Time Sand

As most of her job these days was to figure out a way to make more efficient Time Turners, Hermione spent the majority of her days studying Time sand.

It was actually kind of crazy to see all the precautions one had to take before being authorized to enter the Time Room – and let's not even talk about what manipulation Time sand involved. Those two weeks of cramming up twenty-inch thick volumes of safety measures and incidents reports had been worse than studying for her NEWTS, thought it had been worth it.

Every time she passed through the door now, she couldn't help but think that they had been lucky, back in her fifth year. She had told Harry that terrible things happened to wizards who meddled with time when they had used her Time Turner, and she had thought she had known everything there was to know on that subject, but she had been wrong. So wrong.

Even the Death Eater whose name she couldn't remember, the one who had ended up with his head stuck in a time loop, had been lucky in the end. The effects had been easily reversed by the Unspeakables there, but such wouldn't be the case if Time sand were to come into contact with anyone's bare skin.

There were talks, in the Department, of those who had accidents like that. Sometimes, people whispered, they simply vanished, crumbling into golden dust or simply melting away against their background, a rictus of something between pain and pleasure painted on their faces, gradually disappearing until they were barely more than a shadow, and then gone entirely.

One time, one particularly gory time, the skin had vanished first. Only then had the flesh followed, revealing innards and bones, until those too had gone.

(there were memories of those events, carefully preserved, and they were mandatory watching for anyone who joined the Time Room - even if it wasn't a definitive choice yet)

(it had been the first time she had seen Draco so pale and shaken since the war)

So of course, with all those stories, Hermione was careful, always wearing the dragon-skin gloves that never, ever left the Time Room and were kept in a magic null box, meant to neutralize the effects of the sand, when they weren't used. Even then though, those gloves had to be changed every fortnight.

She liked to think she'd have been just as careful if she hadn't heard all that she had, but she couldn't be sure.

Still, that day was special – she had been read in on the secret of creating Time sand last month, and today was the day where hers was supposed to be ready. Or at least the first grains of it anyway.

Unsurprisingly enough, making Time sand took time.

She had tried tweaking the formula she had been given – she had made a batch following the exact instructions, of course, so she'd have something to compare the others to, but she had also started half a dozen of other batches, the hourglasses she had requisitioned taking up half of the room she and Draco had been given to conduct their experiments.

She saw immediately, upon entering, that three of those batches hadn't worked. Indeed, instead of the slowly falling golden grains she could see from the other hourglasses, the sands from these batches were dull-looking and had already fallen all the way to the bottom half of the hourglasses.

In one case, the sand had even turned completely black. She crept closer, making sure the installations were still secure, and wrote her notes.

She would, she decided quickly, document the failures first before moving on to the potential successes.

And yet, just as she did so, the black grains she had dismissed earlier moved. They shifted in their glass prison, and Hermione took a step back, her heart beating rapidly. For a moment she even thought that the sand might break the glass and spill out (and what a disaster that would be, she thought), but that wasn't what happened.

At first it was just one grain – and then two, then three. And as she watched, oddly compelled, the black grains of sands climbed their way back up into the top half of the hourglass.

Well, she thought as a smile spread on her lips, maybe this one isn't such a failure after all.