Four

"Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen."

–Benjamin Disraeli

24th April 2004

Hermione is 31

I am so tired.

I have not had a good night's sleep since I lied to Julia. A lie by omission, yes, but a whopper of a lie nonetheless.

I can't see that my chance encounter with Snape has rippled into the future, except in my mind. It's almost like I woke the ghost of Severus Snape that day, and now he's haunting my dreams.

I've been very diligent with my Travels, veering far away from the British Isles and the time period that calls to me like a siren. I tried to dull my mind, sitting through drawn-out days and dreary hours of negotiations as the minutia of the Statute of Secrecy were debated. And then I lived through it all again in my Pensieve, taking detailed notes while the mind-numbing officiousness of it all anesthetised my brain.

Julia is delighted with my work. And that makes me feel even worse.

And yesterday afternoon she gave me my next assignment. Oh, the irony of it all! I'm positive that she gives me all the crap jobs that she doesn't want to do: those that are boring and those that are uncomfortable. It's a mentor's privilege, I guess.

She wants an objective recounting of the Death Eater trials.

That means that I have to go back to London and back to Snape.

8th December 1981

Hermione is 31

I hate Travelling back to winter. Despite the Warming Charms woven into the very fabric of the Ministry walls, the sub-levels are still chilly. Maybe my foul mood is making things seem worse than they actually are. I feel uncomfortable in this person's skin; she's smaller than I am, and I feel more insubstantial as an observer than usual. Gaining access to restricted Death Eater trials takes a bit of subterfuge and not a small amount of Polyjuice Potion... not to mention the Obliviates I've been doling out like sweeties. Fun fun. And before you ask...I asked it myself, once, long ago when I had the energy to enter into a long and technical debate with my mentor...doing that doesn't change history, no. According to Julia, it's a Traveller's loophole if you do it just right, apparently.

This is one of those times when I wish I could whip out my wand and AK each and every piece of Death Eater scum who were on trial. It's harder to record history when you've got a personal stake in things. These... people impacted so strongly...will impact if you really want to get bloody technical...on my life. The jagged curse scar on my chest itches even though I'm not wearing my own body. I know and hate most of their faces, except I remember them being older and Azkaban-thin.

I will never, ever admit it again, and I think it's because my brain was looking for any sort of diversion, but yesterday I noted that Rabastan Lestrange was quite hot in his day. Of course, he wasn't quite as broodingly sexy when he was found guilty and hauled off screaming and snarling to Azkaban. The authorities aren't much better. I've come to hate Barty Crouch, Senior and his Aurors. They're every bit as arrogant and ruthless as the Death Eaters, only they have the backing of the MLE. This is almost worse than watching the horrible, reprehensible things that Grindelwald did back in the 1940s.

Dumbledore looks so much younger. And haunted. It's easy for me to forget that James and Lily Potter were killed only months ago, that Dumbledore has just left Harry on the Dursleys' doorstep. What would happen to history, do you think, if I got up right now, went to Surrey and stole him away? Julia would confiscate my Chrono so quickly my head would spin, I bet. I'm saved from that temptation when the tribunal files in, followed by two large Aurors, each with a beefy hand clamped on Severus Snape's elbows.

Logically, I know that Dumbledore is going to stand up and vouch for him; he's going to be that taciturn man on the train; he's going to be the strict and sarcastic teacher I remember; he's going to be wizardingkind's saviour. But the way he looks now wipes all of that certainty away. He looks like the walking dead, like he's already been Kissed. His expression is blank, and his eyes are dead. It's like Lily Potter died and took his soul with her.

I sit through his trial with my lost heart suddenly back in my chest, and it's aching. Severus Snape made his deal with the Dark and the Light, and now he has been lost to the shadows between.

I used to think that I was strong enough to bear the Traveller's Oath, but my conviction is wavering. I have to remind myself that my feelings on the matter are irrelevant. That the rules are set in steel, that one man's life is of little consequence in the long run.

It's always all about the rules...

3rd April 2000

Hermione was 21

Travelling turned out to be much harder than I'd imagined. I'd aced basic Space Apparition...how hard could surfing the tide of Space and Time be? Very hard.

Julia made it look easy on the times she took me through event horizon after event horizon to give me the grand tour. God, I lived on cloud nine for months! It's so easy to talk about Travelling back to witness the past; it's another thing to stand and watch something...be inside a history that's vivid and bright with smells and sound all around you...that Professor Binns had had watered down to a two-dimensional and soporific monologue.

I had the theory mastered in a few months. Theory is one thing, though. Books and learning, I always said. This time it was easy to say, "I told you so." Weaning myself off the 3-Ds was a long process because it'd become second-nature to Apparate like that. Reaching into the very fabric of the world and using my Chrono to create a bridge in the quantum foam to where and when I wanted to go took a lot of practice and even more patience.

I had to give Julia kudos: she had a lot of patience. Especially on the day I landed us in the middle of the Caribbean Ocean, with not a speck of land in sight.

Just before I was ready to take my very first solo trip, she reiterated the rules for Travelling:

Rule 1: Don't do anything to change history.

Rule 2: Don't talk to or contact anybody who you know.

Rule 3: Never carry anything with you from the future that has not been invented yet or could give a clue to your identity.

Rule 4: Don't stop any person in any act.

Rule 5: Never bring anything back with you.

And, of course, I was never allowed to tell anybody what I was doing. I suspected that Professor McGonagall had guessed the nature of what Julia did...she had been her teacher, after all...but she certainly didn't know the mechanics of why her student appeared to have aged fifty years in a decade.

"I had one question, Julia," I said after we'd gone through the rules and various examples of what not to do so many times I'd lost count.

She barked her throaty laugh. "Just one?" she asked dryly, her emerald eyes glinting with amusement.

We were sitting in her garden again, just like when we'd first met. Today, she was wearing orange... all over. I'd come to learn that as a Traveller, being inconspicuous was important; I suppose Julia overcompensated when she lived in the present.

"I've done some reading..."

Another highly amused laugh from her made me duck my head in slight embarrassment. I think she just delighted to have a companion, to be honest... somebody to share her experiences with. We'd already spoken about how difficult the path of the Traveller was... how lonely it could be. I didn't imagine, then, that I'd feel the effects of that so acutely in the years to come.

"Well," I said, "I understand that all the rules are in place to preserve the integrity of the Time thread. The Grandfather Paradox and all that..."

She tipped her chair onto its back legs, swinging on it. It was difficult to forget that, once upon a time, she'd only been ten years older than I was. "Yessss?"

"But what about all of the multiple universe theories?" I asked with a consternated frown. So many of the time-travel theories I'd read postulated that if you changed something in the past it wouldn't matter to the future you'd come from because the universe split with each decision anybody made. According to what I'd read, there were thousands upon millions of universes that existed side-by-side. The change you'd made would just affect you because you'd have to go back to the universe that had arisen and flowed forward from the change you'd made. It had all boggled my mind a bit.

I'd expected her to laugh, but she was serious as she stopped swinging on her chair and nodded. "I have been expecting this question, Hermione, and I am glad you have asked it." She spread her liver-spotted hands on top of the table. "Those are just quantum theories, understand, hypotheses by Muggle scientists who tried to make sense of something very intangible," she said slowly. "But I have found in my years of research that any quantum universe that is ever momentarily created always collapses back into this one. So, in the end, there is just this universe and its timeline of events. That is why it is so important that we preserve the sanctity of history, keep the past immutable and remain silent observers, never leaving footprints where we walk."

"Oh," I said, slumping back in my chair as the gravity of the truth settled on my shoulders.

I'm supposed to be an impartial and objective observer, dispassionately watching and recording. But today my soul is bleeding, and history is no longer a vivid painting to walk through...it's a place where my heart can break, where I can buckle to my knees under the weight of it all.