Folly
Title: Folly
Team Name: spy (for the sexy dark ladies :D)
Word Count: 6x100
Rating: PG
Challenge: child challenge, time turner challenge, traitor to the light challenge
Characters: Hermione and Severus
(and Harry, Ron and Mrs Weasley stop by)
Authors Notes: A bit of a warning for character death. This drabble set doesn’t hold a candle to any of the classic time-turner fics, but the story came to mind vividly so here goes nothing :D
***
It was perhaps best that they didn’t know why.
How could she explain the needful loneliness in a castle where history was written in each breath, where blood would be spilled with the flowing of the dawn through the black sky?
Black as his hair, coffee, humour, robes and the edges of his soul. Black like the ink permanently staining his fingertips, which tread only once on her skin during the night, blackest for fear of the morrow.
Nothing though was as black as his last lie, whispered into her tousled mesh of hair,
“I will come back to you.”
***
They said time-travelling while pregnant was deadly and so she had bided her time, waiting until two days past childbirth.
Floo-ing into her previous apprenticeship quarters, still untouched since the War, Hermione felt lost, adrift. Universities had closed their doors to her and neither was her Hogwart’s diploma sufficient to find gainful employment, academic stature notwithstanding.
Everywhere, she could hear the whispers - "Have you heard? Someone knocked up the Order’s golden girl.." -, see the look of betrayal in Ron’s eyes, pained empathy in Harry’s, the pity in Molly’s -
That was the worst. She didn’t want pity for her folly.
***
She left him unnamed because if her plan worked, he would have never existed in the first place.
But oh, her miracle boy was beautiful in ways Hermione could not fathom: dark curls caught between the shades of his parents’, his eyes identical to Hermione’s, his preternaturally porcelain skin distinctly his father’s - not that anyone could guess who because didn’t people see only what they could imagine, what they might comprehend?
Hermione, however, fully understood the danger of the situation.
Contraception Potion in her pocket, her shaking hands turned time nine times, pulling reality into the night before the battle.
***
Hermione had looked into his eyes and remembered how black they were - or was it really remembering when she had touched his clothes, ran her hands over the precise needlework, felt the truth of his presence, albeit for the last time?
She wondered as she entwined their fingers if he expected that his loyalty to the light would never be told, that he would die branded the Traitor?
Repeating his old lie, he had whispered,
“I will come back to you.”
Hermione had nodded, knowing she wouldn’t remember this promise nor would he.
Against his sleeping self, she silently cried.
***
It was almost insulting how a simple Persuasion Spell sent just right had convinced her past self to sleep the night way. She however stayed awake, watching him sleep his night away.
Minutes to go and she would be returning to the future... present - whichever . Numbly, Hermione apparated to the edge of the
Forbidden Forest.
Here stories were buried under swaying leaves, swallowed by waiting creatures of the night. Here, her story would be kept secret.
Spelling the time-piece open, she watched as the sand-like crystals of molten water and frozen air spilled like tears onto the floor.
***
Time-turner in hand, Hermione knew she had gone back to change something. The empty hourglass told her it was a single, successful chance she had given herself.
From the depths of the Forbidden Forest, she could hear the growling of unmentionables. The sandy soil before her feet was damp, the wind cold; her head hurt.
She apparated home, just knowing she had to prepare dinner for Ron, decidedly queasy that she couldn’t shake the feeling something crucial was being forgotten. Hermione sighed, vowing to trust her past self’s decision to forget.
It was perhaps best that she didn’t know why.