Chapter Text
The Room of Hidden Things smelled of hot dust and something older underneath it, the particular sourness of paper that has been damp and then dry a hundred times over.
Hermione had been inside for eleven minutes. She knew because she had started counting when Ron shouted from the seventh floor corridor that they had until the stairs went, and eleven minutes was already too many. Somewhere below her, the castle was making a noise she had no vocabulary for. Not the crack of spellfire, which she knew. Something more structural. The sound of a building being asked to hold more than it could hold.
She went sideways along a corridor of stacked furniture, one shoulder brushing a wardrobe with its door hanging off, and she was looking for a crown.
That was the thing about the diadem. In the abstract it had been an object of enormous significance, a Horcrux, a piece of the man's soul folded into silver, and she had spent months on it. In practice she was looking through a room the size of a cathedral for a small tarnished tiara, and the room was full to the vaults with the accumulated shame of a thousand years of children. Confiscated things. Hidden things. Broken things nobody wanted to admit to breaking.
A cauldron with a hole burned through the base. Sixty-odd copies of the same textbook, waterlogged, fused into a brick. A stuffed raven under a bell jar, missing its glass eyes. A stack of confiscated love letters bound with garden twine, the top one addressed in violet ink to my own dear Wilhelmina, and Hermione had a completely inappropriate half-second of wanting to read it.
She kept moving.
The fire came later. That was the order of it, afterwards, when she tried to lay the night out flat and make sense of the sequence. The fire came later, which meant that when she found the shelf she still had time, and the thing she did with that time was the mistake.
The shelf was oak, freestanding, and it had been carefully arranged. That was what caught her. Everything else in the room had been dumped. This had been put. Nine objects on three levels, each one on a square of dark blue felt, each square labelled in copperplate on a card gone the colour of weak tea.
She read them because she was Hermione Granger and she was going to die one day with her reading glasses on.
Reliquary, Bavarian, contents removed 1802. Do not open.
Pair of shears, provenance unknown, four fatalities.
Astrolabe, Alexandrian, non-functional since 1691.
And then, on the middle shelf, on a square of felt that had been dusted, which meant someone had dusted it, which meant someone had been in here caring for these objects within living memory:
THE LONG TURN. Confiscated from a seventh-year student, 1899. Board of Governors' instruction: destruction attempted, unsuccessful. Do not wind.
The object itself was ugly. She had expected something delicate. Time-turners were delicate. She had worn one for a year, a fine gold cage the size of a walnut, and she still had the ghost of a chain-mark on her collarbone in the winter if she got cold.
This was the size of a brick. Brass, and the brass had gone green in the seams. The glass was smoked so dark it was almost black, and it was not an hourglass shape at all, more of an oblate spheroid with a flattened base, wrapped in a lattice of graduated rings that did not correspond to any measurement system she recognised. A key protruded from the side. The key had been broken off flush and then, at some point, welded back on by someone who was not a metalworker.
There was a card behind the card. She saw the edge of it and drew it out with two fingers.
It was newer. Not new, but written in a hand she knew, sloping and thin and impatient, because she had spent a year of her life reading Dumbledore's marginal notes on returned essays.
Not a time-turner. Turns lifetimes, not hours. Single use, one direction only. It cannot be destroyed and it cannot be got rid of, and I have decided that a room which hides things is the closest we shall come to either. A. P. W. B. D., 1957.
Hermione stood absolutely still with the card in her hand.
Turns lifetimes.
She thought, with the appalling clarity that comes to people three days without sleep: how far back.
Not because she wanted to use it. She would have sworn that, afterwards, to anyone who asked, and nobody ever asked. She thought how far back the way you look over the edge of a high place to establish the drop. It was information. She had spent nine months collecting information and putting it in order and the habit had gone into her hands.
She picked it up.
It weighed what a brick weighs. The brass was warm, which was wrong, because the room was cold in the way of rooms with no windows.
Down in the castle, four floors below, Vincent Crabbe was losing an argument with a spell he did not understand, and the argument was about to become everyone's problem, and Hermione did not know that yet. She was turning the Long Turn over in her hands, feeling for the seam where the casing came apart, because the rings were engraved on the inside as well as the outside and she wanted to see.
The casing came apart.
Two things happened close enough together that she never sorted out which was first.
The first was that a folded square of paper fell out of the device onto the floorboards. Cheap paper, ruled, the kind you tear out of a school notebook. She saw handwriting on it and the handwriting was hers.
The second was the fire.
It came up the corridor of furniture like something with a spine. Not the colour of fire. Gold and orange, but wrong, articulated, and she saw the head of it lift over a stack of desks and resolve into a shape she knew from a woodcut in a book she had read at twelve, and she thought Fiendfyre in a small flat voice, the way you might identify a bird.
She had two seconds. She used one of them to grab the paper.
The second one she spent running, and she did not run fast enough, because the fire was not moving like fire either, and a filament of it came off the main body and went past her left side close enough to take the sleeve off her jumper and the skin off her forearm underneath. She heard herself make a sound. The Long Turn was in her right hand and the paper in her left and the burn went through her like a wire pulled tight.
The lattice of rings on the device began to move.
It did not spin. It articulated, ring against ring, with a sound like a lock giving way, and then the smoked glass at the centre went from almost-black to entirely transparent, and inside it there was nothing at all, and the nothing had depth.
Hermione had time to think that she should put it down.
She did not put it down.
* * *
Grass.
Wet grass, and her cheek in it, and the particular reek of cut grass that has been rained on, which is one of the four or five smells that go all the way down to the bottom of a person.
She lay still for a while. Not out of caution. Out of a total absence of instruction. She could hear something breathing very hard and it took her some seconds to establish that it was her.
Then she pushed herself up onto her hands and the left forearm folded and she went back down and swore into the ground.
The burn was bad. From the wrist to the inside of the elbow, and the fabric of her sleeve had gone into it in places, and it was already weeping. She sat up more carefully with her arm held away from her body like something borrowed.
It was dark, but the wrong dark. There was a moon and the moon was doing all the work.
She was on the lawn. Her own lawn, the slope below the Astronomy Tower where the ground went down to the greenhouses before it broke towards the lake. She knew every yard of it. She had revised on it. She had cried on it once, briefly, in fourth year, and told nobody.
The tower was above her, whole.
That was the thing that got in first, before any of the rest. The Astronomy Tower was whole. She had seen it two hours ago with a bite out of the parapet where a curse had taken it, and she had seen the north face of the castle with the windows blown out along the fourth floor, and the greenhouses were glass and light and nothing.
Now the greenhouses were glass. All four of them. There were only four.
Hermione turned her head and looked up at the castle and the castle was intact and dark and blacked out, every window, not a chink, and there was no fire and no noise and no one screaming, and there was a smell of coal smoke on the air from the direction of Hogsmeade, and above the Quidditch pitch, very high up and very slow, a light was crossing the sky.
She watched it. It took a long time to cross. It did not blink.
Aeroplane, she thought. That's an aeroplane.
She was still holding the Long Turn. The glass at the centre was smoked black again and one of the rings had cracked through and there was a smell coming off the brass like a struck match. She put it down on the grass and it did not do anything else.
The paper was in her other hand, crushed into her palm, and she had to work the fingers open with her teeth because the left arm would not obey.
She smoothed it against her knee.
Ruled paper, torn from a notebook. Two columns of arithmantic notation, the left column in a fast hand and the right column in the same fast hand but written later, in different ink, correcting the left. At the bottom, three lines of ordinary English:
The error is in the third harmonic. It isn't a duration, it's a displacement, and you can't integrate a displacement over a lifetime without a fixed referent. USE THE REFERENT. Nine rings, not seven. Don't be clever about it.
It was her handwriting. Not a close approximation. Hers, the specific ugly loop she made on a lowercase g, the way she crossed a t high and to the right when she was going too fast to care.
She had never seen the page before in her life.
Hermione sat on the wet grass below the tower with her arm on fire and read it four times, and on the fourth time she understood, in outline, the shape of what had happened to her. Not the mechanism. The shape.
The device had worked. She was somewhere else in the sense of when. And the reason the device had worked at all was that somebody had corrected the third harmonic and gone from seven rings to nine, and they had done it using a page of notes in her handwriting, and she had not written that page yet.
Which meant she was going to.
Which meant she had been here before, in the sense that mattered, and that everything that was about to happen to her had already been true for a very long time.
There is a particular kind of vertigo that has nothing to do with height.
She got up. It took two attempts. She left the Long Turn on the grass, walked six steps, went back, and picked it up, because if she left it there someone would find it, and she had a very cold feeling about who found things on this lawn.
Then she stood in the dark and made herself go through it properly, because panic is a decision and she had decided not to.
One. Where. Hogwarts. Certain.
Two. When. Blackout, and an aeroplane, and four greenhouses. Blackout meant the war, which put her between 1939 and 1945. The greenhouses she could actually date, because she had read the Hogwarts building survey for a Prefects' report in fifth year and there had been a line about the fifth and sixth greenhouses being built in the 1950s under Dippet's successor. So: before 1955. And the fourth greenhouse existed, which put her after 1911.
Between 1939 and 1945, then. In the war.
Something in her chest did a slow sickening turn, because there was a person who was at Hogwarts between 1939 and 1945, and she had spent nine months of her life learning the shape of his mind the way you learn a coastline before you sail it.
Three. She looked down at the cracked brass in her hands. Three. How do I get back.
The answer was standing right there and she looked at it for a long moment before she let herself say it.
She got back by fixing the Long Turn. And she could not fix the Long Turn, because the mathematics on that page were beyond her, not by a little. She had read one column and understood perhaps a third of the notation. She was very good. She was not good enough, and she had never in her life had to think that sentence before, and it landed like a hand on the back of her neck.
So she needed help.
And the corrections on that page were in her handwriting, which meant that at some point she was going to be sitting somewhere with a pen, writing down the answer, which meant somebody was going to explain it to her.
In this castle. In these years.
Hermione stood on the lawn in 1942 or thereabouts, nineteen years old, with her left arm ruined and a dead artefact in her hands, and she understood that the only person in the world who could send her home was the person she had come here from trying to kill.
* * *
She walked to the Entrance Hall because there was nothing else to do. Sitting on the lawn until dawn would have solved nothing and she was starting to shake in a way that had stopped being about fear.
The doors were shut and she did not try them. She went around to the courtyard side, where there was a bell-pull for late deliveries that had been there since before her grandmother was born and would be there for fifty years after she died. She had used it in third year when she came back from Hogsmeade after curfew and Filch had made her polish the suits of armour for a fortnight.
She pulled it.
Nothing happened for a long time. Then the small door in the great door opened and there was a woman in a dressing gown with a wand held up and lit, and behind the light Hermione registered a face she did not know: sixty-odd, grey plait over one shoulder, mouth like a purse snapped shut.
"The doors," the woman said, "are shut at eight. There is a war on."
"I know," Hermione said.
"Do you." The light came closer. "What are you doing out of the castle?"
"I'm not out of the castle. I've never been in it." Her voice came out level and she was faintly impressed with it. "My name is Hermione. I need to speak to the Headmaster."
The wand-light travelled down her.
It found the arm.
The woman's face went through three separate expressions in about a second and a half, and the last of them was competence, which Hermione had never in her life been so glad to see.
"Merlin's teeth," said the woman. She got a hand under Hermione's right elbow, and her grip was dry and hard and entirely certain. "Hospital wing. Now. The Headmaster can wait, he's asleep and he sleeps like a stone. Don't argue with me, girl, I can see the bone."
"You can't see the bone," Hermione said.
"I can see something I'd rather not, and if you faint on these steps you'll crack your head and then I shall have two problems." The woman was already moving her. "What is that you're carrying? Give it here."
"No."
There was a pause. In the pause Hermione heard her own voice as the woman must have heard it, and she filed the information away: that came out like a fifth year telling a teacher to get stuffed, and it worked, because she is looking at me differently now.
"Hm," said the woman. "Carry it, then. Both hands on it and don't drop it on my floor. My name is Gertrude Prewett and I teach Charms, and if you tell me anything untrue in the next quarter of an hour I shall find out."
"All right," said Hermione.
"What's your name again?"
They were inside. The Entrance Hall was the Entrance Hall, the same flagstones with the same dip worn into the third one from the left, and the shields on the walls were shields she had never seen, and there was a wireless set on a stool by the caretaker's door with a blanket over it. On the noticeboard, a paper card in official lettering: IN THE EVENT OF AIR RAID WARNING, STUDENTS WILL PROCEED TO THE DUNGEONS. PREFECTS WILL COUNT.
Prefects will count.
Hermione looked at the card and thought about a boy who would be a prefect in this castle in this year, standing at the bottom of a staircase in the dark with a list, counting.
"Hermione," she said. "Hermione Dagworth-Granger."
It came out of her mouth fully formed and she had no memory of deciding it. Hector Dagworth-Granger, founder of the Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers, a name off the inside cover of a book she had read at eleven and never thought about again. Half of it was already hers. The other half was a door.
She heard herself say it and she thought: there. That's the first one. Remember that you chose it.
Professor Prewett stopped walking.
"Dagworth-Granger," she said.
"Yes."
"Hector's people?"
Hermione's whole body wanted to say I don't know. She said, "The Geneva side."
And Gertrude Prewett, Charms mistress of Hogwarts School, looked at a girl in a burned jumper holding a dead brass artefact in the middle of a blacked-out Entrance Hall in September of 1942, and her face did something complicated and pitying, and she said:
"Oh, my dear. Geneva."
Hermione did not know what that meant. She would find out in about nine hours, from a newspaper, and it would be the single most useful piece of luck she ever had, and she would spend three years being sick about it.
For now she said, "Yes," and let the woman take her up the stairs.
* * *