Chapter Text
Hermione tried not to gag against the cloth in her mouth as her right wrist throbbed in pain. Dried blood coated her arm from where the cuffs had pierced her skin. Rough hands shoved her into a metal chair and yanked her arms forward onto a table. They awkwardly clamped handcuffs to her wrists, above the magic dampening cuffs, and attached the handcuffs to a ring welded into the table.
She had failed. Everything she had done, all the choices she had made, were for nothing.
Sirius was dead, by her hands. She could have saved him. She could have at the very least gone looking for him in this world knowing he was probably somewhere out there, but instead she’d forgotten all about him. Harry would never forgive her. She’d never forgive herself.
And now she’d let Bucky be captured too because she was too slow, too caught up in her own business to keep him safe.
She’d failed everyone.
Tears welled in the corners of her eyes as she slumped forward.
The door clicked open and Director Fury stepped into the room and pulled out the chair across the table from her. His suit was pristine as if he hadn’t participated in anything that evening. Or he’d changed. He watched her through a narrowed eye and then finally set a pair of bulging files onto the table. “Remove the gag,” he instructed and immediately two hands roughly untied the cloth and pulled it out of her mouth and hair.
Hermione coughed and wet her lips. She glanced up through her lashes at Fury. He was still watching her and analyzing every movement she made.
“Bring some water,” he demanded.
Sitting back in her chair she glanced around the cold, all metal room clearly meant for interrogations. On the wall behind Fury was a large mirror that she presumed must be a window for others to watch and take notes from. Who stood back there, waiting for her to reveal all her secrets? To confess to all her misdeeds? Steve? Natasha? … Bucky?
She was never going to see him again. A deep pain gripped her heart. She’d already lost her entire world and friendships and now … perhaps she’d been a fool to let Bucky in just to be hurt so horribly again. But maybe she deserved this pain.
Fury took the plastic cup from an agent and held it out to her. Her eye twitched but she accepted a sip. The coldness burned down her throat.
“So,” Fury started as he set the plastic cup onto the table. “I won’t lie to you. This evening’s sting operation did not quite go to plan. We were interrupted by another … magical being, yes?”
Hermione’s nostrils flared but what was the point in denying anything at this point? “Yes,” she rasped.
“And you … knew him?”
She gulped back the hurt and nodded. “His name was Sirius Black. He was my best friend’s godfather.”
“He was trying to kill you.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes.” When Fury didn’t ask, Hermione let out a long breath and expanded, suddenly too weary to try to lie anymore. “He fell through the Veil a couple years before I did, so when I came through, I thought maybe he’d be here too, but I never found him. I could have looked harder. I should have. I think it’s likely some organization had him and convinced him that the only way he’d be free was to kill me.”
Fury narrowed his eyes further and chewed over the information she’d just given. Finally, he asked, “Why would this other organization want you dead?”
“Why do you want me dead?”
“We aren’t assassins, Ms. Potter, unlike your friend Mr. Barnes. We have never attempted to kill you.”
Hermione raised an eyebrow and Fury had the decency to look away and clear his throat. “You said you fell through the Veil. What is this thing?”
“In my world it is an ancient magical artifact that is a thin barrier between life and death. One side is life, but touch it or fall through, and you’re dead. Or, at least, that’s what we all thought it was supposed to be until I went through and instead of dying I ended up here.” Flashes filled her mind of purple and red spells, of the splintering and fracturing of reality around her, and then cold rain on her skin and lightning in the sky. Hermione shivered and bit the inside of her cheek.
Fury leaned forward and steepled his fingers. “Your world?”
“My world.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
Her wrist throbbed and a tear finally leaked down her cheek. What was the point in keeping anything hidden anymore? They were going to throw her into some cell or lock her in some medical lab and she’d never get the chance for truth again. She took a deep, aching breath. “My name is Hermione Granger, not Potter. That’s my friend.” She could hear muffled movement from behind the mirrored window and knew that they were probably frantically recording everything and trying to verify what she was telling them. “My parents were dentists and when I was eleven years old I found out I was a witch and promptly attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wiz-”
“If you are going to simply create a long-winded fantastical lie, you can stop right now.”
“I’m not lying. Ask Bucky. Ask Steve; I’m sure he can verify as well.” When Fury simply looked at her, she raised her eyebrows. “Reading heartbeats for truthfulness? Surely he’s told you he can read emotions like that?”
Fury’s fingers whitened as he pressed them against the table. “Continue,” he finally said.
She licked her lips and pressed forward. “There was a war brewing during the years I was at school. Some wizards believed in the purity of bloodlines and felt that those like me, born to non-magical parents, weren’t worthy of magic. A dark wizard named Voldemort, who my friend Harry Potter had defeated years prior, resurfaced and led these bigoted wizards in a bid for absolute power. They called themselves Death Eaters. My friend was the only one who could stop him. It was … foretold, in a prophecy, that neither could live while the other survived. Instead of finishing our schooling, Harry, and Ron, my other best friend, and I went on the run in an attempt to avoid imprisonment and death by these fanatacists and in an attempt to find a means to defeat Voldemort once and for all.
“While in hiding we had a lead about where a certain … item, vitally important to Voldemort, was being kept. So we made a plan to enter the Ministry of Magic while under the polyjuice potion, a foul brew that gave us the appearance of another person. Difficult to make, but I’d done it before. While we were able to find this item, a locket, we weren’t fast enough. The potion wore off before we could leave.”
Fury was leaning forward, raptly paying attention.
“Harry was the most important of the three of us. Only he could truly defeat Voldemort. The prophecy said as much. So it was of utmost importance that he escape. I made the choice to distract, to call the attention of the snatchers to me, so that he might live. I made a scene and fled through the ministry and found myself in the room that held the Veil.
“I knew about the Veil because I’d been in this level of the ministry before, two years prior where I’d almost died from a curse.” Hermione paused and then attempted to point, quite unsuccessfully, to her chest, to the ragged purple scar that she had refused to explain away to the SHIELD doctor. “That was when Sirius Black, protecting Harry from Death Eaters, fell through the Veil. So I knew that if I were to fall through the Veil that I would die. I chose that. I chose instantaneous death, instead of being captured by the Death Eaters because I knew my capture would be a slow, tortuous death of not just myself but also my friend because they’d use me to get to him.
“But I didn’t die. Instead I ended up here.”
“Here. This … this world.”
Hermione nodded. “One moment I was falling backwards into coldness and the next I was spit out into stormy night. I didn’t know where I was or how it was possible. I spent months moving from place to place trying to find a way to go home, but Hydra found me and captured me and … did things. You know the rest.”
“Hardly,” he countered, but didn’t say anything for some time, as if digesting everything she had just revealed.
Hermione looked longingly at the plastic cup of water, but Fury was furiously flipping through his files, ignoring her. “Let me get this straight. You claim to be from an … adjacent world to ours and you came to ours through this theoretically magical artifact called the Veil. And you did this despite believing it was a direct passage to death. You still stepped, fell, or whatever through it knowing, or thinking, you were going to die.”
That was concise, but correct. “Yes.” When he continued to stare at her as if she had grown a second head, she added, “wouldn’t you have done the same? Choosing, I mean, death if it meant your friend, your world had a better chance at defeating darkness if you weren’t there to be used as a distracting leverage against him?”
There was another muffled banging from the other side of the mirror. Fury rubbed at the deep furrow between his eyes. He sighed heavily. “You and Steve Rogers are the same person. No wonder you got along.”
She and Steve were most certainly not the same person, but that was not an argument she felt the need to pursue or correct.
“What about Bucky?”
Fury didn’t glance up at her. “What about him?”
“What are you going to do to him? You can do whatever you want to me, just please let him go. Please don’t hurt him on my account.”
Fury finally leveled his gaze at her fully and then shook his head as if that statement was the most unbelievable thing he had heard. “What’s the relationship between you two? I’ve heard reports-”
“Nothing!” She said, quickly, hands spasming. “Nothing. We … we, uh … after I made my escape from your facilities we ran into and recognized each other from our previous, er, interactions.”
“You were, what, working together for Hydra?”
Hermione blinked at him. Was that really what they thought had happened? A laugh burst out of her, hysterical and bordering on becoming ugly tears. “He tortured me. For months. Every day he, as the Winter Soldier, dragged me out of a cell and tortured me for information under the guidance of the khaki suited man, the Dr. Veit that worked for you – that’s why I ran, by the way. They, like you, wanted to know who I was and how my magic worked. I never gave in. But I saw, during this time, that Bucky existed somewhere within the Winter Soldier. He’d been brainwashed. So when I saw him outside of DC, frantic and confused, not as the Winter Soldier, but as Sargeant Bucky Barnes, I chose to help him.”
“You … chose to help the man who had tortured you.”
Hermione clenched her jaws. Was he not listening to anything she’d been saying? “He’d been brainwashed. They’d forced him to do unspeakable deeds, they …” She took a deep breath. She couldn’t reveal their relationship or it would be used against them. “Yes, I chose to help him. So we simply traveled together and were trying to help each other heal and find answers. That’s all. We just wanted to be left alone.”
Fury looked at her as if he didn’t believe a single thing she said.
“He means nothing to me,” she added, quickly, heart breaking at the blatant, horrible lie. He wouldn’t be used against her. “So you can keep me. Torture me, experiment on me, lock me up, I don’t care. Just let him go.”
She finally laid her head against the table, unable to look Fury in the eyes any longer for fear he, without any super-human abilities, would see the lie for what it was.
~ ~ ~
A few hours later, after many more questions and attempts at catching her in some sort of lie, Hermione numbly followed a group of agents, all carrying multiple guns and knives, through the halls of whatever facility she was in.
In a few moments she’d be locked away. Again.
Her entire life seemed to constantly twist around running and imprisonment. If not one, then the other. And now her time for running was over. Despite the looming imprisonment and fear of what kind of cell they were going to lock her up in, she couldn’t bring herself to regret running from SHIELD in the first place. She’d gotten Bucky. Wonderful sweet moments of love that she had never thought she’d live to get.
The agents led her out of the facility and across a snow-blanketed parking lot. It was still dark out. On the other side of the lot was a tractor trailer with an overly large container hooked up to the back of it. Fury stood at the door to the container and ushered her inside.
She stepped through the corrugated metal door and stilled.
At the far end of the container, lashed to the floor with cables, stood the Veil. Its tattered fabric billowed in nonexistent wind.
Fury stepped in behind her, followed by a small group of agents. “Remove her cuffs.” Her arms were roughly snatched to the side and her wrist screamed in pain, but she couldn’t pay attention to that. The Veil was there, in front of her.
She stumbled forward as her magic came rushing back into her. The Veil’s thin fabric reached for her, unnaturally strained. Hermione lurched towards it and pressed her left hand against the stone arch, cradling her throbbing right hand to her chest. Cold, white magic zinged against her palm. It was such a familiar feeling; it was the magic of her world, what she had been surrounded with for more than six years. But now … now her magic was different. She could feel the warmth (golden, as Bucky liked to tell her) of it beating in her bones, coiling through her and ready to emerge as a separate, sentient part of her.
Hermione shivered.
“As you can see, Ms. Potter – I mean, Ms. Granger – we have this artifact you call the Veil. It has defied all experiments Stark Industries has attempted on it, but if it is as you say it is, then perhaps you may return to your world through it. Would you like that?”
She shut her eyes and gripped the cold archway. There was so much she had missed. Harry. Ron. Crookshanks. Her parents. Performing magic easily whenever she wanted. She desperately missed the entire existence she had created at Hogwarts …
But she wouldn’t be stepping back into the nineties. Almost two decades had passed since she’d been gone. What would she walk back into? The same questions that had plagued her for months swirled through her mind. What had Harry and Ron’s lives become? Did they have children at Hogwarts? Had they moved on without her? Were they even alive? She had to believe they were, that they had successfully defeated Voldemort without her, but what could she tell them about where she’d been for all these years? Could she really tell them that the only reason she had miraculously returned was because Sirius, who they all had believed was dead but wasn’t, had attempted to kill her and now he really was dead because she had killed him herself?
Would they even want her back after what she’d done?
Hermione pressed her forehead against the stones and attempted to slow her rapidly beating heart. Her hair wildly spilled around her face and she wished Bucky were there to braid it one last time.
Bucky.
A different sort of yearning welled in her chest. Could she really leave him after everything they’d been through? There was no guarantee, in fact the likelihood was near zero, that she would ever see Bucky again if she remained in this world. He was on his own. That thought alone made her feel guilty.
But this was her chance to go home.
Hermione pushed herself away from the stone archway and gazed up at the doorway back to her world. The fabric fluttered inches away from her ankles, beckoning her into its depths.
She took a step forward and the cool, familiar magic of home whispered against her bloody, bruised hand.
~ ~ ~
The black and white security camera feed glitched and stuttered back into existence as Hermione stood in front of what, Bucky had to presume, was the Veil. Behind her were multiple agents, guns pointing at her, and Director Fury, arms crossed but staring intently.
Bucky held his breath as Hermione lifted her bandaged left hand towards the strangely billowing fabric.
“You see,” Steve said, a desperate sort of pleading in his voice, “you don’t need to protect her anymore.”
Of course she would choose to go back to her world. He had known this was what they had been working towards for the past weeks. But still, now that the moment was upon him, a wholly uncomfortable sensation gripped his heart, threatening to work its way up his throat.
Flexing his fingers against the metal table, he swallowed heavily, forcing the heartbreak down, down, down.
His handcuffs were strangely magnetic, forcing his wrists together, as if they truly thought that was enough to contain him. He could break the cuffs (and the table, and the walls, and Steve Rogers, though he’d prefer not to) at any moment he felt like it. But there was no point now.
What would he even do on the lamb again? Steve had made it abundantly clear that there was nowhere he could go that they could not find him. He thought he could probably disappear if he truly tried, but what was the point without … without a companion to protect, to share meals with, to keep him from somehow going insane. Without Hermione by his side.
“Please, Bucky. She’s gone now. You can talk to me.”
He’d rather be frozen again than open up to Steve. There was far too much to say so there was nowhere to begin.
Steve had a large gash across his cheek that despite the super soldier serum, was just too deep to heal quickly.
“Bucky … please.”
The fabric shifted strangely on the TV screen and then Hermione yanked her hand away from it. She turned on her heels and he could almost hear her huff of breath as she walked away from the Veil.
She hadn’t stepped through.
He held his breath for one, two, three more seconds, but still Hermione walked away from the object that could take her home.
She hadn’t stepped through.
Bucky stood up. The chair clattered to the ground behind him. Flexing his arms he tugged; the magnetic cuffs resisted, but he was much stronger. The cuffs popped apart and he immediately ripped them off his wrists, ignoring the pain in his human arm.
“What are you doing? Stop!” Steve held out his hands in a half-hearted attempt to stop him. And Steve could, if he wanted to. He was probably the only person who could physically keep him from doing anything. But Steve was still Steve, the soft-hearted, good person from Brooklyn. His friend then and maybe … maybe there had been a potential for rekindling that friendship now, but Bucky had more important things on his mind.
He stepped past Steve and kicked the heavy metal door off its hinges, sending it skidding into the hallway. The guards posted in the hallway scattered in surprise and then turned their guns at him. They had stripped him of all his weapons, but he would get to her.
She hadn’t left. She hadn’t left him.
He wouldn’t abandon her either.
“Stop! Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” Steve stepped in front of Bucky and stuck his arms out.
“Code silver. We’ve got a code silver!” One of the agents spoke into a headset and almost immediately more agents began pouring into the hallway.
The hall had tiled floors and boringly beige walls and ceiling tiles. They were most certainly in some sort of old school SHIELD building which meant the doors along the hallway probably opened up to other interrogation rooms and offices. He just needed to find his way to wherever they were keeping the Veil and he’d find Hermione; behind him the hall ended in a wall, ahead of him it T-ed into another hall. There was only one option and that was fine with him.
He pushed past Steve and was about to bowl his way down the hallway when he felt it. There was a shift in the air, like the beginnings of static electricity. He took a deep breath in and smelled magic. Smelled her.
Muffled shouting and thudding boots echoed from around the corner. Bucky ignored it all, focusing solely on finding one heartbeat in the chaos.
A golden glow bubbled at the far end of the hall and then there she was. Hermione stood, gloriously engulfed in her magic, hair wild around her face. Her eyes swung to him and locked on. Her mouth moved but suddenly there was too much blood pounding in his ears, his own heartbeat too frantic, to hear her. She ran towards him, narrowly jerking away from the outstretched arms of Director Fury and the other agents hot on her heels.
Bucky began to run too.
“Stop! Don’t shoot!” Steve yelled.
A gun clicked and went off and Bucky twisted, throwing out his metal arm, letting the bullet ricochet off. Hermione skidded to a stop and ducked. She lifted her hand and the golden glow of her magic retracted into her.
Bucky dropped to the ground, digging his fingers inches deep into the tiled floor.
Magic whooshed out around him, hot air whipping around his face and flinging agents against the walls and rolling down the hallway. As soon as the magic wave ebbed, Bucky was on his feet and running.
He and Hermione collided, arms wrapped tightly around each other. He buried his face in her neck, breathing in her golden glow. “Why?” His voice rasped out, “Why didn’t you go?”
She gripped him harder, fingers curling into his back as if she too were afraid of losing him. “I couldn’t leave you.”
Bucky had never heard such wonderful words in his life.