Hermione didn't spend much time with her parents these days. In fact, if Ron hadn't been being such an ass-hat, she would've been at the Burrow for Christmas this year. However, he was being an ass-hat, and she wasn't at the Burrow.
Her parents were glad to have her. They could feel her drifting away from them, she knew. It was just that the Wizarding world was so different from the Muggle one. It wasn't just the magic, either. It was the people themselves, the places, the secrets. It wasn't about politics and the war, keeping just how difficult and dangerous things were from her parents. It was that her teachers, especially the headmaster, were eager to keep the dangers from them, too. She'd been in St. Mungo's after their blundering around the Department of Mysteries last summer, and she'd been sliced open from throat to hip. Dumbledore and McGonagall had both spoken with her parents, assuring them that it was nothing to worry about, she'd be mended in no time, and it really had been just a little mishap.
The psychology of the whole place was different. People lived longer, grew up faster. Part of it was that the Wizarding world was stuck in the Victorian era to an extent—no arranged marriages, thank God, but the quills and treating children like miniature adults had kept on.
Hermione sighed, putting the thoughts out of her mind. She was part of that world; it made sense to her, even if it sometimes alarmed her that it did. Today, she was doing her best to be a Muggle teenager for her parents. It was kind of nice, actually. She'd complained about Ron quite a bit, and they had smiled at each other and tried to cheer her up.
In two days, she'd be back at Hogwarts and that would be that. She'd have to see Won-Won and Lavender again, but that didn't matter so much. First off because she wasn't actually jealous of them all that much (or at least she could tell herself that from this distance), and second because it meant she'd be able to see Harry, Ginny, Luna and Neville again.
That plan derailed entirely.
Her parents were at work. (They'd had the full week off starting Christmas Eve, and their hours were shorter now until she was back at school, but they still had a few appointments to keep.) She had been reading one of the books she'd gotten for Christmas—a wonderfully distracting mystery novel that had nothing to do with anything—and absently petting Crookshanks. It was the cat that noticed first, getting up and running for the door a full minute before there was a knock.
Usually, she wouldn't have answered. Her parents' house was protected, but not as much as the Burrow. Also, the people at the door very rarely actually wanted to talk to her, and they would probably just leave their card in the mail slot.
Hermione glanced out the window looking down at the door. It was Headmaster Dumbledore. He was looking straight up at the window where she was peeking out and smiling benignly.
"Hello, sir," she said, letting him in. "I'm sorry. I didn't think—"
"Not at all, my dear," he said cheerfully, looking around the hall. He looked as though it was every day they talked to each other. In fact, the only contact she'd really had with him in the six years she'd been at Hogwarts was indirectly through Harry, or the brief conversation they'd had before her parents had arrived at St. Mungo's and he'd told her the cover story.
They went through to the sitting room and Hermione brought tea. It was very surreal.
"I am going to be blunt, Miss Granger," he said after they had gotten through the preliminaries (they were both well, her parents would be at work until half four, and they had both had splendid Christmases). He held up had withered hand, and she tried not to stare even though the point of his holding it up was so that she would look at it. "I am not able to do everything I had planned to do to defeat Voldemort in my current condition."
She nodded because he seemed to be pausing for her input. She sat on the edge of the sofa, back a little bit too straight, as it always seemed to be when she was nervous near authority figures.
"In fact, I have been informed that I will most likely not see the end of this school year." He paused to let that sink in. Honestly, she was having more trouble with the way he smiled when he said it, as though he was amused to have been given this information.
"I don't understand, sir." She couldn't think of a proper question.
"It's quite simple, Miss Granger," he said, putting his hand back in his lap. Hermione realized she'd been staring at it and moved her eyes back to his face guiltily. "I need to adjust my plans. And that means I'm going to need your help."
"Sir?" The idea was ludicrous. Why would he need her help when he had so many other options? Professor McGonagall, Harry, the whole of the Order, Snape, contacts at the Ministry.
"I know, my dear. Why you?" His eyes were twinkling, and she found it a little off-putting. "You are a bright and capable young witch. You already know most of the secrets I would have to tell anybody for the undertaking. You do not have any obligations other that school, and I am in a position to fix that one. Also, you have past experience with a Time Turner, which will be useful in this endeavor."
She frowned. It sounded like she might be expelled to free up her schedule. The thought was a bit alarming. It was the one thing she and her parents really had in common anymore—they didn't understand most of what her classes were about, but they could understand that she was getting good marks and had been made a Prefect.
Dumbledore sat back in his armchair, fluffing his periwinkle robes around him comfortably, and steepled his fingers in front of him as he explained. After the unfortunate destruction of all Ministry Time Turners, the Unspeakables had been doing a few experiments as they put the devices back together. Most of the experiments had been failures. One experiment had sent a poor wizard back to the fourteenth century (where he had lived out the rest of his life quite comfortably, writing letters to his colleagues in the future to inform them just what had happened). The rest of the projects had been scrapped after that one, though Dumbledore had got his hands on a prototype that had been assumed a failure and fixed it up himself. This he held out for Hermione.
"You'll note the differences from the one you had in your third year," he said, holding the Time Turner out by its chain and then dropping it into her palm. It was as light as the other one, cool to the touch. It looked delicate, but she knew it wasn't. The little hourglass was the same, though the sand seemed to be denser, closer to silver in color than the white sand she'd seen previously. The gold rim was different, too; it was thicker, with more adjustable rings to it. "Standard Time Turners can send a person back up to ten hours, and they won't work again until they've caught up to the original time—the natural linear point in time—as you know."
"Yes, sir." She'd had to read a handful of books on Time Turners before Professor McGonagall would sign her approval, and she'd read a few more purely out of interest after she'd turned the necklace in at the end of the year. She'd been meaning to do some research into time from the Wizarding perspective, actually; she just hadn't gotten around to it yet.
"This Time Turner can be set to Turn back hours, days, weeks, or months," he said, indicating the different rings around the rim. "Otherwise the function is mostly the same. Set the time you desire, turn the hourglass once, and back you go. It can't bring you forward again, we're not that far along in their development." He smirked, twinkling again. "But it can send you back, and then back again. It doesn't have to catch up to itself."
"Just how far will I be going back, sir?" she asked, because it was obvious she would be going. In fact, in the grand scheme of time, she technically already had. She wondered if she'd had to tell Dumbledore this plan so that he could tell her. That was a twisty time thought, indeed. She expected she'd start getting headaches if she tried to suss out the proper verb tenses for all this once she really got to it.
"Not so far this first time," he said, taking a pair of leatherbound books out of his pocket.
The books were mostly identical, both plain brown covers with, surprisingly, a Muggle zipper around three sides of the perimeter to keep them closed. One was older than the other, worn and used and faded. He handed her the one that was new, and she unzipped it at his gesture. It was a binder full of blank calendar pages like a schedule book, only there were no days or dates on the pages; they were lined, but totally blank.
"Sir?"
Dumbledore unzipped the older book, showing her the same pages but filled with her own handwriting. He flipped through a few pages, holding the book far enough away that she couldn't read what was actually written. There were photos stuck between a few of the pages, and she had a glimpse of people waving out of them and what might have been the Eiffel Tower before he closed the cover. He was smiling.
"The best part about traveling through time," he told her, smiling and twinkling, "is that you don't have to do much planning. You just tell yourself what happened when you catch up."
Hermione could feel a headache beginning to pulse between her eyebrows.
"I am going to send you back to the beginning of the summer," he told her, consulting the front pages of the schedule book in his hand briefly. "Each day, you will write where you are, where you went that day, what you did, and who you met. This isn't for any reason other than it is important to keep track of yourself. You will be doing a lot of Turning." He held up the thick book. "We don't want you to accidentally forget and cross your own path."
"No, sir."
"This first one will be fun, anyway," he said, the seriousness of the moment before gone in a blink. "You will spend the summer with Professor McGonagall at her home in the Highlands. She's going to get you through your N.E.W.T. curriculum at your own pace. And then, we will reconvene in my office a week before the beginning of the school year, right before the first staff meeting. We'll discuss the next Turn then." He twinkled at her again. "Or, I should say, that's what we did."
"Yes, sir." She wondered if she was in shock, or going into shock. It was certainly shocking.
"Now," he said, clapping his hands and standing. He put his tea things on the tray between them and flicked his wand, clearing it all to the kitchen. "You go up and pack your things. I'm sorry, but you'll have to leave your cat with your parents for the time being." He paused, seeming to think though she doubted it; he was pausing for effect. "I will come back at six o'clock, and we'll discuss it with them. Is that agreeable?"
She nodded, wondering what he would have said if she'd said no. Obviously, that was never going to happen because she'd already Turned back enough to fill the large book in her hand with dates and places, and then returned to give it to him.
"I'm not going to lie to you, Hermione," he said, startling her with his use of her first name. "Not everything you've written down in your book, here, is pleasant. There are good days and bad days. There are difficult days, and downright miserable days, too. But there are some rather nice days, as well." He had started solemnly but was twinkling at her by the end. She wanted to reach out and take the other book from him, flip through it and look at the pictures, but she knew better. It was the same reason that she had had to make such an effort not to be seen when she was Turning back for classes.
"I can do it, sir," she said, because she was a Gryffindor, after all.