Disclaimer: Harry Potter is the property of J.K. Rowling. This story was written for fun, not profit.
Future Imperfect
Prologue
"Imagine there's no heaven.
It's easy if you try."
-- John Lennon, "Imagine"
the future
It was Colin Creevey who had come up with the idea, although he was long dead by the time it came to fruition. At the time it had been a throwaway comment, little more than a joke. That was a long time ago, when the good and decent people had outnumbered the men in black hoods and masks when those same people had still believed that Harry Potter and his allies would somehow defeat the Dark Lord, and prove that hope was stronger than any other force in the world.
They were wrong. Hope wasn't so strong after all.
While Harry fought, rallied and fought on, eventually forgetting a time when hope had existed at all, his wife Hermione remembered Colin's idea. It was insane, of course -- both illegal and very dangerous -- but Hermione had long ago stopped being afraid of insanity, illegality or danger. She attacked her new project with a fervor that in less dire circumstances might have been obsessive.
It wasn't that she failed to understand the consequences. She understood them all too well. She ignored the part of her that was still an academic, that screamed silently that she didn't even know if the project would work, that she was risking far more by embarking on it than by leaving things as they were. After so much pain and fear, academia seemed to be something very far away.
Besides, had she bothered to be honest, she would have admitted that despite the risks, she was fascinated. What she was attempting had never been done before. She would accomplish what others had only dreamed of, and no one would ever know.
If she was successful, Hermione, her world, and everyone and everything she had ever known would simply cease to exist.
The work took years, and it came to consume her. Others fed and clothed Hermione and her daughter, and protected them from the Dark Lord's forces. Dean Thomas, who ran the safe house where her laboratory was hidden away, made sure she was supplied with what she needed. Sometimes he also brought her news about Harry, but Hermione just nodded absently and kept working. She had no time for her husband, or for anything except her project.
When news came one April morning that Harry had been killed, she just calmly handed Dean a list of three spellbooks she needed. She had no time for grief either.
Two months later, the safe house was discovered and Dean Thomas was killed. Hermione escaped. Carrying her daughter under one arm and a tiny silver hourglass in her free hand, she made her way from one questionable refuge to the next, always a half-step ahead of the pursuing Death Eaters. Luck and determination eventually brought her and her precious burdens to the rundown farmhouse where the scattered remnants of Harry's fighting force had taken refuge.
The battered wizards and witches there found supplies for Hermione while she used her considerable skill to put the finishing touches on her project. Hermione never asked where these supplies had come from, or who had died to get them. It was better not to know.
Almost a year after her husband had died, Hermione held the tiny silver hourglass up to the light of a candle and smiled a weary, humorless smile. It was such a simple object, just as Colin's original idea had been so deceptively simple.
"Too bad we can't warn ourselves, huh Harry?"
It was against a hundred unspoken rules, to change what had been. As far as most people were concerned, it was impossible.
Hermione was a tired, beaten woman. She was sick of impossibilities, and she was determined to give her fellow fighters something they had lost a long time ago.
For the first time in years, the men and women fighting against the Dark Lord had a reason to hope for a better future even if it wasn't their own. They were willing to take the risks the project entailed, because this faint scrap of hope was better than no hope at all.
Madam Rosmerta the bartender knew none of these things. All she knew was that on Christmas Eve in the winter of Harry Potter's seventh year, a bushy-haired woman and two small children entered the Three Broomsticks. The woman was haggard and very thin, but she carried herself proudly and wore a strange silver hourglass around her neck.
Her name, she told Rosmerta, was Helen Grandin. She was looking for work.