Chapter Text
Chapter One: The First Impulse
Harry chose life.
Again.
He expected wet leaves, broken spectacles, and Tom Riddle standing over him.
He got train wheels, Ron Weasley, and a Chocolate Frog.
A red-haired, fourteen-year-old Ron sat opposite him, attempting to place an entire Chocolate Frog into his mouth. Hermione Granger sat beside the window with three books open across her lap.
Harry’s hands were smaller. His robes were clean. His chest did not contain a fresh Killing Curse wound.
“Are you all right?” Hermione asked.
Harry touched his forehead. There was no scar.
Not a faded scar. Not a painless scar. Nothing.
He reached inward for the cold, foreign presence that had lived behind it for as long as he could remember. Nothing answered.
Harry had returned; the horcrux had not.
He laughed.
“What?” Ron asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re laughing at your own forehead.”
“It’s been a complicated morning.”
“It’s half past eleven.”
Harry looked at Ron. Seeing him produced a sharp burst of affection that Harry had not expected.
Harry decided it was historical and undeserved.
Hermione was fourteen. Her hair was large, her front teeth had not yet been shortened, and she was glaring at Ron for dropping chocolate onto Numerology and Grammatica.
Harry remembered her walking toward him in a torn red dress at Shell Cottage. He remembered her screaming under Bellatrix’s wand. He remembered her beside him in the tent, refusing to leave. He remembered her standing with him before the Battle of Hogwarts.
On top of Hermione’s books lay her Hogwarts supply list:
ONE SET OF DRESS ROBES.
“Whatever they made us buy dress robes for, will you go with me?”
Ron choked on the Chocolate Frog.
“Go where?” Hermione asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Then how am I supposed to answer?”
“Yes is traditional.”
Ron finally forced down the frog.
“You can’t ask someone to an event before you know what it is.”
“I just did.”
Hermione closed her book. Her cheeks had gone pink.
“All right.”
“That worked?” Ron said.
“Yes,” Hermione said.
“You don’t even know what you agreed to.”
“I know who I’m going with.”
————-
Hermione cornered him between carriages twenty minutes later.
The train rocked beneath them. Wind tugged through the narrow connection as the countryside rushed past.
“You have no scar,” she said.
“No.”
“You keep looking at me as though you haven’t seen me in years.”
“In a way, I haven’t.”
“Pythagorean otter,” Harry said.
Hermione went still.
After the Time-Turner incident in third year, Hermione had devised an authentication phrase for an event she considered fantastically improbable but not technically impossible: time travel.
Hermione had never told Harry the phrase or written it anywhere he could find.
“How do you know that?”
“You told me.”
“I have never told you.”
“You will.”
“What did I do after telling you?”
“You change it because I know it.”
“That does sound like me.”
Harry smiled.
Hermione did not.
“How far?”
“From May 1998, so about three years and eight months.”
“And you came back deliberately?”
“Not exactly. I chose to return. I just wasn’t trying to return here.”
“Where were you trying to go?”
“Back to my body. I’d just died and still needed to finish Riddle off.”
Hermione put her arms around him.
“Oh, Harry.”
Harry held her. It was some time before she let go.
“There was a piece of Tom Riddle’s soul in my scar,” Harry said.
“But it did not return with you.”
“No.”
Hermione opened an empty compartment.
“Inside.”
————-
Hermione locked the door and cast the strongest privacy charm she knew. Harry added another silently.
“What did you just cast?”
“Muffliato.”
“Where did you learn that?”
“From a source you strongly disapprove of.”
“And you used it anyway?”
“It works.”
Hermione took out parchment, ink, and a quill.
“Start at the beginning.”
Harry began with the Tournament.
“The Tournament happens this year?”
“Yes.”
“Three schools. Three champions?”
“Four. Barty Crouch Jr. impersonates Mad-Eye Moody, confounds the Goblet into recognising a fourth school, and enters my name under it.”
“Barty Crouch Jr. is dead.”
“No. His mother died in Azkaban in his place.”
“Polyjuice?”
“Yes.”
She wrote faster.
“And Crouch impersonates Moody for the entire year?”
“Very successfully.”
“Dumbledore doesn’t notice?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t stop him.”
Hermione wrote something Harry could not see.
Harry explained the dragons, the lake, the maze, and the Cup that took him to the graveyard.
“Crouch enters you, helps you through the tasks, clears the maze, and turns the Cup into a Portkey to Riddle?” Hermione asked.
“Yes.”
“Convenient.”
“At least for Riddle.”
“And Pettigrew?”
“Keeps Tom alive until the graveyard, performs the ritual, and restores his body.”
“Sirius?”
“Still innocent. Pettigrew remains the proof.”
“So we know where Pettigrew will eventually be.”
“Exactly.”
“Now explain the soul.”
Harry told her about the diary and the Horcruxes. Tom had intended to make six, leaving his soul in seven pieces.
“Which six?”
“The diary. The locket. The ring. Hufflepuff’s cup. Ravenclaw’s diadem. Nagini.”
Harry touched his forehead.
“And then he made me by accident.”
“So eight pieces. How do you know it didn’t come back with you?”
“I can’t feel him. I always could before, even when I didn’t understand what I was feeling.”
Hermione wrote HARRY and crossed it out.
“That leaves the locket, ring, cup, diadem, snake, and primary soul. You know where the objects are and how to destroy them?”
“Yes.”
Hermione drew a box around the list.
“That simplifies matters.”
He told her about Dumbledore’s death, the Ministry, the Horcrux hunt, the war, and the Battle of Hogwarts.
“And Ron?” Hermione asked.
“He decides I entered myself in the Tournament. He stops speaking to me until after the first task.”
“He doesn’t believe you?”
“No.”
“And during the Horcrux hunt?”
“He leaves after the locket gets into his head. He comes back later.”
“So he leaves twice.”
Hermione wrote RON in the margin and underlined it twice. “Those years were lived. Choices were made. We can’t pretend they don’t count.”
“We destroy every Horcrux we can reach immediately,” Hermione continued. “Leave Nagini until we can reach Riddle. Crouch’s plan gets you there, and Pettigrew keeps Riddle alive until you arrive. And then?”
“I kill the snake and Tom.”
“That is surprisingly straightforward. Three extra years. Perhaps you’ve finally caught up with me.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
————-
Harry then reached the part of the future that required three “tactical corrections.”
“Ron dosed you with love potion during fifth and sixth year.”
“What?” Hermione said.
“Repeated doses. Enough to make you think you fancied him.”
Ron passed their compartment, attempting to open another Chocolate Frog with his teeth.
“I knew something must have gone seriously wrong.”
Harry had not expected that part to be quite so easy.
“We married in seventh year.”
Hermione dropped the quill.
“We were seventeen.”
“You were eighteen, and we were on the run.”
“That is not an explanation.”
“Dancing in the tent, with only each other to rely on. It was very romantic.”
Harry added, “There was a soul debt from the Dementors in June, when I saved you and Sirius. We didn’t understand it at first. We later discovered the marriage had settled it.”
During the weeks Harry, Ron, and Hermione had hidden at Grimmauld before infiltrating the Ministry, Hermione had translated an old Black family text on soul debts.
Life and soul debts did not count within a family. Protecting one another was expected.
Hermione had gone pink while explaining that he had the right to claim marriage in payment of a soul debt. She had described the Black family spell that accomplished it.
She had then corrected his pronunciation.
Harry had remembered the incantation.
Recognising the invitation had taken longer. This time, he meant to accept it.
He took Hermione’s right hand in his left. With his other hand, beneath the table, he traced the remembered runes with his wand and whispered the invocation.
Magic tightened around them. Hermione inhaled sharply as a warm golden line flashed around their wrists and vanished beneath the skin.
The bond did not make Hermione less intelligent, less argumentative, or less Hermione.
It made each of them a fixed point in the other’s loyalties and priorities.
Apparently, correcting him did not count as disloyalty.
“What was that?” Hermione asked.
“Our marriage catching up, perhaps?”
“Marriages do not ordinarily apply retroactively.”
“Neither time travel nor soul debts are ordinary.”
From what she had read, this was how a marriage bond between two willing partners should feel.
Hermione had designed the authentication protocol for time travel. She was not going to insult her own planning by refusing to accept its result.
“So we are married.”
“Magically.”
“And publicly?”
“I was thinking boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“Why?”
“Fewer questions.”
Hermione leaned across the compartment and kissed him. It was brief, uncertain, and nothing like any kiss he remembered.
She retrieved her quill.
“We need a schedule.”
“I missed you,” Harry said.
“I have been sitting beside you all morning.”
“Not from my perspective.”
She softened.
Then she drew a line beneath her notes.
“First, Horcruxes. Second, Sirius. Third, the Tournament. Fourth, Pettigrew. Fifth, living arrangements.”
“Living arrangements?”
“We are married. And you share a dormitory with Ron.”
“Right.”
Hermione underlined LIVING ARRANGEMENTS twice.
She put down her quill and took Harry’s hand.
The door handle rattled. Harry released the lock. The compartment door opened.
Ron looked at their linked hands, Hermione’s flushed face, and Harry’s expression.
“Did I miss something?”