Thank you for your lovely reviews. I'm ever so grateful for and inspired by them. In the chapter below, you'll be thrilled to meet an old friend. Someone we thought we'd lost to that bloody Veil in the Department of Mysteries.

Love from Kia

Chapter 8

May 1978, Hogwarts

Hermione

When they leave Professor McGonagall's rooms, mouth-watering smells from the Great Hall tell Hermione that it's time for dinner. She can't remember when she last had a full, cooked meal. Harry, Ron and she had survived on stale bread, cheese, fruit and water for months. They reach the large stairs leading to the Entrance Hall and Professor McGonagall stops with a short "Aha."

For a second Hermione sees Harry, Ron, Ginny, and perhaps Neville standing at the bottom of the stairs with their backs turned. Then she remembers that when Harry and Ron descended those stairs earlier, the Entrance Hall was in ruins and she left them to check on the library.

In that other time. In the past. In the future.

"Mr Lupin," her professor calls in her dry, clear voice, and the four people she mistook for her friends turn around. The fairest of them is Remus, a scarless Remus the same age as Hermione. Then Harry, no, James looks up at her. Next to him is Lily, a pretty redhead with Harry's green eyes, but clear and calm instead of bloodshot and sad. The last of the quartet to turn is Sirius. When she sees him, his face, his hair, his half-smile, her heart flutters and she feels herself smile. It must be the first time in weeks.

He is… alive. And here.

Sirius smiles back at her, a sincere smile filled with curiosity and a hint of appreciation. Hermione is suddenly aware of that she has worn the same clothes for days, hasn't seen a comb in weeks and probably smells less of roses than ever. She can't stop smiling though.

"Come, my dear," her alleged godmother says and together they walk down the stairs.

"Mr Lupin, Mr Potter, Mr Black, Miss Evans, this is my goddaughter Hermione Granger. She has just transferred from Askrigg School for Ancient Magic and will instead take her final exams with you. I know that the Head Girl's rooms are large enough for another student Miss Evans, and I am thus asking you to share for the last month of the term."

Lily looks surprised but not unfriendly. Instead she smiles at Hermione.

"From Askrigg? How exciting. Their research into Ancient Runes is world leading. I'll be happy to share with you."

Out of the corner of her eye Hermione sees James look a little bit disappointed and, suppressing a giggle she understands why. A girlfriend with rooms of her own is most likely a benefit. Lily's smiling green eyes remind Hermione of Harry so strongly it hurts.

When was the last time I saw Harry smile like that? It must have been at his birthday last summer. I can't actually remember him smiling with happiness since then. At Christmas, when we danced in the tent, none of us were truly happy, but afraid and listening for trespassers, snatchers, Death Eaters.

"Thank you," she says. "I'll try to not be in your way."

"Nonsense," Lily laughs. "If you are brave and confident enough to transfer to Hogwarts just before the final exams it can only mean I have found a worthy study partner."

Remus clears his throat and looks reproachfully at Lily.

"What about me, Evans?"

"Yes, Remus. You are indeed a worthy study partner, when you are around and not off with these good-for-very-little rascals. I say this very lovingly, you know," she says to James and Sirius. James chuckles, but Sirius is quiet. When Hermione chances a glance in his direction he looks intensely at her. It reminds her of something, but she can't put her finger on it.

It is decided that the four students Hermione has been introduced to will be responsible for showing her different parts of Hogwarts, since she apparently is new to the place. Lily will show her Gryffindor Tower tonight and James will take her around the classrooms tomorrow, after breakfast. After classes tomorrow Remus will walk Hermione around the grounds and to the edge of the Forbidden Forest. Tomorrow night, James and Sirius have offered to show her the battlements of the castle. Hermione plays her role as a new student without any slip-ups, and accepts all offers of making her acquainted with her new school.

She follows them to the Great Hall for dinner and is introduced to Peter Pettigrew. She suppresses a shudder when he eagerly shakes her hand and looks at her with hungry eyes.

I could tell. I could grip his left forearm to see if his dark mark hurts. Or rip up his sleeve to show them. Is it there already? Perhaps not. It's more than three years 'til the 31 October 1981. Has he already decided? Or will I watch him become… become what? Whatever made him…? Fear? He has nothing to fear now. He's with a popular group of students. He's still just eager to please them. And I can't give him away. I'm not allowed. I'm here to make sure that I, later on, will meet a boy on the Hogwarts Express, repair his glasses and eventually become his friend. Harry's friend. Always Harry. Oh, Harry! What are you doing now? Have you noticed I'm gone? Does it worry you? What has Remus told you? But you have Ginny, it's written in the stars that you'll have Ginny. I'm sorry. I miss you.

And in an instant Hermione realises that her own will and her knowledge about the future have very little to do with what she must accomplish. She is here to be Lily's friend. Lily who is about to graduate from Hogwarts in only two months.

What then? I don't know anything about your and James's life while… engaged? Married? Expecting a baby? What did you do, what will you do to support yourselves? Didn't James and Sirius join the Auror program at the Ministry? I think so, but I have no idea what you did, Lily. I know you were… you are bright, one of the best in your year, but to what use did you put your brightness? I wonder what I'll do. And for how long I'll be needed here. I'd like to do academic research. If I pass the final exams. Of course I'll pass the final exams! This is 1978, long before Griselda Marchbanks reformed the magical education of Britain and made the exams more random and more difficult to predict. The exams will be on Polyjuice Potion, transfiguration of animals to everyday kitchen utensils, basic apparition, seeing something (preferably a disaster) in tea leaves, and drawing someone's horoscope from the constellations of the stars. I'll pass.

"Eh, hello? Can you please pass the pumpkin juice?"

Hermione is torn from her musings by a familiar voice.

"Yes, of course, Remus. Here."

"Thanks." He looks at her in the same scrutinising way as a few hours before, when his older self said something about her looking exactly like… Like today, she realises. She gives him a smile. She really does want to be his friend, like she is now. Then. Later. In her own time line.

"You look a bit… battered," James says from her left. "How did you travel from Yorkshire? On a Thestral?"

Hermione smiles.

"Yes, something like that."

Sirius looks at her from across the table. He wears the same intense, searching look as before. As if he knows her. As if he can't place her, even though he's trying really hard. Hermione gives him a curious smile, and he snaps out of his gaze.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I just feel as if I've seen you somewhere before."

The familiar timbre of his voice makes Hermione gasp.

"Smooth, Pads," James laughs.

"As if," Remus says. "You only wish."

Hermione feels a blush creeping up her neck and fakes a cough to hide it.

"I don't think so, Sirius. I would have remembered," she says, surprised by her own flirtatiousness. She hasn't planned it; the words just leave her lips before she can stop them.

The cooked dinner of lamb stew and roasted potatoes makes Hermione feel slightly sick. Her stomach isn't used to food like that, isn't used to food at all. For a few seconds she is afraid she'll have to make a sprint to the lavatories to be sick, but it passes, and she sips her pumpkin juice slowly.

"Well then," Lily says when she puts down her napkin. "Are you ready to go up to Gryffindor Tower and see where we'll sleep?"

Hermione puts down her glass and smiles to the girl who is as much Harry as she can find in this new… old world.

"Yes. Certainly."

Sirius jumps to his feet.

"Where is your trunk? I can… I mean, James and I could…"

Hermione pats her small, embroidered bag.

"It's all here. Shrunken. Trunks are rather in the way when you travel by air."

"Oh. Well, in that case…" Sirius sits down again and makes a point of not looking at her, but asking Peter something.

The Head Girl's rooms are spacious. A large bedroom with, to Lily's surprise, a recently added four-poster bed, plus a bathroom and a small hall with several wardrobes.

"And you won't mind?" Hermione asks.

"Sharing? No, not at all. James might, though."

"Oh. So you and he, you are…"

"Together? Yes. Lord, yes. I used to hate the mere sight of him, but… well, I changed my mind. He pestered me to go out with him since third year, and last year, on a whim, I did. He's… He's just the one. The one for me, anyway."

"I'm happy for you. He seems nice."

This is a lie. The sight of James unsettles Hermione. At a distance, or at a glance he looks just like Harry, but when she looks him in the eyes, there is nothing of Harry there, but a stranger. A brown-eyed stranger in the face of her best friend. It's unnerving, and Hermione much prefers to meet Harry's gaze when she looks at Lily.

"Hermione?"

"Yes."

"You do look a bit… well, as if you've been to war. How did you actually travel from Askrigg?"

Hermione doesn't know what to say.

How do I look? How do I smell? I don't remember when I had a shower. I haven't looked in a mirror apart from that windowpane when Professor McGonagall gave me glasses.

"Oh, I don't know if I'm allowed to say. They have some special creatures in England. A bit like your thestrals here in Scotland, but a bit more… dragonlike. But I'm rather tired. It wasn't an easy… flight. Would it be OK if I just went to bed after I've had a bath?"

"Well, of course. But please let me just walk you around the tower first. These are my rooms, since I, for reasons unknown, have been selected Head Girl. As if I haven't enough to do with just my own studies. Down the corridor there are the other girls' rooms. And, please, come down to the common room, just for a minute. I didn't show it to you properly."

Hermione follows Lily down the stairs and is, once more, in the Gryffindor common room. Very little is changed from her time. Or very little will change to her time, 13 years later. When she stands in front of the fireplace with Lily, warming their backs to the roaring fire, she hears the sound of the portrait of the Fat Lady swinging to its side and letting someone in.

"But I'm not kidding. I have seen her before," someone says. Sirius.

"Pads, give it a rest," Remus murmurs. "You would have told me. And I don't think she's someone you've met when you were still going home to your mother's during the holidays. And since then, I've been with you, and I haven't seen her before."

"And neither have I," James chimes in. "But Pads, it's really not polite to drool like that. Your fangs are showing. And your tongue."

"But I'm telling you…"

"I think she's pretty," Peter chirps. "I don't blame Sirius for…"

The four boys, the Marauders as Hermione will later know them, come into view and abruptly quiet down.

"Oh, there you are," Lily saves the day with. "Anything yummy for dessert? Hermione and I were just about to call it a day. Perhaps compare some notes on Ancient Runes before we turn in, right?"

She ushers Hermione up the stairs and into their rooms.

"You made an impression, that's for sure," she giggles with her back to the closed door.

Hermione stares at Lily with a blank face.

"Sirius is usually the charmer and the talker, I've never seen him so… inarticulate."

Hermione blushes. Again.

"Oh," is all she finds the strength to say.

"Ah, don't worry. He's a really nice bloke. Brought up in a horrendous home, though. All pureblood mania. His parents, especially his mother… but, well, it's not my story to tell. He seems rather… smitten, to use an old-fashioned word. How is he now going to be able to focus on his studies for the final exams? He'll blame you."

Lily laughs and Hermione tries to do the same.

Later, after a long bath and in clean pyjamas, Hermione lays awake in the four-poster bed. It feels familiar, just like her old bed in the rooms she used to sleep in. She is tired. Bone-tired and the enchanted stars in the canopy above her shift in and out of focus.

"One day, love, when you are a little older, I will turn around and see you in a completely different light."

Did it just happen? Just now, this evening? They were talking about me, weren't they? Or did I somehow misunderstand?

The only thing that makes it even a touch probable that Sirius really spoke about her to his friends and that Lily is right when she says Hermione has made an impression, is what Hermione knows about the older Sirius.

He actually kissed me and said those words. And he gave me that book of sonnets. Those lovely, lovely poems. And what was it Remus said? At Sirius's memorial service. Brightest witch of his age too.

Now, with hindsight and Remus admitting that he knew her from before, the mentioning of "his age too" makes sense. Hermione puts her hands to her stomach, afraid she is starting to feel sick again. She sighs relieved.

Butterflies.

Sirius

In another part of Gryffindor Tower, Sirius lies awake. The stars in the canopy above his bed are annoyingly clear. He is as sleepless as he used to be as a little boy when Walburga Black was in particularly foul mood and Regulus and he never knew what to expect.

Something about that new girl. Where have I seen her before? I used to make fun of James when he talked about Lily, ever since we were 13. Is this what it feels like? I felt as if she could see straight through me. Or right into me. She can't be someone I met through mother, please Merlin, don't let her be one of those dreadful pureblood bitches.

James snores from the bed beside him, and on the other side Remus coughs. Sirius wants to smother them with pillows. He wishes he were alone. Or at least not with his chums. With her. With that new, intriguing, shy and pretty girl who walked down the stairs and into his life a few hours ago. When he saw her something inside him clicked, something that made him think of keys. A second later the image of keys was gone from his mind, and he just watched her gracefully follow Professor McGonagall down the stairs. He couldn't think of anything to say, not even 'hello' or 'welcome.' He just tried, in vain, to remember where he had seen this girl before. He still can't place her. Strangely it feels as if he's known her all his life.

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