Disclaimer: All characters, settings and generally recognizable properties belong to JKR, Warner Bros, Scholastic, etc. I can take credit only for the plot, or lack thereof.

A/N: I first started posting this story more than a year ago on this site, moved to Ashwinder, which is still my fave archive, and decided after majorly re-vamping it that I wanted to re-post it here as well. So, this is the newest, most updated version, and I flatter myself that it is far better than the previous incarnation. Enjoy!

The Wheel Turns

"Granger, Hermione." None of the students heard the catch in Professor McGonagall's voice. And even if they had, they would have attributed it to dryness of her throat, not to sudden shock.

As the eager girl half-ran, half-stumbled to the stool to jam the Sorting Hat on her head the Head Table went absolutely silent, and heads turned first to Albus Dumbledore, and then to Severus Snape.

The sallow-skinned, hollow-cheeked, coldly-distant and always-composed Potions Master was anything but. His black eyes glittered brightly, the high cheekbones were tinged with red, his mouth trembled, and both hands were gripping the edge of the table, white-knuckled.

No student would notice. But those on the staff who knew what to look for found it in his expression. Before them, in the space of breaths it took to say her name, their colleague aged thirty-one years had dissolved, leaving a blossoming adolescent of seventeen.

But she will be a Gryffindor, Snape thought bleakly, watching the girl with the hat. She always was one. A lamb amongst wolves, the Gryffindor who penetrated the Slytherin hierarchy- and survived. My Hermione... But the child that had just emerged from under that hat's triumphant "GRYFFINDOR!" was not the curvaceous, self-assured young woman who had captured him all those years ago. She was stick-thin and small, her fizzy hair tumbling in all directions around her as she hurried forward, smiling nervously, desperately seeking approval. She was a flat-chested, impressionable child, not a woman at all.

But it was she. And all the questions he had pressed her for answers to those many years ago suddenly raced through his mind, their answers falling in neatly after them. It was as he had suspected. She had traveled in time. He closed his eyes as the Sorting continued, deaf to the rest, the name of his old enemy's son barely penetrating his spinning thoughts.

Traveled through time. And now she was one of his students.

888

"Frankly, I don't understand the fuss, Filius," Sinistra was saying to Flitwick. The short Head of Ravenclaw House was nodding gravely.

"You weren't there, Gwen," he replied as Snape swept past them, into the staff room. Minerva McGonagall reached out to touch his arm in sympathy. He shrugged her away, taking his usual seat by the fire, one long finger coming to rest on his temple as he stared unseeing into the flames.

"Wasn't where? I find myself at a bit of a loss as well," Marietta Lewis, teacher of Muggle Studies, said, pointedly staring at Dumbledore. "Albus, if you would care to fill

us in?"

"Severus- if you wish to tell the story to those who do not know," the Headmaster's voice was gentle as ever, though the eyes behind his spectacles were unusually grave, "it is your right."

"There is nothing for me to say," Snape said roughly.

"Wh-what's g-going on?" Quirrell stuttered.

"Most of the staff were here for it, but for those who were not...well..." Dumbledore paused, giving Snape one last chance to jump in. Snape stared directly into the flames. There was no indication that he had heard the Headmaster at all, except for his tense arms and straight back- nothing in the world could relax him now.

"Eighteen years ago, I received a great shock," Dumbledore started quietly. "I walked into my office to find a young woman standing there, looking mildly surprised and faintly confused. I asked her what she was doing. She replied that she had been sent." Snape and McGonagall's heads snapped to him in an identical motion, the first in uncomprehending shock, the second with a light of understanding.

"She told me her name was Hermione Granger. She was not one of my students at the school, nor had she ever been. But she seemed quite well aware of who I was- leading me to surmise that she was probably from a not-too-distant future, which she confirmed."

"Having no idea how she had been delivered, I also did not know how to send her back. Time is a tricky business, and while Time Turners can be used in exact ways with careful planning, this occurrence was too strange to simply send her forward and hope she ended up in the same year, hopefully the same day, as when she departed. She also implied that she had arrived to learn something very specific and necessary for her own age. What she was there to learn, I only partially discovered- and to this day I do not know why. But we agreed that only I would know the truth, that she would tell a story of having transferred from the Salem Witches Institute in America."

"She was sorted into Gryffindor, much as we saw tonight as a third year- though she was quite obviously physically matured beyond thirteen. But, not knowing how many years it would take for her to learn what she was seeking or to return her to her own time, we decided to sort her as young as conceivably possible to give ourselves enough time."

"The year she arrived in was, as you may have deduced, 1973. Interestingly enough, attending the school at that time- and in her year- were James Potter, Sirius Black," there were assorted grumblings and various ugly faces at this name, "and our own Potions Master, Severus Snape."

"I was on the staff," McGonagall added, her voice unusually subdued and much more human sounding that her normal crisp tones, "as were Filius, Vector, Hooch, Pomona and Kettleburn."

"Severus…?" It was clear the Headmaster thought it was time he speak. Snape gave him a swift look, which the headmaster countered with a slight shake of his head. "They do not need to hear all of it."

Severus snorted, and returned his gaze to the fire, weighing what he wanted to reveal. She had been sent. The rage started a slow simmering. It was so like Dumbledore not to reveal crucial information like that. Well, sent or not, there were parts of this tale that even the Headmaster did not know. The silence grew in the room, curiosity burning for all that he would leave unsaid. It nearly made him smile. The untold story would fill volumes, and leave him raw. Neither was a prospect he relished. His voice was coldly impersonal, flat and disdainful when he spoke.

"Miss Granger had- has- an astonishing ability to forgive others and find their good points, especially if they display intelligence. I quickly found that her ability in… Potions"- McGonagall's and Dumbledore's eyelids flickered just barely- "was the only one in the school equal to my own."

He swallowed, and stopped, realizing belatedly just how open this wound still gaped, but Dumbledore cleared his throat. Clearly, Snape was not allowed to be quite finished. "She remained at Hogwarts for four years. By the time she left we were," he groped for the right word to give nothing away to his often nosy and entirely-too-cloistered colleagues, "close." He closed the subject carefully, still not looking up.

Dumbledore was apparently satisfied, for he returned to the narrative himself. "Towards the middle of her sixth year, I created a rift in time using a powerful magic and sent her back through it- hopefully to the exact moment of her disappearance. For fourteen years, I have wondered whether we were successful. Sometime in Miss Granger's career at Hogwarts, we will all get to know."

Dumbledore smiled brightly, shattering the solemnity and looking around as if they were children who had just finished a thoroughly delightful story hour. "And with that, I think it's time for most of us, especially one old man, to turn in. Does anyone care to join me for a nightcap?"

Most of the staff looked as if they would indeed like to, but Snape's voice grated from the chair:

"Before you depart, Headmaster, a word?" It was not a request. Nor did anyone doubt that they would rather not be around for this particular confrontation. The staff room emptied instantly.

"How dare you?" The cold, controlled voice that Snape used on his students seeped out in his anger, and Dumbledore could see the arms on the chair shaking. "How DARE you not warn me!" Snape surged to his feet, turning for the first time to look the Headmaster in the eye.

"WHY did you not tell me she was coming?" The rage snapping in his black eyes would have terrified another. Dumbledore quietly waited, meeting the fury, allowing it to flame unchecked, to burn itself out.

"As much as I loved her…as desperately as I missed her, much as I searched for her… and you didn't think to warn me when you sent the owls this summer that HERMIONE GRANGER was coming to school here?"

"What would you have done, Severus? Expected the girl of seventeen to come out of the boats as they docked? Worrying about your own conduct? Fearing meeting her again?" Dumbledore's questions were quiet inquiries, which infuriated the younger man. The Headmaster should scream back at him, something to break the dam, release the pressure slowly closing around him since he had heard her name out of Minerva's mouth.

"What would have been gained by telling you? You haven't seen her for fourteen years and this eleven-year-old girl is not the Node you knew and fought with. I told no one. Even Minerva didn't know. I handled Miss Granger's letter personally."

"And sent? She was sent?" Snape continued to rage. "With a deliberate purpose in mind? Simply dropped in and then removed when the job is done? She is not a surgical tool! Do you know, do you have any idea…" he stopped. Even this man, who bared a soul with a single incisive look, would not hear the anguished words trapped in his throat.

"I can't change the past, Severus, or the future that she will face. I couldn't have told the seventeen-year-old grieving boy that the girl he had fallen in love with was returning to a violent time to fight a war- for by the time Miss Granger leaves us and returns, we will once again be embroiled in turmoil. None of us- except her- knew then what would happen now and what the future will bring." Dumbledore sighed. "It does, however, go without saying…She is your student in this timeline, Severus."

"Of course," Snape acquiesced- what did this man take him for?- and brushed past the Headmaster into the hallway. But once there, he stopped, his eyes wide.

"Headmaster…"

"Yes, Severus. She will have to enjoy and endure all that you remember."

Images from his school days kaleidoscoped through his mind, snatches of a foreign land he was irrevocably removed from. Snape drew the curtain over the fractured riot of memories the girl had inspired, closing himself once more.

Once he would have rejoiced to see her, now he saw only the ironic pain of the situation. His adolescent fantasy had come to life.

Hermione Granger had returned to Hogwarts.

888

Remus Lupin called the names in a perfunctory fashion, scrolling down the list, carefully looking at each face as they answered, trying to put them together his very first day.

"Grang-" he stumbled, lifted his head, looked straight at Hermione. She blushed, and lowered her eyes. He stared for barely an instant longer before saying, "I see Miss Granger is here with us already," and moving on to the next name.

After class, Lupin sat back reflectively. Hermione Granger. After her disappearance in his sixth year, he had never thought to see her again…certainly not as a thirteen-year-old.

Hermione had always hated boggarts. It was one of the reasons he hadn't wanted her to tackle one today in class. But there was only one way to be sure it was the girl he thought it would be. Wincing at the necessity, he nevertheless grabbed a handful of powder, threw it in the fire place and called: "Severus! If you have a moment?"

Snape stepped out, frowning. "What do you want, Lupin?"

"Hermione Granger- is that our-"

"Yes," Snape's eyes closed briefly in pain and he pinched the bridge of his nose. "Yes."

The two men looked at each other, one of their rare moments of understanding bridging the feud that had always separated them.

"I am so sorry, Severus."

"So am I."

888

Each year, day by day, Snape waited to see the sudden breath of understanding, the day when she would approach him. She was a know-it-all, friends with Harry Potter, whom he hated as intensely as he had ever hated the boy's father and Ron Weasley- all mouth and no brains, that one.

His cruelty to the three of them increased purposefully year-by-year, triumph-by-narrowly–won-triumph, his loathing a combination of spite, bitterness and the battles of his youth. And still he waited for the day she would rush into his dungeon office and ask the questions. For there would be questions.

Third year turned to fourth, he mocked her, sneered at her, gladly deducted points for her intelligence and love of learning- and jealously watched Viktor Krum take her to the ball. His heart seared watching the sweeping robes of periwinkle dance with someone else. Hermione Granger was slowly transforming from the little girl at the Sorting to the woman he had known. It was fitting that the eighteen-year-old Quidditch star would notice what none of the boys at Hogwarts had wit to see: Hermione Granger could be heart-stoppingly beautiful if she so chose.

Fourth year became fifth. His blood stopped in his veins when he realized that she was in the Ministry with Potter, the fool boy unable to trust that he would get the message and understand. He summoned the Order, prayed fervently that all would be well from his isolated position in Hogwarts, and kept his face coldly aloof when the bodies had been brought through.

She had a great slash across her chest, but she was breathing, and he had gazed at her face only briefly and discreetly before exiting the hospital with the other staff.

Fifth crossed to sixth, the war in full swing, his role as a double agent stretching the limits at both ends. An Unbreakable Vow to Narcissa Malfoy and he would have to show his colors, let everyone on both sides understand where his loyalties lay. But it was too late now to change that.

It will be this year, he thought, looking down at Hermione from the Head Table where she sat eating and talking animatedly with the two hated boys who were like her brothers. This was the Hermione he had known, the young woman from the Hogwarts of his time.

It must be soon. This year, let it be this year…By the end of this year he would be gone. There was no hope that Draco might accomplish his task, and if she went in seventh year, he would never know.

888

The vibrant notes of the harp hung on the air, shimmering into silence as the strings vibrated themselves to stillness. She smiled ruefully to no one. She was out of practice. Allowing her head to rest against the harp for a moment, she gathered her breath before reaching out to close the music, Warlock Shervin's Fifth Concerto. Wizard classical music fascinated her. It seemed that it altered the very air she breathed when played, rebounding off the stone walls not more than an arm's length in any direction to make the air glisten, the music almost tangible.

Fred and George's Marauder's Map had not only the school's secret passages, but the small rooms that pocketed them, and she had selected one not a hundred yards below Gryffindor Tower as a perfect place to keep her harp since third year, though practice had become an infrequent pastime.

She had never found much time to explore music with Ron and Harry- or anyone else. The Weasleys had no money and Harry's aunt and uncle had taken no interest, so she had always assumed that the regular rigmarole of dance, pottery, drawing, piano, voice, football, softball and karate that Muggle children endured had been skipped by her two best friends. There had never been a place to discuss it, or the slightest indication from either of them that they even knew music- or art- existed outside the Weird Sisters and the moving paintings that covered the castle walls.

Now it was March of her sixth year, and she had kept her harp and her voice to herself, an oddly protected private thing, as if she were waiting for the right person to receive the secret- which was a ridiculous notion. Who would she tell? Harry and Ron- and even Neville and Ginny- were the best friends she had ever had. Who to expose herself to if not to them?

But it was a thought she could not shake, a thought that had stilled her tongue for nearly five and a half years on the subject. She had thought she might tell Viktor…but when he had given her the perfect opening, mentioning the music that some of his classmates played under Karkaroff's instruction, her tongue seemed to have sealed itself, and would not come unglued on that subject, in spite of the fact that it was the only time she had ever heard "music" and "magical education" in the same breath.

What she really wanted, desperately wished for, was another musician- which Viktor had not been. Someone who would understand the…the thrill, the intensely solemn joy that came from playing a piece to perfection. A wizard who could feel the gathering power of the notes penned by magic. History books had recorded orders and societies of wizards and witches dedicated to music and magic, and some of the tales of what they had accomplished were legendary in scale. But the most recent records indicated dwindling numbers due to Ministry law restricting the study of music, and the last remaining order had faded out of existence over two centuries prior. There were almost no professional mage-musicians left.

And for all its thoroughness in some ways, Hogwarts did not offer classes in music- or any of the arts, traditional or contemporary. In fact, the subject seemed to be not so much neglected as taboo at the finest school of Witchcraft and Wizardry in Europe. Hagrid had given Harry a rough pipe their first year, which Harry had used to play Fluffy to sleep, but no other time in five years had the topic even been presented, much less given a practical application.

She set the music on the floor next to her stool in a neat stack, yawned, stretched, and stood. It was nearly nine. In a few minutes she would be outside curfew and out-of-bounds. There was a stretch of corridor she had to pass through to get to the Fat Lady, and there was no point getting caught for foolishness. She spelled the door behind her to remain locked to anyone except herself and started up the granite-floored corridor, which would spill her out behind a large tapestry of the Wizengamot Convention of 1712, bordered in gold.

As she reached the top, fingers latched around the heavy brocade to thrust it aside, she heard the one sound that she could never explain herself to.

Footfalls. Soft, and light, and accompanied by the cold voice of her Potions Professor.

But Snape's coldness had been replaced by fear, and a sense of urgency she was sure he would never display in front of a student. Thread-knotted cloth still clutched in her hand, Hermione breathed lightly and slowly and listened:

"He knows then." That was Dumbledore's tired, aging voice, laced with defeat. Hermione's throat squeezed with an indefinable panic. She had never heard the abundantly energetic headmaster sound so completely…beaten.

"He knows. I have used every trick of Occlumency for the past twenty years to keep him from knowing, but he knows. The Echo was only temporarily bound to her, it broke free of Lily Potter at the moment of her death. And now…well, now he has discovered that it was not destroyed with her, but to the contrary, it was released."

"With as much power as he has already gained, this time we would be much harder pressed to stop him from gaining access to it, and manipulating it."

"Indeed. We worked two decades ago to prevent it from happening, even though we only partially succeeded, and-" here the sentence stopped, a peculiar note creeping into Snape's voice. He sounded cramped, almost chained, as if it took a great deal of effort to push the rest of the words through the obstacle of his lips, "-and here, now, Miss Granger does not know anything yet. She was born the Node, but training is essential. We cannot speak to her, or ask her to help us again- not yet."

Hermione's heart thudded loudly, responding to the mention of her name. She hoped Snape's hearing was not as good as she feared, and retreated a few steps down the passage.

"Severus…" Surprised disappointment tinged the older man's soft utterance. "Surely, after twenty years…no…you're not, are you?"

A snort, and obliquely: "Your friend Alastor Moody- or rather, Bartemius Crouch Junior- told me once that there are marks that never come off. He was right."

A sigh, the decision to press no farther. "Well…perhaps it is time. There does not seem to be a better one. We need her considerable talents now."

"Yes." Hermione had crept forward again, unable to resist the temptation of listening to something that so plainly concerned her. What had made Dumbledore so very sadly disappointed? But the footsteps were drifting out of earshot, and the sound decreased first to a mumble, then to a few punctuated sighs, and finally drizzled into nothing in the dark.

When Hermione was sure they had gone, she tore the tapestry aside, her gaze tracking down the long hall where they had disappeared.

"Miss Granger does not know anything yet." The words had not been sneered, or sullen, or angry. They had carried none of the deadly-voiced threats he hurtled in class on a daily basis. They had been factual. And regretful.

But it had been Snape who had said them. "Surely after twenty years…" What could that mean? Twenty years of spying? Of being a Death Eater?

And what was a Node? The notion of being born anything made her skin itch. Harry could keep his highly individual "Chosen One from Birth" status.

Her Astronomy essay held no interest for her as she sat in Gryffindor Tower, listening to Ron patiently explain to Harry why his chess pieces insisted in their Cockney accents that he make a different move than "Queen to C5".

What would she know? From whom would she learn? Jupiter's orbit crossed Pluto's as the conversation ran on repeat through her mind.

888

"Now, Albus?" McGonagall asked softly. "Are we sure? Is she ready?"

"She will never be ready," Snape's voice came out sandpaper rough. "But she will survive. One of the benefits of knowing the past is the knowledge that it all must remain pristinely untouched for this future to exist."

"Will she know enough to help us now, though?"

"We can only hope," Dumbledore replied. A small smile, unusually sad, touched the Headmaster's features as he looked at his Potions Master's drawn countenance and over-bright eyes. "She gave me a date, you know. The exact date of her departure."

The sharpness on Snape's face as it jerked to him was hungry- hungry in a pure, honest way that belied his intense loneliness and longing for the girl, a ghost of his beloved past that had the misfortune to be amongst the living.

"When?" he asked, past caring that his voice was stressed and low, his thoughts obvious to both Dumbledore and McGonagall.

"Tomorrow, Severus," the older man replied. "The date she gave me was tomorrow. March 14th, 1997."

"So you are already determined to send her?"

"I was determined from the instant her name was brought to my attention as a talented Muggle-born witch. There was no chance that it was coincidence. And I can't not send her- she already went."

McGonagall closed her eyes. Time travel and the implications that spun so readily from it made her dizzy if she pondered it too long. She loved the practical application of magic, but the theoretical wrappings of time and the magic involved seemed so… fruitless. Few traveled, and many of those few died. For the headmaster to send a student back deliberately seemed irresponsible- except that they already knew she had gone and succeeded and vanished, and now they desperately needed the knowledge she would bring back with her.

"Will her information of then be useful now?"

"I believe so," Snape hesitated. "Last time we found what was clearly a temporary solution. This time I hope to find a more permanent one. I fear, however, that like the Philosopher's Stone, the Echo can be only either well-hidden- with the potential to be found by the wrong person- or destroyed. Five years ago, Nicholas Flamel agreed to demolish the Stone in the greater interests of humanity. I think it is likely time to find a way to obliterate the Echo as well."

"It is a constantly changing magic, not an object," McGonagall warned. "Destruction might be impossible."

"Do not lecture me on the things I studied," he spat. "It was written by men, it can be unwritten by them."

"But before we can do that," Dumbledore intervened gently, "Miss Granger must go- must learn all she will, and must return."

"Tomorrow?" Snape's tone held both hope and dread. For a closed man, he was remarkably open.

"Tomorrow."

"I do not wish to be here."

"You must. We have to deliberately open the rift she steps into. A Time Turner cannot handle the move of decades. As the most powerful wizard in my employ I will require your assistance in opening the rift and sending her back."

"I cannot. Headmaster…surely another-"

"No, Severus," and the blue eyes promised that there was nothing to appeal to behind them, "I want you to be here."

"Do not ask me to face her as she is leaving- or returning," Snape whispered, eyes closed. He was not in the habit of begging, but the rigidly imposed self-control of five and a half years was beginning to disintegrate as he contemplated facing a Hermione that remembered all he did.

"You have never run," Dumbledore's voice was equally quiet, but burned with clarity of purpose. "Never from a fight, or a lecture, or a class room. You have never shied from what I have asked of you. Don't run from yourself, Severus. No matter how fast you fly, you always reach the end of the road to find that you're right there with you."

"Headmaster-"

"No. You will assist me. You don't have a choice Severus. This is not a request." Snape glowered at the Headmaster, but the firm sky-colored eyes won. Snape lived under his protection alone- and he played by Dumbledore's rules, no matter the game.

Dumbledore turned to McGonagall and asked lightly, as if requesting a book: "Can I persuade you to bring me Miss Granger tomorrow at noon?"

"Of course Albus."

Snape could not stand the all-too-understanding pity that glittered in McGonagall's eyes as he turned from them and strode out of the office.