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Snape stalked from the Headmaster's office, his mind a storm of cold, silent fury. Dumbledore's casual, almost amused dismissal of his warnings was maddening. The old man was playing some grand, cosmic game, and he was using children as his chess pieces. It was unforgivable.
He swept through the dark, empty corridors of the castle, his black robes billowing behind him, a creature of shadow and resentment. He needed to get to his dungeons, to the familiar, comforting smell of bitter herbs and simmering potions, the only place where the world made any logical, predictable sense.
He turned a corner. And froze.
Down the long, torch-lit corridor, a lone figure was walking. A girl. She wore a simple, light-colored skirt, and her shoulder-length, dark red hair seemed to catch the firelight, glowing like a halo.
The world narrowed to a single, sharp point of focus. The air left his lungs. His cold, dead heart, the shriveled, useless organ in his chest, gave a single, painful, impossible lurch.
Lily.
The name was a prayer, a curse, a wound that had never healed. He was moving before he even realized it, his feet carrying him forward, pulled by the ghost of a love that had defined his entire, miserable life. He had to be hallucinating. A side effect of the stress, of his argument with Dumbledore. It had to be.
He drew closer. Her face became clearer. Those eyes… those beautiful, brilliant green eyes. But the smile he remembered was not there. Instead, the eyes were wide, panicked, and staring right at him.
Snape's mind, which had been soaring on the impossible wings of a phantom hope, came crashing brutally back to earth. The hair was a cheap, clumsy wig. The dress was ill-fitting. And the eyes, though they were the exact shade of green, were not hers. They were his.
They were Harry Potter's eyes.
In the face of a boy wearing a dress.
Snape's brain simply stopped working. He stood there, rooted to the spot, a statue of pure, unadulterated shock.
Harry, for his part, was also frozen, his own mind a screaming vortex of pure, abject terror. Of all the people in the castle, of all the monsters and ghosts and dark wizards, this was the one person he had not wanted to see. Hermione's "crazy idea" had, in that moment, curdled from a bizarre, impulsive prank into a life-ending catastrophe.
"Women's clothing," her voice echoed in his head. A memory from just an hour ago. He had been so shaken by the Parseltongue incident, so desperate to understand why Snape hated him, that her insane, whispered suggestion had actually started to make a twisted kind of sense. And now he was caught. By Snape himself.
Hermione, you have killed me, he thought, a wave of despair so profound it was almost peaceful washing over him. He lowered his head, his back soaked in a cold sweat, and waited for the inevitable, world-ending explosion of rage.
But it didn't come. There was only silence. A deep, heavy, suffocating silence that stretched on for what felt like an eternity.
Finally, Snape spoke. His voice was not his usual silky, venomous drawl. It was a raw, hoarse, and barely audible whisper, a sound of something broken.
"Potter," he breathed. "What… are you doing?"
Harry looked up, catching a glimpse of Snape's face. It was a pale, bloodless mask of emotions so complex and so painful that he couldn't begin to decipher them. He quickly looked down again.
"It was… it was Hermione," he stammered, the lie a pathetic, desperate shield. He didn't know how to explain, didn't even understand it himself. He subconsciously tugged at the hem of the skirt, as if trying to hide the mortifying sight of his own knobbly knees and the woolen socks he was wearing.
Snape was silent again. He stared at the boy, at the absurd, tragic, and deeply confusing tableau before him. He saw the clumsy wig, the cheap dress, and beneath it all, he saw Lily's eyes, staring up at him from a face that was a pale, terrified echo of James Potter's. The collision of the two images, of the woman he had loved and the man he had despised, was a new and exquisite form of torture.
"Change," Snape finally said, each word squeezed out, as if it were causing him physical pain. "Change it back. Now."
Harry didn't need to be told twice. He turned and fled, not even daring to look back, though he could have sworn that, for a second, he had seen a glint of moisture in Snape's cold, dark eyes.
Snape stood alone in the empty corridor for a long, long time, his hand braced against the cold stone wall, his composure completely shattered. The ghost he had just seen had torn open a wound he had thought long scarred over. And in the midst of his own profound, bottomless grief, a new, strange, and deeply unsettling thought began to form.
Perhaps, he thought, his mind replaying Dumbledore's words from earlier, a friend like Hermione Granger is exactly what Potter needs.
Marvel Universe.
"And you're sure there are no more… surprises?" Hermione asked, her voice a skeptical drawl over the phone.
"Consultant, I promise, the only thing we've collected is what you see on this list," Nick Fury's tired voice replied.
"Fine," she said. "Send the materials to Stark Tower. I'll identify them when I have time."
She hung up, a satisfied smirk on her face. Her new arrangement with S.H.I.E.L.D. was proving to be wonderfully fruitful. But as she was contemplating her next alchemical project, another call came through. It was Fury again.
"What now, Boiled Egg? Did you find a cursed rubber duck you need me to look at?"
"There's a situation," Fury's voice was all business, the weariness gone, replaced by a tense urgency. "A small town in New Mexico. An anomalous event. Coulson is on-site, and he's seeing things that aren't on any of our charts."
New Mexico, she thought, a jolt of recognition shooting through her. 2011. Oh. It's hammer time.
"I see," she said, her voice full of a new, predatory interest. "Send me the coordinates."
"Understood," Fury said, a wave of relief in his voice. "Coulson will brief you. And Hermione… thank you."
"Don't thank me yet," she replied with a grin. "Just make sure my identification materials are waiting for me when I get back."
New Mexico.
Agent Phil Coulson stood in the harsh, unrelenting desert sun, looking at the impossible object in the center of the crater. It was a hammer, intricately carved and radiating an aura of power that made the air around it feel heavy. He was on the phone with the Director.
"Yes, sir, I understand," he was saying. "I'll arrange for transport to pick up the Consultant immediately."
A sound like tearing air and a shower of orange sparks erupted behind him. Coulson turned, his professional calm firmly in place. Hermione Granger, in her strange black robes and holding her purring orange cat, stepped out of a swirling portal.
Coulson just sighed. He lowered his phone. "Never mind, sir," he said. "She's here."
He hung up, the wizard's magic no longer even surprising him. "Consultant," he said with a nod. "Welcome to New Mexico." He handed her a tablet with the preliminary data.
She barely glanced at it. Her eyes were fixed on the hammer. She walked to the edge of the crater and looked down, a slow, reverent smile spreading across her face.
"Well, well," she murmured to herself. "Mjolnir."
"You know what it is?" Coulson asked, a new hope in his voice.
Hermione just nodded, her eyes still on the hammer. "Of course," she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "It's a legend. A myth."
She looked at him, her eyes sparkling with the joy of a true nerd who was about to drop a massive lore bomb.
"That," she declared, "is Thor's Hammer."