"And then I need you to finish that report from last week and send it over to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement."
Harry sighed and fought the urge to roll his eyes. He forced a smile and tapped his quill on his desk. "Anything else?" he asked, somewhat testily.
"A cup of tea would be nice, too. Not as much sugar as last time, thanks."
Harry kept the forced smile in place until the door clicked closed, then scowled and kicked the leg of his desk. It hurt; he let out an involuntary and most undignified yelp.
"Feel better, mate?"
The blatant amusement in Ron's voice was enough to snap the thin thread that remained of Harry's self-control.
"Tea?!" he raged. "He wants tea!"
"And the report on - what was it? violation of trade licensing hours in Diagon Alley? Don't forget about the nasty apothecary who stayed open ten minutes past his -"
"Fuck off, Ron."
"Hey." Ron looked taken aback. He looked for a moment as though he was going to say something, but then he scowled, pushed his chair back with undue force and stormed from the office.
Harry stared after him in disbelief. Ron was always so touchy these days; ever since they'd started working at the Ministry together, he had acted as though Harry were being unreasonable.
"You've been blowing a bit hot and cold yourself," Hermione told him over lunch that day, her eyebrows raised in the haughty fashion that recalled her first-year self.
"No, I haven't," Harry snapped.
Hermione smiled. "See?"
Harry frowned at his sandwich. He'd been acting completely normally - it was Ron who pitched a fit every time he complained at their pointless assignments or yelled at a superior (albeit when said superior was out of earshot) or -
Oh.
"I s'pose I have been a bit tetchy," he conceded. "But honestly, Hermione, this is the most pointless job imaginable!"
"I thought you always wanted to be an Auror?"
"Well, yeah, but I thought that meant I'd be out chasing Dark wizards. You know, protecting the innocent, fighting for freedom, and all that malarkey." Harry made a vague hand-waving motion that he hoped conveyed the utter coolness of the supposed life of an Auror.
"You didn't suppose you'd start off like that, did you? I mean, you don't even have any NEWTs."
Something about Hermione's tone made Harry bristle. "Not all of us could just waltz into the exams without being at school all year," he snapped.
Hermione's cheeks flushed, and she looked away. Harry, poised to descend into a lengthy rant, suddenly paused.
"Did you really just turn up to the exams?" he asked.
"Of course," Hermione bristled. "What else would I have done?"
Harry shrugged and let it go.
As he walked back to the office, though, something kept nagging at the back of his mind.
"You think Hermione's been acting weird?" he asked Ron that afternoon.
Ron, though, was still being irritable; he just grunted and didn't look up from his work. Harry was sure that whatever stupid report he'd been assigned couldn't possibly be that interesting. He felt a surge of annoyance at Ron's stubbornness.
"Come on," he persevered. "You live with her."
"So do you," Ron snapped.
"But I mean you live with her. In the same room and everything." Harry preferred not to think about what they got up to in there. Not that he had a problem with his friends being in a relationship, but that didn't mean he needed to lie awake at night wondering whether that knocking sound really was the Doxies or something else he'd prefer not to contemplate.
"So? You're the one who's acting mental," said Ron.
"Fine, forget it." Harry turned his chair to face away from Ron and tried to focus his attention on licensing hours. It was difficult to think of anything less interesting, really - it was even questionable whether Professor Binns' classes had been this dull.
"What you mean by weird?" Ron interrupted Harry's contemplation of a lesson on licensing law taught by Binns, complete with a monstrous textbook and three-foot essays. Hermione would be in heaven.
"Doesn't matter," said Harry. A thought had suddenly occurred to him: there had been one occasion before when they had had cause to believe Hermione possessed superhuman powers in completing her schoolwork.
Harry attacked his report with as much vigor as he could muster, tackling the issue of cauldron sales outside of standard trading hours almost as though it mattered. The day zipped by. In no time, the clock ticked over to five o'clock, and the other half-dozen wizards in the office rose simultaneously, all reaching for their cloaks in motions that could have been choreographed.
"You coming?" said Ron, holding the door open.
"Um…. Just want to get this finished. I'll catch up with you at home."
Ron looked as though Harry had suggested dancing naked in Snape's office. "You what?"
"Yeah, I'm nearly done, so..."
Ron shook his head, mumbled, "Effing mental," and left Harry alone.
Harry hadn't exactly thought this plan through, but he had expected to have to remain well into the night in order to move around the Ministry unseen. He had not counted on the obsessive clock-watching of the average Ministry worker, however; less than ten minutes later, he was strolling through empty corridors and past deserted offices, feeling very pleased with himself indeed.
He rarely visited Hermione's office, so he took at least three wrong turns, ran straight into a sarcastic plant and had a lengthy philosophical discussion with an unhelpful door before he eventually found the right place.
It was a large, round office—completely incongruent with the surrounding building, of course, but Harry was used to that by now. The desks were heavy mahogany and the curtains a plush red velvet. Underfoot was a soft rug, embroidered with ornate flowers and butterflies that fluttered between them. Hermione's department certainly received more funding than the Aurors, Harry thought ruefully.
It didn't take long to recognise Hermione's desk: where the others were strewn with parchment and old teacups, hers was bare but for a photograph of Ron. Feeling a little guilty, Harry put the picture face-down before he started rifling through Hermione's desk drawers.
Bloody hell, that girl was neat. Her quills were all nicely lined up in the top drawer with tightly-wound rolls of parchment, making the scrunched-up Gryffindor scarf wedged in the back of the drawer almost painfully conspicuous. Harry rolled his eyes as he tugged it out, wondering whether he should have words with her about how to hide things.
The scarf fell open, and a flash of silver glinted up at him. The distinctive circles and small, delicate hourglass were immediately recognizable: it was, as he had suspected, a Time-Turner.
Harry lifted it up by its long chain and watched as it swung and twisted in mid-air. So it was true: she had cheated. Why had she never told him and Ron? Or perhaps she had told Ron. Perhaps they'd conspired together. But no, that made no sense. Ron didn't have any NEWTs either, that was why he was stuck in the same dead-end job as Harry.
With a sigh, Harry picked up the scarf to re-wrap the Time-Turner, wondering whether he should take it home to confront Hermione directly or whether it would be best to try to wheedle it out of her. Then he saw a scrap of parchment flutter to the ground. He stooped to pick it up, and squinted to read it in the half-light.
Use it well.
- Hermione
Harry stared at the note. Two thoughts sprung into his head simultaneously: he felt indignant that she would expect him to go through her belongings, but also curious about what she was expecting him to use it for.
He picked up the Time-Turner again and turned it idly in his hands. What would he do first, given the freedom to manipulate time? Images from the final battle at Hogwarts flickered through his mind, each one offering an opportunity to right a great wrong. He could save Fred or Remus or Tonks - maybe even Dumbledore. Or Snape. Would he, if he could?
He was sure Hermione would chastise him for thinking such things. She'd once given him a long talk about something called the grandfather paradox, which he hadn't really understood, but he knew it had something to do with the dangers of time travel.
Then again, if she didn't want him to change the past, why allow him to find it? She surely knew him well enough to know that his greatest temptation would not be to take his NEWTs. Or perhaps she didn't; considering she was the most brilliant person he knew, she could be remarkably dense about him and Ron at times.
He turned the Time-Turner over and twisted the hourglass absently. He could get an awful lot of work done with this thing and persuade the Ministry that he was worth more than a stupid desk job -
There was a sharp tug behind his navel, similar to that of a Portkey but more sudden and violent. It was nothing like the experience of using the Time-Turner in third year; this felt like falling from a great height, with air whooshing past him and images blurring into merged colours before his eyes.
It seemed to last for an age. Harry felt panic beginning to overcome the nausea. What was going on? Was he supposed to stop it in some way? As his head spun in dizzy spirals, it occurred to Harry that he had no idea how he had set the thing off. Which also meant he had no idea whatsoever how to get back. How far was he going, anyway?
In a panic, Harry called out, "Finite Incantatem," but still he continued to fall. As he was wracking his brains for other options, he landed with a heavy thud upon a cold stone floor.
He stayed there for a moment while his head and insides settled back into some semblance of equilibrium. Idiot, he thought as he hauled himself to his feet. Why had he picked up the blasted thing? Merlin knew where he had ended up. Given the violence and length of his travel, he supposed it was significantly more than the couple of hours he had gone back in his third year. He cringed as he remembered how complicated that had been; how would he manage if it turned out that he had gone back a week, or even more?
As his vision swam into focus, Harry looked around. He wasn't in Hermione's office anymore; he wasn't even in the Ministry. In fact, he appeared to be in Dumbledore's office, though it seemed different somehow. The same portraits were on the walls, all snoring softly, and there was Fawkes asleep in the corner. Yet some nagging doubt pulled at the back of Harry's mind, though he could not quite put his finger on what was wrong. He hauled himself to his feet and slipped out of the office as quietly as he could manage. The steps were the same, and the gargoyles and the corridor seemed the same as well. Harry's heart leapt; this really was Hogwarts back in Dumbledore's day. He was being given a chance to save Dumbledore!
