A/N: This was written for the Are You Crazy Enough to Do It challenge on the HPFC forum. It's going to be a series of drabbles/one-shots that focus on Hermione in various AUs. They'll all be connected in that canon Hermione is being dropped in these different worlds and can't figure out why. This first one was written for the book title prompt Eldest.

The clock chimed, and Hermione wasn't at her kitchen table any longer. Even the toast she'd been about to take a bite of was gone from her hand. She glanced around at the wild landscape, each of her senses on high alert.

The sun's position in the sky hinted that it was morning, just as it had been in London, but she had no idea what magic could have whisked her away from her own home and dropped her in a foreign landscape without her lifting a finger. Her instincts told her this wasn't good, and her hand dived into the pocket of her robes, her heartbeat calming slightly when her fingers closed around her wand.

Her most important possession, at least, hadn't disappeared with the toast.

But, she realized as she glanced down, she wasn't in the same clothes as before. She'd put on her black Ministry robes that morning, yet she found herself in robes of a ghastly shade of green. They were metallic. Hermione had never owned a metallic pair of robes in her life.

She noticed a patch that had been sewn on the left hand side of her chest, and she tugged at the robes until she could read the text that lined the patch.

"Dragon keeper!?"

She hadn't come face to face with a dragon since breaking out of Gringotts, and she was fine with that. In fact, she'd made it a personal goal to never see a dragon again. If someone wanted to kill her, dropping her amongst dragons was certainly one way to do it, but she didn't know why they'd have bothered to give her these robes.

"Granger!"

Hermione's head shot up, finding an older, unfamiliar man watching her.

"Get something on your robes?" he asked in amusement. "Shouldn't you be used to that by now? Just siphon it off and come on. We still have ten nests to survey."

He turned and walked away from her. Hermione stared at his back, trying to piece together what was happening to her.

Clearly, this man knew her and believed she worked with him surveying dragon's nests of all things. A shiver ran down her spine. She still didn't know what she'd gotten herself into, but it felt creepier in more ways than just being a dragon tamer.

"Granger!"

He hadn't turned around to see that she wasn't following, so she jumped at the sudden shout. Hermione hurried after him, hoping his senses were well enough trained that he could save her from any unfriendly visitors. Assuming, of course, that he wasn't the one trying to kill her.

"Betsy's brood should be hatching either today or tomorrow. Here's hoping we get lucky, eh? I don't fancy coming in at three in the morning like we did for Henrietta this year. Merlin, that was a tough hatching."

He grew lost in his reminiscing for a minute before he glanced back at Hermione, one eyebrow raised.

"What's up with you?" he asked. "You're awfully quiet today. Weren't you just telling me yesterday that hatchings make the job worth it? You were the only one not falling asleep where you stood at Henrietta's hatching."

"Was I?" she asked before she could think, immediately cursing herself for letting her voice shake.

The man gave her another strange look. She wished she knew what his name was, but he didn't seem eager to provide it.

"'Course," he said. "You've been like that since you joined, haven't you? Always enthusiastic about everything. I have to admit—and I'll never say this again—I like it. You remind me why I got into dragon keeping in the first place. I thought I'd lost interest years ago, but now you're here getting excited about the babys' first droppings. It's refreshing."

A blush warmed her cheeks. She fiddled with her wand, trying to focus both on the man and any spells that might come in handy if she was forced to face a dragon.

"Uh, thanks."

She had no way of knowing how far they were from Betsy's nest, and with each step, her feeling of dread increased. They'd traveled for ten minutes when she heard the call of a dragon, and she nearly tripped over nothing.

There was another peculiar glance from the mysterious dragon keeper, but he didn't say anything about it.

"Sounds like her eggs might be cracking," he said lightly, grinning for the first time since he'd found her. "We might be sticking around here awhile. Hope you brought your lunch."

For the first time, she paid attention to the bag she had slung over one shoulder. It was so light that she'd hardly registered it was there, but she got the feeling it was charmed just like her beaded bag from the war had been. She had no idea if there was a lunch inside it or not, but she nodded for the man's benefit.

His footsteps grew quicker, and Hermione hurried after him even as her fear tried to weigh her down. She was better off by his side than on her own, she reminded herself. She had a hunch the dragons trusted him. She wasn't as confident that they would trust her.

He slowed once they were able to see the nest. Hermione's heart stuttered as she stood with him, half hidden by a thicket of bushes.

She could recognize a Common Welsh Green from the Triwizard Tournament of her fourth year. It circled around its nest in which Hermione could count four eggs, though there might have been more.

Glancing at the landscape, she realized that they very well might have been in Wales, and that knowledge let her breathe a little easier. It wasn't as far from home as she might have feared. From here, she easily could have apparated back to London, but part of her knew that trying such a thing was a bad idea. There was more off than just her physical location. She had no way of knowing if she had a home in London to apparate to anymore, so she crouched beside the man and prepared to watch the arrival of the baby dragons.

Her fears eased as they stood watching without anything happening to them. The dragon was more preoccupied with her babies than the two apparently familiar humans watching her from a distance. Hermione made herself comfortable and gawked, with the man beside her smiling as if he'd seen her return to normal.

Then, just as the first egg cracked and Betsy began to sing, Hermione's world dissolved again.