The Key

Everyone had secrets. Even Hermione. Almost against her better judgment, she had opened the unmarked owl she'd received that morning, a frown tilting her lips as a heavy old brass key had fallen out. It had clanged loudly against the table, and she'd stared at it. It looked familiar, and yet she couldn't place it. It was bent and tarnished and had clearly seen better days. She couldn't imagine how it could possibly open anything anymore. One of its teeth was missing, and the shaft was bent at an odd angle, as though it had been roughly jammed into something, and then twisted. Violently.

Even now, a year and a half after the end of the war, Hermione knew well the signs of violent jamming and twisting, of keys and humans.

When the key just lay their, neither lighting the scarred wood of the tabletop on fire nor standing up to do a tap dance, she turned her attention back to the missive that had enclosed it.

Eleven o'clock.

That was it. All it said. Eleven o'clock. What happened at eleven? she wondered. But there was not further information.

Picking up the key, she carried it and the letter to her cramped living room, gently shoving Crookshanks off her favorite reading chair, and settled in with her morning cup of tea.

Odd, really. Very odd.

And intriguing, at the same time.

Now that the caffeine was beginning to take hold of her brain and the gears were beginning to turn she had made the obvious, though slightly intuitive, leap of logic that the key was, in fact, a Portkey. Although she still didn' know where it would take her. At eleven o'clock. Which was in an hour.

The real question was, would she be holding it when the time struck? She debated. Part of her, the curious part, wanted to go. To see. That was the part that had always thirsted for knowledge. And the part that told her that she would be a failure to her House, a poor Gryffindor, if she allowed fear of the unknown to stop her in her all consuming pursuit of knowledge.

But there was another part, equally loud, that cautioned her. She had, after all, managed to survive the war. And she hadn't done so by taking unexplained Portkeys to destinations unknown. Quite a dilemma, really.

Forty minutes to go....

The key was sitting there, innocently. And still nagging at her with its sense of familiarity.

But who had sent it? And why? A friend? Someone she knew? A stranger? An enemy?

A Death Eater?

Did they need help?

Or did they seek to do her harm?

Biting her lip, still staring at the key, she picked it up in one hand, holding it closer to her face and tilting it this way and that, trying to jog some piece of the puzzle into place so she would know why this key seemed so very familiar.

At exactly twenty-nine minutes till eleven, the Portkey activated.

Early.

With a shriek of surprise, quickly muffled, she felt herself tugged away, as though something held her by the navel, spinning her through time and space.

Well, she thought to herself, it seems the decision has been made for me....