Disclaimer: This is still Jo's world, just slightly to the left and across the street.

Each day, Minerva kisses Hermione as she leaves for the Department of Mysteries. "This is the day!" Hermione says, crossing her fingers. Minerva watches as she follows a fistful of floo powder into the green flames of the hearth. Then she sits down to tea and biscuits in the library.

They marry in Victoria, make love all day in Taos, and quarrel in Alice Springs. Hermione will not set booted foot on Uluru, no matter how important it is to their mission. Time turns. Danger lurks. Guile cannot hold off the enemy forever.

If her hands shake while pouring, it may be that she is an old woman.

They talk all the way to Sacsayhuamán, stop for tea in Gombe, escape with their lives from Chandraguthi. The adepts of the temple there are under constant threat from a world that begrudges the time, resources, and real estate necessary for the pursuit of spiritual matters.

If the morning hour passes slowly, there are books to distract her.

This morning, like every morning, Hermione kisses Minerva goodbye and tells her, "This is the day!"

On this day, she lets herself be stripped in the clean room, stuffed into a hideously orange pair of coveralls, and sent on to the main laboratory. They are all waiting for her there. She nods to the crew, and they grin back at her in excitement. On a stainless steel table in the center of the room is a small, shiny object. It is slightly larger than the one Hermione remembers from girlhood, but its general shape is the same. A tiny hourglass is surrounded by a gyroscope and a gleaming web of metal perforated with a starscape. It is lovely.

"Right, then? All ready?" She asks. Each member of her team answers in turn.

"The Trace is cast and the monitoring equipment in place, Madam Granger."

"Calibrations are checked and re-checked."

"Wards are in place."

She nods at each pronouncement. Never taking her eyes from the object on the table, she waves her hand. Quick-smart, she is alone in the room. She lifts the object by a golden chain and places it around her neck. The spring mechanism, as small and delicate as the stem of a watch, is cool to her fingertips. One. Two. Three.

"Expelliarmus!"

Clattering. Rustling. Smoke. Something wet and sticky and warm on one side, something dry and smooth and cold on the other.

Hermione thrashes after her wand, realizing too late that it has been ripped from her hands. She opens her eyes in a burst of adrenaline. The pain that greets this move almost sends her crashing back to the ground, but she scrambles against the slick surface fiercely enough to sit up and remain sitting. The dancing dark blobs before her eyes stop moving and resolve into people-shaped blobs.

"Who the hell are you and how did you get here?" Demands the nearest blob in a voice that almost - - almost - - compels Hermione to reply.

Oh, Merlin. No.

She blinks several times and finds that she is staring into the business end of a familiar wand. The wand's wielder vibrates with rage. No. Not rage. Battle fury. Barely suppressed, instinctive high alert. From six long years spent fighting on the front lines.

The vibrating blob resolves itself further into a woman, thirtyish, with a thick shock of dark hair pulled severely back and secured with a wide cloth band, preternatural blue eyes, little but long bone and hard sinew in a tweed skirt, white shirt and plaid vest. She advances silently, almost gliding across the tile floor. "Identify yourself or be cursed," says the woman in a deceptively soft, girlish voice. It is clear which option she prefers.

Hermione Granger stares down the raised wand of Minerva McGonagall and says, "My name is Jane Puckle. You are the Bearded Lady. Take me to Merkin the Magician at once."

The children join them for a holiday in Kathmandu. They leave Beppu two years younger than they arrive. They cross the steppes in a log cabin on chicken legs.

Minerva sometimes allows herself to relive past adventures, to follow her memory across maps of the world. Generally, though, she looks forward to the future. If there is a secret to living happily ever after, it is to be prepared for ever after when it arrives.

Which is why, each morning after being kissed, but before the tea and biscuits, she stands near the center of that great, book-lined room and waits. Just waits. Were someone watching, the watcher might note that Minerva is in her dueling stance. Her feet are shoulder-width apart and she is balanced lightly on the balls of her feet. Her breathing is deep, relaxed, but controlled, as if the precise management of inhale and exhale is the focus of her being. Her hands hang at her sides, resolutely refraining from balling and unballing into fists.

She loves books. Each book is a perfect world. Beginning, middle, and end all exist together-whole. Life, despite metric fucktons of circumstantial evidence to the contrary, is not like that. So she waits ten minutes every day for the thing that may never happen.

When it happens, it happens in far less time.

Hermione emerges at a dead run from a mirage-shimmer of air just this side of Section 808.838 732. The distance from there to here is covered immediately and Hermione slams into her, pulling up at the last moment only enough to avoid toppling and breaking bones. In the moment between emergence and contact, Minerva can see Hermione's face, see eyes fully framed in crows' feet, lips in laugh lines, hair more salt than pepper. Minerva doesn't even have to look hard to know it by heart, because she has seen that face before in circumstances that have graven it in memory.

It takes seven years, nine months and a brace of days in remembered time and something over eleven in subjective time. Possibly three minutes as the library clock ticks.

"Oh, God," Hermione gasps in her arms, with a voice like steel wool and fingers like steel talons. "Oh, God," she repeats. Gulps for air. Tries to shudder down a discordant bark that breaks free anyway and vibrates against Minerva's skin even as Hermione kisses her at neck and jawline and cheek, "I am so sorry, Lintie. I am so, so sorry. Forgive me," she croaks. Then she asks again, whispering. "Forgive me."

A/N: 11/8/2010 - 8/11/2018. Forgive me.