Chapter Text
Hermione
Hermione Granger had, of course, made a list.
Or tried to.
The first one she wrote—within hours of waking up in her fourteen-year-old body—had to be burned. It made her heart race just to look at it. Her handwriting was frantic, half-illegible. Some lines were scratched out and rewritten so many times they’d torn the parchment. One entry had simply read “Burn Malfoy Manor to the ground,” underlined three times.
The second list was no better. Less unhinged, maybe. But still entirely useless.
Checklist for Fourth Year (Version 2):
– Prevent Harry’s abduction from the maze
– Prevent his subsequent torture in the cemetery
– Prevent Voldemort’s return to a body
Noble on parchment. Suicidal in practice.
It was the kind of list you made when you still believed you could save everyone—idealistic to the point of delusion.
Stopping the portkey abduction in the third task was no guarantee that Harry wouldn’t end up in the graveyard—there could still be other contingency plans she had no knowledge of; Barty Crouch Junior was, unfortunately, intelligent and determined—he would undoubtedly have a back-up method for kidnapping Harry.
Not to mention that Voldemort had been pursuing his resurrection for years ; if the graveyard ritual failed this time, what stopped him from trying again? A thwarted resurrection didn’t end the war—it prolonged it.
And maybe worst of all: if the Dark Lord remained bodiless, hunting him down became far more difficult. It’s hard to kill something that can’t bleed.
As if it weren’t hard enough with seven goddamned horcruxes anchoring him to the earth.
The third list was equally flawed.
Checklist for Fourth Year (Version 3):
– Secure the Sword of Gryffindor
– Gather basilisk fangs (or harvest venom)
– Begin destroying horcruxes early
It was heroic Gryffindor nonsense dressed up in clean bullet points.
The sword was locked in Dumbledore’s office. The Chamber of Secrets couldn’t be accessed without Harry. And Hermione wasn’t supposed to know about horcruxes for another two years.
Worse than the associated dangers was the potential for drawing attention. Taking any one of these actions would place her directly under Dumbledore’s scrutiny. And she didn’t trust the man—not anymore.
He had sent Harry into the forest to die.
Not in desperation or as a last ditch effort to salvage the Battle of Hogwarts. But as the endgame in a plan he'd been quietly shaping for years—one that required Harry’s life as a final offering.
She would never forgive him for grooming her best friend—her brother in all but blood—to become a martyr.
No, Hermione had to remain discreet. Unnoticed. Insignificant.
Which led, eventually, to the compromise. Not a plan to defeat Lord Voldemort so much as a stopgap. A placeholder. Things she could do until his resurrection without cracking the timeline wide open:
Checklist for Fourth Year (Version 4):
Operation Make-Life-Marginally-Better:
– Do not let Cedric Diggory die (preferably at all, but
especially
not in front of Harry)
– Learn Occlumency
– Keep Harry alive through the Tournament (again)
– Help Harry realize he fancies Ginny sooner (Yule Ball, maybe?)
– Prevent Ron from turning into a jealous prat
– Encourage better study habits in Harry and Ron (without “nagging”; try incentives?)
– Intervene
sparingly
with fake-Moody’s child-endangerment (ferret incident excluded)
– Break Neville’s wand
– Threaten Skeeter sooner
– Befriend Luna sooner
– Convince Padfoot to stay in a real house with food instead of a cave
It was absurd, really—how quickly her checklist had gone from ‘prevent a murder’ to ‘play matchmaker.’
On parchment, it looked deranged.
But what else was she supposed to do?
She was trapped in this stopgap-of-a-fourth-year with too much knowledge and not enough power, waiting for future horrors to be set in motion so that she could fix them.
If she couldn’t prevent the war from happening altogether, she could at least try to make Harry’s life slightly less miserable. Maybe help Neville get a better wand. Make sure Luna didn’t have to eat lunch alone. Small things. Quiet things.
The first time through, none of them had realized how little time they had. How rare it was to laugh without flinching, to sleep without fear. They’d wasted it on petty fights—on insecurities.
Now she knew better. And so she would scrape happiness wherever it could be found and infuse it into her friends’ lives.
And, anyway, it wasn’t like she had anything else to strive for.
Her OWL scores hadn’t mattered, in the end. No one cares how hard you studied when you’re running from snatchers. The version of herself that had lived and breathed studying timetables did not travel back in time with her.
No. Hermione couldn’t find it in herself to care about exams or accolades or future career aspirations.
She hadn’t survived the war the first time.
She certainly didn’t expect to survive it the second.
Pretending to be that bright-eyed girl again, the one who raised her hand too much and lost sleep over test scores… It was going to be hard.
But Hermione Granger could do hard things.
She just had to stay quiet. Stay useful. Stay alive.
And maybe—just maybe—she would change the ending.
If all went according to plan, Harry would not die during the Battle of Hogwarts.
Because if all went according to plan, there would be no Battle of Hogwarts.