#hgtr

Hermione had spent many grim nights in odd places over the years. She thought, as she sat in her dark cell, that the five days she'd spent in a Muggle prison in what the muggles now called Mali had been the worst.

She had been caught off-guard in a sudden crackdown on magic. She had been capable of escaping both the raid and the prison itself (having had the presence of mind to shove her wand in her hair like an ornament), but in doing so she'd have confirmed she was a witch and that would have cemented the death of the witchdoctor she'd been staying with, so she had stayed, crammed into a cage with ten other women. One had been pregnant, in the early stages. The stench of vomit had been a permanent feature. So had the heat and the smell of unwashed bodies, including her own. And the rats. The mind could not remember pain, but it could remember rats. Eventually she'd slipped off during a rather conveniently timed attack by rebels from the north.

That had been her full experience of jails up unto the point her best friend flung her into a holding cell in Azkaban, with the wind not so much whistling in off the North Sea as trying to flay off her skin, and told her, still icy with shock and rage, to stay put.

She estimated she'd been in the cell for about seventeen minutes when the wall revealed a door, and then the door opened to reveal Harry (the ice had melted and been boiled to apoplectic in the short interim) and the Senior Undersecretary for the Minister for Magic.

Choosing Grey by Beta Gyre

Hermione x Tom Riddle

An attempt to salvage more than a Pyrrhic victory lands Hermione in 1944. With conspiracies, schemes, and difficult choices in every corner, and a charismatic young Tom Riddle who is increasingly interested in her, she will eventually have to answer the question: How much darkness and grey in him can she accept?

unsphere the stars chapter forty-seven: call me ishmael

The war began with a whisper, and then another.

Hatred and fear-mongering about Muggleborns increased, and so did their responding violence. The fringe radicals Tom Riddle had once stoked on either side stepped towards the centre. Society’s fractured bones punctured through to the surface and lay exposed and bleeding.  

The question of the second apple rang unanswered as the war loomed, threatened, and then began in earnest. But all that violence was a backdrop for Hermione, set to a song of questions like why am I here? what do I do with the second apple? why must I suffer this too? how can we possibly find a way to send me back in time after a quarter of a century with no real leads?

Hermione stood at Albus Dumbledore’s side as he built the Order of the Phoenix up from the ashes of a society where neighbour had lost trust in neighbour, but she did not fight. She couldn’t, because of the hag-blasted oath she’d sworn to a beautiful boy by a lake all those decades ago. But even if she had been able to, Hermione had no interest in fighting a war whose outcome - whose every death - was fixed before her involvement.

“The war is your job,” she told Albus. “Mine is to worry about what comes after.”

It was a mantra she repeated to herself often as the bodies piled up and the age grew darker.

(Caradoc disappeared and something inside her broke).

What a contradiction she was: old and young, as driven by ambition as she was by social justice. She had always been this way, but it was amplified now, as though the other woman no longer felt she had to apologise for her own complexities. Hermione was as honourable as she was ruthless and perhaps Ginny could understand why she had fallen for Tom Riddle. She herself remembered his charm, though she rarely thought of it now.

"What is your grand plan here?"

Hermione poured them both some more tea and held out a plate of shortcake that had mysteriously appeared. Ginny did not think the waitress had brought it.

"A better world," she pronounced without any apparent self-consciousness.

The ambition was staggering; it was what everyone professed to want but few ever actually did anything about it. Yet, Ginny had kept a close eye on the newspapers lately and she could see the hallmarks of her friend's influence in a whole realm of spheres. Grand, mad, and impossible - or perhaps not.

"Does your better world look like something we all fought for?"