Happy Friday! This one's probably my most cliche story starter out of all the ideas that have popped into my head but this plot bunny wouldn't stop bouncing in my head so I hope you like it anyway. Cannon until epilogue (EWE) and the first couple chapters are pretty dark. Particularly chapter two because it it shows a bit of what Hermione had to live through. Also, the rating for this one is M mostly because my own sailor's mouth really bled into this version of Hermione.

A side note: Hermione will have a love interest in this one but I'm not sure who it is yet. I can see it going a lot of ways right now so I'm waiting to see how they interact. As soon as I know, I'll indicate that in the pairings but until then, I just put a few of the major characters.

Like my last few longer hauls, chapters for this one will go up every Friday.

If you're waiting on Mistletoe Mishaps, I fumbled the thread with it but I'll be posting at least one chapter for that short this weekend (hopefully more than one)-my already limited Christmas spirit abandoned me completely so it's been a bit of a rough go.

Thank you so much for being here, I hope you like how it starts out!

Love Always,

Adrien

TRIGGER WARNING: This chapter holds brief suicidal ideation/suicidal thoughts from a version of Hermione who is the last survivor of a world she never really got to see the best of.

Disclaimer: I don't own any recognizable characters or settings, those belong to J. K. Rowling. I just enjoy making things in her sandbox.

Chapter One: Death Doesn't Always Come When You Expect It

They had died for nothing.

Draco…Ron…Harry…and now they were coming for her.

The four of them had been the last hope. They'd had one last plan to fix everything and now…now, Hermione was alone with an unusable time turner and a bottle of fire whiskey in what was supposed to be the last safe place.

But it wasn't safe anymore.

She could feel them tearing through her wards.

She was alone and they wanted her dead.

If she were being completely honest. She wanted her dead too.

She just couldn't...her boys would hate her if she hurt herself…and she couldn't…she couldn't do that to her memory of them.

But she also couldn't keep fighting or running.

So she would let them come.

She would stand one last time.

She would see her boys soon.

She would see everyone soon.

But she wouldn't let the Deatheaters get the last time turner—even if it was unusable now. Not when they would have all the time in the world to try to fix it, to bring back the master all of them had started out serving.

The last of her wards fall as Hermione takes the last swig of alcohol and slams the heavy bottle down on the delicate but dented hourglass.

A loud crash sounds, a bright light flashes, the world swirls around her, and everything goes black.

The first person who greets her in death is the boy who had stood by her side for basically as long as she could remember. Her best friend. The only family she had had in the end.

"Harry," Hermione sobs, throwing her arms around the raven-haired man as she cries into his chest.

Had she been sober, she would have seen the small differences in the man she was currently crushing. But as luck would have it, she was still sloshed.

"I'm so sorry. I know you wanted me to fight and you're probably pissed that I just sat back and let them…But I just…I couldn't do it without you. I was so tired, Harry. I just wanted to be with you and Ron and Neville and the Weasleys and Remus and Tonks. Hell, even Draco and Sirius. I'm sorry…I just…I couldn't be alone anymore."

Eventually she realizes that her best friend isn't hugging her back in the bone crushing way she was used to, "Harry?"

"Not Harry, love."

Hermione scrambles away from the man, her wand out faster than anyone in the room has seen someone outside of the Aurors pull a wand, let alone someone so clearly sloshed.

"Who—" Hermione's words freeze in her throat as she takes in the faces of all the dead people that are currently surrounding her. The majority are only familiar from pictures and the rest are much younger than the last time she had seen them. "Circes tits. This can't be happening to me."

"What can't be happening to you, kitten?" The voice is familiar but smoother than she has ever heard it, drawing her attention to a very young and entirely healthy Sirius Black.

"Sirius," the name is barely a whisper before her wand is falling and her arms are thrown around the much younger Marauder.

Though it takes a moment for his arms to wrap around her, his hug is still familiar. His stiffness melts away nearly as soon as it comes and he hugs her back just as firmly as he had the last time she had really spent time with him when he was alive. Like he knew the one thing she needed right now was someone to just be there.

He also waits until she pulls away before saying anything.

"Not that I will ever turn away a surprise hug from a pretty bird, but teary eyed and heartbroken isn't usually how I have pretty birds throwing themselves at me. I've never met you and you clearly know who I am. How is that?"

Hermione runs her right hand through her hair, wandlessly casting the sobering charm she and George had created after her first war when they'd unintentionally run out of the sober-up potion one too many times between funerals and celebrations.

As her mind clears, she scans the room for the first time. This Order is even bigger than it had been in the picture Remus had given Harry during their third year…including two identical men leaning against the wall near Kingsley Shacklebolt. Two identical men who look eerily similar to another set of red-haired twins though their coloring was closer to Bill's and their builds were all Charlie. She had never seen any pictures of them but Hermione knew instinctively that these were Molly's brothers and she would do everything she could to make sure the woman who had taken her in at eleven years old never lost them.

The twins seem to recognize her interest in them in the same moment, their eyebrows raising in unison as their gazes lock with hers, and Hermione focuses her attention back on Sirius.

His gaze is patient which surprises her because that was never a word she had associated with him but the way he looks at her is so eerily similar to how he had looked at her the first time he had ever met her that it steadies her. He looks at her like he has never seen anything quite like her before.

"My name is Hermione Granger and you don't know me because you haven't met me yet. In fact, judging by the faces currently in this room, I haven't even been born yet."

Pandemonium broke out at the statement the same way it had when the Order had turned on Mundungus for Harry at the beginning of her first war and Hermione understood how so much had fallen through the cracks in the original timeline. It was entirely unacceptable.

She'd been too young with an idealistic view on authority and more than a little bit of righteousness centering around the cause of this familiar brand of pandemonium (because her best friend's welfare had been its focus more often than not) the last time she had seen this.

But she was a different person now.

Pulling a page from Ron's handbook, she pulled out his version of Dumbledore's illuminator (the one he had created himself when Dumblerdore's had been broken in a raid) and flicked the switch.

Every light in the room flew to Hermione as a general muffling enchantment radiated out in a two meter radius around the curly-haired witch.

For a moment, the soft creak from the shuffling of anxious feet was the only sound in the room as every eye once again fell on Hermione.

Hermione releases the room's light and cancels her muffling enchantment with a second flick of the switch.

"I understand that this is a lot to take in," Hermione's voice is clear and clipped as she meets each gaze with an unflinching glare of her own. "But what just happened is unacceptable. I can help you win this war but if incidents like that keep happening, I will walk out the door. Your help would be appreciated but it is not needed for the changes that I need to make."

That isn't necessarily true. To do what she wants to do, she will need to seek out support, but if these people couldn't even take a minute to listen to her story, they sure as shit weren't the people she wanted beside her going into war.

"Prove it," Sirius's voice is challenging but Hermione knows him well enough to see the belief already beginning to bloom in his sharp gaze. "Prove you're from the future."

Mischief flickers through Hermione's eyes and Sirius tilts his head to the side.

"Ok," she replies, her gaze breaking away from Sirius's just long enough to whip Harry's favorite flannel over her head. Modesty had gone out the window for her years ago, it had for everyone she knew in her timeline, and she always wore a sports bra these days but clearly the action was something these people weren't accustomed to because many of them averted their eyes.

Though Sirius surprised her by keeping his gaze on her face and simply raising an eyebrow instead of letting his eyes wander down her body like she had expected.

Hermione points her wand at her ribcage and says the words she knows will give her away to the four people standing closest to her in the room, "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

Hermione watches as shock contorts Sirius's face before she allows her gaze to drift to the equally shocked faces of first Remus then James before finally settling on the woman who had her best friend's eyes.

Hermione gestures to her rib cage, drawing their attention to the glowing mini-patronuses etched across her body.

Harry and Ron had convinced her to etch a matching living memorial of everyone they had lost into her side with them after one too many drinks a week after Fred's funeral. They'd spent hours drunkenly working out a design until the idea of living patronuses had taken over, of giving each other the ability to activate the comforting feeling of a patronus when the losses began to feel too much.

The charmwork had taken a sober-up potion and several pepper-up potions as the three of them had worked through the night but they had finally done it. It had burned like hell to apply and the magic itself was bordering on grey since it did require a bit of blood (either yours or whoever else you trusted to apply it) but the comfort it brought, especially when things got bad again, had been more than worth it. Hermione had even found herself adding to hers during her late night watches in the last war.

The light blue visage of Hogwarts was the first thing to appear as it always was for everyone they had known in passing who had stood beside them until the end. A grim for Sirius, two wolves for the Lupins, three deer (a proud doe, a stag, and a faun in between its parents) for the Potters, a mass of intertwined patronuses for every Weasley that had been lost being held together by a jack russell terrier, a toad for Neville, a hare for Luna, a dragon for Draco, a tabby cat for Minerva, an acromantula for Hagrid, and a lynx for Kingsley.

"What the hell is that?!" Someone's voice breaks Hermione away from her thoughts and draws her attention to her left arm which was glowing just as brightly as her ribcage but radiated comfort in a way her ribcage didn't. Though the boys had used their blood for her initial tattoos on her ribcage, the intent behind the initial tattoo had been more for reminiscence than anything else. She had added the remaining images and could feel her all encompassing love for each person she had memorialized on herself. But the words on her arms had been entirely the boys' doing and they had intentionally poured as much love and comfort into their inscriptions as their magic would allow.

Each of their inscriptions covered a brutal scar from her second round of torture and she'd allowed her boys to have free range while she was healing. The only thing she had requested were the three otters covering the scar from her first bout of torture, two adult otters for her parents on either side of a baby otter for the childhood she never really had the chance to have.

To be honest, Hermione forgot about the scars most of the time. She couldn't make them go away and she refused to purposefully hide them if she wasn't undercover because she had nothing to be ashamed of. They showed that she had survived and they hadn't been able to break her.

But objectively, she could admit they were gruesome. They were probably a shock for these people who had barely dipped their toes into what it means to be at war, many of which were barely even out of Hogwarts.

"Mischief managed," Hermione cancels the incantation so that the room can see exactly what her scars say. "This is from my first real war," Hermione states as she gently runs her fingers over the word Mudblood. "These are from the war that killed everyone." Hermione gestures to the rest of the insults littering the once clear skin of her left arm.

The belief of those around her swells in waves as more and more members of the Order realize exactly what her scars mean. The war is still going on decades from now and it gets worse.

"Miss Granger, this is very sensitive information. We should—" Dumbledore speaks up for the first time, trying to gain control of the situation, but Hermione cuts him off the way she hadn't had the courage or confidence to when she was fifteen.

"You had more than one chance in my timeline to do it your way. Your first chance cost everyone in this room their lives except yourself, Sirius, Remus, Kingsley, Mad Eye, Minerva, Hagrid, Arthur, and Aberforth. Even then Sirius and Remus didn't really live for thirteen years after your first chance. My best friend never had a childhood because you were raising him for slaughter because of some bullshit prophecy that won't see the light of day if I have anything to say about it. He was malnourished and malleable when he finally came to Hogwarts where we met and faced Voldemort five times before war broke out for the second time all because you wanted to make sure he would be willing to die at the right time but strong enough to make it to that time. Your second chance cost first your life then literally everyone else's life except mine and I was ready to give up mine when I came back here. So I don't want to listen to your bullshit. We're doing this my way or you can get the hell out of my way."