Disclaimer: I own nothing except a laptop the plot. Characters and world belong to J. .

Destroyer

By Catsitta

.x.

Prologue;;

This was never supposed to happen.

Amongst the ashes of a battle long since passed, a solitary figure stood. One might assume such a person would forlornly gaze upon the ravaged ruins of this war swept place, their heart filled with grief for the dead and sorrow for the broken survivors. However, that is not the case. And the very fact sickened her.

Hermione Granger felt only bitter resignation. Even the deep fury that once drove her onwards had long since been quelled by resentment, survivor's guilt, before fading into nothingness. Terrible, numbing, nothingness.

A heroine, they declared her, but what kind of hero let her friends and family die. What kind of hero let said friends and family die more than once? What kind of hero managed to screw up a bad situation and make things worse? Not a hero. Never a hero. A failure. She was a pathetic, hopeless failure. But she had no choice in the matter. Ironies of all ironies, she, the studious third wheel of the remarkable Golden Trio, the so-called brightest witch of her age, was doomed to a life of failure after failure.

Strange, strangled laughter bubbled up into Hermione's throat and she could not contain it. Tired lungs ached as the unfamiliar, eerily inhuman sound escaped, filling the dreadful silence of the post-war world she did not belong in. The laughter soon consumed her and she collapsed onto the scorched earth, her mind tainted with cloudy madness. She could not do this anymore. Every time she meddled, things grew worse or became unrecognizably altered.

There was a reason why time travel, even in theory, was highly discouraged. Because even if one knew the outcome of one timeline, there was no telling how a single action could throw everything off kilter and drive the delicate balance of things at a dangerous slant. And she wanted to stop. God, how she wanted to stop. Too much death. Too much living. No human being was supposed to endure what she was going through.

But you're not quite human any more, are you Hermione? she reminded herself bitterly.

It was then that a glint of something reflective caught the witch's attention and tears flooded her eyes, the last vestiges of laughter smothered by a choked groan. Not again. She could not do this again.

You have to. There is no giving up. There is only existing until the damn universe decides it's happy and lets you die.

"No rest for the wicked, is there?" Hermione murmured as she reached out with agonizing slowness to grasp the seemingly harmless device that lay less than a few inches from her nose. After all the death she both caused and witnessed, to admit wickedness felt like an understatement. Grimly, the witch drew the item in her hand close, uncurling skeletal fingers to reveal what they caged beneath.

To the average person, magical or muggle, it appeared to be nothing more than an antique compass. A very finely made compass that was left to suffer century's worth of disrepair and whose creator fancied ancient runes instead of cardinal points. However, to her eyes, at her touch, it was so much more. The worn metal took upon a new shine and the murky face of the compass began to glow with an internal light. The runes began to swirl and hidden gears became very prominent as they shifted and spun.

All Hermione had to do was blow across the face of the compass and the needle floating within it would spin furiously, stealing her away from this place, this time, in a matter of seconds.

Like all things of old magic, it was powerful and it had a price to match.

In her hands was what Hermione liked to call a Time Shifter, an artifact so old and so unpredictable that no history book nor bardic legend spoke of its existence. Unlike its similarly named, and modern, cousin, the Time Turner, the Time Shifter did not turn back time, so to speak. One could not control the number of hours by matter of turns and there was no returning to the moment in which you left. Somehow, some way, it ripped the user from one point in a timeline and dumped he or she unceremoniously into another.

Alternate universes were not as metaphysical as the general population believed.

Not that it was a comfort to the no longer young witch that discovered this fact. She might have been thrilled with the discovery if the Time Shifter did not have its own agenda, of which it was shamelessly manipulating Hermione into serving. For one, the damned thing would not let her die until she served her purpose. Neither age nor injury changed the result. Nor did blatantly mucking up the timeline. The device would always return when it deemed her current adventure an irredeemable failure, and compelled a rather unwilling Hermione to leap into another "universe", the date of her arrival spanning from mere days before the Final Battle against Voldemort to the days before Tom Riddle's birth.

It did not help that the Time Shifter insisted on resetting her body each time as well, returning her to the nineteen year old girl form that she possessed when she'd found and first activated the device.

As old as she felt, looking her age would have been but a small reminder of what she underwent. But no. Every failure was punctuated by that scarred up, malnourished, undeniably young body with frizzy brown hair and experience-filled, but otherwise unremarkable brown eyes, she would have to see in the mirror.

Until she fixed things. Until those that died were given a chance at life. Until the greatest evil the wizarding world had ever known fell and his successors vanquished…

Hermione Granger would endure.

Her very soul was at stake.

Thus she softly blew across the surface of the compass and closed her eyes, attempting to forget Harry Potter's mangled corpse and Ron's last words. This was only one possible outcome, with which the universe seemed to disagree. No doubt there would be more deaths to lay heavily on her heart. More failures.

All delusions of normality were but wistful memories. There would be no falling in love, no children, no peacetime world in which nurture her new love of quiet. She was to be the chosen warrior…the hero.

Everyone knows there is no happy ending for a hero.

TBC?

A/N: This is my first Harry Potter fanfic, but any of my FF7 readers whom give this a glance will recognize the fact that I'm playing with a few themes that I love more than anything else. Time travel and the broken hero in need of healing. I will admit, my understanding of HP lore is a bit rusty, so corrections and suggestions are always welcome.

But I will say this: The Deathly Hallows utterly bewildered me. Themes were introduced that did not belong, the writing seemed forced in places, especially near the end and the epilogue was utterly…disappointing. J. is a remarkable author, but the way HP ended was confusing in its abruptness.

That, and I do not believe that Ron and Hermione ever made sense as a couple.

However, despite my meddling and my plot, and the liberties I'm taking with J.K.R's world, I do recognize cannon, including DH, save for the dreadful Epilogue.

Thank you for your reading the beginnings of this story as well as this overly long author's note.