Given Hermione had already had an emotionally exhausting week, she and Tom resolved to do the attractiveness lessons together later, once things had calmed down. That would give her time to stabilize her own emotions, and it would give Tom time to search through his memories and determine what sort of lesson plan she would need.
In the meantime, Hermione did her best to push the whole debacle out of her mind. She still felt kind of hurt and tangled about the whole situation with Blaise ignoring her for so long, and throwing herself headfirst into her studies worked wonders for helping her suppress the entire thing. Classes had been in session for a whole month already, and she wanted to make sure she reviewed what lessons were upcoming before working on more advanced magic again so she could be sure to stay at the head of the class.
Hermione was studying in the library one afternoon when she saw two familiar figures, both approaching her cautiously, as if she were a tiger. They nodded to her and sat down at her table, looking at her, and Hermione nodded back, curiously.
"Fred. George," she said. "How can I be of assistance to the Weasley Twins today?"
The twins exchanged a glance.
"You're in Slytherin," Fred said finally. "We need help from a Slytherin with a… situation."
There was a dramatic pause.
"We don't have much experience with this sort of thing," George said delicately. "But Ron and Ginny both said you're the nicest evil person they've ever—"
"Oh, honestly." Hermione sat back and rolled her eyes. "Fine. What's wrong? What's going on?"
Fred and George exchanged another look, before slowly, they began to talk, and as they did, their story began to unfold.
Hermione had been aware that the Weasley family was desperately poor. It had taken Fred and George ages to save up the money they had as seed money for a joke shop. And when they'd seen a chance to multiply it, they took it – they'd gambled with their gold on the Quidditch World Cup – and they'd won.
They'd bet on Ireland winning, but Krum catching the Snitch. With a bet of 42 galleons, 15 sickles, and 3 knuts at 36:1 odds, they should have won 1530 galleons, 24 sickles, and 6 knuts – a small fortune around £7500. But Ludo Bagman, the bookie, had cheated – he'd paid them with Leprechaun gold. And now he was claiming the debt was settled.
Hermione drummed her fingers on the table as she considered the matter.
"So what are you hoping to get out of this?" she said. "Your gold? Revenge? All of the above?"
The twins exchanged a look.
"Maybe a little bit of both," Fred admitted, and Hermione snorted, pulling a piece of paper towards her.
"The first thing we need to do is file for a lien," she said, writing it down. "If we file with the goblins – wait, hold on." She paused, looking up at the twins. "Do you still have your betting slip?"
"We do indeed." George fished it from his robes, setting it down on the table with a flourish. Hermione rolled her eyes, but she smirked.
"This would be easier if I did it directly," Hermione mused, looking over their slip. "The goblins like me and already collect on debts for me, but it's not something they do for most people. How about this: I'll buy the debt and deal with the goblins and Bagman. That'll get you your gold immediately, and it'll free you up to plot your revenge."
Fred and George looked at her suspiciously.
"What do you mean, 'buy the debt'…?" George wanted to know.
"We'd make a contract," Hermione said, flipping over the sheet of parchment she'd started writing on. "We'd say that you two agreed to sell me the debt in exchange for gold."
"How much gold?" Fred pressed.
"How about we just round up a bit?" she suggested. "I give you 1550 galleons, and you two give me both the debt Bagman owes you and stay on retainer as my official pranksters on call for the rest of the school year?"
The twins' jaws dropped.
"You—you just have that?" Fred sputtered. "1550 galleons?!"
"Keep your voice down!" Hermione hissed. "This is a library!"
"She's mad, Gred," George said, his voice awed. "Brilliant, but mad."
The three quickly came to an agreement, writing it out on the parchment. Hermione would give them 1550 galleons in a charmed bag, and they in turn would sell her the debt owed to them by Ludo Bagman and provide her pranking services on demand through June. When the time came to sign the contract, Hermione winced.
"There's only one way the goblins will accept this," she apologized, transfiguring an empty ink bottle into a small glass bowl. "Brace yourselves."
Hermione went first, cutting her arm and bleeding into the bowl just enough to pick up the blood with a clean quill and sign her name, before Vanishing the remaining blood and healing her arm. Fred and George looked mildly sickened, but they dutifully followed suit, cutting, bleeding, and signing the contract. As Fred Vanished his blood and passed the bowl to George, Hermione idly wondered if they could have gotten away with George using Fred's blood. They were identical twins, so their DNA was identical, but their magical cores – would those have identical signatures as well?
Once it was done, Hermione blew on the contract to dry the gleaming signatures.
"Official Pranksters on retainer," Fred said appreciatively. "We're moving up in the world."
"Do you have any pranks in mind?" George asked her, grinning.
Hermione hesitated. "…I haven't gotten you the gold yet."
George waved her off. "You're the one crazy enough to set all this up. We've got faith in you."
"Besides," Fred said, grinning, "you've just freed up a lot of our time, dealing with this issue. We could use a distraction."
Hermione gnawed on her lip, considering.
"…are you willing to take an Oath of Secrecy?" she asked.
The twins' eyes lit up in intrigue.
"Absolutely."
"Without question."
"Excellent," Hermione said, standing up and putting away her things. "As it happens, I could use some help with a 'prank' of sorts to serve as a distraction very soon. Come on, we need to find Harry."
Ever since Hermione had visited Grimmauld Place with Harry over the summer and overheard Sirius' vow to destroy the library, her mind had been fixed on saving the books. That much knowledge – she couldn't let all that knowledge just vanish into the ether. There were centuries worth of knowledge in there.
Thus, she'd begun sketching out a plan.
The plan was simple at first – 'rob Sirius Black's library' – but it'd quickly gotten complicated. They weren't just stealing one thing, after all; they were stealing everything. And when everything was hundreds and hundreds of heavy books, logistics weren't quite as simple as a smash-and-dash.
The best opportunity, they determined, would be on a Tuesday during a Wizengamot session. Not only would that ensure Black was out of the house, but Hermione would be able to drag on the session until she got the all-clear from the others, to keep Black from going home too soon. Lupin would already be out of the house, Harry had learned in a letter from Sirius – he was working a day job as a bookseller in the muggle world, of all things.
The entire coven had been recruited to help. With Harry's blood being added to the wards at Grimmauld Place, anyone with his blood would be able to bypass the wards without setting off an alarm. And given the coven had all shared blood, they should all (theoretically) be able to get in as well.
Draco had joined Team Coven to infiltrate, explaining that his Black blood from his mother's side would ensure he could get through the wards as well. The rest of the Shadows would be in the treehouse, waiting for one of the Coven Team to arrive, whereupon they would dump the trunk full of books as fast as possible and give it back to the Coven Team to take back to the library and fill up again. In the meantime, they'd start putting the books all together in a new library for the covenhouse in one of the little rooms across the bridges.
The difficulty came in finding alibis.
The Wizengamot met during the day, during classes. This was the entire reason Hermione had been given a Time-Turner – so she could go to classes and still go to the Wizengamot sessions. Likewise, if a large group of students were all conspicuously missing from classes at the same time, it could raise suspicion. Therefore, they couldn't all be missing at the same time.
The plan, then, involved a detailed schedule of hand-offs of the Time-Turner:
Hermione to Harry - 4pm
Harry –back– 4pm-11am
Harry to Blaise - 4pm
Blaise –back– 4pm-11am
Blaise to Luna - 4pm
Luna –back– 4pm-11am
…and so on
Putting all of the hand-offs at 4pm gave them a little wiggle room as well – if things went very badly, there would be time at the end of the day for everyone to turn back again to make appearances at dinner while simultaneously finishing the heist.
4pm, therefore, was the critical moment for the plan. If a teacher should happen upon them at any point during the Time-Turner hand-offs, it would mean utter disaster and ruin. Therefore, that could not happen.
Luckily, Fred and George excelled at the sort of large-scale, scandalous pranks that distracted everybody. After hearing a very abstracted description of the mission, verifying with Harry that yes, they actually were risking all of this for books and no, nobody was going to be hurt, they were happy to swear an Oath of Secrecy and blindly accept the duty of massive distraction immediately after classes, wide grins on them all the while. They'd even promised to try and make some sort of prank book that the heist team could leave behind as an 'explanation' for why all the books had suddenly gone missing, though Hermione doubted they'd be able to come up with anything in time.
The real difficulty in the plan, however, came in not communicating information during the hand-offs.
Hermione had read the books her father had given her when she'd first been given the Time Turner, and while she'd struggled through most of them, one thing had stuck out to her from The Grandfather Paradox: if time was linear, and the Time-Turner worked on one path of time, the timeline had to be preserved. No one could know anything about what they might be walking into.
If Harry post-robbery handed the Time-Turner to Blaise, Blaise had to remain entirely unaware of anything that happened during the robbery that he was about to embark upon himself. Verbal information was easy enough - they could just ban talking during hand-offs. But there was other ways of passing information as well, which was harder. If Blaise saw Harry come in covered in cinders and ash, for example, he might realize the Floo had exploded, and knowing that in advance could change the outcome of the raid, which could splinter the timeline.
After much consulting with the books on Time-Travel her father had given her, Hermione decided the safest way would be for everyone to be dressed and waiting to go in one room at 4pm, all standing blindfolded in a line. A person would put the Time-Turner around their neck, and then the person would flip it where they stood to go back in time before removing their blindfold upon arrival at 11am. When it came to be 4pm again, they would simply put the Time-Turner on the neck of the next person, repeating the process, until everyone had gone.
The hardest part of all this for Hermione to accept was that she wouldn't be able to be present at the heist itself. She'd be in classes, and then at the Wizengamot. And as the person who was essentially the 'distraction' for Sirius, it was of critical importance she be present and engaged as long as was needed in the Wizengamot session to ensure their success.
The others approved of her plan, with one modification.
"You need to be the last one to turn back, Hermione," Susan pointed out. "That way, the last person back from the heist can tell you how long you need to occupy Sirius Black for. You won't be at the same place as us, so that kind of knowledge transfer should be fine."
Hermione didn't like it, but she conceded that Susan was right.
And so it was with great apprehension that Tuesday dawned bright and cheerful, the sun shining ominously over their busy day.
Classes went by in a blur, and Hermione moved on autopilot throughout the day, barely paying attention to where she was walking. Right now, as she sat in Transfiguration, Harry was robbing Sirius Black's library, while Harry was also sitting across the room, frowning and prodding a candlestick with his wand. And while she was sitting in Transfiguration, she was also in the Wizengamot chamber, delaying Sirius from returning too early.
She was glad she had worked with Theo and made a firm chart of the order of Time-Turner hand-offs. Theo had been enchanted by the Time-Turner, utterly fascinated to learn its capabilities, to the point Hermione rather wondered if he was going to take up Alchemy as a hobby in his N.E.W.T. year to try and make his own.
After classes, at 3:55pm, everyone helping with the heist went to an abandoned classroom not far from the library, far away from where Fred and George were (hopefully) just outside the Great Hall, launching their prank to distract the teachers. They went through the line, tying blindfolds over everyone's eyes, leaving Harry to tie one over Hermione's eyes last. He grinned at her.
"Don't be nervous," he told her. "It'll be fun. I'm a Gryffindor, remember? I was made for this sort of adventure."
Hermione laughed and shook her head in mild dismay, before finally handing over the Time-Turner as Harry tied the black cloth behind her head.
Far away, the clock tower began to dong, and Hermione could feel the air disperse as Harry silently vanished back in time.
Almost immediately, she could hear somebody come through the door, walk down the line, and the faint clinking of the chain as they put the Time-Turner on the next person's neck. Another person came in almost immediately after, the clock tower still ringing, and then another, and another. Even though this quiet hand-off was going exactly according to plan, the heavy footsteps and utter silence of people as they returned made Hermione's gut clench and her heart speed up with anxiety. Her hands felt clammy and sweaty, and when footsteps finally approached her, fixing the chain around her neck, Hermione forced herself to take several deep breaths to calm herself down.
"Keep him occupied until 2pm," Susan's voice came from the darkness, fiddling with the Time-Turner. There was a pause. "…if you can make it seem natural, meet with him and ask about his family."
Hermione was surprised. This wasn't part of the plan. "His family?"
"The Ancient and Most Noble House of Black," Susan confirmed. "Just… who's been disowned, who hasn't been, what happened to his brother… that sort of thing."
"How," Hermione said dryly, "am I supposed to make that not seem suspicious?"
Susan laughed.
"Not a clue," she admitted. "Just… try your best, I guess?"
Hermione opened her mouth to object, but Susan let go of the Time-Turner, and abruptly Hermione was spinning back through time, ready to go distract their mark.