Author's Note:

WHHHHHHHHAT? A CHAPTER?

The only answer I have for you is that therapy works. I'm writing again. (Go to therapy everyone! Everyone needs it.)

Thank you to all of the reviewers! This chapter is dedicated to all of you, with a special shout out to Rainbow_Foxes on A03. Thanks for lighting the fire under this chapter.

Chapter 2: A Place Like Home

North of Winterfell

First, she screams.

She cries, she slaps the snow and begs, actually begs. She throws her blades as far as she can and they tumble in the snow. She says Harry's name over and over, and she just doesn't understand.

How did she get here? Why here, why home, at long last but too late? Why now and not when she was eight and scared and alone in a vast and metal world?

It doesn't make sense. How could she come here now, when as a child, that was all she had tried to do? When at 15, she had tried apparating to Casterly Rock, hands fisted so tightly she drew blood, and she exhaled before the sound of a hollow pop, but she found herself exactly where she had started, not a hair forward or backward. These are the rules of apparition: you cannot find a place that doesn't exist.

No, Hermione thinks, dizzily, and the moments streak with tears, like failed and dirty windshield wipers. A world without windshield wipers.

—Breathe, breathe, breathe. No, she can't be home, not now, not at last. It doesn't make sense.

Perhaps…perhaps this is something else entirely.

Is this her death? Green light, the veil, a land of snow and Weirwood trees?

Dumbledore had said that death was a train, a platform of loved ones long since gone.

She had hoped for it—that Death would have the screech of brakes on wheels and there, like an apparition in the train's smoke, would be a ginger head. Ron's. Then two, then three. George, Percy. Maybe brown-and-shabby Remus would be there too, and he would gather her in a hug, and she would smell parchment and ink, and when he released her she would see his old white scars melt away. Maybe Remus would look like he had woken up from the sweetest sleep. And then Ron—always impatient, always possessive—would swoop in and kiss her and she would hear bells and train whistles and she would never ever let go of his hand. Then the others would leave the platform, shadows in the mist, but she and Ron would pick a comfortable bench, and wait the sweet years for Harry. They would take turns and guess whether it would be a stooped and gray Harry that would meet them, or whether it would be a Harry round with Mrs. Weasley's cooking. In the end, it would always be she-Ron-Harry, because how could it not be?

It was the death she wanted. The death she earned. The family she earned.

She remembers the green light of the Avada and a train whistle, but no platform, no Hogwarts Express carriage with velvet seats and licorice wands—

Wand. Wand. Where is her wand?

Sweet gods.

She claws through the snow frantically, sifting for golden vinewood. The snow around her looks as if a hippogriff has stamped through it, but she comes up empty.

She tumbled through the Veil and she dropped it she dropped it where is it?

She walks in long, unsteady circles, looping in and out of the Weirwood trees, shivering, until her tears are freezing on her cheeks. Her lashes are stiff with ice, but Hermione knows she must not rub them or they will come off.

It is not until night veils the snow in panes of cooled amber and shadow that she admits her wand is gone.

The unjustice of it. After everything.

Even in death.

Death (for this is Death, she decides, for what else could it be? No one but Harry can survive an Avada) is cold, a hellscape of winter with strange, fiery beauty. Hermione breathes into her hands. She supposes it is her blood—a dragon inside roars—that keeps her from freezing entirely, but perhaps one cannot freeze in their own Hell.

It's strange: Hermione has lied, Hermione has lusted, Hermione has had sex—has loved sex—Hermione has hated, Hermione has killed (over and over and over, and she would yet kill again), but still she did not think she merited this lonely Hell.

She does not deserve this.

If she deserves Hell, Voldemort does and Dumbledore does and Bellatrix does but Malfoy (Draco, she quietly acknowledges) does not.

She would grant him that small mercy.

But perhaps he's in his own Hell, too. If hers is cold and scarlet leaves, a ghost of home, maybe his is too. Maybe his hell is a mudslide through his manor, bits of twigs and rocks everywhere, a whole treetrunk through his window, and he tries to clean his face but his hands always come up muddy. ("Mudblood," she remembers him saying the very last time, when he twitched suddenly in her arms and he looked like a first-year. Small. Scared.)

Grangers may be small and scared, but not Gryffindors or Lannisters. Not Targaryeans. Hermione snorts into her palm, exhausted. What to do?

She asks the stars, trails the constellations with prayers, but the Crone's Lantern is silent. The Sword of the Morning is silent. The Shadowcat, King's Crown, and Sow, is silent.

How funny, Hermione thinks as windshield wiper tears blur and unblur her vision—it's a world away, under different stars, but she swears the tip of King's Crown could be Polaris: shiver-bright and bursting through the North sky.

Hermione startles, a sudden jolt of sound and light quaking her like thunder.

Ice coats her nails, her nostrils. The ends of her hair are stiff.

She must've fallen asleep.

She flails for the source of the noise, and rocketing towards her is a black stallion, white-eyed and heavy-coated. Its rider is swathed in lanternlight and black leathers that flap in the wind, and she is so stunned by this sudden apparition into her private hell that she almost misses the broadsword he swings.

He swipes at her head, and it catches her hair, maybe her ear, she doesn't know, because everything is suddenly whistling—steel to scalp and arctic to flesh, and the horse rears in front of her, forelegs striking the air, and down comes that flashing sword again.

Hermione forgets all thoughts of Hells and Lannisters and Potters and Grangers and dives. A hoof almost collides on her face, near-stomping on her skull.

Her attacker's hood falls. And then, with dreadful trickling alarm, she recognizes him. She knows this face: the almond eyes, the fine chiseled features of the dead Northman carted from King Aerys' throne room. All brothers look alike, if you look for it.

He's a Stark.

Which one she doesn't know, and she doesn't guess, because the sword swipes—

Hermione catches the blade on the cuff of her basilisk-clad shoulder. The blade pops off of the scales with the shriek of steel on glass, but the impact forces her to her knees. She can see the glint of her thrown longknives a good dozen meters off.

The size of a secondary Potions classroom, yet the man stands in between.

"Wildling!" The Stark-man curses, though he sounds as bewildered at her appearance as she was to his.

Wildling? Father had warned her of the stupidity of Northmen.

The Stark-man shouts again, but she misses the words because she is too busy dodging, watching, seeking out a weakness, there—in the horse's left-leaning gait, in the unsure way the idiot's elbow rolls with the blow. An old injury.

One last swing from his sword, and it surely would have halved her at the eyebrows, but she parries with the armor at her crossed wrists, catching the blow and rocking to her heels, and it stings so sharp she worries that the edge has sliced through, basilisk armor or not, cutting right through to her bones.

But she isn't, he hasn't, and so she rockets through her thighs, pushing against him, twisting her baskilisk-scaled arms on both sides of that sharp, sharp blade, and she locks, and pulls, and twists to the right, and it is enough to loosen his grip on his sword.

It skitters far more than she would have guessed, and as he lurches away from his saddle to seek it out, she goes to the opposite direction, towards her longknives.

She has time to grab one.

In that same instant, she hears the whistle of a blade towards her back before she registers the man behind her. She ducks, bringing the blade against his before it comes crushing down, the blow jarring wrist to armbone, and it hurts, but all she needs is an opening—

He's larger, but she's quicker. And more flexible. She angles the blocking blade, and strikes a glancing kick to that injured elbow. He swears, near-dropping his sword. He manages to keep his grip, but his arm shakes.

She's on the offense now, targeting his elbow with every forward strike. This she likes. She's rubbish with defense, anyway—that was always Ron's purview. How to strike, how to wound, how to make them kneel and beg, that was hers.

He falters in his steps, and that's enough for her twist outside his radius and tap her blade against his throat. The Northman stills. When she applies pressure, he drops his sword, kneels. He gasps noisily.

Game, set, match.

With her blade safely against the flap of tender skin between his jaw and windpipe, she takes the time to study him. In another light, in another life, she might call him a Black. Sirius had the same narrow-eyed wariness. A man who served a life sentence in Azkaban, and a man of the Night's Watch, and the pinched horror they share.

Her love for Sirius is almost enough to distract her from the fact that her shoulder will be one bruised rose.

"Where are we?" She demands. "We're North, but how far North?"

He spits redly into the snow. She furrows her brow. She hadn't hurt him that much. Perhaps he bit his tongue in the scuffle? "Westeros, Wildling. You will answer to the King's Law."

And—Hermione's had a very hard day. She's lost her family, potentially died, potentially ended up in hell, and now a fucking Stark won't use his fucking brain.

"I know we're in Westeros, Stark," she hisses. "Do I look a fucking wildling to you?"

Honestly, she's never seen a wilding in the flesh either, but all of Varys' stories depict them as furred savages, so.

He blinks far too slowly at her. "You know me," he says, and she knows she is being measured, so she draws herself to her full height, and hopes his eyes are not on her breasts or lips but on the blood welting above her ear, the scaled pattern of her armor, the snow melting in her breath.

"Aye," she says. "So you better answer rightly."

She pivots the blade just a nick, and it may have drawn blood as it scratched against the scruff.

So? You learn from scars, and it had been a terrible day, one of the worst of Hermione's life. At least he'd learn to answer quickly now.

"North of Winterfell," comes his strangled reply. "About a two days' ride."

Winterfell. The home of the Starks, a clan as cold and gray and stalwart as the stone under the snow. Their sigil was a direwolf, but as he wears none, and by his all-black, she guesses that he is serving at the Wall. At the Night's Watch.

We are the shield that guards the realms of men.

Yes—his face is haggard enough to be so devoted.

"And what would make a Night's Watch Ranger leave his post?" He doesn't startle at his identification as a Ranger, so he must be learning quickly—analyzing her as she analyzes him.

His throat swallows twice before he speaks. "The King rides for Winterfell."

She stares. A king to ride so far north to Winterfell? And who would be King now that Aerys (she shudders at visions of flames as green as beetles)—Aerys is dead. Long dead. She holds onto that thought. He must've been dead for (she does the math quickly: she was eight when she was left, and she's seventeen now) nine years. Nine blessed years free of Aerys. How Westeros must rejoice.

After Aerys, it would be Rhaegar in line, but Rhaegar is surely gone. He ruined the Starks, or it was a Stark who ruined him. And his children are all dead.

(And no, she doesn't tear apart at the memory, even if her veins burn.)

But Aerys still had a son, Viserys, though she quietly believes him to follow the same fate as Rhaenys and Aegon. She imagines Viserys on the throne, his child-face still pinched. Draco had reminded her of Viserys—white-haired and beautiful, in a narrow ferret-face way. There has been a Targaryean ruling in Westeros for 300 years, but perhaps the dragon line is gone.

Her terrible secret burns in the silence.

But if there is a Stark in the Nights Watch, then it was either because a King forced them (like Jaime in his Gold Cloak posting), or it was because there was already a Lord and Lordling in the Stark house.

She had watched the eldest, Brandon Stark, die. Eddard Stark, then, must be Lord of Winterfell. Or a son in his place as he rules—it was Eddard who was leading the charge against the Targaryeans she remembers, though he was on the battlefield, not the attack on the keep. He would have the right to rule by conquest, if not by blood.

She tries to picture a gray-faced King on the Iron throne.

"The King?" And she tries to make it a statement, she really does, but it's inevitably a question, and when he doesn't speak again, she hazards, "King Eddard?"

His gaze falls so shrewdly it has a touch of McGonagall in it. Snow falls between them, and in that time, Hermione knows she has made a colossal, colossal mistake.

Not King Eddard then. Not even close.

"King Robert Baratheon, First of His Name, King of the Andals and the First men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and Protector of the Realm." And oh, how this Stark's lip curls. He has ferreted out that she doesn't quite belong. It was the look Pansy Parkinson gave her on that first train to Hogwarts.

She's shocked at a Baratheon on the throne, she won't lie. They don't have the ancient foothold of the Starks or the clout of the Lannisters, but maybe a lot has changed in nine years.

"And Jamie—Jaime Lannister?" Tears prickle, but she blinks them in the snow. It won't do for her eyes eyelids to freeze. If she's shown her hand, she doesn't care, she presses on.

"Does he still serve this king?" Is he alive, she wants to scream.

He killed Aerys for her. Perhaps Robert Baratheon would have spared him for that.

"Ser," comes the correction, filled with a scorn true to the North, and there's that McGonagall twitch again, for she called him Jamie and not Ser. She knows that's another piece of information this Stark is filing away. "Oathbreaker. Man without Honor! Can such a one serve a King?"

Hermione stares. Moves the longknife even closer. "The King rides for Winterfell, you say? Jamie will be with him?"

The Stark—Benjamin, Benjeen, Benjen…the name of a third son of a great house was never important to know. Whatever his name, this Stark man is puzzling her out. His eyes dart to his fallen sword. "You know me yet you don't know the year, the king, the Kingsslayer—"

She flinches.

"—You fight like a wildling. Or a knight."

She grins at that, and for a clear, sweet moment, she can picture Jamie perfectly in her mind. Her brave brother. Gleaming and golden and alive, and she, like him.

He must be alive; otherwise the Stark wouldn't be so snide, so venemous.

"Jamie Lannister will ride with the King to Winterfell," she repeats, a plan already forming.

This death is no hell, no purgatory. This is a marvel—the once impossible chance to be Hermione Lannister once more, in Westeros once more..

Father, Jamie.

She will be whole again.

Hermione eyes the man kneeling in front of her, plan cemented. "How good are your legs?"

She steals his horse.

She leaves him his shaggy cloak, his swords, his flask, his lantern. Everything but his horse, really. Rangers were made for the North, so he'll travel slow, but she's certain he'll make it out alive, as long as he avoids crevices with shadowcat lairs.

Nudging the weather-worn stallion (she names him Casterly) south to Winterfell, their pace is rigorous. This stallion was Northbred, probably even journeying North of the Wall, she imagines, and Casterly churns through the snow easily. She must arrive at Winterfell before the King leaves, for where the King will be, the Kingsguard goes, and where the Kingsguard goes, Jamie is.

Jamie will find her. She will see his sunstreaked armor first, and then he will see her, soldier to soldier, and then—then Hermione Lannister will return to Father's hall, to Casterly Rock. She will sleep in her scarlet-striped room and hear the sea break on the rocks, and she can rest, a sleep such as she has never known since her fall.

And all will be well.

Author's Note:

Nothing is ever well in Westeros. Poor Hermione, as she'll soon find out.

You may have noticed that Hermione did not question after Robert's queen.

More surprises, including about the timeline, await! Thank you for your support and patience. It's been rough. Thank you. Thank you.