Parallel

2. Herbologists and Gobstones

She raised her trembling hand and turned it slightly. There, on the skin of her pinky, right above the knuckle, was a thin graze of red.

Eve felt an existential crisis looming on the horizon. She wasn't crazy. She wasn't crazy! What just happened? What was happening? She felt like someone had hit her over the head with a cauldron: her mind was whirling with innumerable questions, but she couldn't focus on a single one.

She sat there, gazing at the floor unseeingly, empty of knowledge on how to act or what to do next. Her mind felt like it was lagging, catching up with her current situation: her Time-Turner had crashed onto the floor and exploded, there was a burst of bright light that had made her feel like she was floating, and then she'd physically returned back to the memory, where everything was exactly the same bar the fact that the remains of her Time-Turner were nowhere in sight and she didn't know what to do and she felt like she was going crazy and nothing made sense because how could it just disappear and she was literally just reaching for the sand and what was that light and she was still stuck in a memory with no way out and—

"Hello."

Eve whirled around, the tornado of confusion in her head temporarily pausing, and then she proceeded to whirl right back, turning her head left and right as she looked for someone behind her.

Because Dumbledore had spoken from where he was sitting at his desk, and he was looking right at her.

Eve frowned, staring at the wooden office door, which was located conveniently behind her. There was nobody there. Had there just been a ghost behind her? Dumbledore wasn't going senile, was he? Talking to himself?

Oh, the knocking from only seconds before.

Eve clenched her hands into fists, staring down at the ground. The knocking—the catalyst for everything that had just gone wrong in the past minute. She'd forgotten about it for a moment, too preoccupied with the consequences of said knocking that her brain was still struggling to catch up with the current events. The slow motion play-by-play of the Time-Turner's destruction flew across the forefront of her mind: the THUMP THUMP THUMP from the other side of the door in the memory, the slip of her fingers, the fall of the hourglass, the shower of glass and gold that followed.

Whoever had knocked was probably patiently waiting outside the office at this very moment, unaware of what exactly they'd just caused. Eve swallowed down a sharp spurt of bitterness, averting her gaze from the door and suppressing the urge to internally blame said person on everything that had just gone wrong. Only she was at fault—she was the one who didn't have a tight-enough grip on the Time-Turner, and thus had let it fall and shatter. She was the one who wasn't vigilant enough and let her guard down in a bloody memory. She was the one who was drawn in by the Pensieve and stupidly chose to investigate it. Actually, she was the one to even agree to steal that bloody sword in the first place.

She inhaled, shutting off the self-blame and shoving it inside a spare compartment in her brain. No use for that now. Again, she glanced at the door, which remained unopened. Wasn't Dumbledore supposed to say something like, "Come in!" now? Or flourish his wand and magic the door into opening? Or maybe get up and open the door like a normal person? Saying "Hello" from the opposite side of the door to invite a person in was a bit odd—but, granted, this was Dumbledore, the man who'd started off Eve's first year at Hogwarts with "Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!" The man basically spoke the language of odd.

Eve shook her head and reached up, anxious hands making contact with her chainless neck. She desperately eyed the cracks and fissures between the stone plating on the floor, scanning for any evidence of her Time-Turner's existence at all. Whatever was happening in the memory didn't matter. What did matter was the shattering of her Time-Turner, the object she relied on and depended on—just gone and destroyed; that strange floating sensation coupled with the bright light—which she hadn't even gotten around to stressing about yet; and the sudden disappearance of the Time-Turner's remains, which was just unexplainable—how did that happen?.