A Time-Turner. Not exactly Draco Malfoy's preferred mode of transport.
It was profoundly unpleasant. First came the sensation of hurtling backward at great speed — then blurred shapes rushing past, like clouds seen from inside a storm — and simultaneously a hammering pressure in the ears that drowned out every sound, including one's own voice. Shouting, gasping, saying nothing — it made no difference. And throughout all of it, a persistent doubt about whether one would be standing on solid ground at the end.
Then, abruptly, he was. Standing in the hospital wing, exactly where they had left.
Everything was as it had been.
Except the light was different — brighter, earlier — and the bed where Ron had been lying, pale-faced and watching them disappear, was empty and neatly made.
"Seven-thirty," Hermione said, already thinking aloud. "Where were we at seven-thirty?" She tucked the Time-Turner away.
"Hagrid's hut, I think," Harry said, still looking faintly dazed.
"Then that's where we go. Come on." She was already moving.
The two boys exchanged a brief, helpless glance and followed her down the empty corridor.
"Hermione," Harry said, breathing hard to keep up, "is there going to be an explanation at any point?"
"I'm explaining now," she said, without slowing. "Professor McGonagall gave me a Time-Turner at the start of term. That's how I've been attending several classes at once. It allows me to travel back—"
"We've gone back in time," Harry said, as it landed.
"Yes," Hermione said. "Three hours. We need to be careful — we absolutely cannot be seen by ourselves."
They rounded a corner, and Hermione slowed just enough to peer through the glass of a corridor window. Outside, in the last of the afternoon light, was the large flat rock near the pitch.
Draco looked.
Across the grounds, another version of himself was standing very still while another Hermione drew back her arm and punched him squarely in the nose.
"I have to say," Draco said, watching his past self stagger, "that really was a very powerful punch." He touched his nose absently. "It still aches a little."
Hermione went crimson.
She raised her chin and kept her eyes firmly forward. "Thank you," she said, with cold dignity.
The scene outside triggered an uncomfortable chain of recollection for her.
She was still angry. She had spent the last hour in mortal terror in the dark, and then clutching Draco on the bank of the lake, and then doing her level best not to dissolve entirely while he dressed her wounds by candlelight — and she had let her guard down completely, and she was furious with herself for it.
She couldn't just forget that. She couldn't pretend the scene at the rock had never happened, that her dignity hadn't been comprehensively destroyed, that she hadn't cried in front of Harry for an embarrassingly long time.
She needed to be composed. She needed a certain distance. She absolutely could not allow herself to be soft with him just because he had a very nice way of applying antiseptic ointment.
She kept her face carefully neutral and stared straight ahead.
In the corridor outside, past-Draco pressed a hand to his nose and said something fierce and dismissive to Crabbe and Goyle, then stalked away. His hair was dishevelled and his robe bloodstained and he looked, Draco thought with some objectivity, rather pitiful.
It was Draco's turn to feel warm around the ears.
He glanced at Hermione and received nothing in return. Her expression was entirely unreadable.
When the corridor outside went quiet, Hermione turned and moved quickly to the door, slipping outside and crossing to the rock. She crouched down, searched the ground, and stood holding something in her palm — a silver ring, catching the last of the evening light.
*Merlin's beard.* Everything snapped into place at once.
The Tracking Charm. The ring pointing toward the Forbidden Forest. The Time-Turner.
The first Hermione had thrown the ring away; the second Hermione — this one — had retrieved it before the first one could return for it. That meant it had been in second-Hermione's possession when she was near the Forbidden Forest, which was why the Tracking Charm had pointed there. It was a perfectly sealed loop of cause and effect, and thinking about it for too long made his head swim.
Hermione slipped the ring carefully between her fingers. She was looking at it rather than at him, her expression composed, giving nothing away.
"Where to now?" she asked, to the air between them.
"Back the way we came," Draco said, looking at the crown of her brown hair. "If we can track where the rat goes once Pettigrew flees the hut, we can catch him before he reaches the Whomping Willow."
"Agreed," Harry said, with the restrained urgency of someone who had been waiting to say exactly that. His eyes were alight with purpose.
They ran.
---
They reached Hagrid's hut and tucked themselves behind the sprawling pile of pumpkins. Through the open window, Draco could see the three of them inside — the other Harry, Ron, and Hermione, sitting with mugs of tea. The other Hermione had her face turned away, but her shoulders were tense, and she was rubbing at her eyes.
"You — you were crying in there?" Draco said quietly, turning to look at Hermione.
"She was crying for quite a while," Harry said, from Draco's other side, with a tone that conveyed its opinion very clearly.
"I'm sorry," Draco said, holding Hermione's gaze. He meant it simply.
"It's fine." She looked at the hut window instead of him, her voice flat. "I was being silly."
She was furious, he could tell. Not the hot, visible kind — the cold, armoured kind. The kind that involved very straight posture and a fixed point of focus anywhere except his face.
He didn't push it. He watched the window.
After a few minutes, Crookshanks emerged from the undergrowth at a businesslike trot, ignored Hermione's whispered attempts to call him over, and stationed himself near the hut like a small, furry sentinel.
Inside, Hagrid reached for the kettle.
"He's in the canister!" Harry said, suddenly sharp-eyed. He started to rise.
Draco caught him by the shoulder and pulled him back down. "You can't go in there. The other you is right there — you'll cause a panic, and very possibly hex yourself."
"He's right," Hermione said quickly. "Interfering with a timeline in progress is dangerous. We can't appear in front of ourselves."
Harry subsided, jaw tight. He looked at the window for a moment, then scooped a pebble from the dirt beside the pumpkins and threw it hard.
It went through the open window and hit the table.
The tea canister skidded. Tea leaves scattered. A small, grey shape shot out of the canister and hit the floor—
Inside, Ron's voice rose in alarm. An instant later, the rat-shaped Peter Pettigrew bolted out of the rear door of the hut, low to the ground and moving fast.
The past-Harry, past-Ron, and past-Hermione filed out after it and ran.
Then the front door flew open and Hagrid charged out, bellowing something about Dementors, and pounded toward the castle.
"Go," Draco said.
They went.
---
They followed at a careful distance through the deepening dusk, keeping to the shadows of the trees, tracking the trio ahead by sound as much as sight. Crookshanks had stopped pretending to be a statue and was running alongside them with a focused energy that suggested he had been waiting for exactly this.
The sky had gone dark and heavy with cloud. By the time they reached the edge of the Forbidden Forest and lay down behind a stand of thicket, the Whomping Willow was visible below them — and a large black dog had just dragged something small and struggling into the hollow at its base.
"That's Sirius," Harry said, in a different voice entirely. The anger had left it. "I didn't know he was an Animagus."
Draco said nothing. He had suspected it since Narcissa had let slip, months ago, that Sirius had told her Animagi could resist Dementors. Today confirmed the last detail.
Below them, the scene from earlier played out again: the other Hermione calling out a warning, Crookshanks doubling back toward her from nowhere, all three of them vanishing into the tree.
"Crookshanks," Hermione murmured, crouching behind the bushes. "There he goes."
"He went back to you," Draco said.
"He has a mind of his own," she said, watching the cat disappear into the shadows below.
The Whomping Willow had gone completely still.
"Is this the tunnel to the Shrieking Shack?" Draco asked.
"Yes," Hermione said quietly. "Pettigrew has been hiding there."
He turned that over. The lights Harry had mentioned seeing from that direction on previous nights. The tunnel that appeared on the Marauder's Map, which the Weasley twins had always said no one knew how to use.
"How did Sirius and Lupin know about the tunnel?" he murmured.
"Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs," Hermione said, half to herself. "That's what Sirius and Professor Lupin called each other — those are their names for each other. Nicknames, or—" She paused, and looked at Draco. "Do you think those are their—"
It was the first time she had made direct eye contact with him since the ring. A slight, involuntary thing, drawn by the current of the puzzle.
Draco had been waiting for it.
He smiled at her, just a small one, and watched the thought complete itself in her face.
*The creators of the Marauder's Map.*
He could see the moment she got there.
She looked away. But the ice in her expression had cracked, fractionally, in the way it always did when a problem was more interesting than her feelings about him.
She turned to Harry instead. "What happened at the lake? You said Dementors attacked — but you said you were saved by something?"
"A Patronus," Harry said. He was looking at the still willow tree, but his expression had shifted — complicated, raw. "But it wasn't mine. I could barely hold my wand. I saw a stag and a doe — running from different directions across the water — they drove the Dementors off completely."
"Harry," Hermione said, carefully.
"I know what you're going to say." He turned to look at her. "Professor Lupin told me — my dad's Patronus was a stag. My mum's was a doe."
"Harry—" she began.
"I know they're dead," he said. "I know. But there was someone on the other side of that lake, and I think—" He stopped. "I think it was my dad."
The silence stretched.
"Ghosts can't cast spells," Hermione said, as gently as she could.
"He didn't look like a ghost."
"Then perhaps," she said carefully, "perhaps it was *you*. Perhaps under that kind of pressure, without knowing it—"
Draco nodded quietly, in agreement.
"I couldn't cast a Patronus! I could barely stay upright!" Harry said, with a frustrated intensity that wasn't quite anger, because it was directed at something neither of them could give him. "Just — wait. When we get to the lake, you'll see. You'll see who's there."
Hermione opened her mouth and closed it again. She glanced at Draco.
"We'll wait and see," Draco said simply. It seemed kinder than further argument.
"Our first priority is Pettigrew," Hermione said, pulling herself back to purpose. "Once he transforms and breaks away from the group, we move. Harry, you Petrify him — quietly, before he reaches the undergrowth. We secure him and then get to the lake."
"Yes," Harry said. He breathed out and sat on the grass, eyes fixed on the hollow at the base of the willow. "It'll be a while yet."
"About an hour," Hermione agreed, checking her watch.
Harry went quiet. He stared at the tree.
---
The wind moved through the leaves overhead. The moon came and went behind clouds. No one spoke.
Hermione found a spot with a clean sightline to the willow — carefully positioned away from Draco — and sat very still, watching.
Draco sat nearby and watched her instead.
She had armoured herself. He could see the construction of it — the straight back, the deliberate focus, the complete management of her expression. It was the kind of composure that was very obviously constructed, which meant it cost her something to maintain.
He had put that there. He knew it with a nauseating clarity.
He had been a coward. He had reached for the most available exit — the word *sister* — and used it to deflect something he was afraid of, at exactly the moment she had trusted him enough to let it matter.
He had done this before, in different forms, across two lifetimes. The specifics changed; the cowardice did not.
He had told himself, since his rebirth, that keeping his distance would protect her. That she would be better off without the particular complications of Draco Malfoy wanting her. That wanting things was how he damaged them.
On the bank of the lake, holding her while the fear worked its way out of them both, he had understood with absolute clarity that this reasoning was simply another form of cowardice with better justification.
He stood up, crossed the distance between them, and sat down beside her.
"Hermione," he said quietly. "About what I said — the thing that made you angry. I want to explain. I have — I have a great deal of feeling for you. More than I've been willing to say."
"Yes," she said, without looking at him. "A sisterly affection."
"No," he said. "That's not what I meant."
She was quiet for a moment. Her jaw was set.
"I said it badly," he said. "I said it because I was afraid. Not because it was true."
"And why were you afraid?" she asked, still looking at the willow.
He exhaled. "Because I thought — because you have better options. Because anything you chose that wasn't me would probably be a better decision." He paused. "Because I didn't think I deserved to want you."
Hermione said nothing.
"That is still probably true," he said, with more honesty than grace. "But I decided tonight that it wasn't a good enough reason to keep lying to you about it."
A long silence.
"That's a very poor apology," she said at last.
"I know."
"It doesn't even address the kiss."
"I genuinely don't remember the kiss," he said, which was the truth. "I would appreciate a hint, if you're feeling generous."
She glanced at him — finally — and the expression on her face was doing several things at once that he couldn't fully inventory.
"I'm not feeling generous," she said.
"That's fair."
She looked back at the willow.
"I'm not going to simply forgive you," she said, after a moment. "Just so you know."
"I know," he said.
"Good," she said.
They sat in silence. It was a different kind of silence than before — not the armoured, frozen kind, but something more like a ceasefire. He was close enough to see her breathe.
Nearby, Harry had developed the focused stillness of someone waiting for the right moment to strike.
The moon slid behind a cloud. The willow's branches hung motionless.
Draco kept his eyes on Hermione's profile.
The faintest possibility — tentative, fragile, entirely unearned — had settled in the air between them. He was afraid to move in case it scattered.
He sat with it instead, and waited.