Chapter Text
Below the Ministry of Magic, 18th June, 1996
Hermione was being hunted.
They'd been separated, she, Harry and Neville. She'd been forced deeper into the Time department as Dolohov split Hermione from Harry and Neville with a well placed blasting hex that had destroyed the desk between them as the polished black dragonhide boots clicked closer towards her.
"Run!" Harry screamed and she ducked out from under the desk and pelted towards the closest door behind her. She slammed the door and used the strongest sealing charm she knew to lock it behind her. She heard Dolohov crash into the door and swear loudly, before it began to shudder from what could only be exploding charms.
Hermione hurried to put more space between herself and the door. The room she'd entered was similar to the first, but with more storage shelves of bubbles of time as well as towering shelves full of books in a small library that must have been dedicated to time related texts. If she hadn't been running for her life , Hermione would have loved to explore through the tomes and experiments on the shelves.
Large glass domes captured never-ending loops of time; flowers in constant bloom and decay; a dove that laid an egg only to puff into feathers that decayed as the egg hatched and grew into a chick; a large club sandwich that popped out of nothing only to rot away.
Hermione slipped into the stacks of books, the smell of musty pages and aged leather helping to sooth her racing heart, though only slightly. She'd gotten only a few rows in before she heard the door fly open and bang against the wall, followed by the clicking of Dolohov's boots against the stone floors of the Department.
Rounding another stack, Hermione's head was swinging wildly around as the footsteps of the death eater seemed to ring out all around her. Peering around one of the shelves, Hermione saw nothing but more books, and what appeared to be the back wall of the room. She sighed softly and went to look down the end of the aisle to see if she could see an exit to the room.
The silver-masked face of Dolohov appeared from around a corner at the same time as Hermione looked, and she pulled back quickly and a silver spell was thrown in her direction. Hermione turned and ran, trainers slapping against the floor as she skidded around each corner, dodging spells. One impacted a book to her left and it went up in flames. She grit her teeth at the destruction of knowledge.
When Hermione hadn't had a spell fly past her in a while, she stopped to take a breath, breathing heavily. She had a wall of shelves behind her and she was standing amongst books that had been stacked high in piles, rather than shelved in any sort of orderly fashion. She could no longer hear the clicking of Dolohov's boots against the flagstone.
Dolohov rounded a tower of stacked books ahead of her, facing the other way and Hermione couldn't believe her luck. She fired off spells in rapid succession, a trio of slicing hexes, a binding curse and an expelliarmus for good measure.
Through some unknown power, Dolohov sensed them all and whirled around, a shield catching all but her first hex which sliced through his wand arm near the wrist. He growled and a deranged light went off in his eyes. Hermione sent off the first spell that came to mind, an overpowered muting hex and tried to raise a shield. The greasy haired man raised his wand, undeterred by being silenced, and a dark glint entered his eyes as his lips formed an unknown curse, twisting his wand quickly in a series of intricate triangles. Hermione tried to dodge but was too slow.
The insidious purple sizzled like fire and hit her lower stomach, just above her left hip and threw her backwards. Hermione felt a sharp ripping and twisting up her torso toward the centre of her chest, before her skin split wide from the site of impact. Blood began to soak through both her shirt and sweater. A frightening amount of blood. A harsh whoosh of air left her lungs followed by a low, pained scream. She flailed around behind her to grab a shelf to stop her momentum before she hit the floor, but she still stumbled, taking the shelf with her with a loud crash and the musical tinkling of shattering glass.
Wildly shooting off a stupefy that she was surprised actually managed to hit Dolohov, she let herself fall back against the ruined shelf briefly, breathing deeply through the almost mind-numbing pain from her abdomen and trying to stop herself from losing consciousness.
Hermione belatedly recognised that she was sitting in the remains of what looked like experimental and half-finished time turners. A particularly interesting model caught her gaze, one that had survived its fall. It was a dark, cold metal with a relatively short chain, unlike the gold of the one she'd used in third year, and the perfectly spherical glass bubbles of the hourglass were suspended in only a singular circular ring, which looked like it could rotate only on its vertical axis. Each bubble was held in place by a thin band of metal that encased them around the widest part of the sphere vertically. Along the centre where the two bulbs met, she could see the beginnings of a fine crack in the thin glass. The sand inside was larger than normal and a pale green that glowed incredibly faintly, as though it were still cooling down from a previous use. The overall effect was incredibly ominous.
A muted tap-tap-tap from the far corner of the room drew Hermione's attention, snapping her from her study of the time device and she rolled shakily to her feet, blood dripping from the soaked shirt that stuck to her body. The sticky material was currently staunching her wounds only just enough to stop her from bleeding out entirely. With a pained groan, she aimed her wand where the spell had impacted and used a healing spell she'd never had to use practically before. She had no idea what the spell she had been hit with was, or what it had done to her body aside from the large cut, but she needed to stop the bleeding before she did anything else.
" Vulnera Sanentur " Hermione whispered softly, tracing the wound slowly. The blood stopped seeping out so quickly but she had no time to complete the remaining two incantations to heal herself completely. A dark, high pitched laugh had started emanating from the open door she'd used to enter the room, and was getting closer, and she realised the tap-tap-tap was the sound of high heeled boots moving closer towards her.
"Oh mudblood, where are you? I want to play with you! It's been so long since the last piece of filth I tortured!" The sing-song voice of Bellatrix crooned to the room. Hermione needed to move or she'd be caught by the mad woman. Hurrying away from the stupefied body of Dolohov, she shot a petrificus at him for good measure. At the same time, she wound the short chain of the time turner around her hand once and clutched it softly within her fist, moving to find the closest wall and follow it. Hermione hoped she was heading in the direction of the main chamber. A door popped into view in the murky darkness and Hermione opened it as quietly as possible, slipping inside and closing it after her with a soft click.
The room she had entered was not, in fact, the main chamber, but must have been an offshoot of the Time Department. While the lights were not currently on, It was still brighter than the previous room and Hermione could see it was slightly smaller as well, with pale blue walls and a soft yellow ceiling that was reminiscent of a sunny day outside. Six massive red brick fireplaces were evenly spaced along one side, the rest of the room taken up with a dozen large white oak desks, covered in papers and storage flasks.
Opposite the fireplaces, shelves ran across the whole length of the room, covered in jars of all colours and sizes that Hermione peeked into while she made her way slowly across the room. They were filled with powders that ranged from a pale red that was incredibly fine to the point of almost being liquid to a puke brown the size of small pebbles and a lilac that appeared to just be a solid rock in a glass jar. A large quantity were dark green and sand like, much like the current widely used Floo powder, and Hermione realised that this room must be used for the development of new Floo systems and powders. Across the dim room she could now see that there were 3 more doors like the one she'd just used to enter.
Hermione was a third of the way to the doors across the room when the door she'd entered through was blown off its hinges and a cackle preceded the form of Bellatrix Lestrange into the room.
Hermione threw up a protego and tried to take cover behind a desk, but was blown backwards as a sickly yellow spell erupted across her shield. The power of the blast knocked her into one of the shelves along the wall, knocking down what had to be at least 30 different jars. Her blood and sweat soaked jumper and jeans let the finer grains stick to her body and the pebbles bounced down around her, mixing into a rainbow of colours on the ground and on her body. A piece of glass from one of the pots cut into her cheek, and Hermione grit her teeth to not cry out in pain, tightening her hand around the time turner she still clasped desperately. She didn't know why she hadn't dropped it yet.
"Aw, itty bitty muddy got a boo boo." Bellatrix sing-songed, prowling towards Hermione.
Hermione backed up, crossing the room as quickly as she could while firing whatever she could at the mad witch. Bellatrix's curly hair framed her face in a terrifying black cloud and the white of her face looked thin and sallow against her enormous dark eyes. Hermione realised that at one point Bellatrix Lestrange had probably been quite beautiful. But 15 years in Azkaban had done more than just ruin the mind inside of the witch, it had broken her body to match it.
Bellatrix lazily cast dark curse after dark curse at Hermione at a rate she could only just defend against, managing to dodge what she couldn't block or repel. But she was growing tired quickly and needed to think of some kind of plan. She'd been pushed across the room and was backed against one of the towering fireplaces, the backs of her heels brushing the edge of the hearth.
"Growing tired, muddy?" Bellatrix taunted as her shield wavered and she had to slide sideways to avoid a bludgeoning hex.
Hermione tried to raise another but her arm was getting so heavy and Bellatrix took her opening, sending a spout of flame toward her that would burn the air from her lungs and the skin from her bones, wicked laughter escaping the blood red lips of the deranged witch.
And as the fire engulfed her, Hermione felt herself tumble backwards into the fireplace. The flames surprised her as she thought she would feel some sort of pain, but instead she felt only a light tickle, like magic brushing against her skin. She threw her hands out to catch on the sides of the fireplace but it was too massive.
Hermione observed the events that followed almost in slow motion. There was a sharp tug deep in the base of her spine as the time turner that was held loosely her open hand began to spin backwards smoothly and the fireplace around her sparked into flames. She attempted to count the revolutions but had no idea whether each turn meant an hour or a minute. Her last thought before she was surrounded in a pale green light and the prickling feeling of the fire was whether anyone from Grimmauld Place was actually coming to help them and if anyone would actually find her body.
And then she was falling.