Chapter Text
No Steel
Chapter 1: Shattered Time
The air in the Department of Mysteries did not breathe. It sucked. It was the deep midnight of June 18, 1996, and the world was splitting along its seams, shedding its skin in a violent cascade of glass, dust, blood, and spent incantations. At least, that was how it felt to Hermione Granger.
Only hours ago, she had been in the Forbidden Forest, dragging Dolores Umbridge toward the centaurs with a lie sharp enough to cut. She had watched the woman vanish into the trees in a blur of pink wool and shrieking indignation, and though Hermione knew she ought to feel guilty, she could not quite manage it. Umbridge had threatened Harry, threatened the D.A., threatened them all. Hermione had done what she had to do.
The thestrals, however, were another matter. The memory of that skeletal body beneath her, its bones pressing into her thighs as its wings beat furiously against the night sky, sent a renewed wave of nausea coiling through her. She had forced it down during the flight from the Scottish Highlands to London. She forced it down again now.
Because now she was in the Department of Mysteries. Now, thirteen Death Eaters had cornered six teenagers. Now Harry Potter’s recklessness had once again dragged her into danger, and Hermione was beginning to wonder, with a clarity that bordered on hysteria, why she had ever let friendship make her this stupid.
Harry was crouched beside her in a dark corner of the Brain Room, one arm braced behind her shoulders, his other hand shaking as he tried to hold her together. His face was white beneath the grime and blood. His glasses sat crooked on his nose. He kept muttering apologies under his breath as though regret could stitch flesh back into place.
Hermione wanted to tell him to stop.
She wanted to tell him that apologies were pointless when he had ignored every warning she had given him. He had believed the vision. He had taken the prophecy from the shelf. And when Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange had tried to coerce him into handing it over, Harry had mocked Voldemort to their faces. Then everything had exploded.
The six of them had scattered from the Hall of Prophecies into one nightmare after another, trying to stay alive long enough to find a way out. Hermione, fighting through pain and dizziness, forced herself to think. Panic would get them killed. Numbers, strategy, and memory might not.
Thirteen Death Eaters at the start. Thoros Nott was still in the Hall of Prophecies, as far as she knew. Hermione had stunned him, then stomped on his face and wand hand before fleeing after Harry and Neville. It had been brutal. Necessary, but brutal. Nott was a ruthless bastard, and from what Hermione knew of Theo Nott in Slytherin, his son was more victim than heir. If the elder Nott rejoined the fight, they were in trouble.
Then there had been Villius Crabbe and Rabastan Lestrange in the Time Chamber. Crabbe had lunged for her, one thick arm outstretched as though reaching for her throat. Hermione’s Diffindo had landed too perfectly. The spell had opened his neck in a crimson spray that struck her face and robes. For one frozen second, she had watched the light leave the father of one of her classmates, and the knowledge of what she had done had nearly hollowed her out.
Harry had stared at her blood-spattered face, horrified. Then he had grabbed her arm and pulled her onward.
Rabastan Lestrange had pursued Neville deeper into the room. Harry sent Stupefy after Stupefy at him, but Lestrange dodged them with infuriating ease until Hermione, moving on instinct, hit him squarely with a Jelly-Legs Jinx. Harry’s next Stunner blasted him into a bell jar. His head began to age and de-age grotesquely, shifting between infant and adult while Neville sealed him in a Full Body-Bind.
They had run. Neville first, Harry at his heels, Hermione bringing up the rear. At the door, Hermione had hesitated.
“Just in case,” she whispered. And because fear had sharpened her mind into something reckless, she snatched one of the Time-Turners from the wall of glittering devices beside the entrance. It was not the neat school-issued model Professor McGonagall had once entrusted to her. This one was heavier, stranger, its rings etched with markings she did not recognize. An experimental Ministry prototype, perhaps.
She shoved it into her pocket and pushed through the door. Back in the revolving chamber, everything went wrong again. Dolohov and Jugson were waiting.
Harry and Neville were struck by Impediment Jinxes. Hermione cast a Silencing Charm on Dolohov before he could call for the others, and Harry managed to bind Jugson. But Dolohov flicked his wand toward her without a word.
A purple, flame-like whip of magic hurtled across the space and struck her in the chest. The pain was immediate and obscene. Heat buried itself in her veins, racing through her body as if the curse had teeth that were tearing at her veins. She remembered falling. She remembered Harry’s hands on her, frantic and useless. She remembered Neville launching himself at Dolohov with unexpected ferocity, slamming the man’s head into the tiles before binding him.
Then there had been blackness.
When Hermione came to, the bleeding had slowed. Neville’s rudimentary healing charms, the sort his grandmother must have used on him growing up, had held when they truly needed to. They had not fixed her. Nothing short of a proper Healer could do that. But they had kept her alive. That was enough.
Harry was still holding her when she woke fully, her body half across his lap as they crouched in the Brain Room. Ron, Ginny, and Luna had found them there. All six of them were alive, though none of them were whole.
Ron was glassy-eyed and giggling to himself, clearly under the effects of some curse that had left him almost drunk. Ginny was pale, clutching a badly twisted ankle. Luna stood near the shelves of brains, her wide grey-blue eyes reflecting the eerie light from the tanks.
“Luna used the Reductor Curse on a model of Pluto in the Space Chamber,” Ginny explained, her voice strained. “It was the only way we got away from Rookwood and Malfoy.”
Luna tilted her head. “I got Rookwood in the neck with a piece of Pluto. If all goes well, he’s bled out by now.”
Ron flinched. Hermione nodded.
Thirteen Death Eaters. She ticked them off in her head. Nott was stunned and injured. Crabbe was likely dead. Rabastan was undoubtedly still incapacitated. Jugson had been bound by Harry. Dolohov was unconscious. Rookwood possibly dead. That left somewhere between seven and nine still capable of fighting, depending on how quickly the others recovered.
Too many.
Hermione pushed herself upright with a hiss of pain. Neville stepped toward her, but she held up a hand.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not,” Harry said hoarsely.
“No,” Hermione said, reaching into the small medical bag she had begun carrying after Mr. Weasley’s attack at Christmas. “But I’m standing.”
She ran a diagnostic charm over herself. The results made her stomach twist. Dolohov’s curse had left a dark, spreading residue in her veins, some necrotic magical substance that would keep moving unless slowed. Neville’s stasis charm had bought her time. Not enough, but some.
She swallowed a pain potion and a blood-replenishing draught, then forced herself to her feet. The room tilted. She gripped the edge of a desk until it stopped moving.
“We need to get out of here alive,” she whispered. Then she moved to Ginny.
The younger girl tried to wave her off, but Hermione ignored her and ran the diagnostic charm over the swollen ankle. A quick Episkey drew a raw groan from Ginny, but the joint shifted back into place. Hermione conjured white bandages around the injury, tight enough to support it, then handed Ginny another pain potion. Ginny uncorked it and swallowed it in one go.
“Thanks,” she said, pulling her trainer back on.
Hermione tried to smile. It came out more like a grimace.
Ron was the greater concern, but whatever curse had scrambled his mind was beyond her ability to treat in the middle of a battle. Mixing potions with unknown spell damage could make him worse.
Harry watched her with haunted eyes.
“Harry,” Hermione said, her voice rough. “What’s the plan?”
Before he could answer, the door exploded inward. Bellatrix Lestrange’s Blasting Curse tore through the chamber. The fight swallowed them again.
Harry, Hermione, and Luna had barely reached the entrance when the blast sent them stumbling back. Neville and Luna tried to seal the doors on Harry’s shouted command, but Bellatrix hit one with another curse, and Death Eaters poured in behind her.
Rodolphus Lestrange sent an Impediment Jinx that hurled Luna across the room. She struck one of the desks and collapsed. Ron, confused and laughing, summoned a brain from one of the tanks. It wrapped itself around him with rope-like tentacles, choking him.
Harry severed the tendrils with a frantic spell while Hermione and Ginny turned on Bellatrix and Rodolphus. Ginny sent a desk hurtling toward Rodolphus with a wild flipendo, pinning him beneath the heavy wood.
Walden Macnair blasted Ron unconscious with a Stunning Spell.
Harry, desperate to draw the Death Eaters away from Luna and Ron, sprinted out of the Brain Room and back into the revolving chamber. Bellatrix followed him, laughing.
Neville dragged Luna and Ron beneath the remaining desk, trying to shield them. Macnair advanced on him, but Hermione, dizzy and weakening, sent a Leg-Locker Curse across the room. It clipped Macnair’s legs just as he passed a tank of brains. He crashed into it, glass shattering around him as the brains spilled free and attacked.
“Move,” Hermione gasped.
Ginny and Neville helped her pull Luna and Ron from the room. They found the corridor leading back toward the entrance to the Department and propped the two unconscious students against the stone wall.
“They’ll be safer out here,” Neville said. Hermione did not have the strength to argue.
There were four of them left standing: Harry, Ginny, Neville, and Hermione.
Harry was somewhere ahead, alone. Ginny took off first, limping toward the open stone door marked with the rune Yr. Neville followed. Hermione paused for half a second at the symbol, dread settling in her stomach.
Yr. Death.
Then she stumbled through after them.
The room beyond was an ancient amphitheater carved from cold black stone. It descended in tiers toward a freestanding archway at its center. From the arch hung a tattered veil that stirred though there was no breeze.
Harry stood near it, cornered. Bellatrix, Lucius Malfoy, Avery, Mulciber, and Travers surrounded him with their wands raised.
Ginny sprinted down the steps to help, but Travers fired a Blasting Curse that shattered part of the stairs beneath her. She barely avoided the worst of it before crashing hard onto the stone.
Neville came in behind Hermione. Bellatrix saw him and smiled.
“Crucio.” Neville screamed. The sound tore through Hermione like a blade.
“You give me the prophecy,” Bellatrix called to Harry, “and your little friend will be spared the madness his parents now endure. I can do this all night, Potter. Little baby Longbottom’s life is in your hands.”
Harry’s face collapsed. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the prophecy.
Then the chamber doors burst open behind Hermione. Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Kingsley Shacklebolt, and Alastor Moody stormed into the room, spells flying from their wands.
For one impossible second, Hermione felt relief.
Sirius raced past her, pulled her briefly into a fierce side hug, and winked.
“Still standing, Granger?”
“Barely,” she breathed.
The exchange lasted less than a second, hardly more than a brush of leather and smoke and Sirius’s familiar reckless warmth, but it struck Hermione with such sudden force that her throat tightened. He was half-starved and too pale, all sharp bones and restless energy, but he was here. He had come. After months of being trapped inside Grimmauld Place like another cursed heirloom, he had broken free the moment Harry needed him. For one irrational instant, Hermione wanted to seize his sleeve and order him back.
It was ridiculous. Sirius was an adult. A member of the Order. A man who had survived Azkaban, Dementors, betrayal, and twelve years of being hunted for a crime he had not committed. He would laugh in her face if she told him to stay behind a shield.
But Hermione had seen something in him that winter that Harry had not wanted to see. She had seen the way the walls of that house ate at him. She had seen how his laughter often came too loudly, how his silences came too long. She had found him once in the kitchen long after midnight, staring at the tapestry as if he could burn holes through the names with sheer hatred.
From her assessment, Sirius Black did not know how to be careful with himself. He had never learned. And his history didn't help. He had gone from a house that hated him, to a war that used him, to a prison that broke him, and then back again to the house that had started it all. Freedom, for Sirius, had never meant peace. It had only meant motion. Noise. Risk. A door thrown open and a wand raised high.
And now he was here, grinning in the middle of a battle as if death itself were merely another authority figure he intended to offend.
Hermione’s fingers curled against the stone floor beneath her.
“Don’t be stupid,” she whispered, though he was already gone.
Remus caught sight of her blood-soaked robes and immediately guided her to the top tier of the chamber. He threw a shield charm around her before rushing into the fight.
Tonks fired a Stunning Spell at Lucius, giving Harry and Neville enough time to break away from Bellatrix. Mulciber grabbed Harry from behind, choking him with the neck of his hoodie, but Neville jammed his wand straight into the eyehole of Mulciber’s mask. The man howled and released Harry. Harry hit him with a Stunner.
Sirius dueled Avery with a reckless grace that made the fight look almost like a dance. Kingsley engaged Travers. Tonks faced Bellatrix. Moody barreled toward the lower tiers.
Then Dolohov appeared.
He came careening down the steps, bleeding and furious, somehow free of Neville’s bind. He struck Moody with an Impediment Jinx to the head, sending him crashing down. Then he turned on Neville, hitting him with a Dancing Feet Spell before lifting his wand toward Harry.
Hermione recognized the movement. The same silent curse. The same purple flame.
Remus saw it too. He blasted Harry out of the way with a Knockback Jinx, and before Dolohov could fire again, Sirius slammed into him. The two men crashed into a duel.
Harry struck Dolohov from behind with a Full Body-Bind. Dolohov froze and toppled.
Sirius was already moving, sprinting toward Bellatrix, who had blasted Tonks unconscious and sent her tumbling down the stone steps.
Harry and Neville tried to retreat, but Lucius intercepted them. Harry tossed Neville the prophecy and blasted Malfoy aside with a powerful Impediment Jinx. Remus stepped between them before Lucius could recover.
Then Neville stumbled. The prophecy slipped from his pocket. It hit the stone and shattered. For one terrible heartbeat, every Death Eater in the chamber seemed to understand what had happened.
Then Albus Dumbledore entered.
He swept past the upper tiers, wand raised, fury etched into every line of his face. The Death Eaters froze. Even Bellatrix faltered. Travers tried to flee, scrambling up the side of the chamber, but Dumbledore intercepted him with a simple blocking spell.
Kingsley reached Hermione and pulled Harry and Neville behind his shield. Ginny lay unconscious nearby, shielded but pale. Hermione gripped the stone beside her and tried to breathe through the fire still spreading beneath her ribs.
Below them, Sirius laughed. It was that sharp, barking laugh of his, all aristocratic defiance and reckless joy. He dodged a jet of red light from Bellatrix, his dark hair flying behind him, his leather jacket swinging loose around his thin frame.
“Come on,” he shouted, “you can do better than that!”
Bellatrix’s next spell hit him squarely in the chest.
It was not green.
It was not the Killing Curse.
It was red, heavy, and brutal, a spell of force and momentum rather than death. But Sirius stood too close to the archway. Too close to the veil.
For a heartbeat, Hermione did not understand what she was seeing; her mind rejected it.
Sirius had been laughing. Sirius had been moving. Sirius had been alive in the most impossible, infuriating, blazing way a person could be alive. His whole body had been an argument against confinement, against despair, against the cruel arithmetic of war. He could not simply be struck backward like a training dummy. He could not fall because Bellatrix Lestrange had landed one lucky spell.
But his face changed. The laugh vanished. His eyes widened, not in pain, but in surprise.
It was that expression that undid her. Not fear. Not agony. Surprise. A flash of boyish confusion, as if some part of him had never truly believed the world would be allowed to take one more thing from him.
His arms lifted as he fell. One hand opened and closed on empty air. For a horrible fraction of a second, Hermione thought he would catch himself. His fingers brushed the edge of the archway. His boots scraped against the stone.
Then the veil reached for him. It pulled him in.
No, Hermione thought. The word did not leave her mouth.
The black fabric parted, soft and soundless, welcoming him with a ripple that looked almost gentle. It did not tear. It did not wrap itself around him. It simply accepted his body as if it had been waiting for him all along.
Sirius Black disappeared. The veil settled. And the room did not stop. That was the worst of it. The world did not pause to acknowledge the enormity of what had happened. Spells still cracked across the chamber. Someone shouted. Stone shattered. Bellatrix laughed. Harry screamed.
“Sirius!” Harry’s grief tore through the amphitheater.
Hermione had heard Harry angry before. She had heard him frightened, furious, defiant, wounded. This was different. This was a sound dragged from somewhere below language, below thought, below anything a fifteen-year-old boy should have had to know. It was the sound of a child losing the closest thing he had ever had to a parent, and for one awful moment, Hermione felt as though the veil had taken the breath from her lungs, too.
Harry lunged. Remus caught him around the chest and hauled him backward with both arms. Harry fought him wildly, his hands clawing toward the archway, his face twisted in disbelief.
“He’s gone,” Remus choked.
“No!” Harry screamed. “He’s not!”
Hermione wanted to move. She wanted to help. She wanted to do something useful, something clever, something Hermione Granger would do. But her body had betrayed her. Her legs remained rooted to the stone. Her chest burned. Her vision blurred.
The only thing that moved was her hand. It slipped into her pocket and closed around the Time-Turner. She did not remember pulling it out. She did not remember looping the chain around her neck. Perhaps she had done it when the Order arrived, some foolish instinct telling her that adults meant safety, that now there might be room to think. Perhaps she had done it when Neville dropped the prophecy and the glass shattered across the stone. Perhaps she had done it when Sirius fell, because some desperate, frantic part of her mind had reached for the one object in the room that seemed to disagree with permanence.
Time could be turned. She knew that. She knew it in the marrow of her bones. She had lived an entire year by borrowed hours. She had eaten breakfasts twice, attended lessons twice, slipped through the corridors with a schedule folded into impossible shapes. She had used time like a thread, pulling one moment through another until the days held together. It had nearly broken her, but it had worked. Buckbeak had lived. Sirius had escaped.
For one dangerous second, the thought flared so brightly in her mind that it seemed almost holy.
What if?
Her thumb brushed the outer ring of the device. It was warmer than it should have been. The markings etched into the metal glimmered faintly, responding not to motion but to magic in the room. This was not the Time-Turner she had worn in third year. That one had been delicate, precise, obedient to the number of turns given. This one felt heavier against her breastbone, as though it contained not hours but years. As though the sand inside it were not sand at all, but something alive.
Hermione’s breath caught. She should take it off. The thought came with sudden, crystalline certainty.
This was not a tool. It was an experiment. A Ministry prototype kept hidden in the Department of Mysteries for a reason. She did not know its limits. She did not know its rules. Time magic was dangerous even under supervision, even with a professor’s permission and the careful boundaries of a school timetable. Used improperly, it could collapse lives into paradox. It could unravel cause and consequence.
She knew better. She knew better.
But Harry was screaming for Sirius, and Hermione could still see that startled look on Sirius’s face as the veil took him, and all her knowledge became unbearably small beside the impossible shape of wanting.
Across the chamber, Dolohov stirred. At first, Hermione barely noticed. The movement was slight, half-hidden by smoke and the shifting bodies around him. His Full Body-Bind had not completely failed, but the curse seemed to be cracking under the force of his will or some old protective charm woven into his robes. One knee dragged beneath him. His wand hand twitched. Hermione saw his mouth curve.
Then she saw the wand move. The loop of his wrist was familiar. Her skin went cold.
No. Not that curse again. She tried to raise her own wand, but pain clamped around her ribs. The first curse had weakened her too badly. Her arm trembled. Her fingers would not close properly.
The Time-Turner grew hotter. The etched rings began to spin. The purple flame struck the Time-Turner against her breastbone. The glass did not shatter. The sand inside did not fall; it expanded. White-hot gold burst through the hourglass, molten and impossible, sinking through her robes and into her skin. The metal rings melted against her chest, burning a circular brand into her flesh. Hermione opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out.
For one unbearable second, she saw everything. Not clearly. Not as memories. More like reflections in broken glass.
Harry at eleven, thin and wary beneath a fringe of black hair. Ron laughing through a mouthful of food on the Hogwarts Express. Her mother waving from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. Her father lifting her suitcase. Professor McGonagall’s tartan dressing gown. Crookshanks asleep in a patch of sunlight. The library stacks. The smell of parchment. The sharp sweetness of pumpkin juice. Sirius in the kitchen at Grimmauld Place, looking at her as though she were the only person in the room who had asked a question and truly wanted the answer.
Then those fragments began to peel away. Hermione panicked. She had thought, in an abstract way, that time travel meant movement. A turn. A reversal. A journey along a path already laid. This was not movement. This was unmaking.
The world did not send her backward. It took her apart and dragged each piece through a different door. Her skin remembered one year, her bones another. Her breath belonged to the present. Her blood, burning with Dolohov’s curse, seemed to know nothing but pain. The Time-Turner pulled all of it inward, crushing her around one fixed point: the last coherent thought she had held before the spell struck.
Sirius. Regulus. The Black family. The house divided before either boy had known how to escape it.
The name Regulus flashed through her mind with a force that was not memory and not prophecy, but something between the two. She saw a green velvet parlor. Silver-framed portraits. A boy with Sirius’s nose and darker, quieter eyes. A hand reaching for a locket. Black wax on a letter. Mud on a hem. Gold on a ring.
Harry’s sobs stretched into a low mechanical groan. Remus’s shout bent into the cry of metal under pressure. Bellatrix’s laughter thinned and warped until it sounded like steam escaping a pipe. The black stone walls dissolved into streaks of gray and gold.
Hermione fell without wind, without direction, without a body she could trust.
She clawed for something solid. Not Harry. Not her parents.
Sirius. Her thoughts filled with him, his barking laugh, his sharp cheekbones, his grief-sunken eyes.
Sirius in the kitchen at Grimmauld Place, firelight turning his hollow face gold. Sirius with a bottle of firewhisky near his elbow and his long fingers tracing the old burns in the walnut table where his mother had once thrown silver candlesticks in a rage.
“We were blood,” he had told her once, his voice rough and bitter. “Regulus and me. Same nose. Same ears. My mother used to say we were two sides of the same sovereign. One for the king, one for the ditch.”
Hermione had listened because Sirius so rarely spoke to her without performance, without swagger.
“The house divided us before we even knew what the world was,” he had said. “By the end, by the time the Dark Lord started sending letters with black wax, we couldn’t even look across the kitchen table without seeing a target. He stayed in the house. He stayed in the gold. And I went into the mud.”
The gold lines around Hermione snapped. The roaring stopped so suddenly her ears rang.
Then the smell hit her. Not ozone. Not blood. Not the dead stone of the Ministry.
Sulfur. Coal smoke. Wet wool. Factory grease. River mud after rain. The low, relentless thrum of the industrial North pressed in around her like a second atmosphere.
Hermione hit the ground hard. Her knees struck rough cobblestones slick with soot and rain. Pain burst up her legs and into her hips. Her palms scraped against stone, instantly blackened by grime, and she collapsed onto her side with her cheek pressed to the wet iron edge of a gutter.
For several long seconds, she could not breathe.
The brand on her chest pulsed beneath her robes, hot as a coal buried under ash. She clawed weakly at the ruined collar of her jumper, expecting to find the Time-Turner still hanging there, but her fingers met only torn fabric and burned skin. The chain was gone. The hourglass was gone. In its place was a circular mark seared above her sternum, its shape too precise to be an ordinary wound.
Hermione rolled onto her back with a broken gasp.
Above her, the sky was not the enchanted black ceiling of the Death Chamber. It was low, gray, and choked with smoke. Brick buildings leaned over the narrow street, their windows dark or yellowed with weak lamplight. Somewhere nearby, machinery clanked in a steady, merciless rhythm. Men’s voices drifted through the fog, rough and tired. A horse snorted. Wheels rattled over stone.
She was outside. She was not in London. Or if she was, it was a London she did not know. Hermione pushed herself up onto one elbow, every movement sending fire through her ribs. Her wand. She needed her wand. Her hand flew to her sleeve. Still there. Relief nearly made her sob.
She drew it with shaking fingers and whispered, “Lumos.”
The tip flickered weakly, then steadied. Magic still worked. That, at least, was something.
A newspaper lay half-submerged in a puddle near the gutter, its ink bleeding into the rainwater. Hermione dragged it closer with trembling fingers. The paper was grimy, the print blurred, but the date at the top remained just legible beneath a smear of soot. Her heart stopped. Not 1996.
Not even close. The numbers stared back at her from the ruined page, impossible and absolute.
Hermione’s breath came apart.
Somewhere in the distance, a steam whistle blew its five o’clock shift change through the mist. She clutched her wand tighter and forced herself not to scream. The Department of Mysteries was gone. Sirius was gone. Harry was gone. And Hermione Granger, bleeding, burned, and alone, had fallen into the past.