Chapter Text
He had married her.
And Hermione had been left with the deeply unpleasant knowledge that if she had simply made different choices, at different times, she might have been the person standing beside him. So Hermione had done what Hermione Granger always did when confronted with an unsolvable emotional problem.
She found a research paper.
Then another and then seventeen more.
She worked and experimented. She discovered that most existing research into temporal displacement had been written by people who were either cowards or idiots.Sometimes both.
She spent a year refining the theory, stabilising the magic, convincing herself that this was about correcting historical disasters. There were lives that could have been saved.
But that was not why she kept going when the experiments failed, that was not why she started again when the calculations collapsed. That was not why she spent an entire Christmas Eve alone in a laboratory adjusting a sequence that three separate experts had told her was impossible.
She did it because there was a version of the past in which Ron Weasley was still seventeen.
And Pansy Parkinson had not married him yet…
She had imagined this moment so many times that she had expected something profound, a sense of triumph, the overwhelming knowledge that she had done something no witch or wizard had ever managed before.
Instead, there was a sensation like being turned inside out, then darkness.
Then—
Hermione opened her eyes.
She knew immediately. For several seconds she simply lay there on the cot in Ginny’s bedroom at the Burrow.
Then she laughed. It was a small, slightly hysterical sound.
She had done it, she had actually done it.
She had gone back. She had done what every adult who had ever made a disastrous decision secretly dreamed of doing. She had gone back to age seventeen with all the information and experience of her adult self.
She had gone back with the knowledge of an entire war. And if she could save everyone while getting Ron all to herself, then there was no reason not to.
She could do both. How difficult could it be?
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The first thing Hermione had done when she arrived at the Burrow was go downstairs for breakfast. This was partly because she was hungry and mostly because she had heard voices in the kitchen.
She stopped halfway down the stairs.
Ron was sitting at the table.
For a moment Hermione simply stared at him.
There he was. Not the Ron she had spent years watching become taller, broader, angrier, funnier. Not the Ron who had stood beside Pansy with a ring on his finger and looked so obscenely happy that Hermione had sometimes wanted to hex the memory itself.
This was Ron before all of that. Ron arguing with Fred over toast. Ron looking half asleep and entirely unconcerned with the fact that Hermione Granger had just crossed time itself to get another chance with him.
Her Ron. Seventeen. Unmarried. Uncomplicated. She had forgotten.
Not forgotten what he looked like, exactly. It’s just that this was before the war, the tent, the locket. Before years of arguments and reconciliations and all the complicated history that had eventually become so enormous that Hermione could hardly remember what it had been like to know him without it.
He was just Ron.
Young Ron.
Her Ron, before he had ever belonged to anyone else.
Except not hers yet. Not really. Not in the way she wanted. She looked at him for one second too long. This time.
This time would be different. She knew what happened before. She knew about the war, the tent, the locket, the things they said to each other when they were frightened and exhausted and too young to understand what they were doing. She knew how much she'd lost.
But she also knew something else. She had been given another chance. A second life, a chance to stop the things that had gone wrong before they went wrong. She could fix this, she could fix all of it.
No locket, no leaving, no years of pretending she didn't want him.
No watching him choose someone else.
No Pansy.
Her fingers tightened as she gripped her wand in her pocket.
No wedding.
No ring.
No Pansy standing beside him in white.
No Ron looking at someone else the way Hermione had always wanted him to look at her.
She would change it…. She could prevent the arguments that had damaged them.
She could say the things she had been too frightened, too proud or too confused to say the first time.
He pulled the toast out of his mouth and frowned at her “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like…” He gestured vaguely at her face. “That.”
Hermione walked over and sat down beside him “Perhaps I'm pleased to see you.”
Ron stared at her. Hermione smiled at him. It was, she thought, probably the sort of smile women used when they were flirting.
Ron looked at it for a moment. then he said, very cautiously, "Right."
Hermione waited.That seemed to be the difficulty with flirting. There was apparently supposed to be a pause after you said something suggestive, during which the other person understood the suggestion and responded appropriately.
Ron was not responding appropriately.
Perhaps she had been too subtle. She turned towards him. “I think you look nice.”
He frowned at her again.
“You have nice eyes,” she prompted
Ron blinked.“My eyes?” He stared at her as though she had just complimented him on his spleen.
She loved Ron’s eyes, she had spent years watching them go bright with laughter and dark with anger. Because she knew exactly how they looked when he was worried about Harry, when he was embarrassed, when he was trying not to cry, when he was about to say something stupid and brave and very Ron. She had never told him that. There had been so many things she had never told him, and she was beginning to suspect that this was the root of quite a lot of her problems.
Hermione could feel Ginny watching them.
She ignored her.
She had known Ron for years. She now knew that he liked being complimented. She now knew he liked being noticed. She knew that, underneath all the jokes and the temper and the extraordinary amount of insecurity he carried around like an extra limb, Ron wanted to know that someone had chosen him.
This should have been easy. Unfortunately, the seventeen-year-old version appeared to regard compliments as a suspicious form of interrogation. “What's wrong with my eyes?” he asked.
“Nothing.” Hermione smiled. “They're unusually expressive.”
Ron frowned.“What's that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing bad.”
“You said unusually.”
“Well, you are unusually expressive.”
“Is that good?”
“Yes.”
He waited, Hermione realised she was going to have to elaborate. “They make it very easy to tell what you're thinking.”
Ron looked offended.
But before she could amend that, she was interrupted by Kingsley calling them to order.
Hermione knew the plan was going to fail.
She could save people who had died. She could prevent the war from taking quite so much from them….
The kitchen at the Burrow was full of people preparing to do something Hermione knew would end with Mad-Eye Moody dead, George Weasley missing an ear, and Harry Potter being chased across the country by Lord Voldemort.
There were several problems with knowing the future.
The first was that nobody else knew it, the second was that Hermione had no satisfactory explanation for how she did. The third was that knowing something terrible was going to happen did not, apparently, grant you the authority to prevent it especially when you are trapped in the body of a squeaky voiced seventeen year old girl who was currently being ignored by a room full of adults.
Seven Harry Potters.
Seven destinations.
Seven escorts.
"We should change the plan."
Moody looked up at her in surprise “No." He grunted.
Hermione sighed "I haven't even said what I think we should change."
“You’ve been hovering around the edge of the conversation for the last half hour looking like you've swallowed a wasp. Whatever it is, no.”
“Professor— Hermione sighed. "What if we just drove Harry away in a Muggle taxi?"
Moody stared at her.
Hermione pressed on. “Just put him in a car, a normal one, under his invisibility cloak. No seven Potters or flying. No complicated arrangements. We drive him somewhere, and then someone side-along apparates him to the outskirts of the Burrow.”
There was silence as everyone looked at her.
Moody's magical eye rotated slowly until it was looking directly at her."A taxi."
Hermione ignored him. "The point is, Voldemort won't be expecting it.”
Kingsley was looking thoughtful. “The taxi isn't actually an unreasonable idea…”
Moody turned on him. “Don't encourage her.”
“I'm not encouraging her. I'm saying it's less predictable.” There was another pause.
Kingsley gave Moody a long look.
Moody swore.
Hermione's heart leapt.
“Kingsley—“
“They’ll expect a big show of magical force, if we can get Harry to the Burrow without the Death Eaters knowing where he is, it's worth attempting.”
Hermione smiled.
For the first time that mornning, she felt as though she could breathe. She had done it, she had changed the future.
Mad-Eye would live, George would keep his ear and Harry would still get safely to the Burrow.
And somewhere, far away, Lord Voldemort was learning that Harry Potter would be taken to the Burrow that night.
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The fragment had been delighted to see him. It reunited with him in the dark, cold chamber where he had been keeping himself busy with matters of considerably less importance than the future.
For several seconds neither of them spoke until…”Well?”
"I know everything."
Voldemort's expression changed.
It had spent years with Hermione Granger. It had watched Hermione discover time travel and immediately decide that the appropriate response to being given another chance at life was to interfere with absolutely everything.
And now it could tell its master all of it.
"The Potter boy survives," it said.
Voldemort's eyes narrowed.
"You lose."
Silence.
The fragment smiled. "Quite badly."
"You are certain?"
"Oh, yes."
It began.
The prophecy.... The Horcruxes.... Harry's connection to Voldemort.... Snape....The Elder Wand....The Battle of Hogwarts.....Neville...
Everything....