Chapter Text
May 2, 1998
Hermione was cornered.
Her back against a crumbling wall, the castle was a smoking pillar of debris all around her, and she was trapped.
Fenrir Greyback had come calling, and the sick sneer on his face was highlighted by the deep, gouging scars that tore a line across his features.
“Your fear smells delicious, Mudblood.”
He stormed towards her, and Hermione raised her wand at him, but each spell she levied was easily brushed off. Werewolves were impervious to most spells; it was what made them so dangerous while transformed.
“Stay back!”
Greyback was always in a state of half transformed, half human.
He laughed at her, a gurgling, disturbed thing that erupted from the back of this throat.
He was terrifying.
Hermione shuddered as he growled deeply, the sounds of explosions combining with his roar rocking the ground beneath them.
This was it. Now or never. She didn’t want to know what kind of person it made her that she didn’t hesitate to wield a dark curse against him.
“Sectumsempra!”
A few lacerations opened up on his face and chest, but he remained undeterred.
“You’ll have to do better than that, little lion.”
Hermione was contemplating her last resort when he was suddenly upon her.
His hot breath steamed her ears and she jabbed her wand into his abdomen but he easily jerked it out of her hands, holding it aloft as he pressed her body into the wall.
She cursed herself for being so weak, so unprepared, so fragile after nearly a year starving and on the run.
And for what? For nothing?
For everything to end with her broken, alone, drowning in the grief of Harry’s death—
His mouth descended upon her cheek and she cringed, trying to flinch back as far as she could but it was futile.
There was the unmistakable lap of a rough tongue against her skin.
“Your tears taste like honey, little lion.”
And then his extended claws ripped into her jacket, tearing fabric and jostling the item hanging around her neck.
He had just slid one sharp talon against her chest, shredding skin and drawing blood, when it happened.
A pulse wrenched the world apart as golden threads hung in the air like wisps of clouds. Fabric that shimmered and glittered as if held aloft by pure starlight floated by her head.
Hermione wondered if it was a figment of her imagination, this manifestation of golden light before her as if to comfort her in her last moments.
Greyback growled into her hair as her jeans were ripped, his hand and sharp claws descending where no one but her had ever been before, but she closed her eyes and brought a hand up to his face.
Without thought, she jammed two fingers directly into his eyes while he was busy trying to shred her undergarments in two.
His scream was guttural and unnatural, a braying, whining thing, and she felt satisfaction curl in her gut before the threads wriggling and dancing around the air pulled taut like a bowstring.
Her entire body lifted in the air by some unseen force, her arms pinned behind her.
Hermione’s head was wrenched backwards as she stared at the sky as night brushed hands with the silken effervescence of dawn.
Greyback had finally gathered his bearings, but she could hear him below her yelling in shock.
Whatever happened now, at least he couldn’t get to her anymore. That was some small comfort, she supposed.
Her last resort, the Time Turner around her neck, grew scalding where it lay beneath her torn jacket on her chest.
She couldn’t move a single muscle, not to cry out in fear or pain, or to discern what was happening to it.
Perhaps it had been Greyback’s claws ripping through it and he had turned it accidentally, or it could be that it was finally gaining sentience as she’d once theorized the objects could do if the wearer utilized it enough.
Whatever it was, though, Hermione would never know, for she was sure this was her end.
Suddenly, the brewing dawn shrunk into pitch black night once more, except now there were no stars guiding her way.
Hermione became unmoored as the golden threads released her from their bindings, but she did not fall to the ground where the battle was still raging at Hogwarts, no.
She simply fell.
Fell into cold, dark oblivion.
She didn’t know if her eyes were open or closed.
She knew nothing of herself but a tiny, imperfect piece of her soul that urged her to remain.
She was suddenly reminded of a quote from a story she’d once read.
“Look, don’t be afraid, it is nothing, it is only eternity.
“Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live.”
And live, she would.
Though oblivion, she observed, was a strange thing.
For there was laughter here.
Laughter, and soft music. A song she remembered her Mum and Dad used to dance to in the living room.
It's only me who wants to wrap around your dreams
And have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
Dreams of loneliness
Like a heartbeat drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost
And what you had
Ooh, what you lost
Hermione smiled as eternity sucked her under, and she bled, and bled, and bled.