Hey everyone!

Here's what you can expect from this story:

The time frame spans book years 5-7 (and some time after), and is maybe half-canon-compliant and half stuff I came up with. I should warn you that the beginning is very, very slow - Bellatrix and Hermione don't even meet until about 40K words into it. Also, it's going to be a good while before they can even tolerate each other, and Hermione will be an adult.

Although this story does deal with the time travel, I want to be clear that Hermione will not be traveling back to the period of Bellatrix's youth, nor will Bellatrix be traveling forward. Instead, I wanted to focus on themes of paradox, chaos, and the consequences of meddling with forces beyond our control.

I've also included a sort of story-within-a-story which follows Bellatrix from her Hogwarts years to her imprisonment - most of these chapters are titled with the year they took place, and can be skipped without losing important plot points.

If any of this sounds good to you, please read on!

1995.

Time was a mysterious thing, Hermione thought. Some moments could flicker past like faces in the window of an oncoming train; others could linger stubbornly, as though unsure of which path they ought to take. Watching the slow pulsing rhythm of raindrops hitting the glass, she felt as though time had paused, wondering how to proceed, how to unwind the many threads it held within itself.

Maybe it was this house - a dusty monument of faded grandeur- that made one feel like the past was much more real than anything. Grimmauld Place seemed to wheeze with the weight of its history, as though the lingering presence of all that had ever been said, hoped, and mourned here was pushing out at the very window panes. It was suffocating.

A book lay open in her lap. It was A History of Time-Travel by Bathilda Bagshot, and it was the only one on the subject she'd been able to find in the Black library. Mostly, it was a painstaking explanation of the various rules and regulations pertaining to time-magic, and a history of how the Unspeakable Sub-Division for the Study of Time came into being. It also described the misadventures of Eloise Mintumble, who, in 1899, had traveled back more than four hundred years, caused two-dozen wizards to be "un-born", and drastically changed her own timeline. All in all, the reading wasn't a complete waste of time, but it wasn't really useful either.

Hermione sighed, rather forcefully, rousing Crookshanks from his extended afternoon nap. The part-Kneazle pinned her with a look of absolute disdain, flicked his tail irritably, and curled in on himself yet again.

Out of habit, Hermione flipped to the back of the book to look up an endnote.

It read:

# 719. Information from private interview with Judith Mintumble, January 15, 1961. J. Mintumble carried on her mother's work in time-research, with perhaps even more tragic consequences. As of this printing, she is serving a life sentence in Azkaban for a murder she committed in the 17th century.

That's strange, Hermione thought. Why would you go so far back in time to kill someone? And how would anyone ever know that you did?

Getting up, she went to the bookshelf and picked up a copy of Wizard Who's Who; flipping to M, she scanned the page until she found Mintumble. There was a brief bio of the mother, but only a couple of lines on the daughter, which told her that Judith had been an Unspeakable, had never married, and was generally considered to be a few sandwiches short of a picnic. She had been born in 1898 and was apparently still alive.

Unsatisfied, but unable to think of anywhere else to look for information, Hermione decided to give up her research for now and go down to dinner.

In the kitchen, Mrs. Weasley was already setting down a heaping platter of beef and mashed potatoes.

As the aproned witch turned her back, Ron snuck a quick spoonful into his mouth.

"Ronald! I can hear you chewing! Wait for everybody else to come down."

"Sorry mum," he mumbled around a mouthful of food, drawing a look of disgust from Hermione.

"Honestly, Ron, I don't understand why you can't swallow before you speak."

He glanced at her, eyes bright, and snuck another piece of steak into his mouth. "'Cause life's too short, 'Mione."

She made a face at him and crossed her arms, looking very self-righteous indeed.

Ginny came in then, followed by Fred and George, who both had an air of giddiness about them.

"Say, Hermione…" Fred began.

"Fancy a sweet?" George finished, holding out a little wooden box with an assortment of colourful candies.

Hermione studied it suspiciously, and then looked to Ginny, who was deliberately avoiding her gaze. But Hermione could see that her neck held the traces of what seemed to have been an enormous boil.

"What happened to your neck, Ginny?"

The girl was about to open her mouth when the twins said in unison: "Nothing!"

"I know you two had something to do with it!" Hermione glared at them.

"Us?" Fred sounded scandalized. "How could you ever think that?"

Their sister gave a long-suffering sigh. "These two are letting me listen in on Order meetings with them. In exchange, I've got to eat their stupid Blistering Bubble Gum or whatever it's called."

"Skiving Snackbox. Prototype phase." Fred whispered, shooting his mother a nervous glance as she rummaged around in a cupboard across the room. "But it's not painful, we swear! Just a bit of fun that's going to help us get out of History of Magic."

"First of all," Hermione began,"experimenting on your sister is completely unacceptable! And I don't understand why you would want to miss History of Magic. Its a terribly important N.E.W.T level subject, you know."

"N.E. ? George, I don't know why we've never considered-"

"The pecuniary possibilities of a product that could get you out of-"

"YES! We could do a special line for O. too-"

They carried on like this while Hermione shook her head in exasperation and poured herself a glass of pumpkin juice.

As the minutes wore on, others began to filter into the room. There was Sirius and Professor Lupin, both of whom looked rather the worse for wear, like a couple of old suits left to the moths in the back of the closet. There was Mad-Eye, with his unsettling gaze and lingering odor of sour ale. Elphias Doge shuffled in, followed by Arthur Weasley, who wore his characteristic look of good-natured befuddlement. Dinner was a subdued affair, with the adults talking in strained whispers at one end of the long table and the children, huddled at the other end, struggling to look as though they weren't eavesdropping. Hermione, glancing up periodically, found Harry's godfather staring in her direction, as though looking at her but seeing someone else. It left her feeling uneasy.

Afterwards, she went upstairs with Ginny. They spent an hour or two playing Gobstones, and then Hermione read Hogwarts: A History for the umpteenth time until she fell asleep. And, as the shadows blossomed in every corner of the room, she dreamt:

Stumbling through a dead heavy fog, she was making her way towards lights, somewhere up ahead. Everything seemed unnaturally bright and there was a rushing in her ears, growing louder and louder. The journey seemed interminable, as though her feet were moving forward, but so slowly...

Somewhere- close by or far away, she couldn't tell- a woman screamed.

She could make out the bare outlines of wreckage on the ground. Blistering metal and melted plastic and a thin string of blood leading toward...

There was a huddled figure before her, trembling, weeping, but she couldn't stop, it wasn't what she needed to find…in the distance, she could just make out the shape of something…

An overwhelming feeling of dread settled in the pit of her belly. She came closer. Praying… praying for…

Suddenly, inexplicably, Harry was there. His face was a frozen mask of contempt.

"I saw what you did."

Ron too had stepped out of the mists, looking very solemn.

"You're a liar, Hermione."

"No!" she gasped, "No...no…no… I…" but before she could finish, her hand was moving, as though pulled by invisible strings, and there was a burning… everything was burning…

Hermione woke with a gasp, breathing hard. The collar of her t-shirt felt too hot and the covers were surely going to swallow her up. In the twin bed across, Ginny was still sleeping soundly.

She leapt out of bed, and as quietly as she could manage, made her way to the bathroom, where she spent a good quarter-hour by the toilet, heaving up bile. It wasn't the first time. She'd been having nearly the same dream every night for two weeks. But this time, her friends had appeared in the dream for some reason, judging her, hating her. A wave of overwhelming sadness washed over, and she began to sob, forehead pressed against the cool tile of the floor.

What kind of person was she, that could have done what she had done? Just one moment of anger, of weakness, and everything had splintered apart so very badly.

She sobbed until her body couldn't take anymore, and then she simply sat staring out of the bathroom window at the brick wall of #11, fingers absently rubbing at the angry scar on her wrist.

Eventually, she managed to pull herself together and decided to go downstairs to get a glass of water. The house seemed unnaturally still; one couldn't even hear the snoring of Mrs. Black's portrait or the echo of Kreacher's crazy muttering. In the hall, dozens of mounted house-elf heads watched her disapprovingly, and Hermione shivered, thinking that perhaps coming down all alone hadn't been the best idea.

Stumbling around in the pitch-black kitchen, Hermione cursed the absence of electricity.

"OW! Hecate's toenails!" she yelped in pain as she stubbed her toe against a bit of furniture. Flailing in the darkness, she fell back against the counter, knocking down some pots.

Suddenly, a manic whizzing filled the air and Hermione felt a million tiny, sharp hands grasping at her face, but all she could do was wave her arms about wildly, hoping to scare off her unseen attackers.

"Lumos," a disembodied voice said, but Hermione, engulfed in a black buzzing cloud, couldn't make out who it belonged to.

"Depulso!" the same voice came again. Then: "Evanesco." She felt a brief, powerful gust in her face and then the whizzing cloud was gone, just like that.

Hermione, now an undignified jumble of limbs sprawled on the floor, looked up to find a young woman looking down at her, laughter clear in her eyes.

"Wotcher'. Name's Tonks."

"Ughh…" was all Hermione could manage. Feeling the heat in her face, she realized she must have been blushing scarlet.

"I reckon you're Hermione Granger? Harry Potter's friend?"

"What…" she steadied her voice, "What was that?"

"Doxies. Nasty little buggers, too, and a whole lot of 'em!" The woman smiled down at her, and Hermione felt a little jitter run down her spine, though she didn't know from what.

"Well, um, thanks for...um... rescuing me."

"Don't mention it. We better take a look at your hand though, looks like they chewed you up pretty good." And indeed, Hermione could see that her left hand was covered with dozens of tiny little imprints of tiny little teeth.

"Accio Murtlap," Tonks called, and a stoppered green vial flew out of Kreacher's pantry and into her waiting palm.

By this point, Hermione had managed to plop herself down in a chair. Surreptitiously, she ran her fingers through her hair, praying that it didn't look like the typical bird's nest she woke up with every morning.

Sitting across, the woman said "Give it here" and without w\aiting for a response, grasped Hermione's wrist and began to apply the brownish goop onto her skin.

Tonks had shockingly pink hair and her bottom lip was pierced. Hermione found her eyes drawn to that little round of metal again and again. She seemed utterly incapable of stringing together a single intelligent sentence at that moment.

Finally, she blurted: "So...you're in the Order?"

"Yup! They let me join a couple of months ago, after I finished up my Auror training."

"You're an Auror?" Hermione was very impressed. "But it's very difficult isn't it? You've got to have top marks in nearly everything."

"Well they ask for five N.E.W.T.s minimum. I had seven." Tonks grinned, looking proud. "Though between you and me, I'm complete rubbish at Potions. Mad-Eye - you've met him already, I bet - vouched for me, the old goat. But I've still got to pass a practical in Poison Detection in July. Don't know what I'm gonna do."

Clearly on the verge of saying something, Hermione opened her mouth, thought better, and shut it again.

"So...er..." Tonks' eyes slid over the girl's pale, puffy face, "Having a rough night?"

"No I'm just..." she paused, searching for the right word. "Homesick, maybe."

Tonks nodded in understanding. "Your parents are Muggles, huh? I don't mean anything by that, you know, my dad's Muggleborn too. Just saying it must be hard not being able to tell them about everything that's going on."

"Yeah." Hermione's voice had grown very quiet, barely audible. "Or protect them."

At home, she had taken to going around in the middle of the night checking and re-checking that the windows and doors were latched. Logically, she knew it wouldn't even keep out a defenseless first-year, let alone a Death Eater, but the mindless routine of it soothed her nerves.

"The Order can put your house under a Fidelius Charm! We just did it for my folks' place. The Burrow too."

"I don't think that's going to happen, somehow," Hermione replied, a cynical edge creeping into her voice. Voldemort had returned a scant few months ago, and one of the first things she had done upon returning home was owl Dumbledore, begging him to put protective wards around her home. She hadn't heard back yet.

Watching Hermione's face grow dark with her thoughts, Tonks took pity.

"Hey, Hermione, what's that smell?"

Hermione looked up, and was shocked to see the other witch's nose transform into a long, yellow toucan beak.

"Hmmm...bird? Nope I don't think so! Maybe something more...porcine?" Her nose now morphed into a pink, whiskered pig snout. It wiggled.

Caught off guard, Hermione laughed out loud. The metamorphmagus entertained her like this for another quarter-hour, and then Hermione went back to bed, her heart feeling lighter than it had in a long time.

The next day they continued cleaning out Grimmauld place. Hermione, Ginny and Sirius worked on sorting some cupboards in the drawing room while Ron and the twins mounted another valiant campaign against the colony of Bundimun living under the couch. By the time Mrs Weasley brought up afternoon tea, neither party was having a lot of success.

Ginny had discovered the hard way that the drawers liked to open and shut unexpectedly, no doubt trying to gobble up some unsuspecting fingers that didn't withdraw quick enough. The twins spent their time dodging streams of foul-smelling acid that periodically shot out from under the sofa, leaving the floor slimy and smouldering where it fell.

Ron kept a safe distance, crouched behind the grand piano. "You two are mental! Why are you jumping right in front where it can see you?"

"Bundimun is a fungus, O brother mine, and fungi don't have eyes!" Fred yelled as he leapt out of the way of another acid stream, rolling across the floor, an empty flask in his hand.

"Well how come it's aiming right at you then?"

"Ah, that's exactly what we wondered. That's why we need to collect some to test in our new Dungbomb line...imagine if they could find the target themselves, you'd never get caught!"

Listening to this ridiculous exchange from across the room, Hermione made a mental note in case she ever had to deal with a mysterious dungbomb attack when she was made a Prefect this year. Shaking her head in exasperation, she went on organizing the contents of one of the drawers. There were a couple of old family photographs, a nasty looking black quill, a broken Sneakoscope that seemed to still be trembling faintly, and an old locket emblazoned with an emerald S on the front.

She picked up the locket, feeling vaguely uneasy. Her fingers examined and prodded it from all angles, but it wouldn't open.

Strange… Hermione thought. Then, the locket flickered, just for a nanosecond.

It had disappeared and reappeared so quickly that she wasn't sure what it was she had really seen. Just as she was convincing herself that it was merely a trick of the light, it happened again.

And again.

As though the thing was in two minds about whether it should really exist or not.

She dropped the locket as though it had turned blistering hot all of a sudden, jumped to her feet and rushed to the door, dread settling heavy in her stomach.

"Hermione!" Ginny called, a question in her voice.

"Lavatory!" she replied, but instead of heading towards it, she turned and ran up the stairs, not caring where she was going, only wishing to be alone to quell the violent tremor of her nerves. One flight, two - how many floors did this house even have? She didn't stop until she reached the very top, panting.

Hermione was remembering riding the tube through London a few weeks ago. She had had a strange feeling then too, like a sense of impending something. She took out her wand just in case, though reasonably sure everyone in her compartment was merely a harmless Muggle.

Clutching it between sweaty palms, she had watched in utter astonishment as it disappeared, just for a second. Then it was back.

She had no idea what to make of it, at all.

For something like that to happen once was odd enough, but twice? It was too much to suppose that it was coincidence. Something was going on.

But turning her considerable mental powers to the problem turned up nothing, so Hermione decided she had to go back before her absence raised any questions. Unfortunately, she wasn't exactly sure where she was anymore; Grimmauld place was larger than any of them had realized. Turning the corner, she found herself staring down a long, unlit hallway lined with portraits.

"Lumos," Hermione whispered. Walking forward, face bathed in the eerie blue glow from her wand, she realized that they were all unoccupied. All, that is, except the one at the very end. From far away it had just looked like a black stain on the canvas, but as she came close and raised the blue beam towards it, she realized that it was the image of a woman. But unlike other wizarding portraits Hermione had seen, the subject of this painting was completely still.

Perhaps it's a Muggle painting? She wondered, but discarded that idea. Walburga Black would never tolerate anything Muggle in this house, would she?

Her eyes scanned the frame and wall for some sort of plaque or title, something that would give her a hint, but then-

The dark woman in the painting twitched. It was just a flicker of a motion: barely there, like a half-remembered nightmare, but no less terrifying for that.

Hermione gasped, panic turning icy in her stomach, and took a step back.

What the hell is going on here? My wand, that locket, now this…

A more rational part of her brain insisted that everything always turned out to have a straightforward explanation, but the primal, the here-and-now part that had always managed to keep her alive in the face of impossible odds - it told her to run.

But she stood rooted to spot and as she watched, the painted lady twitched again, but unnaturally. It reminded Hermione of when you put a broken video cassette into the player and it got stuck on one image. Like the film was trying its hardest to keep playing, but couldn't. The whole effect was somehow incredibly creepy, especially since the portrait's eyes seemed to be frozen, gazing at some specter in the distance.

Behind her, a floorboard creaked, and Hermione spun around, wand raised. Given the inexplicable events of the past few minutes, she was half-expecting something to attack her, but it was just Sirius. His face caught the shadows, looking hauntingly skeletal.

"Sirius…" she shuddered. "What...what are you doing here?" He had never resembled a living ghost more than in that moment, Hermione thought.

"I live here, unfortunately." His voice was light and jovial, but his gaze was... desolate, and cold. "Ginny was concerned. You've been gone a while. And, I should tell you that this house is the last place you should be wandering about. My family's collection of Dark Objects - not to mention their obsession with security hexes - rivals the Malfoys'."

"Sorry. Um, Sirius...what happened to all the paintings? They're blank."

"There's quite a few dubious characters in the family line, as I'm sure you can imagine. Their portraits used to be here, but the Order decided it was a security risk. Pity we weren't able to get rid of my mother."

"And this one?" Hermione gestured toward the painted woman in front of her.

"Ah, yes. Bellatrix." She waited, but he didn't elaborate.

"Is she… is she dead?"

"She might as well be." Apparently, Sirius was in no mood to explain, but Hermione was notorious (at least among the Hogwarts staff) for her curiously and her incessant questions.

"What's wrong with her portrait? I almost thought it was a Muggle one, but she kind of... twitches sometimes."

"I'm not really sure. It's always been that way."

"I read that the reason a wizarding portrait moves is because a piece of the soul inhabits it after death-"

"Oh, I doubt if Bellatrix ever had a soul," Sirius interrupted, his tone icy. "There was something wrong with her, even as a child. But you may be right, in a sense. My mother commissioned this while Bellatrix was still alive, no doubt expecting her to die before it was finished. But she never did."

That might explain it, Hermione though. The way she seems to be here and not here at the same time.

"So where is she now?"

"Azkaban."

As though the word alone had brought back a ghost of the place itself, Sirius shivered violently. He was, no doubt, remembering his own imprisonment. Twelve years, Hermione thought, but it must have seemed like a century. A century living a nightmare.

The injustice of it all was staggering. Over the years, Hermione's wide-eyed enthusiasm about the magical world had slowly eroded into weary disillusionment - and hearing Sirius's story had been a particularly faith-shattering step along that journey. She wondered how long this strange dark woman had been there, having the life sucked out of her moment by moment, and whether it was justified.

Hermione didn't think it likely that she would get anything more out of Sirius just then.

"Fancy a cup of tea? You look like you could use it." She tried to give him her best smile.

He nodded, the ghost of a grin hovering about his lips... and for a second she could see a shadow of the reckless, merry youth he had once been.

As they walked away together, Hermione couldn't help but glance back at the portrait of the woman. She looked so… beautiful? Haunted?