Thank you so much to TinkWolfe for beta'ing this in its (hopefully) final version!

March 29th, 2078

It was well after midnight and she'd been awakened by the dream again. Muttering darkly to herself, the old woman drew her shabby housecoat around her deceptively frail form and shuffled into the tiny kitchen to make a cup of tea.

"Again, Hermione?" an older man's voice asked with warm amusement. The question came with a wry chuckle from the painting above a small two-seater table in the corner.

She offered nothing more than a harrumph to the portrait as she dropped a tea bag into a chipped mug.

The man's brilliant green eyes twinkled in amusement from behind his glasses, laugh lines deepening around the edges. "You know, for as many times as you used to harass me about recurring dreams…"

"Oh, that's rich," the woman threw back over her shoulder. "And what does the brilliant Harry Potter propose I do about dreams of a man I've known longer dead than alive?" She dropped into the chair below the portrait, glaring at her best friend. His salt and pepper hair still stuck out hopelessly in all directions, giving him a look of timeless youth despite the age he was when the painting had been commissioned.

He simply smiled softly in return. "You'll figure it out, Hermione – you always do. Your water's about to boil."

She got up and filled her mug. Just as she was spooning the sugar, however, a pop sounded from her living room, causing a jolt of alarm in her. She grabbed her wand from the counter, but before she could creep to the kitchen door, a familiar young voice called to her.

"Grandmamma?"

Relief mixed with a deeper sense of alarm swept over the old lady. She rushed into the living room to her only living blood relative. "Persephone! What on earth are you doing here – you shouldn't have come. He'll find out-"

The tall slender witch with auburn curls wrapped her arms around her grandmother in a brief but warm hug. "I know, Gram. But this is important."

"Important!" Hermione scoffed. "Important enough to get yourself killed or worse?"

Persephone gazed at her solemnly. "Yes, actually," she answered, and pulled from her robes an iridescent sphere that Hermione recognized immediately.

It had been a lifetime since she'd had the misfortune of seeing one, well, thousands, actually. It was unmistakably a Prophecy. But The Hall of Prophecies was destroyed ages ago, along with much of the Department of Mysteries, which made it all the more disturbing to see one in the hands of her own granddaughter.

"Persephone, how?" Hermione asked warily, shaking her head.

The younger witch took a deep breath. "I did it." Her blue eyes were fathomless with the gravity of what she had to tell her grandmother. "Gram, it's about you. It's your Prophecy."

Hermione frowned at Persephone, then very nearly laughed. What kind of meaningful future secrets could a dying old woman have? She shook her head and then held out her hand.

Persephone paused before handing it over. "There's something you have to know, first. I don't understand all of it myself, but somehow the timing is off."

"Off? What do you mean?"

"I mean, it came to me tonight, but it's for something that is supposed to happen, was supposed to have happened, in the past." Her tone reflected how ludicrous she knew this sounded as she muttered, "Nearly eighty years in the past, actually."

Hermione's frown deepened. The only way, the only reason a Prophecy would be this late, would be because someone had meddled. Meddled with the Prophecies or with time, or both. She swallowed and motioned with her fingers. Her granddaughter obliged then, placing the sphere into her wrinkled hand.

~O~

"Grandmamma, you must go back. I know you can - you're the only one who can. You must save our world - this is not how it was supposed to be." There was a slight note of hope behind the urgency in her granddaughter's voice.

Hermione was seated on the threadbare old couch, overwhelmed by the words she had just heard from the now dim sphere resting on a worn cushion on the coffee table. Pieces started fitting together in her head in some places, falling apart in others. She slowly looked up at the redhead standing in her living room. "Persephone, you understand if I go back and this prophecy is fulfilled, you will cease to exist? We both might cease to exist, at least as we are now…"

The young woman was clearly long beyond tears in this life. She shook her head sadly at her grandmother, possibly the only other living witch in their world who had not died or succumbed to the darkness that ruled everything. "Grandmamma," she whispered pleadingly, "I don't want to exist in this world. Please."

There was a sudden thundering crack outside, and the wards on the old witch's cottage shuddered violently. They'd found her at last.

Persephone thrust the Prophecy back into Hermione's hand. "The Time Turner, Gram! GO!" she said, urging the old woman into action. Hermione dashed into her bedroom, straight to the bookshelf by the fireplace. She grabbed a smallish wooden box from the fourth shelf and made to return to the living room, but Persephone had sealed the doorway behind her. "GO!" Hermione heard her yell from the other side of the door.

Fighting every instinct she had to stay and protect her only living relative, she steeled herself, the silvery orb in her hand reminding her of the one last hope that was far more important than either of their lives. She grimaced and turned on her heel, thinking of a place long since destroyed and forgotten.

Hogwarts.

~O~

No one had been near the ruins of Hogwarts in decades. While they had been able to finally tear down the wards that prevented Apparition in and out of the grounds, something of the ancient magic remained that made it unusable for the dark wizards that had desecrated the old school.

The air shimmered briefly before a soft crack sounded, accompanying the sudden appearance of a very tired looking old woman. She paused only momentarily, clutching a wooden box to her chest, before picking her way up the overgrown path to the crumbling castle.

She pushed thoughts of her granddaughter out of her head. She'd had too much practice at it over the years. She'd made the grave mistake ages ago of giving in to her heart, and they'd counted on that. She'd narrowly escaped herself, only after being forced to witness the murder of her daughter Rose and son-in-law Scorpius. It was a mistake she never made again.

Silver unkempt curls flew around her shoulders as she purposefully climbed the stairs to the main entrance. The mammoth wooden doors swung open easily with a flick of her wand hand. She tried not to pay much attention to the pathetic remains around her, focusing instead on getting to the old headmasters' office as quickly as possible.

There were no secret passwords anymore. No more whispers from paintings. Even the ghosts, and Peeves himself had been evicted from their ancient home. Hermione smirked to herself. That alone should have tipped her off ages ago that something was wrong with the way of the world. Hadn't she been taught that ghosts couldn't leave the boundaries of the places to which their spirits were tied? And yet, Sir Nicholas, the Bloody Baron, the Fat Friar and the Grey Lady – all were gone.

Her pace quickened with resolve from this one more clue. Her footsteps echoed off of the cracked walls as she approached the small curved staircase, no longer guarded. Remnants of the old stone gargoyle were still scattered in pathetic pieces across the hall. She closed her eyes briefly, taking a breath before climbing the steps.

When she reached the door at the top, she opened the wooden box in her arms, and pulled out the pristine golden ring encircling the little hourglass. She draped the chain around her neck.

So much power for such a tiny trinket.

She pushed open the door and stepped into the room, no longer an office, no longer anything, really, except a wasted carcass of a room. She kept her eyes focused on the floor, refusing to see the charred ruins, refusing to waste any more time grieving yet another failure.

Her gnarled fingers flipped the timepiece with a deftness that belied their age, and she braced herself for the onslaught of nearly ten decades ripping past her.

~O~

March 29th, 1980

Even at the greener age of ninety-eight, it was rare for Albus Dumbledore to display surprise, much less shock. Had she not been preoccupied with gut-wrenching dizziness and blinding head pain, Hermione Granger might have even laughed at the feat she so easily performed by suddenly appearing in the headmaster's office, nearly one hundred years earlier.

As it was, however, she found herself mildly annoyed by the Body-Bind curse he threw at her, momentarily disabling her from succumbing to the need to retch. With a quick mental twist she shirked the hex and slumped to her knees, coughing bile onto the decorative rug and stone floor.

As Albus raised his wand again, she held up a hand between heaves and spoke hoarsely, "Really, Headmaster, if I meant you harm you would know it by now."

He hesitated for barely a second before flicking his wand again. This time, Hermione simply felt a warm physical calm sweep through her, easing her nausea and headache.

She rocked back and sat on her heels, her head bowed as she caught her breath.

"Thank you," she murmured gratefully before vanishing her mess with a sweeping motion of her hand. She silently cursed herself for not better preparing for the adverse reaction to her journey.

Albus frowned, apparently disturbed at the ease with which she performed wandless magic. She had to remind herself that these were different times, so different. The need to develop wandless magic hadn't really been so pressing until the third wave of darkness. She'd had so much practice since then, it was like second nature now, her wand used more for detailed magic and strong channelling than anything else…

"Madam, while I accept you may mean no immediate harm, I must insist you explain yourself," he stated with the gentle yet commanding tone she recognized with a pang.

As Hermione looked up into his wary but kind and familiar face, she was overwhelmed with emotion. She glanced around the Headmaster's office, shaking her head at the flood of old memories.

"Oh, how I've missed-" all of it, she thought, before catching herself.

She eased herself up to her feet, accepting Albus' hand for help, and brushed off the front of her worn robes. She took a deep breath, and her brown eyes, now fringed in grey lashes and thin wrinkled skin, met the clear blue of her old Headmaster.

"Professor Dumbledore, you don't know me yet, but my name is Hermione Granger," she stated, giving the maiden name she had readopted upon the death of her husband decades prior.

Alarm flashed in the wizard's eyes as he backed up, dropping into a chair. He shook his head.

"No," he began. "You can't be here," he muttered almost to himself before raising his volume to a direct level.

"You cannot be here now," he repeated, and it almost sounded like an order. "Madam Granger, wherever you've come from, I must insist that you go back. You have no idea of the repercussions-"

Annoyance flickered across Hermione's wizened features.

"No idea?" she interrupted in an irritated tone. "Albus Dumbledore, I'll have you know I am nearly one hundred years old. I have spent the last thirty-seven years of my life studying time travel and picking apart history."

She strode over to him and dropped something shiny into his lap. "Do you know what that is?"

He picked it up and frowned. He knew it was a Time Turner, but not just any Time Turner. It had very specific runic markings on its polished surface. Identical, in fact, to the one he was currently safeguarding for the young witch who'd arrived just a week ago in a similar fashion to the old woman standing before him. It was one of a kind, but here was its duplicate, lacking in the scratches and scuffs of time passed. "How…" he whispered.

"I made it!" Hermione practically crowed. "After the Ministry disaster, all of the Time Turners were destroyed, and they were never able go back this far, anyway. So I made one. The problem was, I couldn't use it. Didn't know just where to begin, or when or evenif things started to go wrong." Her lips curled almost into a sneer as she added in a mutter, "Repercussions indeed."

Catching herself, she took a deep breath and the ire in her tone was swiftly replaced by something indefinable. "They did, though…go wrong. And tonight, I finally have proof." Her voice softened with a soul deep pain. "Albus…the time I come from, it's – it's all wrong." She shook her head.

"Wrong?" he frowned questioningly.

She nodded slightly and repeated, "Wrong. Not just terrible, but wrong. Something somewhere happened. Someone… meddled, and…" She closed her eyes, swallowing back the desperate pain of the past countless years. "There's a darkness that is greater than anything you will ever see, and it won."

"Voldemort…" Albus whispered, more to himself than anything.

"No," she replied. "Not Voldemort, but worse – much worse. There's nothing left now. We lost the third war, Albus. They've completely taken over our world, and are well on their way to taking over the rest."

She spoke softly, but matter-of-factly, reiterating her original point. "The world – the future I'm from…. is wrong. I've known so for quite some time, but I didn't have any definite answer or proof until now."

She reached into her cloak with a wry and bitter smile, pulling out the silvery sphere her granddaughter had brought to her. "Any clues as to how a Prophecy would come into being only now, about something that was supposed to have happened more than seventy years in my past?"

The headmaster gazed silently at her, his blue eyes piercing as if seeing into her soul. It was a look she remembered well, even if it was from a lifetime ago. And, just like it did then, it stripped away any pretence she might have hoped to carry.

Hermione took another deep breath, her expression urgent and sincere. "Professor Dumbledore, I beg you – there really was no one else I could go to with this. The other in the Prophecy…" she dropped off, muttering more to herself, "Well, Merlin, but he would be here in this time now, wouldn't he?"

Brown eyes flicked up to blue again, remembering. "Before I give you this, there is one other very important thing. I don't know if you're already aware, but in the Department of Mysteries, there is a – a room, with an ancient stone archway, and a veil…"

Albus nodded his head slowly, clearly familiar with the artefact.

She continued, "It's said to be a veil between the living and the dead, but no one ever studied the effects of physically falling into it. It was just assumed that to do so meant absolute death, but that's not exactly correct. I know how to charm it, Albus. Not – not to bring back the dead on the other side, but to retrieve those living who might... fall in to the archway, physically passing through the veil itself." She paused, wringing her hands helplessly.

Hermione was becoming frustrated with herself. All of these things that made perfect sense to her probably sounded like the ramblings of a mad crone to the wizard before her. She didn't really have a choice, though. Sirius Black would be the one to fall, stuck there between worlds in a nightmarish purgatory.

By the time she'd unlocked the mysteries of archway in the Death Chamber and attempted to retrieve her best friend's godfather, Sirius had succumbed to the madness and horrors found on the other side of the archway. There was hardly anything left of the man, certainly nothing left to bring back. The nightmares that haunted Hermione from that point forward were relentless. She was never able to tell Harry exactly why she dreamed of his "dead" godfather, certain he would never forgive her for failing him so. There was simply no way she could explain what thirty years in a place more maddening and hellish than Azkaban would have done to the man. She wasn't even sure what a few years would do to him, but she had to believe he'd survive it well enough for her younger self to rescue him in time to fulfil the Prophecy.

Dumbledore was waiting patiently for the old witch to gather her thoughts. She cleared her throat, trying to maintain a calm tone as she continued. "Look, it is absolutely imperative that I charm back the veil – my younger self. There will be someone who falls through – there's obviously no stopping that without creating a world of other problems, even preventing things from happening as they should. But if he isn't returned…" She shook her head and pulled a small leather notebook from another pocket in her robes.

"These are my notes for the Death Chamber. I am the only person who can read them. I don't care how, but my younger self – she… I… that is, he must – well, he will be returned, and I am the one to do it. But I must have these notes in order to do it. Am I clear?"

Her businesslike demeanour faltered under Albus' scrutiny as he considered her silently. Somehow, despite the fact that they were now nearly the same age, the headmaster still managed to make her feel like a nervous third year as seconds passed.

"I know this is a lot, Professor…" she said softly, her tone pleading.

Albus eyed the Time Turner in his hand, his thumb running over its surface absently. He stood and regarded the elderly witch, his gaze troubled. After another moment of consideration, he simply sighed and nodded, holding out his hand.

Hermione let out a breath she wasn't aware she was holding as she handed him her journal first. She smiled slightly and shook her head. "Sirius Black, of all people," she muttered as she gave Albus the silvery orb that would speak the Prophecy and hopefully grant her a peaceful oblivion.

Albus looked at her expectantly and she simply waved a wrinkled hand over the sphere. Immediately the gentle voice of her granddaughter began to speak.

As the last word was spoken, Albus looked up at Hermione, comprehension filling his expression. She felt an odd wave of lightness pass through her as if her very molecules were loosening. She smiled fully for the first time in probably decades and a peaceful whisper of thanks passed her lips as she faded completely from sight, leaving Albus Dumbledore alone with a second Time Turner, an old leather journal, and a Prophecy that was perhaps even more important than the one whose secrets he was already working to protect.

~O~

March 29th, 2078

Just as the powerful old crone Disapparated from the rundown cottage, the wards on her house failed with a loud crack, and the front door blasted off its hinges.

They flooded the living room like a murder of angry crows, surrounding the fiery haired witch who stood defiantly. A large and imposing wizard stepped through the door casually, his dark features set into a hateful scowl.

"Visiting your filthy Mudblood of a grandmother, dear wife?" He sneered maliciously. "I would have thought even you would know better – lead us straight to the old hag, you did."

Persephone glared evenly at her Death Eater husband, not saying a word.

"Where is she?" he demanded, his wand pointed at her chest. She'd been forced into marrying the ringleader of this group, a plot designed to eventually track down the powerful old witch and bring her to their Lord, who would then siphon her magic and gain complete reign over both the magical and Muggle world. Tonight was his night of triumph, and he could finally be rid of the disgusting urchin that was his wife.

"TELL ME," he bellowed, but Persephone merely smirked.

"Crucio!"

She crumpled to the floor, screaming and writhing in pain that seared every nerve ending in her already wasted body. The glamour she'd cast on herself to prevent her grandmother from fretting slipped easily away, revealing the gaunt and bruised frame of a woman subjected to years of abuse.

This will all be over soon, Persephone repeated mentally, between jolts of agony. She endured the torture for what seemed like hours before he finally stopped, rage flushing his face.

"Fine, bitch," he snarled. "Tonight I'll be done with you either way."

She heaved a great sigh of relief, readying herself for the flash of green as he pointed his wand one last time. "Avada Ke- wha..?"

Everything shimmered and fell into blackness, and the last thing the dark wizard saw was a peaceful smile on his wife's face.

Persephone LeStrange was no more.