Chapter Text
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7 July 1995
12 Grimmauld Place, London, England, UK
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Hermione's eyes popped open. She had only just yesterday arrived at . . . what was it? Yes—it was still there in her mind, the address she’d been told just before the house had appeared out of thin air—12 Grimmauld Place. Mr Weasley, who had come to collect her from her parents’ house after they had agreed she could spend most of her summer with Ron’s family, had inexplicably brought her here instead of to the Burrow.
No—there had been an explanation. The Order of the Phoenix. Sirius’s ancestral home, once a bastion of a tremendously prejudiced pureblood family. That ancient house elf who spewed vile insults. Walburga Black’s portrait. She blinked.
She had been asleep, unfamiliar as the place was, in her bedroom. The bedroom she’d been left to choose out of frankly terrible options—dark, dank rooms with gaudy furnishings decades out of date. She had chosen the one with the sign that said Do Not Enter Without the Express Permission of Regulus Arcturus Black. Inside, it was all in black and silver, but it wasn’t gaudy: everything was fine, but simple. It was also full of journals and books, so of course she had liked it best.
She shook herself a little in the heavy silk sheets. Was that what had woken her? Had the ghost of Sirius’s teenage brother come to shoo her out of his domain?
It was morning, she realised. Just very early morning. The light coming through the gaps between the heavy curtains was thin, pale. She spared a moment to wonder about the boy who’d lived here, under the tyrannical rule of Sirius’s parents, who had never escaped as his brother had, as far as she knew. He must have died, she thought, saddened.
Then, in the gloom, among the thin streaks of light from the windows, she saw a silhouette. It was very familiar.
There was a faint light, which became brighter, seeming to come from all corners of the room at once. A neat trick, she thought dimly. It stopped brightening at a comfortable, rosy glow, and she could see the person’s face, sitting quietly, looking at her from the chair at the desk, her wand returning to her sleeve. She fought the urge to yell, “I’m old!” and faint, à la Jennifer Parker in Back to the Future II, and settled for slightly unhinged, uneasy laughter. Her own face, staring back, smiled.
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As she gathered over the course of the strangest conversation of her life—and frankly, that was surprising, given that McGonagall had once come to her parents’ door to explain that magic was indeed real; that just a few months ago she’d had to accept during the course of a pleasant conversation with the headmaster that she would be put into a state of suspended animation and tied to the bottom of a lake—her . . . older self . . . was here, in the room belonging to Regulus Black, with her, because she had travelled back in time. Because she needed Hermione’s—her own—help. Because she needed her—herself—to go much further back in time.
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Time travel wasn’t entirely new to Hermione Granger. In fact, she had spent a year utilizing a time turner issued by the Ministry so that she might take more courses at Hogwarts, which fact, even only a full school year later, seemed surprising and possibly dangerous. Given the fact that she and Harry had used said time turner to free two fugitives, one the owner of this dilapidated and gloomy house, and the other a hippogriff currently ensconced in one of its opulent bedrooms, it had been certainly dangerous, but quite helpful, nonetheless.
However, what was concerning her most at the moment was not the reemergence of time magic into her life per se. Instead, it was the nature of said time magic. Which was to say—this time magic was simply not operating according to the principles that she had come to be familiar with in third year at all, if her future self was to be believed. And she considered that it would be a struggle not to believe her—who, after all, could she trust, if not herself?
But this future Hermione—from ten years in the future, she’d said, and that already had raised more questions for her—had not only indicated that she had travelled back in time to an extent—years!—that Hermione knew wasn’t supposed to be possible (she had read about Professor Croaker’s law), had not only suggested that her goal, if the present Hermione accepted the mission, was to send her even further back in time, even more impossibly—but, critically, had also indicated that this had not happened already. That is, future Hermione had sent herself back to a moment in time, to interact with herself, when she (that Hermione) had no memory of already having met herself in this way. The causal loop had been broken.
It simply should not have been possible, and it took her a long discussion, and leaving her other self hidden in the room while she went to the kitchen to try to wrangle some breakfast out of the most disgruntled house elf (because Kreacher would not allow her to get it herself, no matter how many insults he hurled), and returning to eat in silence while focusing her mind only on the frivolity of surreptitious other-self examination (where had those scars come from? Despite them, she looked quite good at twenty-five, she thought. She never would have imagined that her hair was quite capable of looking so nice while still being allowed its natural curl and volume . . .) before she was able to breathe deeply, and choose to accept what she was being told—that, ten years into her own future, she was not only an Unspeakable with the Department of Mysteries, but that she and her colleague (so far, mysteriously unnamed) had come to invent, and be given permission by the minister himself to use, a new and experimental form of time travel with the intention—and this was, really, the difficult part to accept—to change things. Events. Eventualities, which, unfortunately, her older self was disclosing, piece by piece, from her own future.
Unfortunately was the only word for it, as the future sounded . . . quite bleak.
At first, she had thought perhaps it wasn’t so bad (despite the obvious elephant in the room—that she simply couldn’t imagine herself, or whoever the future Minister was, developing, much less putting into motion, a project to change time if things weren’t quite terribly dire), because the older Hermione told her they had won. Somehow, Harry had prevailed. Voldemort was dead, with no prospect of further resurrection.
But then she’d started to tell her (herself) about the cost.
Harry’s death and impossible resurrection. The deaths of friends, family, too much magical blood spilled on both sides of the war. Another generation of child soldiers with PTSD. How it had come out better than the first Wizarding War, but not by much.
Hermione could tell her older self was holding back. She wasn’t naming the dead, yet, though Hermione had known barely two weeks before, when Harry had so desperately and suddenly reappeared with Cedric Diggory’s dead body, before the school year had ended and Harry had been shuffled off to his horrible aunt and uncle’s house without even a murmur of getting him any therapy for what he’d seen and endured in that graveyard, that Cedric’s death would not be the last.
She wasn’t sure her older self would need to name those casualties, to convince her, though some part of her desperately wanted to know. Would they lose Ron? His parents, his siblings? Would her own parents survive? Their professors, their classmates? These people gathered here in this house, the Order of the Phoenix? Somehow, she knew that not all of them would make it through.
Given that she had to accept that this future was true, it shocked her even further to hear that there was a population crisis. But it made sense. Losses, even of powerful or deeply loved individuals, might make someone want to go back and change things. But only a true calamity could cause the government to approve such a plan.
She knew then that she would do it.
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Hermione—the older one—explained. She had wanted to do the project herself. In fact, that’s what the minister had given approval for: the project went forward only if Hermione Granger were the one to go back in time. It seemed the government, by that time, trusted her implicitly. She must have contributed greatly to the winning of the war, she thought.
But try as he might, her colleague could not make a time device that would send her back more than twenty years. It sounded as though the team for the mission comprised Hermione and the unnamed colleague as the authors and principal responsible parties for the mission, and several consultants or colleagues who worked on specific tasks within the preparation. And the team had all agreed that 1976 was the year needed: the pivotal moment when changes could be made that might abate the most tragedy (and by preventing loss of life, thus also prevent the collapse of population) from both of the Wizarding Wars involving Voldemort.
Thus, the plan was hatched to iterate the time travel. Future-Hermione would return to the point furthest in the past at which the version of herself whom she’d encounter would be reasonably capable of completing the mission. They wouldn’t burden her at eleven. But almost-sixteen was considered sufficient. Especially as she would have a rather large window of time in which to work.
Additionally, she was offered all the tools, all the ideas, all the plans, all the knowledge that ten more years of memory and research and experience could supply.
They had thought of everything. The younger Hermione was trying to control her face, but she was bursting with pride at the person she had—would—become. There were journals filled with information: one with profiles of the people she would likely encounter, labelled Book of Characters; five with timelines of events (the labels read Book of Time, each one with a range of dates: 1976–1979, 1979–1990, 1990–1995, 1995–1998, and 1998–2005, and she tried not to think too hard just yet about the last two); one, useful spells, labelled, naturally, Book of Spells; one labelled Book of Plans, containing primary plans, secondary objectives, contingency plans, backup plans, rogue ideas. All the journals were enchanted, her older self explained, to appear blank, inside and out, to anyone but Hermione herself. It was . . . everything she had ever wanted from a study partner. Her older self seemed to realise her delight, and they just grinned at each other, feeling bizarre.
“If it’s okay with you, and you’re sure you want to do this . . .” her . . . herself said to her, taking a deep breath as the younger Hermione nodded firmly, “then I will stay here with you for a month. We’ll have to hide me from the other residents of this house, but I have some ideas for that. I’ll tell you everything I can, and walk you through all this reference material I’m handing you, and . . . if you are amenable, show you some memories.”
“You have a pensieve?” Hermione asked her older self, remembering the description she’d read of the Hogwarts Pensieve in her favourite tome. She’d wanted so badly to see one, but now she considered that the memories might not be very pleasant.
The older Hermione nodded.
“I won’t show you everything,” she stated gently. “I’d rather spare you some of that trauma, and we don’t have ten years to spend. But there are things you need to know.”
The younger Hermione nodded. She needed to understand what had happened—and more, what she needed to change. What could she change, without taking the risk of changing so much that she—or, more likely, her friends—might end up not born at all?
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Ron and Ginny were likely still asleep, and the adults in the house would probably assume they were all having a lie-in, because . . . all children were layabouts, or something. Her presence had not been requested by anyone, though she could hear faint evidence of occupancy via the signature—fortunately muffled—explosion noises that signalled that Fred and George Weasley were on the premises, and the occasional squawk from Buckbeak. All those noises were delightfully faint. The house didn’t seem as large as it was. She got the feeling that this house was ancient, and that if she’d needed to, she could probably have kept discovering new rooms and corridors for days. Crookshanks was already wandering it, likely doing just that.
Unfortunately, just now she could not dedicate herself to thoroughly exploring the space, as she was needed for an exploration in time.
The two Hermiones took a break from talking about the impending mission, and ate lunch together, in a weirdly soothing silence. She sort of wished she could hold on to her elder self. She would make such a great friend.
After lunch, she and the other Hermione began to talk.
“Can you summarise what the main things are that I need to do in the past?” she asked bluntly. Her other self was probably thinking of starting with the same thing, but it felt like she needed to be the one asking. “Primary goals? I know it’s in the journals; but I think I need to take it a little at a time right now,” she explained, trying not to stammer.
Hermione smiled.
“Well, I am hoping to land you in the right place to make a very important friend,” she started. “Pandora Lovegood, née Rosier. I need you to be a Slytherin.”
This was a very intriguing plan.
“That house would be safest, anyway. We can work with Ravenclaw if we have to, but given our initial encounter with the Sorting Hat . . .”
Hermione nodded. She remembered, as well as she was sure her elder self did, what the Hat had said—what offers had been made. But why was Slytherin the safest?
Her older self must have seen the question on her face, or, just as likely, anticipated it.
“One of the most important aspects will be to keep you under the radar of Albus Dumbledore.”
Oh. Yeah.
“As he is a powerful legilimens and known chromic meddler”—the younger Hermione couldn’t help giggling to herself here, at this vast understatement—“and as he will unavoidably inhabit the same castle we need you to be in, the best option is to avoid his notice. As a Gryffindor, you would automatically draw his attention.”
Right. That made sense, and Slytherin did have that advantage, though how a student who would suddenly appear in fifth year would avoid drawing his attention anyway was not yet clear.
“Don’t worry, we have a plan for your identity.”
She could see that her other self was holding back from explaining every detail of it right now, and while she wanted to know, she had asked for the broad strokes, so she nodded.
The elder Hermione smirked. Oh, good. There was more.
“The primary goals are to prevent certain deaths. And also to make other ones more likely. If possible, one hundred per cent likely.”
“You want me to kill people?” Hermione gulped.
Her other self looked her in the eye, her face full of emotion.
“Not with Avada Kedavra. Never that. But—yes. Essentially, I want you to use my plans to cause the deaths of five specific people. My assumption is that once you know who these people are, you won’t feel too badly about it, and in most of the cases, you’ll already know what they have done, by your time, to deserve it. There is no one on the list who won’t already have committed heinous acts by the time you will be in. Can I list them?”
She appreciated that she was being given time to process this. She suspected that it was true that her morals were flexible in this way. She didn’t think she would need to get into duels with these people, given her future self’s planning. And . . . well, she was willing to at least hear the list. (She had some guesses.) She nodded.
“One: Tom Riddle, Lord Fuckface. Murderer, psychopath, and cult leader.”
She must have made a face.
“Don’t look shocked at my obscenity. You already believe that rules about which words are ‘unacceptable in polite society’ are a waste of everyone’s time; you just haven’t got up the courage to say ‘fuck’ out loud yet,” her older self smirked at her, and she considered that it was not entirely sunshine and daisies having to contend with a version of herself who had knowledge she lacked—or hadn’t yet faced, in the present case.
All right, the name was called for. He had killed Cedric, Harry’s parents . . . but . . . how was she meant to kill him? And what would keep Pettigrew or someone else from resurrecting him again?
Her older self kept smiling. “There are several steps to that process, but trust me that I won’t allow you to go back there until you understand them all and are confident you can do it. You’re going to have tools to help you. Quite a few.”
Hermione nodded.
Her older self had the look of someone who needed to see a thing through.
“Two and three: Orion and Walburga Black. Child-abusers, elf-abusers, and blood supremacists. The child abuse is the legal reason.”
Her expression was dead serious.
“We have several artefacts that were confiscated and came to the Department of Mysteries from the DMLE: ancient Egyptian relics that judge and punish child abusers. Evidently these ritual items are somewhat common: they pop up or are brought into the country every decade or two and often expose the rot in a whole chain of inheritance before ending up as Ministry evidence. Sometimes the object is introduced by a family member, sometimes a vigilante. These perpetrators are investigated, but not often caught, as the object does the job itself and only needs to be placed in the vicinity of its victim.”
“You will have government approval for the use of any or all of them—albeit a government decades away from the one ruling at the time you will be acting in.”
“However, the frequency of these infiltrations has been relatively stable for some time. It will not seem strange for it to happen to the Blacks, in the seventies. You will not be suspected as long as we can deliver one of the artefacts into the house—this house, in fact.. I . . . I need you to look around a bit, here, in this time, to learn what we can about this house, soon,” she supplicated, breathless from her lecture.
Her younger self smiled. Space as well as time, then. She nodded, grinning.
Her older self grinned back. These houses were so fun to explore, and fifteen-year-old Hermione had really only got to explore the castle and the Burrow so far: no pureblood manors with dungeons and rose gardens, or sprawling villas, or vast preserves, or underground warrens of banks. They just needed to look out for the other inhabitants of the house—twenty-five-year-old Hermione did especially, as she should not be seen by others. The younger agreed to explore, with the goal of finding the secrets to infiltrating the house.
For now, the elder went back to listing.
“Four: Tobias Snape. Muggle. Child- and spouse-abuser.”
Oh. No wonder Snape was so unpleasant. That must be his father.
Guessing that, this already felt important, and older-Hermione’s eyes contained much more empathy for their Potions professor than she’d thought she would see.
All right. That must mean there was more to the caustic wizard than she had assumed. If his father was horrible, she could imagine where the anti-muggle sentiment had come from. She’d known he was a half-blood, and, since Harry had described the memory he’d fallen into of the trial of Igor Karkaroff, had known he had originally been a Death Eater, and then turned spy for Dumbledore. She had wondered how he had reconciled serving Voldemort with the presumably muggle or muggleborn side of his family. Now she knew.
“As a side note, unfortunately the artefacts I mentioned can be used for the Blacks, and for the fifth person on this list as well, but for Tobias Snape, the minister has not authorised . . . well. He’s a muggle, and if he dies in a magical way, the aurors will get involved, and the only likely suspect will be his wife. The nature of the artefact is such that it would likely leave him unmourned, but she would probably still be tried for murder. We would rather . . . well, I have some ideas, but basically you’ll need to kill him in as unmagical a way as possible. Try not to use any spells, at least none that leave a trace. And if possible, do it out of his house, in a public place with witnesses.”
Hermione’s heart beat rapidly. Kill a man without magic, in front of witnesses?
“You will need Harry’s cloak. Artefacts like that don’t leave magical traces. We know Tobias spent a lot of time in a particular pub, but we don’t know which place it is, so we’ll have to come up with a few possibilities. I won’t send you without enough plans that something will work.”
Hermione took some breaths. She could still turn it down if she didn’t feel confident she could do it. Her older self knew that, and truthfully, she did trust that they could come up with something. There were lots of ways to use magic that didn’t rely on casting spells, and plenty of ways to keep muggles from noticing. She swallowed, nodded, and went back to listening.
“Five: Tithonus Nott. Pureblood wizard, Knight of Walpurgis, Death Eater. Child- and spouse-abuser. I assume you are sensing a theme.”
Hermione nodded, fully agreeing that eliminating child abusers—and one psychopathic cult leader—was a good way to improve the general climate and build healthier families. But Nott? Why was that name vaguely familiar?
“Theodore Nott is a boy like you and me,” the elder Hermione whispered solemnly.
The younger Hermione blinked, as her memories rearranged themselves. Theodore Nott. How had she never noticed him before, yet could now perceive that he was always there in her memories, all the way back to her first trip on the Hogwarts Express?
“It's a code phrase we imbued with the charm we developed to undo the staggering number of notice-me-nots and handful of disillusionment charms he was, frankly, encased in,” the future Hermione explained. “He gets to choose who hears it and can perceive him; remember him. It feels safe to him. He gave permission for me to include you. In fact, he was always kind of desperate for you—me—us? to notice him,” and her older self blushed.
Oh, darn—shite, did she want to know this? She’d fucking blushed. It was too late: she had never been good at hiding certain emotions, and she could see that wasn’t going to change soon.
“You like him.”
Her older self blushed harder.
“Erm. Yes. I was . . . trying not to give you spoilers about your future that aren’t necessary for the mission,” she stammered. “Sorry. I’m still quite bad at hiding things like that . . .”
But younger Hermione shrugged and smirked. “Now I can stop trying to be good at it,” she grinned.
“Yeah . . . I do like him, and maybe someone else, too, and I’ll tell you the whole thing if you really want to hear it, but it’s probably best to experience it yourself, yeah?” the elder one said quietly, and she thought that was fair. For now, at least. She said so.
“Anyway, Theo is my colleague,” she admitted. “My fellow Unspeakable. He invented the time device that's allowing all this.”
Oh. Fuck. Hermione could see the thread now. Theodore had been the coauthor of this entire mission. He had helped write the list. His father was on the finalised version. That meant . . . yeah. If he had put his own father on the list, she was fairly certain that she herself could not object to that wizard’s death happening earlier than it would have in her own timeline.
She took a moment to assimilate, and examine, all these new memories that had, evidently, been there all along, waiting to be unlocked. It was a remarkable piece of magic they had done, to unravel the notice-me-nots across time, rather than simply cancel them in the present.
“You work in the Time Room,” Hermione blurted.
“What gave it away?” the elder version raised her eyebrow, smiling, and winked.
The results of multiple projects involving it, the fifteen-year-old Hermione thought, but she could only nod, dumbstruck. That was a really nice piece of magic. She was insufferably proud.
She began to sift through her new memories, seeing Theodore’s—Theo’s—dark brown curls and deep blue eyes everywhere now that she knew how to look.
In the backgrounds, behind the big scenes Malfoy was so fond of throwing. Often rolling his eyes. Sometimes like a shadow to Zabini, sometimes alone. Watching, but almost always seeming not to dare speak. He could see that we didn’t notice him, she thought. Did he know why?
Reading her mind—or more precisely, tracing the same train of thought—her older self explained.
“Theo knew he was ensorcelled, and the effects; but he didn’t know how to undo it, and his mother had died. This magic of hers persisted, and it was something Theo had of her, her magic always wrapping him up and keeping him safe. It was actually keeping him safe, as Theo’s father was his legal guardian, to whom he had to keep returning in the summers, and he was violent whenever he did manage to perceive his son. . . . And there were plenty who would have hated him, for his name alone, in Hogwarts.”
Hermione knew that she was likely one. She had heard the name of Tithonus Nott, Theo’s father, and had known he was those things. Death Eater. Blood supremacist. She, along with Harry and Ron, had made those assumptions about Draco Malfoy. He was a git, and that made her feel less bad about it, but had he started to change? Was he growing up a little now: was some of his bluster just an act, to keep himself safe? Could it always have been? She wasn’t one hundred per cent sure.
Her other self continued, nodding at her revelations without any judgement in her face. She could see her ideas rearranging themselves.
“Theo became an Unspeakable because he went to that department for answers, after his father finally died at the end of the war. They studied him and he studied along with them,” she laughed.
“By the time I was hired, he had already been hired as well, because he was so helpful to his own project—he’s really quite brilliant”—as though Hermione couldn’t have worked that out for herself, when he had invented a new kind of time travel—“even though most of the things they had tried had failed. So I got to work on him too. We went about it the long way . . . me talking to him every day, in the nullifying magic of the Time Room, wove me into the enchantment enough that I could see him, that I started to remember him, and when they explained the project to me I . . . we worked together to develop the magic that set him free. It was very fulfilling.” She grinned.
Oh, she was hooked. She already wished she’d been able to know him all this time. Imagine the mind it took, to develop that charm. The mind that could develop a different, new form of time device. Imagine being able to work on such a project with someone with a mind like that, who could keep up with her! And he was so pretty, too! Dark haired, with big gorgeous eyes . . .
Gods. She breathed, calming herself. She’d been spoilered into a sudden crush on a boy she’d never noticed until today. Still not the strangest part of what was happening right now. In fact, if she was guessing right about what she was meant to do in the past, there would be a couple of years spent there, at least. She would have to wait—and understand some probably esoteric time reckoning and what it meant about getting back (to the future, of course, she thought, thinking of Marty McFly)—before she got to cosy up to Theodore Nott. She might be an entirely different person by then; so might he. Oh, well. She was fairly certain she would still be curious about him, at least.
Memories were still surfacing. How he’d come out of his shell when he’d realised that his enchantments kept him out of most possible danger while he was at school. He'd started passing notes, in a roundabout way: he'd annotated books. The people he had paid attention to—Hermione, and she thought Malfoy and probably some of the other Slytherins too, and perhaps even a couple of Ravenclaws—seemed to be those who were studious enough that they had a chance of finding his notes: and they had.
All of them had begun to come across annotations in books they read. Some of the messages, oblique, never addressed to anyone, were nevertheless meant for specific audiences—she had known some were directed at herself, even if she hadn’t quite been able to focus on them long enough to put together what it all meant—and others seemed just there to convey small bits of his personality. They couldn’t talk to each other about him—another thing she was certain was to do with the notice-me-nots (even though Hermione at fifteen had never yet felt able to talk to Malfoy or those other Slytherins anyway), because future Hermione seemed to know it, and because she had never thought to speak to anyone else of that personality she had come to know in the margins of books—the one with the neat compact calligraphic handwriting. If it had been anyone else, she would have considered talking to her friends about it, even if she hadn’t in the end.
But each of them, separately, knew him, at least a little. His first loophole.
Theo was rarely called on by professors. Occasionally one would read his name off a list and he would answer, and then everyone, including the professor, would immediately forget him again. He studied. He annotated. He learned.
She could see him there in the stands near Malfoy, but seeming to distance himself from the others, during the three tasks of the Triwizard Tournament. Looking worried. Wincing when Moody called on Neville in Defense, demonstrating the Cruciatus on spiders—gods, that had actually been Barty Crouch Jr., hadn’t it? How fucking sadistic.
Theo following Fred and George around, learning the secrets of the Marauder's Map. Occasionally stealing Luna Lovegood’s shoes back from whoever’d stolen them and leaving them outside the Ravenclaw common room or out in the forest where the thestrals came. Hermione had seen him there once, after Care of Magical Creatures, but had not remembered that she had until now. Remarkable magic. It struck her that Theo had clearly been able to see the thestrals, just as Lovegood had.
“Now, Tithonus Nott is a known child abuser, and Theo’s experiences are enough to make me feel he deserves death.”
Her older self’s eyes were stormy.
“But you should also know that Theo had older siblings. Two half-sisters—one from each of his father’s previous marriages. They testified to their father’s abuse as well. The minister would not have signed off had all of his crimes been in the future from the perspective of when you will be.”
Hermione nodded. It helped to know that she would be committing state-sanctioned executions, not preemptive murders. Even if the morality was still a bit wobbly.
“And, y’know, along with saving the lives of James and Lily Potter and Regulus Black, and hopefully a lot more people—the Prewett twins, the McKinnon family, Caradoc Dearborn, Benjy Fenwick, Dorcas Meadowes, the Bones family, a whole slew more wizards and a mess of muggles, and hopefully Evan Rosier, perhaps Ariadne Wilkes and Kharon Avery, and whatever other Death Eaters might be somewhat redeemable—and substantially improving those of Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Severus Snape, and the future lives of Harry Potter and Theodore Nott—and of most kids of our generation—you’re also going to be saving Theo’s mother’s life. His father killed her when he was seven. In front of him. She’s Pandora’s older sister: Persephone Nott née Rosier.
Oh. Wow. That was why Theo could see thestrals.
People she hadn’t even known existed might get to live. Maybe Theo wouldn’t see the thestrals in the new timeline. Maybe Harry would grow up with parents. It was a lot of hope, and a lot of pressure. She took deep breaths.
“The world will be really different, won’t it?”
“Yes,” her older self was looking her in the eye. “You, and I, separately,” she gestured between them, “will each have to suffer a reintegration: two sets of memories merging into one when the consciousness is kicked forward into a future different from the one remembered. It will be like what just occurred with your memories of Theo, but with a much wider area of effect: the merging of, potentially, fairly distinct personalities. Another taxing feat I must ask of you. I firmly believe you to be capable of it. We've tested it, to some extent—on me,” she explained, and Hermione’s tongue tripped over the idea of expressing her concern that what the older Hermione was capable of, the younger might not be, and she tried to trust herself.
She also didn’t point out that, as they were, actually, the same person, it was Hermione herself, who would have to experience the integration both times: just separated by ten years. The other knew it as well.