Chapter Text
Part Three
Day 13
Hermione sat in the abandoned classroom where Gus liked to study, waiting for him to be finished with his chores for the day. She'd seen him out in the grounds earlier, tending the grass, and knew he didn't have much left to finish. She sat cross-legged on top of the big desk at the front of the room, her eyes closed in a poor attempt at meditation while she waited.
The adrenaline coursed through her body; impossible to control. It made her hands tremor and her legs twitch with the need to do something.
She'd finally figured it out. After breakfast she'd followed Riddle all the way to the seventh floor and watched as he disappeared through the secret door to the Room of Requirement. In hindsight, it was obviously the perfect place for him to hide a Horcrux, especially since he believed himself to be special ; the only one powerful and smart enough to discover the magic of the room.
Her body had been screaming at her to act ever since, but she couldn't. She couldn't risk ruining everything now. If she went and made a grab for the Horcrux, there was a good possibility Riddle would discover it missing and make more. She couldn't risk more Horcruxes appearing in the future.
So she did nothing. She only had about eight hours left in this time anyway.
Hermione took a deep breath in through her nose and let it out slowly through her mouth. Eight more hours. She didn't know how she was going to tell Gus, but she needed to tell him something . She couldn't just disappear without a word. He deserved so much more than that. He'd been such a good friend to her. If they had more time, maybe they would have become more. She almost wished she could stay and explore the possibilities with him. Explore what it would be like to be a normal teen. To get to go on dates with boys and only worry about studying and grades. To not have a self-proclaimed dark lord trying to kill your best friend.
The creak of the classroom door alerted her to Gus's entrance and her heart rate jumped with anxiety, but she kept her eyes closed. Breathe. In...and out…. She hadn't yet figured out how to tell him she had to leave. She needed more time.
She felt him settle on top of the desk next to her, his shoulder and knee brushing her right side as he sat cross-legged.
"Hermione, what's wrong?" He grabbed her hand, stopping the anxious rhythm she was tapping with her fingers.
It was a moment before she replied. She took another deep breath, letting it out as she dropped her shoulders. "Just thinking about home. Worrying about what's happening there."
It wasn't a lie. She was worried. Was the future still the same as it was when she left? Had time passed for Harry and Ron at the same speed it had passed for her? Would she appear in 1998 as though she'd never left, or had two weeks passed for the boys as well? Had more time passed? Did she mess up and change the timeline accidentally? Did Voldemort already win? Did the Order? There were so many questions, and she couldn't explain any of it to Gus.
"What's happened at home? Is there anything I can do to help?"
Hermione pulled her hand out of his and brushed back a strand of wayward curls that had fallen into her eyes.
"No, but thank you," she replied. "It's... complicated."
Gus's head was lowered, looking at his clasped hands resting in his lap.
When he finally spoke, his voice was soft. "Complicated? Is it because of the Muggle war?"
"No, um, not exactly. Not really."
Gus slowly looked up, and his eyes met hers. She couldn't look away from him. His eyes, usually so kind and sparkling with intelligence, were hard, the lines fanning out from their edges as pronounced as she'd ever seen them.
"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to, Hermione. You can tell me to mind my own business. But don't lie to me. Please."
Hermione reached out, her hand wrapping around his bicep. "Gus, no! I'm not. There's just so much I haven't told you. So much I can't tell you. And I so badly want to but I don't know what will happen. And I don't know where to even start. I don't have—"
She cut off, and her hand tightened around Gus's arm as her head spun to the left.
"Did you...did you see that?"
"No," he replied, peering over her shoulder at the spot she was staring at. "What did you see?"
"It was a flash of light. Like...like the sunlight from the window shifted." She squinted her eyes, staring at the window on the wall of the classroom and the sunny patch currently on the stone floor.
"There!" She pointed, this time to the wall in front of them. "There it is again!"
"Hermione," Gus said, his eyebrows raised as he looked at her face. "I don't see anything."
She turned to look at him, frustrated that he couldn't see what was obviously right in front of their eyes. "How can you not—"
Her gaze was drawn behind him, to the heavy wooden door. It was opening and closing repeatedly, faster than any one person could accomplish. Next to the door, a poster with arithmantic equations appeared on the wall, flickering into visibility and then disappearing again in a split second. It was followed by a poster advertising the Gobstones club and then one for a Valentine's Dance.
Time.
She was seeing time pass on the walls of the classroom. But it wasn't—
She scrabbled for her wand and yanked it out of its scabbard on her wrist. She cast a Tempus making sure she was still correct on the hour. 4pm. She should still have seven hours left.
"Hermione?" The worry in Gus's voice cut through her growing panic. "What's happening?"
He looked at her hand as it rested on her thigh. Or, at least he looked to where her hand should be. Her skin was flickering in and out of existence, each time it reappeared looking more translucent.
"Merlin, no. It's not time yet." Her breathing became erratic as she stared at her arm, watching as it too began to fade.
The spell was failing early.
"HERMIONE. What. Is. Happening?"
She looked into his face. His scared, kind, beautiful face.
"I'm sorry. I thought I had more time. I didn't realise—" she paused as both of her legs faded, the scarred wooden top of the desk visibly through the translucent skin.
"Didn't realise what? Hermione? Should I get help? Hermione?"
"No! Wait—"
The spell began to pull her back to the future, her body now completely faded up to her nose. Her mouth continued to move but no sound came out.
"Of course I'll wait, Hermione. I'll always wait for you. You're worth it. Just come back to me. As Hogwarts is my witness, I'll wait."
Just before time completely pulled her away from him, Hermione felt magic coalesce around Gus, sparking at his words, his latent magic apparently recognising them as a vow.
She wanted to scream at him. To yell that she loved him. That he meant so much to her. That he shouldn't wait for her. That she didn't know if she could come back. That she was sorry .
But all she knew was darkness as her body blinked out of existence.
Present Day
Time flew once Hermione returned to her own year. She once held time in the palm of her hand, but now she couldn't seem to get enough. Harry and Ron had planned the Gringotts heist, and before she could even sleep in her own bed again, they all were off. Imperio'ing goblins and dodging burning galleons and flying on dragons and jumping into lakes.
There's no time to think about Gus.
Then Hogwarts called them. The Room of Hidden Things beckoned. Diadem and fire and flight. Crabbe. Then Fred. And oh Merlin, Snape, and then everything was quiet. Too quiet.
Then Harry. Harry, Harry! No, not Harry.
Time stood still.
Hermione saw Harry, cradled in Hagrid's arms like a child. Harry . She had to get to Harry. Nothing else was as important as getting to him.
She ran from the safety of the castle's front steps, her sense of her surroundings and self preservation gone. She paid no attention to the fighting resuming around her, the spells whizzing by her head as she ran across enemy lines and the magic that crackled the night air.
She dropped to her knees on the ground where she saw him tumble from Hagrid's arms. Her eyes darted around the area, unable to see his body through the tears fogging her vision. Where was he?
Her hands scrabbled through the grass and dirt, reaching for him, hoping her touch wouldn't fail her as her sight had. Maybe someone disillusioned him. Maybe someone wanted to keep his body hidden from desecration.
The fighting continued around her unnoticed as her arms searched in wild arcs. The Order seemed to gather a second strength, and the Death Eaters fought back, hurling curse after dark curse. Hermione paid it no mind. There was no body. She couldn't find the body.
Then suddenly, there was a spark of bright white light blinding her even though her head was lowered. Someone came tumbling in from her left side, falling in front of her, face down, blocking the jagged light of the hex. The sickening crunch of impact and an accompanying scream of agonised pain quickly followed. The fallen body was a heap of shabby, drab robes, and the hair on its head was long—past the shoulders—and was a tangled, stringy mess of grey and brown.
Definitely not Harry.
Hermione's attention snapped back into focus. Ignoring the injured person in front of her for a moment, she raised her head, her wand already in her hand and and sending a stunner to the Death Eater still sending hexes hurtling her way. The battle was still raging, and she could hear the shouted hexes and the fizzing of spellwork bouncing off the stone walls of the entrance hall. The majority of fighting had moved inside the castle, but she wasn't safe out in the open like she was. The spell this man had taken for her proved that.
She didn't know where Harry was, but dead or alive she couldn't help him now. She needed to move this man and herself to better cover so she could look over his injuries. She stuck her wand between her teeth for easy access and grabbed the man by the back of his robes, dragging him across the grounds as she crawled to a pile of rubble fallen from the Astronomy tower. The man gasped in agony at every jarring bump, and Hermione winced in sympathy. She didn't want to hurt him any more than he already was, but she couldn't risk the attention a mobilicorpus would bring to them.
Reaching her destination, she released the man's clothing and stumbled back to fall on her backside, panting from exertion. She closed her eyes. Thirty seconds to catch her breath, and then she'd see what she could do for his injuries.
When she got to thirty, her eyes snapped open and she set to work, rolling the man over onto his back to assess the extent of the injury. The front of his robes was covered in blood, the red liquid saturating the wool and staining the dirt where he lay. There was so much blood and so many layers to his clothing, Hermione was forced to use a severing charm on the fabric to get a better look at what was causing the massive bleeding. Pulling apart the sides of his shirt, she gasped.
Sectumsempra .
She'd only ever seen it once, on George's ear, but that had been a relatively clean slice. This was more like the damage she'd heard of from Harry. The man's entire chest was covered in deep slashes, the cuts scattered from neck to hips. She looked at the damage from the dark spell, trying not to panic. She didn't know how to heal it. When George's ear had been hit, Molly had used poultices on it, but even then nothing had stopped the bleeding but time. Time was something she didn't currently have.
Hermione's left hand automatically reached out to the deepest gash and covered it in hopes of staunching the blood flow. Her right hand, meanwhile, scrabbled at her hip, reaching deep into the beaded bag.
" Accio dittany!"
She let out a growl of frustration as no vial soared into her hand. She must have used the last of it on Professor Snape. " Shite."
She turned her attention fully back to the man and began to tear his shirt into strips, hoping compresses would keep him stable until she could get him up into the castle and with Madam Pomfrey.
Her hands kept busy, and she kept her eyes fixed on her work, desperate to help this person who had so selflessly helped her.
"Hermione."
At the sound of her name rasped from the lips of her patient, Hermione finally looked at his face.
"No," she groaned. "No no no."
"Leave it, Hermione. There's nothing you can do."
"No! I can! I'll go get help. Madam Pomfrey—"
"Will be too late. It's my time. I can feel it in my bones." He tried to smile but it was twisted with pain.
Hermione scrambled closer to him, gently raising his head so she could slide her legs under him, cradling him against her chest. One hand carded through his hair, massaging his scalp gently, and the other stroked the side of his cheek. She felt the skin there, rough and wrinkled with time and bitterness but yet still so familiar.
"Gus." She managed to choke out, tears beginning to blur his face.
"I always knew you'd come back," Gus whispered, looking up at her from where he rested. "It took fifty years, but I knew eventually you would. I just didn't expect you to be eleven."
His chuckle turned into a gurgle as blood sprayed from his mouth. Hermione grabbed the hem of her shirt and wiped the mess away.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I should have told you."
"I waited there for you, in the classroom," he forced out. He raised his hand to cover hers on his cheek, fingers twining with hers. "I didn't know where you went but I was sure you'd be back. You're powerful. I thought if you really cared for me you'd come back. But you never did."
Hermione looked at his face. It was hard. All of this was so hard. The face in front of her was the face of the man she and her friends had tried to avoid their entire childhood. The face of an old and bitter and angry man. The face of a man who they thought had been out to get them for seven years.
She looked into his eyes, and all she could see was Gus. Her Gus.
"I wanted to go back. Please, please believe me. But I had to…" she removed her hand from his hair and waved it around her, "take care of all of this first."
Gus shifted in her lap, his breath wheezing. The blood had slowed its escape from his wounds but still they seeped with the sticky substance. He didn't have much longer.
"I know," he coughed, struggling to breathe. "Just glad you're safe now. Mrs Norris and I—we've been keeping an eye on you and your friends. Trying to make sure nothing too bad happened. It was an impossible job."
Hermione smiled wetly down at him and sniffled, trying to staunch the worst of her tears. "We always thought you were trying to get us in trouble."
He struggled to answer. "No, never that. Just keep... you...safe. Loved you...fifty years. Only ever been...you. No one... understood me like you. I stayed here for...you. Didn't want to...miss...when you...came back."
She placed her fingers over his mouth, the blood on his lips staining the tips of her fingers red.
"Shh. Don't speak. Save your breath." A sigh escaped her as his lips pursed and kissed her fingers. "Let me go get help."
"No...my time. Can feel it."
Wracking coughs shook his body, and Hermione cast a simple throat clearing charm, helping him to breathe more easily. At least for a little longer.
"Don't cry... for me, Hermione. You were meant to be… in this time. Don't be like...me." His hand on hers grew stronger, his fingers gripping hers as though desperate for her to listen. "Move...on. Do what makes you happy. Find...someone...makes you happy."
" You made me happy, Gus. Don't ever doubt that." She leaned down and placed her lips on his forehead, kissing him softly. "I love you."
Gus smiled and closed his eyes. His wheezing slowly subsided, and his blood trickled to a stop.
Gus Filch had breathed his last breath.
Later that night—that morning? Time meant nothing to Hermione anymore— she found herself curled up in her old four-poster bed in Ravenclaw tower. So much had happened. So many people had lost their lives.
Harry had lived. Voldemort had died and his loyal followers had been disposed of. The war was won.
But it didn't feel like it. It felt like the world was falling apart, crumbling around her even as the Wizarding World celebrated.
The Weasleys were without a son and brother.
Little Teddy Lupin was without a mum and dad.
Hogwarts was without its greatest Potions Master.
And she—she was without Gus.
She wrapped the black woollen blanket more tightly around herself and breathed in the scent.
Freshly mown grass.
New parchment.
Spearmint toothpaste.
Furniture polish.
Gus.