The last thing Hermione Granger remembered was light.
Not the warm, amber kind. Not candlelight or sunlight or the comfortable glow of a library in winter. This was the light of something tearing — white and absolute and utterly indifferent to the person caught inside it, the way a lightning strike is indifferent to the tree it splits.
She had been in the Department of Mysteries. That much she was certain of. The war was over, technically — Voldemort was dead, the Death Eaters scattered or imprisoned, the wizarding world exhaling its first clean breath in decades. She had been called in to assist with the cataloguing of confiscated artefacts, because of course she had, because Hermione Granger could not simply rest. There had been a room she wasn't supposed to enter. A device she wasn't supposed to touch.
She had touched it.
Then: light. Then: nothing.
Then: mud.
---
She came back to herself in stages.
First the cold — a deep, penetrating cold that had already worked its way past skin and muscle and was making serious inroads on bone. Then the sound: rain, heavy and relentless, drumming against the earth around her with the commitment of something that had been falling for hours and intended to continue indefinitely. Then the smell of wet grass, churned soil, and something underneath it both — something older, a green-dark scent that her brain, still rebooting, couldn't immediately classify.
Wild land, some instinct said. Uncultivated. Old.
Hermione opened her eyes.
The sky above her was the particular purple-black of a storm that had eaten the stars. Trees at the edge of her vision, dark and massive, their branches thrashing. She was lying on her back in a field she didn't recognise, her robes soaked through, her wand — thank god, her wand — still clutched in her right hand by the apparently indestructible reflex that had kept her armed through two years of running for her life.
She tried to sit up. Something along her left side expressed a sharp, articulate objection.
Ribs, she catalogued distantly. At least two. The landing had not been gentle.
She sat up anyway, because she was Hermione Granger, and Hermione Granger did not lie in the mud simply because her body was filing complaints. The world tilted unpleasantly. She pressed one hand to the ground — cold, wet, solid — and breathed through it until her vision steadied.
The gash on her temple she discovered when she raised her hand to push her hair back and her fingers came away dark. Not deep enough to be dangerous, probably, but head wounds were theatrical and it was running freely down the side of her face with complete disregard for her dignity.
Right, she thought. Assess. Think.
She was outside. She was injured. She was — she looked at the trees again, at the particular architecture of them, the shape of the hills rising in the distance — she was in Britain. Scotland, possibly. The quality of the darkness felt northern.
She did not know when she was. That thought arrived with a quietness that frightened her more than the pain did, because Hermione Granger's mind was not in the habit of going quiet. It was the quietness of a system encountering something it had no framework to process.
She did not know when she was.
She raised her wand and cast the only diagnostic charm she knew that could answer that question — a temporal orientation spell she had read about precisely once, in a restricted text, eighteen months ago, and memorised because she memorised everything. The magic came out slightly ragged, unsteady from the journey, but it came.
The answer it returned made her close her eyes.
August 1975.
Twenty-three years. The light had thrown her twenty-three years into the past, and she was sitting in the rain in a field she didn't recognise bleeding on herself, and no one knew she was here, and in 1975 there was no one who could know, and the war she had just survived had not yet happened, and the boy who would end it had not yet started school, and every person she had ever loved was either a child or not yet born.
Hermione pressed her wand against her sternum and breathed.
Don't spiral. Spiralling is a luxury. Think.
She was alive. She was armed. She was injured but not critically. The land around her was old and wild and felt — peculiarly, persistently — as though it was watching her. Not with malice. With something else, something she couldn't name, a sensation like being recognised by something that had no eyes.
She was still trying to identify that feeling when she heard the crack.
---
Apparition. Close — twenty feet, perhaps less. Hermione had her wand up before the sound finished, every combat reflex firing at once, years of war compressing into a single razor-sharp moment of threat, respond, survive.
The figure that had appeared stood very still.
She was — young was the first word that arrived, and it arrived strangely, because the person standing twenty feet away in the rain did not carry themselves young. She was perhaps seventeen, perhaps eighteen, wearing robes that had been expensive before the rain got to them, dark curls plastered against her neck and shoulders. She held no wand. Her hands were visible, open at her sides, and she was looking at Hermione with an expression that contained several things at once: sharp suspicion, clinical assessment, and underneath both of those, something that Hermione's instincts flagged before her mind caught up.
Curiosity. Genuine, undisguised, hungry curiosity, the kind that didn't know how to hide itself entirely.
The girl looked at the wand pointed at her face without blinking.
"You're on Black family land," she said. Her voice was low, precise, with the particular diction of someone raised to believe that every syllable was an exercise in authority. "That ward should have thrown you off the moment you arrived." A pause, just long enough to be deliberate. "It didn't."
Hermione kept her wand up. Her ribs screamed. "Who are you?"
"I live here." The girl tilted her head slightly, the rain running in rivulets off her hair and down her jaw without apparently bothering her at all. "The more interesting question is who you are, given that you appeared out of nothing in the middle of a warded estate during a storm, and my family's land decided to keep you."
Hermione's wand hand was steady. Her mind was running calculations at speed — threat assessment, exit routes, the distance to the treeline, what she knew about 1975 and the Black family and who would be here in August with no other family members apparent.
The answer landed with the force of a physical blow.
Bellatrix.
The name arrived and with it everything she knew — everything she had seen, the hollow eyes and the cruel mouth and the laugh like something breaking — and she almost lowered her wand from sheer cognitive dissonance, because the girl standing in the rain in front of her was not that. This girl was whole. This girl was watchful and sharp and burning with an interior intensity that had absolutely no cruelty in it yet, just brilliance and hunger and that frankly unsettling curiosity.
She looked like someone who hadn't been ruined yet.
She looked like someone who could be saved.
Don't, Hermione told herself, with the firmness of someone who had learned what happens when emotion outpaces strategy. Don't make this about that. Think.
Bellatrix — she couldn't call her that, didn't know her yet, had no reason to — was watching the war play out across her face with an expression of considerable interest.
"You know something," she said. Not a question.
"I don't know anything," Hermione said, which was such a spectacular lie that she almost laughed.
"You're bleeding on my family's land," the girl said, with the composure of someone filing a minor administrative complaint, "you appear to have Apparated from nowhere and survived impact that should have broken considerably more than whatever you've cracked on your left side, and you're pointing a wand at me with the grip of someone trained in combat rather than duelling." She paused. "That tells me rather a lot about what kind of person you are. It doesn't tell me why you're here."
"I'm not entirely sure myself," Hermione said, and that at least was true.
Something shifted in the other girl's face — barely perceptible, a fractional softening. As though honesty, even partial honesty, was currency she hadn't expected to receive.
She reached up and conjured something wordlessly, wandlessly — a shield against the rain, spreading out above them both, because apparently wandless weather charms were simply what this girl did with idle hands. The sudden cessation of rain drumming against Hermione's skull was so relieving she almost swayed.
Then Bellatrix Black extended one hand, palm up, rain hammering against the shield above them.
"You'll want to come inside," she said. "Before you bleed on anything else."
Hermione looked at the hand. Looked at the girl attached to it. Ran every calculation she had and found that they all returned the same answer, which was that she was injured and stranded twenty-three years from home and the only person within reach was someone who would either help her or end her, and something in the land beneath her feet — something old and magic and inexplicably certain — was telling her which one it would be.
She took the hand.
Bellatrix's grip was firm and immediate and her magic, where it brushed against Hermione's, felt like a livewire and a key turning in a lock at the same time.
Neither of them mentioned it.
They walked toward the house through the storm, and the Black family land let them pass.