, and she would have a wand. She remembered that happened sometime early in August.
With a wand, she could take the Knight Bus to Cokeworth, where she had helped Professor McGonagall clear out Snape's personal belongings after the war, and present her case to the man. She was not entirely certain that her current experience was real—if she was on a spiritual journey then surely wouldn't her Arithmancy tell her whatever she needed to believe to fully put her regrets to life? But she had to treat it as if it were real, probably, for the full effect to take place.
She hoped Snape would believe her and help her, because the next person on her list—Remus Lupin—gave her only an abysmal fifty percent chance of saving all the people she wanted to save.
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AN: Hi all! I'm back with a time travel fix-it of sorts! I'll be updating weekly as best I can, and I have somewhat detailed outline and a very clear idea of how this fic will end so I am pretty confident I will finish this. Just wanted to thank everyone who supported me through writing my previous fic, Advanced Floriography, and hope to hear from you all on what you think of this one!