Chapter 1: Feline Awakening
The first thing she noticed was the sound.
A scrap of parchment sliding off her nightstand was a thunderclap. The rustle of her own hair against the pillowcase grated like sandpaper. Hermione’s eyes flew open, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. Something was… twitching. At the top of her head. A flick-flick-flick against the linen pillowcase that was entirely, horrifyingly separate from any conscious movement.
She lay perfectly still, paralyzed. The Gryffindor dorm room was washed in the pale, buttery light of a Hogwarts morning. She could see the familiar hangings of the other four-posters, the gentle rise and fall of a sleeping form in Parvati’s bed. Everything looked normal. Everything except the symphony of noises crashing against her eardrums and the peculiar, heavy weight shifting on her chest with every breath.
Slowly, dread a cold sludge in her veins, she brought a hand up from beneath the quilt.
Her fingers, trembling, walked up the column of her throat, over her jaw, past her cheek. They met not bushy hair, but something else. Something warm, furred, and pointed. It twitched violently at her touch.
She snatched her hand back as if burned.
No. This is a dream. A very detailed, very bad dream.
Gritting her teeth, she pushed the covers down. The movement revealed another impossibility. A length of tawny, furred muscle, attached to the base of her spine, lay coiled anxiously on the sheet. It lashed once, a betrayed and independent thing, as she stared.
She was out of the bed in one graceless, tumbling motion, her legs tangling in the sheets. She stumbled to the full-length mirror that stood between her wardrobe and Lavender’s. The girl who stared back was a stranger painted in the soft morning light.
Her face was hers, but… sharper. Softer in the wrong places, harder in others. A dusting of faint, golden freckles bridged her nose. And her eyes… her brown, know-it-all eyes were gone. In their place were vast, liquid pools of molten gold, bisected by thin, black slits that widened and narrowed as she watched, breath catching.
Her hair was different. Still a riot of curls, but sleeker, threaded through with bands of darker amber. And then there were the ears. Two pointed, fur-tufted cat ears, the same tawny brown as the tail now puffing up behind her, were perched high on her head. They lay flat against her skull in terror.
Her gaze dropped, and the world tilted.
The simple cotton nightdress she’d gone to sleep in was strained across her chest. The shape beneath was wrong. Not just the size, but the… number. Two distinct curves sat where her breasts should be, but below them, slightly smaller, were two more. Four. The fabric pulled tightly across the unfamiliar topography.
A sound escaped her—not a scream, but a choked, airless gasp. Her hands flew to her mouth, and she saw her fingers were slimmer, the nails slightly thicker, more like translucent claws.
“No,” she whispered, the word scraping her throat. “No, no, no.”
This wasn’t happening. It was a curse. A polyjuice potion gone catastrophically, permanently wrong. A…
The memory slammed into her, bright and terrible as a lightning strike.
The Time-Turner. The sand, hotter than blood. The screaming chain of causality. She had to go back, just five minutes, just to pull the lever, to stop the cabinet from falling, to save Professor Vector from being crushed. The Ministry had destroyed them all, but she’d kept the shards, she’d pieced one together with a terrible, desperate precision. Five minutes. She’d felt the world rip. She’d pulled the lever. She’d seen the cabinet steady. She’d felt the timeline snap back into place with a sound like a giant’s vertebra cracking.
She had come back. She’d gone to bed. She’d…
She’d changed.
This was the backlash. Not a divergent timeline, not a failed mission. The raw, unraveled magic of time had sewn itself back together through her, and it had used bits of whatever was nearby to patch the holes. Mrs. Norris. The thought was hysterical. Filch’s cat had been weaving around her ankles in the corridor just before it happened.
A paw. She was patched with parts of a cat.
Her tail lashed again, hitting the leg of her bed with a solid thwump. Panic, pure and distilled, closed her throat. She needed clothes. She couldn’t be seen like this. She yanked open her wardrobe, grabbing for a standard set of robes.
It was a futile, fumbling disaster. The robes wouldn’t close over her chest. The sleeves were tight across her shoulders. The back was a flat plane where a arched, restless spine now demanded space. And the tail… there was no hole for the tail. She stood there, half-strangled by wool, the tail trapped and awkward, a lump under the fabric.
Tears of frustration burned her strange new eyes. Think. Think, Hermione.
Her hands went to the clasps. She wasn’t the brightest witch of her age for nothing. With vicious, focused tears, she began modifying. A severing charm here, a stretching charm there. She created a hidden, layered opening in the back for her tail, reinforced the front with expansion panels. It was crude. It was ugly. It covered her.
A knock at the dormitory door was a gunshot. “Hermione? You awake? Breakfast is almost over.” Ron’s voice, muffled and concerned.
“I’m—I’m not feeling well!” she called back, her voice too high, thready. “Tell Professor McGonagall I’ll be along later!”
A grunt of acknowledgement. Footsteps retreating.
The silence they left behind was deafening. She was a prisoner in a tower of her own skin. She sank onto the edge of her bed, her tail wrapping tightly around her ankles, a self-comfort she didn’t understand. What was she? Where did she belong now? Not quite witch, not quite beast. A mistake in parchment and flesh.
The door creaked open again. Hermione jerked her head up, her ears swiveling forward to pinpoint the sound before she even saw who it was.
Luna Lovegood floated in, her blonde hair a cloud, her radish earrings dangling. She held a tray with a single piece of toast and a cup of tea. Her large, silvery eyes took in the scene: the torn robes, the wild eyes, the ears flat against Hermione’s head.
“Harry said you might be hiding,” Luna said softly, placing the tray on the nightstand. “He’s very perceptive about these things. Ron just thinks you’ve got spattergroit.”
Hermione could only stare, her mouth dry. Luna’s gaze was not one of horror, but of calm, open curiosity. She drifted closer, and Hermione stiffened.
“May I?” Luna asked, her hand hovering near Hermione’s head.
Hermione gave a tiny, desperate nod.
Luna’s fingers were cool and gentle as they brushed the fur of one cat-ear. A jolt went through Hermione, electric and strange. The ear twitched, then, incredibly, leaned into the touch. A low sound started in Hermione’s chest, a quiet, rumbling purr she could not stop.
“Oh,” Luna murmured, a soft smile blooming. “They’re very soft. And quite expressive. You’re frightened.”
“I’m a monster,” Hermione whispered, the purr stuttering into a sob.
“Nargles often reshape things they find interesting,” Luna said, sitting beside her, not touching her anywhere else. “But they don’t understand our attachment to our original shapes. I don’t think you’re a monster. I think you’re… rearranged. The magic had to go somewhere when you mended time. It’s rather beautiful, in a way. Time left its fingerprints on you.”
Hermione looked into Luna’s pale, unwavering eyes. No pity. No disgust. Just Luna. The profound, terrifying loneliness cracked, just a little. And in that crack, something else unfurled. A warmth that had nothing to do with panic. A sudden, hyper-awareness of Luna’s proximity, the scent of her—like dittany and fresh air. Her golden eyes traced the line of Luna’s jaw, the curve of her lips.
The feeling was so alien, so utterly divorced from anything she’d ever felt for Ron, or for anyone, that it stole what little breath she had. It was a pull, deep and instinctual, and it horrified her more than the tail.
She looked away, breaking the spell. “I can’t go to class like this.”
“No,” Luna agreed, standing. “But you can’t stay here forever. The library might help. The Restricted Section has volumes on anomalous magical metamorphosis. I could help you look. People stare at me all the time anyway. Another oddity beside me might not even register.”
Hermione watched her, this ethereal girl offering a lifeline carved from simple, unwavering logic. The panic was receding, burned away by a sharper, more familiar flame: the need to know, to understand, to fix.
She was Hermione Granger. She had teeth Voldemort. She had rewound time. This was just another problem. A catastrophic, life-altering, humiliating problem, but a problem with variables. And variables could be studied.
She took a deep, shuddering breath. Her tail uncoiled from her ankles. She stood, adjusting her horrible, modified robes.
“Alright,” she said, her voice finding a fragment of its old steel. “Let’s start in the library.”
But as she followed Luna out of the dormitory, every sense was heightened, every shadow was a new dimension. The world was louder, smellier, brighter. And walking beside Luna Lovegood, she felt a terrifying, thrilling tremor that had nothing to do with fear, and everything to do with the unfamiliar, quiet thrum of her own, altered heart.