Until Such A Time

Disclaimer: The characters and the world they live in do not belong to yours truly.

Author's Notes: Sorry it took awhile to get this out. I got a job! A real, grown-up, using my degree kind of job as a legal editor. Basically, I have no time to myself anymore. Expect updates to be much slower than usual at least until I can get into my new schedule. Thank you for all the great reviews though!!

On a side note, as much as I adore Ginny and the G/D pairing, I think that by going in depth into her death (which I only did because people were confused), I might have misled some people into believing that I'm heading a certain direction with this story. I usually don't say anything like this about my stories while they're in progress because I don't like to close any doors, but I will say, just so there won't be too much disappointment later on, there's not a real good chance that Ginny will be coming back, time-travel notwithstanding. Sorry, guys. Good people die fighting the fight. It's just life:( That being said, I hope you keep reading anyway, cause I promise you a good story!

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Until Such A Time
by Kristen Elizabeth

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"Oh, thank god you're all right!!" After hearing everything that had happened with Draco Malfoy in Emma's bedroom, Hermione folded her daughter up in her arms and squeezed as hard as she could. "If anything had happened to you..."

"I was never in any danger, Mum," Emma assured her. "Dad was completely in control; he had that guy confessing all these deep secrets. He was very cool."

Hermione smiled into her daughter's hair. "Cool? Yes...your dad is cool." She met Harry's eyes. "I should have known you'd be fine with him. No matter what."

"Don't make me out to be more than I am, Hermione. I let Draco see me. And I left him unconscious without even trying a Memory Charm." Harry rubbed his eyes. "But, I can't change any of that now. The only thing that matters is getting into Hogwarts and finding Molly Weasley before Ron has a chance to use the Serum on her."

"I can't believe he'd do that to Mum," Percy said, staring at the camp fire. "Forcing a Truth Serum down her throat...it's abombinable."

Charlie poked his younger brother's foot with his own. "Ron sold out to Voldemort for a pair of Spanish tits. Believe it."

"Do you have to be so crude?" Lavender asked the oldest living Weasley sibling.

"I don't think of it as crude, I think of it as the whole truth without any sugarcoating."

Lupin stopped the fight before it could even begin. "Hermione's come up with a plan, a good one. We shouldn't have too much difficulty getting into the main part of the castle. Harry...any thoughts on where they might be keeping her?"

"The dungeons, maybe. The astronomy tower? Dumbledore's old office? How the bloody hell should I know?" Harry snapped. "There are rooms in that castle that only come out in the morning. There are chambers that get hidden for a thousand years. She could be anywhere!"

A moment passed after his outburst. "Are you all right, Harry?" Hermione ventured to ask, putting a hand on his arm.

He let his shoulders relax. "I'm sorry. I'm just...getting a headache."

"You've been Apparating too much," Lupin said. "Perhaps you should stay here..."

"No."

"It's not a terrible idea, Harry," Hermone said, softly. "You could stay with everyone...and Emma, keep her safe and rest yourself. Time-travel and too much Apparating...it's a wonder you're still..."

"I said 'no'." Harry looked at her.

Emma kicked a pebble with her shoe. "Don't make him, Mum. I'll be fine; I don't need a babysitter."

"Emma will be fine. Plenty of us are staying," Percy reminded Hermione.

"I'll keep a special eye on her," Lavender volunteered. Neville squeezed her hand and she laid her cheek on his shoulder.

The young girl scowled, turned on her heel and started off in search of her books. Hermione watched her daughter flounce off, a worried frown on her own face. Lupin smiled at her, reassuringly. "She'll be in good hands."

Hermione's frown all but disappeared. Harry had to look away; he cleared his throat to get everyone's attention. "Just who is going?"

"I am." Charlie stood up and rubbed his weathered hands together vigorously. "Never thought I'd get to go back to school."

"I only hoped I wouldn't," Fred snickered. George nodded his whole-hearted agreement.

"Only the essential personnel," Seamus answered Harry's question. "You won't have to babysit anyone tonight, mate."

Hermione pointed to each person as she spoke their name. "Charlie, Fred, George, Remus, myself...and you."

George looked sheepish for a rare instant. "I tried to get enough people together to mount a really wicked attack. But...there aren't many people left."

"You did your best," Lupin said. "The cloak will cover all of us, but it's imperative that we not let any toes poke out from under it or let ourselves be heard by anyone. We're playing on what Voldemort considers his territory; I for one want to get in, get Molly and get out. Anything more than that risks lives."

"Wouldn't it be easier if I went alone?" Harry asked. It wasn't that he felt like being the devil's advocate; he was just finding it very hard to go along with everything his old mentor came up with, knowing how the man looked at his wife. There was something there...and he was fairly certain he didn't want to know what it was. That didn't mean, however, that he could force himself to ignore it.

Hermione approached him, placing a soft hand on his shoulder. "Harry...I say this only because I love you. But the last time you faced Voldemort alone...*was* the last time."

"You think I can't do it?" Youthful resentment flashed in the dark centers of his eyes.

"I think that I can't bury you twice."

It was possible to hear a single drop of water hitting the loch from a dripping stalagtite in the silence that followed. Finally, Harry let himself relax. His head was pounding too hard. And there were too many old, but still open wounds peeking through his wife's composure. He wouldn't be the cause of any fresh ones.

Harry tore his gaze away from Hermione and turned a much harder one on Remus Lupin. "Lead the way."

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She hadn't been able to sleep all night. Not only was the baby kicking her worse than ever, apparently as aware of her father's absence as Hermione herself was, but horrible images of what might be happening to Harry had haunted her dreams. If not for her huge stomach, she would have tossed and turned until dawn.

As it was, she found herself awake and dressed and standing in front of Ron's home just after dawn with a huge plate of freshly baked cinnamon rolls in her hands. True, Ron was not a fan of her cooking, but she had never seen him turn down a sweet in all the years she had known him.

Plus, she had to do something. She had to get out of the house, walk around a bit, anything to keep her mind occupied. Hermione balanced the plate with the help of her round belly and knocked on the door.

It took a few minutes, but finally, the door opened. But it wasn't Ron who greeted her. Serafina, his current fling, answered wearing only one of the sweaters Mrs. Weasley had knitted for her son. Apparently, it was one she had made for Ron when he was much younger; the 'R' worked into the wool was stretched tight across Serafina's breasts and the hem only barely skimmed the tops of her thighs.

Hermione blinked. "Good morning. Um...buenos dias, I mean." The other woman ran a hand through her tousled, streaked locks and yawned. "Is Ron up?"

"He is taking the shower."

"Oh, I see." There was a pause. "May I come in and wait for him?"

Serafina shrugged and stepped aside to let her in. "Sit if you care." She half-heartedly gestured to a sofa cluttered with old newspapers, dirty clothes and dishes.

"It's all right. The baby gets restless if I sit too much." Several painfully long moments ticked by. Hermione set the plate of rolls onto a corner of the coffee table that was relatively clean. "Um...has Ron heard anything? About Harry?"

"Ron has been...how do you say...?"

*Shagging?* Hermione thought. "Occupied?"

"Si. Occupied." Serafina smiled for the first time, reminding her of the nice young girl Ron had brought to dinner only a few days earlier. But then she stretched like a well-fed sex kitten. "He is very much a man."

Nausea that she couldn't attribute to her pregnancy welled up in Hermione's stomach. "I'll take your word for it. So...no one's stopped by from the Ministry? No owls?"

"Hermione..." Ron entered the living room in his bathrobe, a wet towel hung around his neck. "I told you I'd come by to see you, not the other way around."

"Well, I was in the neighborhood..." She picked up the plate. "I brought breakfast."

He moved towards her and took her arm. "You should go home. Harry would kill me if he knew I was letting you walk around by yourself in your condition."

"I'm pregnant, Ron, not terminally ill. And let's stop to deal with this 'letting' me walk around thing. Since when does anyone 'let' me do anything? I'm a grown woman and I decide what I..."

Ron cut her off. "Look, I haven't heard anything, okay? Harry's dropped off the bloody planet and until he decides to surface again, there's not a damn thing either of us can do. Just go home, put your feet up and try not to send yourself into early labor."

"Ron." Hermione stared at him with blank confusion. "What's wrong with you?"

"You come over here uninvited at the crack of dawn looking like hell and you ask *me* what's wrong?" Serafina approached him from behind and slid her arms around his stomach. "Sorry if I can't manage to get all worried about Harry. He has a history of going off and doing stuff on his own without consulting us and he always winds up playing the hero. You're the one who married him; aren't you used to him by now?"

She took a step back. "I can't believe what you're...Ron? Why are you...being like this?"

"Being like what?"

"Like..." Her eyes clouded over. "...an insensitive bastard!"

Serafina's head peeked up over his shoulder. "I wish to go back to bed..." She nipped at his ear with strong, white teeth.

Ron's eyelids fluttered. When they finally opened again, he leveled his old friend with the ice of his stare. "The great Harry Potter, wherever he might be, is doing just fine without us. Go home, Hermione. And get used to coming in second. The only person who's important to Harry...is Harry." He turned around and hauled his girlfriend against his body; his hands gripped her underneath the wool of his sweater. "If you'll excuse us, Mrs. Potter."

Hermione listened to Serafina's sexy laughter as it trailed down the hallway and back towards Ron's bedroom. She remained standing in that same spot for a long time, her only motions were to rub her swollen belly, as though soothing away Ron's completely uncharacteristic words from her baby's ears. Her cheeks were wet.

She left the cinnamon rolls on the table and fled the tiny house that she and Harry had helped their friend move into only months earlier. She needed Harry. There was something very wrong with Ron, far worse than mere jealousy. If only Harry were there...

The baby kicked her hard, but she barely felt it.

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"Percy?"

"Don't ask it, Emma."

"How long has it..."

He snapped his book shut and gave the teenager a long look. "It's been an hour and a half. When you last asked, it was an hour and twenty-five minutes. Next time you want to know, they will have been gone for a hour and thirty-five minutes. Is that all? I'd like to finish this book sometime this year."

Emma tilted her head to one side and studied the older man. "Were you this much of a fuddy-duddy when you were my age?"

"More," Seamus called out from across the camp. When he caught Percy's glare, he laughed and shrugged. "Sorry, mate. You docked points from our own House because I threw one ear of corn at the Slytherin's table. I haven't forgotten."

Percy flipped his book open and studiously ignored them both. With a sigh, Emma glanced down at her own book. She was so close to finding out a way to send her father back to his proper time. So close, in fact, that she imagined it would only take a few more pages of reading. She had the time, the resources...what she lacked was the heart.

She didn't want him to leave.

Harry Potter was everything she had always been told he had been. Not by her mother, of course, but by everyone else who hadn't wanted her to grow up not knowing about the amazing man who had been her father. Handsome. Smart. Brave. Cool. Powerful.

None of that really mattered. What she had latched onto was how loving he had apparently been. Emma could remember all of the nights she would lay awake long past her bedtime, imagining that when she woke up in the morning, he would be at the breakfast table eating bacon and toast and just waiting to give her a kiss on the forehead. Every morning she would vault into the kitchen, just in case. But the table was always empty. And she'd cry, once again, for the man she had never known.

Lying on her stomach, she rested her head on one outstretched arm. It was monsterously selfish, but she wasn't ready to let him go just yet. No one understood, how could they? With all of their memories of him, they could afford to think about the big picture. All Emma could think about was how she'd give anything, do anything, be anyone he wanted her to be...if only she could hear her father say he loved her.

She flipped a page without reading it. No matter how old she got, some part of her would always be six years old, wishing on stars for her daddy.

"Stars," she said outloud. Emma's head shot up. "That's it!!"

With a burst of intellectual energy, an inevitable side-effect of having grown up under her mother's tutelage, Emma frantically pawed through her book until she landed on a certain page. Her eyes whipped back and forth like a tennis ball as she read. "Yes...yes! Of course! Why didn't I think of it on my own?"

She almost stopped reading; the answer was in her hand whether she liked it or not. But something compelled her to keep going, reading further into the section on time-travel theories. As quickly as her pretty face had lit up, it fell. "Oh no...no..." Emma put her hand over her mouth. "I didn't know," she whispered to no one in particular. "I didn't know he could..."

Forcing herself to swallow most of her fear, Emma closed her book, carefully placed it in her waterproof jacket and looked at the camp. Everyone was occupied either reading or cooking a late breakfast. Most importantly, no one was keeping their promised "close eye" on her.

With grace and a little bit of luck, Emma snuck down to the water's edge, conjured up the Bubble-Head charm and slipped under the water without so much as a splash. As she carefully kicked for the antechamber and the loch beyond it, she felt a pang of guilt. Everyone would be sick with worry. Her mother...and possibly her father, would have good reason to kill her. But she had to get there. She had to fix what she had set in motion...before it killed the one person she'd do anything to keep alive.

It looked like she would finally get to go to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. But it wouldn't be to further her education. It would be correct her own unforgivable mistake.

It would be to save her father's life.

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To Be Continued