The room she had chosen had windows, meaning that she could see the vexing sun making its way across the sky. She didn't want to feel time passing. And she especially didn't want to feel it slipping away while she tried desperately to get the little time machine to work again.
It was her second time returning to this day. The first time, the sand in the hourglass had run out and miraculously, the rings had spun freely. She had thought at first she had fixed it, until she tried to turn it back more and found it stuck again. Somehow, she had the presence of mind to run to a different room to avoid coming into contact with herself.
She had taken a few moments to feel the despair that pitted in her stomach before she settled enough to break down what had possibly happened. The only acceptable theory she had come up with is that she had fixed it– gotten it to turn again– but it would only turn once before getting stuck, allowing her to go back no more than twenty four hours. When she had finally gotten it to work, it had taken her back to the present before she could fix the problem. So it was as simple as doing what she had done last time to fix it. Thankfully she had pocketed a few tools before vacating the Room of Requirement.
That had been well over ten hours passed, and all she wanted to do was throw the little device against the stone in rage. It wasn't working! There was no reasonable explanation for it to not be fixed. She had followed all the same steps she had taken the first time. She twisted and pried, unscrewed and refastened the dials– nothing worked the way it should.
The small tools shook in her hands. She should take a break, the strain on her eyes was giving her a headache. In the back of her mind, she registered things like thirst, hunger and exhaustion that the rest of her refused to acknowledge. She used the pain from the injury caused by Dolohov's spell to keep herself alert. It was a reminder of what she was doing this for. What her failure would cost them all.
She blinked her eyes closed for a long moment, letting the darkness behind the lids ease the strain for a bit, before opening them to narrow her eyes closer to the golden gears. If she could just remember what she had done that made it work last time…
"Hermione?" A voice addressed her from behind her back.
She was startled so badly that she spun herself into the wall next to her and smacked her forehead into the rough stone. She sucked in a sharp breath at the sudden pain.
Footsteps approached her quickly, and a hand steadied her by the shoulder. When she looked up, the concerned face of Professor Lupin greeted her.
He looked just the same as he had in the Hospital Wing when she had last seen him. Which made sense, since this was technically the same day, at least for him. Two – no? Was it three? – days had passed for her but he was still living that day for the first time.
"Hermione! Why are you here? You shouldn't be up right now." Lupin led her to a seat.
Oh, there were desks. She hadn't even noticed. He pushed her down gently and she felt her legs buckle under her. Pins and needles began to shoot down to her toes. How long had she been standing?
Lupin pried the Time Turner and the watchmaker's tools from her hands while she was stuck in her own head. She barely noticed, until a hand came up and pressed a threadbare handkerchief to her forehead, the fabric partly obstructing her vision.
"Hermione?"
Her eyes finally focused and she looked at her former professor, who had taken a seat across from her, their chairs so close that they were knee to knee. He looked worried. His concern was plain in the tilt of his brows and the red rimmed eyes that watched her like he was witnessing some sorry tale on the TV that would have her mother hiccuping sobs.
"It's jammed." She blurted out. "I need to fix it." She felt like an outsider on her own body. The words on her tongue felt foreign and not her own. Her mouth was so dry.
His eyebrows creased as confusion crossed his face. He looked down at his palm where he held the Time Turner and tools. A piteous comprehension lit his face as he looked back up at her. Sad eyes became even more devastated. As though her only hope was somehow the most tragic thing in the whole world.
A seed of anger was trying to break through her veil of exhausted apathy. Why did he look like that? Professor Lupin was smart, he should be able to see this would fix everything. She had done it before, hadn't she? She just had to fix the damnable device.
She reached out to grab it from his hand, but he pulled it away from her reach. Now she was angry. She lunged for it, but he moved back too quickly. He leapt from his seat and took a step away from her, which had her nearly sliding out of her chair.
"Hermione, calm down."
Enraged tears sprung to her eyes as she stood. Her hand reached for a wand that wasn't there. "Why are you doing this Professor?! Give it back!" She demanded. Her overworked hands curled into fists. The sting of her torn fingernail bit up into her knuckles. She couldn't understand it. It was his best friend she was trying to save. Harry's godfather. Sirius was family. He wasn't an acceptable casualty.
"You can't." He said, his voice cracked with emotion.
"The HELL I can't!" She shouted at him, pouncing for his hand with a spurt of her waning energy.
But Lupin was still faster. He moved out of her way and with the grace of someone who hadn't been awake for two or more consecutive days, and drew his wand to swiftly incant a paralyzing spell over her.
It was unlike the body bind spell, where the body becomes rigid and topples over like a toy soldier. She fell bonelessly, into a heap on the ground. It hurt less than she would have thought, and he had been considerate enough to catch her head from smacking into the stone floor with a cushioning spell.
She glared mutinously up at him as he knelt beside her. He was still looking at her with that frustrating expression of pity. She didn't need pity. She needed to go back to fixing the Time Turner. If he couldn't bother helping, he could at least not get in her way – let alone stop her altogether!
"Hermione, it's too late." He said, pulling her lax body up to lean against the wall. He sat next to her, an arm across her shoulders as she slumped against his. "The Time Turner can only go back twenty four hours. It's a failsafe to prevent the misuse of time travel."
"Failsafes can be worked around." She mumbled belligerently against his shoulder, unable to adjust herself away from him.
Lupin actually barked out a laugh at that. He covered his face with his free hand as the laugh turned into stifled sob. "I have no doubt that you eventually would." He said after a moment of getting himself under control again. "But by the time you did it would likely be even more impossible."
Hermione clenched her teeth but didn't say anything. Sitting as she was, unable to move, was making her head foggy– the pain from her newest contusion muddled with the throbbing headache she had been ignoring for the last few hours. She tried to grasp onto the manic rage that had kept her upright for so long and cling to the desperation she had been mistaking for hope, but the longer she was still, the more reality clawed at her to accept the truth.
"You know." Lupin began, his tone deceptively conversational. "I'm so glad he had you as a friend."
A hard lump formed into the back of her throat. "What good was I to him? He still died. He died without hope."
"Before you came along," Lupin continued to speak as though she hadn't said anything at all. "Sirius lived as a wraith. He was just a listless shadow of who he used to be, whose sole purpose had been to watch over Harry. Everything had been taken from him. His family, his friends, his life, his sense of self. And when he came back, it was to a place of torment and rot, where nothing was his anymore, and everything had been tainted by death. Even me, and even Harry."
The tears that had first begun in rage were now creeping down Hermione's face as he crushed her heart anew with his words. "But he loved Harry and you." She defended. Despite her anger, she couldn't bear the idea that he thought that about himself.
"Yes, he did. But we were from before." He said as he stroked his thumb across her deltoid comfortingly. "We were part of the life he lost. I was the best friend who ignorantly tossed aside all loyalty and trust even as his whole world fell apart. And Harry…Harry was the physical reminder of the life he could have had but lost." Sadness tugged past the careful neutrality he had been speaking with. He cleared his throat, and sniffed back his own tears. "To go through everything he had gone through, to come back and live in that place…he had nothing. Nothing but bad memories and one singular purpose that drove him to stay alive. But, then you showed up. You were the first person in his new life to reach out her hand out of love and compassion. You were the first friend he had made since James died. The first new family. You gave him the vision for a life that could be content and fulfilling and possible for him. You became the foundation of hope for him."
"Doesn't that make it worse, though?" Hermione asked thickly, into his shoulder. "He died because I didn't persuade Harry to stay at school. Because of us, he lost his chance at that future."
"No. I think he died happier and more at peace than we can imagine."
Remus held her closer as her limp form shook from the force of her cries.