Rating:
R
House:
Schnoogle
Ships:
Ginny Weasley/Harry Potter
Characters:
Harry Potter
Genres:
Action
Era:
The Harry Potter at Hogwarts Years
Spoilers:
Philosopher's Stone Chamber of Secrets Prizoner of Azkaban Goblet of Fire
Stats:
Published: 09/18/2001
Updated: 03/30/2002
Words: 425,244
Chapters: 21
Hits: 583,257

Harry Potter and the Time of Good Intentions

Barb

Story Summary:
During his fifth year, Trelawney did a Tarot reading for Harry. She told him he would have to make a choice that could "change the world as we know it." At the beginning of his sixth year, Harry chooses, and the world does change. Does it change for the better? If he wants, can Harry change it back? Or is giving Harry exactly what he wants Voldemort's ultimate revenge? The sequel to
Read Story On:

Chapter 17 - The Wand

Chapter Summary:
During his fifth year, Trelawney did a Tarot reading for Harry. She told him he would have to make a choice that could "change the world as we know it." At the beginning of his sixth year, Harry chooses, and the world does change. Does it change for the better? If he wants, can Harry change it back? Or is giving Harry exactly what he wants Voldemort's ultimate revenge?
Posted:
02/15/2002
Hits:
24,437


Harry Potter and the Time of Good Intentions

(or: The Last Temptation of Harry Potter)

Chapter Seventeen

The Wand

Just as Hermione lunged for the telephone, Draco lunged for Hermione, and Harry tried to separate the two of them and claim the telephone at the same time, using his left hand, which slipped and missed. Draco didn't miss, having abandoned his crutches so he had both hands free (he was hopping on his good leg), but Hermione had already started pounding on the "9." Harry grunted with the effort and managed to knock the telephone out of her hands with his elbow; it went flying into a paint pan with a wet roller in it. Luckily, there was actually just a thin film of paint in the pan.

Hermione tried to lunge for it again, but Harry grabbed her around the waist and took her down, then howled at the pain it caused his wrist. Just then he noticed that Draco was rolling on the floor, his crutches rather far from him, holding his crotch. Hermione's foot was in close proximity to it still. His mouth was open in a silent scream, his eyes round and horrified, and Harry made a mental note that she was willing to do whatever it took, so he decided he was too.

He concentrated, trying to convince himself that he wasn't feeling radiating pain from his not-quite-healed wrist, and when his paws landed on the drop cloth and he shook his mane out, Hermione was the one with the horrified look on her face. He ambled toward her with that rolling, casual lion's gait, then lifted his right front paw to swipe the phone out of the paint pan; he nosed it over to Draco, who heard someone on the other end frantically saying, "Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? Please, do you require assistance?"

Draco leaned over a trifle awkwardly and spoke into it, saying, "No, sorry, but thanks for asking." He punched the button to hang it up with a look of intense satisfaction on his face, followed by a glare of intense hatred directed at Hermione. Harry turned to her; she was still paralyzed by shock and fear, staring at him, and he decided that this wasn't helping his case any, so he transfigured back into his human form.

As soon as he did, the pressure his body weight was placing on his wrist made him cry out, and he collapsed on the floor, panting, realizing too late that he'd landed on a spill of wet paint, which now ornamented his pants, shirt and his right cheek and part of the right lens of his glasses. In fact, he noticed now, all of them were liberally spattered with paint after the tussle with the phone. Hermione had been already, but now she was even more so. Draco's crutches were paint-spattered as well. Harry sat up with some effort, realizing too late that he was sitting in more wet paint (which was, after all, the purpose of drop cloths) and he groaned at this.

"Hermione, give me a moment to explain...."

"Explain?" she squeaked, finding her voice. "Explain that you're an escaped murderer? I trusted you! I let you into my home. You can explain to Scotland Yard!"

"Will you be quiet, you bleeding cow?" Draco yelled at her. "You don't know what the hell you're talking about, so just shut it and listen!"

Harry leaped to her defense from pure reflex. "Listen, Malfoy, you can't talk to her like--"

"Oh, I don't want to hear it Harry. So you knew her in your other life. So she was a good shag. I don't give a damn; she's going to be quiet and listen if I have to put my fist in her mouth while she does."

"How did you know that?" Harry demanded. "I never told you that!" A second later, he clamped his mouth shut, looking guiltily at Hermione; he'd as much as admitted the truth of the statement.

Now Hermione was livid. "What?" she shrieked again, turning to Harry. "When did we ever shag? What other life? Tell me why I shouldn't run to the window and scream for the police this very second?" Harry glanced up; the window was already open for ventilation of the paint fumes.

He tried to calm himself. "We're trying to stop the war," he explained, hoping he sounded a lot saner and more reasonable to her than he did to himself. "Draco didn't mean anything by what he said; he was just trying to get you hacked off--"

"Don't make excuses for me--" Draco started to say, but Hermione cut him off.

"Well it bloody well worked!" she exclaimed, standing and brushing herself off. "And what about the escaped murderer part?"

"Well--technically I did get sent to wizarding prison for accidentally killing my mother. She was trying to put the killing curse on Ron Weasley--"

"The tall red-haired boy? He was a prat, but if everyone who's a prat deserved to die for it, the world would have a population of about ten people. And it wouldn't include me."

"Yes, well, why she was trying to kill him is an even longer story I won't go into right now. At any rate, I stopped her by disarming her. When she went flying backwards...." He had to stop; suddenly he felt like he couldn't swallow. "We were in a cave, see," he explained with some difficulty. "And her head...she hit it on this outcropping of rock..." He couldn't go on, turning from her so she couldn't see his face. He felt her soften and approach him; her hand was on his arm.

"I'm--I'm sorry. Didn't they see it as self-defense?"

"Harry's spell caused her death," Draco said, his voice hard. "That's the only thing that matters to them. They only gave him five years, but he was still convicted."

Harry composed himself and turned to face her. "While I was in prison, a teacher at the school who was one of Voldemort's followers killed my sister and my girlfriend and he destroyed my little brother's mind; he's twelve and insane, locked up in a wizarding hospital. My stepfather and Ron's brother Charlie--you met him, didn't you? At the concert?--they're both professors, and now they're also running for their lives. A week ago we felt our Dark Marks activate...." Harry pulled up his sleeve so she could see it; "...which meant Voldemort was summoning his followers. He recruited us because our parents promised us to him when we were babies, but we've been working as spies. That's why my mother tried to kill Ron; I was the one told to kill him, and I didn't do it, so my brother was kidnapped--to 'convince' me--and then he died. My mother was afraid my other brother or my sister would be targeted next if I didn't do as I was told. And there's also the Obedience Charm to contend with...."

"Obedience Charm?" Hermione and Draco said together. Harry furrowed his brow, looking at Draco.

"Weren't you in the cave when Mum told me about that?" Draco shook his head dumbly. "Oh, that's right--you ran for help." Harry thought for a moment; he should have told Draco about this. He must have the charm on him as well. "It's this charm Voldemort put on me when I was a baby--he probably put it on you too, Draco. I wish I'd remembered to tell you. Anything he tells either one of us to do outright--a direct order--if we refuse to do it, we drop down dead. And if we agree--then we will do whatever it is, if it is at all possible. That's the other reason why Mum was trying to kill Ron in my place; I'd received the order to kill him second-hand. She was afraid that if he told me to do it himself--if it was a direct order--I'd refuse and die. So she was trying to prevent my death as well. If Voldemort ordered me to kill someone who was already dead, I couldn't possibly do it, so there'd be no consequence of my either agreeing or refusing."

"You weren't kidding when you said it was a long story. You did, however, say you weren't going to tell it..."

"Sorry. I--"

"Bloody hell!" Draco exclaimed suddenly, as though he'd just woken up. "An Obedience Charm! That's why my dad was so anxious to come to us and give us the orders to kill Ginny and Ron--"

"Were you supposed to kill Ginny?" Hermione said, looking horrified.

"Oh, Draco didn't kill her," Harry said quickly. Suddenly he had a lump in his throat and had difficulty speaking. "Remember, I said it was a teacher...."

Hermione put her hand on her chest and sat down on a drop cloth-covered ottoman, shaking her head. "She was so nice. And I was so glad that she was all right after that car hit her....And your sister too? She was very pretty, and so interested in my cello after the concert, wanted me to demonstrate some techniques...."

"They were killed while I was in prison. My sister was Draco's girlfriend, as well. The moment I received the letter, I decided to escape from prison, and soon after, I did. I've been on the run ever since. We have to go to Dover to get--something. And then we have to go to Wales. In Wales we have to do something--something that will hopefully stop this war. When Voldemort summoned his people last Friday night, I think it was either to facilitate the war, which has been stirred up by Voldemort's grandson, or to tighten their search for me. It's not just Aurors who've been looking for me; it's dark wizards too. I might have been safer if I had stayed in Azkaban...."

"In what?"

"That's the name of the wizarding prison. But now that we've learned that the war is all because of Voldemort--"

"But--but how can I believe you? All right--let's just say I want to. Do I have to take you at your word? Is there any proof you can offer? And how would you stop this war anyway?"

Draco looked at him. "Tell her about the time change, Harry. You know you want to."

"No." He glared at Draco, and felt very close to calling him 'Malfoy' again. "There's something better. In a way, you do have to take my word for it. But would you rather take the word of Alicia Spinnet and Ruth Pelta? Didn't you wonder why Alicia wanted to borrow Sebastian?"

"Who still hasn't come back. One perfectly good owl, gone."

"He'll be back. Don't worry. Give me the phone, Draco." He put his hand out and, hesitating for a moment, Draco gave him the sticky handpiece. Harry in turn gave it to Hermione.

"There's your telephone. Call Alicia or Ruth or both of them and ask them whether you should trust us. We were both feverish--especially Draco--when we reached Manchester, and Ruth brought us some of her great-grandmother's chicken soup; then we went to a Passover seder at her house. And she bought us train tickets. We injured ourselves when we were close to Alicia's--we were heading there anyway, and we'd almost made it. She let us stay at her place for a week getting some rest, and she drove us down here today. We just need to work out a route to Dover, then back here, then out to Wales, that's all. We've come so far and we're so close now...can you help us even a little? We're perfectly harmless, I assure you."

She looked ruefully at him and rubbed her bottom; she must have landed painfully, Harry realized. "I wouldn't say perfectly harmless. I mean, you turned into a lion...."

"Golden griffin, actually. I didn't spread my wings, so you couldn't tell."

"Wings?"

"Yes. And it hurt like hell to put my weight on my right paw--er, hand. But I'm going to need to, because when we're at Dover, I need to fly over the landscape to find what I'm looking for...."

"What?"

He sighed. "Just call them."

Her mouth had grown very thin. "I don't know. How do I know you haven't put spells on them to make them say nice things about you?"

"Because that would have brought the Ministry of Magic running, that's how. You saw how fast Lockhart and Angelina Johnson showed up at the British Library when I was trying to convince you you're a witch. You know what they can do. As it was, we had to leave the park where we were camped because we did do one little spot of magic, and they picked up on it....We've been avoiding magic, so we don't call attention to ourselves." Harry didn't mention that it was actually Draco who performed a Disarming Charm on him, and Draco looked sheepish and like he appreciated Harry leaving this out all at once.

"What do you call turning into a lion, then, if not magic?"

"Golden griffin. It's the Animagus Transfiguration. Doesn't show up on the magic detectors. Neither does the use of magical objects, like our tent, our paper sack, our carafe of tea and the Invisibility Cloak."

Now she looked like she was trying not to laugh. "You have a magical paper sack?"

"Endless supply of food. That's how we've been eating."

She looked impressed and surprised. "Oh. That's convenient. Well--all right, then."

Harry heaved a sigh of relief. "So you will?"

"Yes. I will call Alicia and Ruth, that is. Oh, it's not that I don't want to trust you, but if that eventually turned out to be the world's stupidest move, I'd hate to think I passed up the perfect opportunity to find out that you're full of it."

She punched in a telephone number and held the handpiece up to her ear. Harry could hear ringing on the other end, then a familiar voice saying, "Hello, this is Alicia. I'm frightfully busy right now and can't possibly be bothered to answer the telephone, so I'm afraid you have to settle for the sparkling conversation that this machine provides. Speak slowly and carefully and tell me how to contact you and I just might consider doing it. Remember to sound dishy. Speak now." Harry heard a long beep, and while this was sounding, he thought, She must only ever expect boyfriend candidates to ring.

"This is Hermione Granger. You might have told me that Har--"

Suddenly, Harry put his hand over her mouth. "Don't say our names!" he hissed. "What if someone were to trace us to Alicia's and break in and listen to her messages?" She nodded, and he uncovered her mouth, muttering, "Sorry," as an afterthought. She resumed speaking to the machine.

"Like I said, you might have mentioned your, er, 'visitors' to me when you called earlier in the week. Please call me back as soon as you get this message." She rang off and looked at Harry. "If I call Ruth, will she also be conveniently out?"

Harry glanced at a clock sitting on a drop cloth-covered table. "She's probably still at school. And Alicia--I don't know what I was thinking. Of course you couldn't get her; she just dropped us in front of your building, then went off to meet some friends at the National Gallery. I can't believe how stupid I was to suggest you call her..."

Hermione smiled ruefully. "All right. I'll trust you until I can contact them. And hopefully after that as well, but we'll just see. Don't make me sorry."

Harry nodded earnestly. "Right. Now about that help; neither one of us should probably climb ladders, but I've got one good hand and Draco has two. If we have a bit of lunch first, I don't see why we can't help you paint."

She looked at them uncertainly, then shrugged and said, "Well, you're already covered with it, so the damage is done. Let's go see what's in the fridge. And maybe you can show me that magical sack of yours."

But before they could move an inch, there was a loud buzzing noise coming from near the front door.

"What's that?" Harry said sharply, all of his nerve-endings jangling. Hermione shrugged and walked to the door. She pressed a button on a small cream-colored box with a grille which was mounted on the wall at head-height.

"Yes?" she said into the grille.

"Police, ma'am. You called 999 from this location. Is everything all right?" It sounded like a woman.

She took her finger off the button and said, "Damn! I forgot--" Then she pressed the button again and said, "Yes. Just fine. Thanks anyway. It was an accident." Her voice wavered ever so slightly, and the crackling voice on the other end said, "I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to let me judge that for myself."

Hermione sighed. "Of course," she said into the grille, then moved her finger to a blue button next to the white one she'd been pressing. When she did this, another loud buzzing sound was heard, and Harry could hear it simultaneously through the open window that overlooked the street, followed by the sound of the outer door opening. He grabbed the Invisibility Cloak and threw it on.

Draco spun around, looking for him. "Harry! Where are you? Dammit! I need to hide too!"

"No you don't; your face wasn't all over the Muggle news. Just deal with the cop, all right?" Draco went into the kitchen, and Harry was about to tell him to help Hermione, but he didn't want his voice heard by the cop in the corridor, so he bit his tongue. A moment later there was a knock at the door and Hermione smiled feebly in Harry's direction, then turned to open it. It was a rather young woman, no more than twenty-five, tall and thin with a slightly pinched look about her face and very suspicious-looking eyes. She took off her hat and held it under her arm, revealing very short-cropped dark hair. Her blue uniform was crisp and practically crackled with starch.

"Do you live here?" she asked Hermione briskly, while pulling out a small pad of paper and a pencil.

Hermione was appropriately meek. "Yes, ma'am."

She looked up from her pad. "Name?"

"Hermione Granger." The cop registered no recognition of the name. "Do you have any identification?"

Hermione went to a purse sitting on a table in the corridor leading to the living room, and removed what looked like a passport, which she showed to the cop, who nodded and read it closely, then glanced back and forth between the photo and Hermione's face. Then she managed to worm her way into the corridor and stroll casually to the living room, taking in the drop cloths and ladder and paint.

"Where are your parents?"

"At work," she said, obviously not interested in explaining her living situation. "They're dentists." Technically, she was telling the truth. They probably were at work--in Greenwich.

"So, you're out of school?"

Hermione hesitated. "Temporarily. I'm going back soon." To the best of Harry's knowledge, that was not true. Perhaps Hermione was worried that the cop would figure out that she was painting the flat because she planned to leave the country, and alert the authorities. The young woman continued to pace about, and several times Harry had to move out of her way, trying to walk as slowly and quietly as he could, hoping she would stop moving about soon.

"So," she said, as though she knew she was barely two arm-lengths away from an escaped convict. "Painting, eh?"

Draco emerged from the kitchen without his crutches, hopping just a little on his good foot, and came up behind Hermione, putting his arms around her waist and giving her a smacking kiss on the cheek.

"I am afraid it is all my fault, officer," Draco said in a strange sort of sing-song mock-Swedish accent, his arms tightening around Hermione, who looked shocked. "I vas distracting her ven she vas about to use the televone, and she dropped it in some paint, vich made de nine stick..."

Hermione couldn't move, Draco was holding her so tightly. Harry thought he might be holding onto her for support, since he didn't have the crutches. Hermione nodded at the sticky phone on the table, which the cop bent over to examine without touching. She straightened up, nodding and put her pad of paper back in her pocket.

"Right, then. Try to be more careful. Put the telephone someplace safe while you're painting, hear?"

But Draco had started moving his lips down the side of Hermione's neck, then up again, nipping lightly at her earlobe. Hermione had a glazed expression on her face and her eyes were partially closed. One of Draco's arms was just below her breasts, and his other hand was pressed flat against her stomach. Her breathing didn't seem to be quite normal. The cop cleared her throat loudly, making Hermione jump away from him. Now the cop had a smile curling at the corner of her mouth.

"Well, I can see how you probably became 'distracted.' Just see to it you don't accidentally dial 999 the next time you become 'distracted.'"

Hermione was blushing furiously. "Yes, ma'am," she mumbled, walking her to the door to the flat. Suddenly the cop turned on her heel and confronted Draco.

"What is your name? And where are you from?"

Draco looked panicked for a second; then he seemed to have a red light in his eyes.

"Lars Bergen. I am from Sveden," he said promptly.

She grinned. "Oh, I thought you might be Swedish! Can you listen to this?" And she let fly a stream of something that clearly wasn't English; it went on for several minutes. Draco stood listening attentively, and Harry thought, How the hell is he going to get out of this?

But when she was done, smiling and proud of herself, he grinned at her. "Dat vas vonderfall! Qvite good, qvite good! You must haff been practicing!"

She blushed a little and looked bashful. "I have a pen-friend in Stockholm and I'm getting ready to go visit him."

"Oh, my!" he said. "No von vill know you haff not lived there all of your life!" He put his hand on her back and steered her toward the door, only limping a little bit.

"You think so?" she said breathlessly.

"Qvite positiff. You should not vait any longer; you should go as soon as possible." Yeah, Harry thought. Like right now.

She looked quite happy. "Yes. Yes, I will! Thank you! I mean, tahck soh muck-eh."

"Oh, you're velcome, you're velcome! And tank you for being so concerned about us."

"Vaw-SHOH-good," she said earnestly. Draco nodded at her.

"Vaw-SHOH-good," he agreed, clearly not having any idea what he was saying. She smiled and nodded some more, reaching for the doorknob. Once she was in the corridor and the door to the flat was securely closed and locked, Hermione sagged against the wall near the kitchen, relieved that the ordeal was over. Draco limped over to her from the door.

"So," he said to her softly. "You found that--distracting, did you?"

She didn't answer him, but it seemed that she couldn't look away from him either. He put his hands on either side of her head, supporting himself and trapping her, bringing his head very close to hers. "You liked it, I could tell..." he said breathily, before leaning in to press his lips against her neck again. She threw back her head and made an incoherent noise in her throat, and then he moved his lips up to hers, which opened, and he started moving one of his hands down her body, wrapping the other arm around her waist, then moving his hand below her waist, while the kiss continued and Hermione began to moan softly. Harry tore off the Invisibility Cloak, disgusted.

"Just because I'm invisible with this thing on doesn't mean I'm not here!" he said, unable to keep the irritation out of his voice. Hermione jumped and pushed Draco away, having obviously forgotten that they weren't alone. Harry thought Draco looked odd around the eyes again, and his facial expression was both familiar and unlike his best friend. It looked like he wore an expression borrowed from someone else, someone Harry knew he'd seen. There was a cruelty around the mouth, and something about the eyes that seemed to say, I take what I want. Harry shivered and tried to restore some normalcy to the situation, reminding them that they were going to eat lunch. Suddenly, something seemed to go out of Draco; he immediately appeared to be more relaxed and started talking about how hungry he was for something that didn't come out of a magical paper sack.

There was enough food in the fridge to feed the three of them (leftover Indian and Greek food), and they got to work after eating in the small, neat stainless-steel kitchen (whose walls were already painted white). They spent the afternoon painting. Harry decided to shrink his hair and beard again, as it was very hot in the flat; Hermione was as fascinated by this process as Ruth had been. He noticed that Hermione and Draco seemed to be steering a wide path around each other during the rest of the day.

After it began to get dark, Hermione tried calling Alicia and Ruth again, this time successfully. When she was done speaking to both of them she looked up at Harry and Draco.

"You pass. Ruth wanted to know whether you're both eating well and Alicia told me the pair of you took turns sharing her bed for sleeping and were both perfect gentlemen." She smirked. "Of course, it depends on your definition of the phrase. Something like that could wreak havoc with a girl's ego...."

Harry grimaced. "Come on. We each just lost a girlfriend. After that you don't just--you know. Not after a month, anyway." Harry wondered whether she'd argue with this assessment, considering the attention Draco had been giving to her neck earlier.

She smiled, then clucked at him. "And I thought you might turn out to be the one with the sense of humor." Draco glared at her, and she responded as though he were a dog who'd peed on the carpet. "Don't you look at me like that! Of course, the other explanation is that you're a couple, but then I suppose you would have let her sleep on the couch and taken the bed for yourselves...."

"We are not a couple," Draco growled, making Hermione laugh out loud. She was clearly enjoying needling him.

"You should see your face..."

They cleaned up for dinner; Hermione suggested they go out to eat, but Harry explained to her that he only had sixteen pounds. She didn't seem to relish the idea of paying for all three of them, so they ate food from the paper sack, which she found novel and interesting, as she hadn't been eating out of it for a month. They did a little more painting in the evening, but by nine o'clock, both Harry and Draco were having trouble keeping their eyes open. Hermione teased them about this.

"Planning to save the world, but you can't stay awake past the bedtime for an eight-year-old..."

"Sod off," Draco snapped automatically, as though he hadn't been attacking Hermione's neck with his lips earlier in the day. Harry glared at him. "Er, sorry. I mean--we've been keeping odd hours. Traveling at night, that sort of thing."

She nodded. "Right. Your circadian rhythms are all out of whack. I was just kidding, anyway. You have no sense of humor."

Draco drew himself up. "I have a finely honed sense of humor, thank you very much. You should hear some of the insults I've used on Ron Weasley over the years."

She laughed. "That does sound like fun--" she began, but Harry interrupted her.

"Some other time, perhaps. Can't we just work out the sleeping arrangements?"

Hermione shrugged. "There's not much to work out. I'll sleep in my room, and you two can decide who gets Edith's room and who gets the spare room."

"You have three bedrooms?"

"Well, we had to choose between using our combined money for a decent flat or a decent car. So we have a grotty car we share--I just got my license last October--and a nice flat. We get a lot of guests. Visiting musicians, mostly. I suppose if we'd gotten a very nice car we could let visitors sleep in that, but I doubt they'd ever come again. No one cares if a musician arrives in a hatbox on skates as long as he or she does show up. And technically, it's a four-bedroom flat; the fourth is a practice room. We installed some acoustical tiles on the walls and ceiling, which we're going to have to rip down now. We can attack that problem tomorrow. It's so fantastic to have some help..." Suddenly, Draco let out a loud snore. Hermione bristled. "The nerve--!"

"Hermione--we're both knackered. Cut him some slack. Here; help me wake him so he can hobble to bed...."

Harry took the spare room and gave Draco some of the clothes Alicia had given them so they'd be able to change on the subsequent part of their journey. It was absolutely luxurious to sleep in a real bed with no one else. Harry was reluctant to get up in the morning, but by eight o'clock, Hermione was bouncing on his bed wearing different paint-spattered shorts from the day before and a red sleeveless T-shirt. He put on his glasses, bringing her into sharp focus. Seeing her clearly now, it suddenly occurred to Harry that the sight of her pale arms was decidedly odd.

"What happened to your tattoos?"

"Good morning to you, too." She glanced down at her arms. She was kneeling near the foot of the bed. Harry thought there ought to be a law against being so alert before noon. Especially on a Saturday. "I never actually had tattoos. That stuff was painted with henna. It's long-lasting, but not permanent. A friend did it. What do think I am, daft? Tattoos are dangerous. You can get infections that way."

"What about your piercings?"

She put her hands up to her ears. All of the holes were empty today, but they were still visible. He assumed she didn't want to get paint on any of her jewelry. "I'll have you know that every one of these was done in a proper sterile environment by a nurse. And you'll notice it's only my ears. I would never do my eyebrows or nose or tongue or lips...too risky."

He smiled at her and sat up, the sheet slipping down. "Well, I'm glad you haven't permanently covered up that collection of freckles on the back of your left arm that looks like a smiling face. I always rather liked that..."

She stiffened. "And just when would you have seen that?"

He froze. Oh. I shouldn't have said that.

She wouldn't let it go. "What did that prat mean last night when he said I was a 'good shag?'"

He felt a bit irritable suddenly. "You didn't think he was such a prat when his tongue was in your mouth..."

She flushed. "Never mind that. And he said something about a 'time change'."

Harry stared at her. How could he possibly tell her about their relationship in his other life? She would probably react even more poorly than when he'd taken off the Invisibility Cloak.

"Time," he said musingly, trying to figure out what, if anything, he should tell her. "You're planning to go to America, right? Because of the possibility of war. Well--we're planning to go back in time to change something so that all of this will never have happened. We need to get something at Dover to help us do that."

She stared at him, incredulous. "Change time? You can do that? How far back?"

"Fifteen-and-a-half years."

"What? Are you mad? Think how much you'd be changing!"

"Yes, that's the trouble. Eight months ago--I changed it. And now this horrible world exists. What I'm trying to do is change it back."

She sat back on her heels. "Oh," she said simply, unprepared for this. "Why did you change it?" she whispered. He looked at her desperately.

"To save my mother's life. And to give my sister a chance at a life. My mother was pregnant when she died."

"And now they're both gone," she said quietly.

"It never occurred to me that it wouldn't be a good thing to save someone's life. But now I know; some deaths are necessary. She chose to make a sacrifice, and a lot of good came out of that. Voldemort lost his power and there were thirteen years of peace in the wizarding world because of it. And now this Voldemort--who never lost his power--and his followers are bringing the Muggle world to the brink of war. And it's all my fault. I have to fix the timelines before it gets any worse. This world can't just go on. It never should have been."

She stared into space, frowning. "What's the world like, then, in the life you used to live?"

He shrugged. "Where do I start? The Soviet Union broke up a few years ago. When the Berlin Wall was being dismantled, it was a big party being broadcast around the world. It lasted quite a while. People were selling chunks of the wall for souvenirs, but I rather get the impression the bottom's dropped out of the market. Too many people marketing forgeries, I think. Now there's a unified Germany, and it's part of the E.U.--"

"The what?"

"European Union. Oh, and there's the Chunnel. And, um--some rather awful things, too. But they were just caused by human stubbornness as far as I can tell, not wizards. Like the war in Bosnia--"

"Isn't that part of Yugoslavia?"

He smiled. "I should have known you'd know that. Most people never heard of it before the war. And it's not part of Yugoslavia any more."

"Hmm. I played at a festival in Sarajevo. It seemed peaceful enough to me."

"In this world, yes. There's good and bad in all, times, of course, but the difference here is that this world was never meant to be. It needs to be fixed."

"Hmm," she said again, picking at the blankets with her fingers. "You mentioned my freckles on my arm and your friend mentioned shagging. In this other life, what were we to each other?"

Harry caught his breath. "You--you were my girlfriend," he finally admitted. "Most brilliant Muggle-born witch Hogwarts has seen in a very long time. Most brilliant witch period, really, Muggle-born or not."

"And we--" she said, looking down at the bed and raising her eyebrows. Harry grimaced and nodded, flushing. "I see."

Harry closed his eyes and groaned. "I was afraid of this. Now you feel weird. I didn't think it was a good idea for you to know. I mean, in this time, I'm practically a stranger to you. Now you're thinking about all of things I must know about you, and what I've seen, and what we've done together--"

He opened his eyes to see her sitting, hugging her knees to her chest. "Well, no, I wasn't, but I certainly am now. Thanks a lot."

"Erm--sorry. See? I keep putting my foot in it."

"Oh, don't be sorry," she smiled now, a little bashfully. "It's kind of cute. You're so awkward about it." There was a silence between them. Finally, she said, "Well. You know what I look like without my clothes, but I can't say the same. And right now I can only see half of you." Harry looked down; he hadn't slept with a shirt on. "Mind you, it's a very nice half--"

"Ginny," he said softly, as a reminder. Now she flushed and looked down.

"You loved her very much, didn't you?" He nodded. "Were," she hesitated; "were we in--in love?"

He opened his mouth to answer, then shut it. How could he explain what she was to him? He wished he could say Yes, we were madly in love, but he'd be lying if he did. "I--I loved you very much. You're one of my two best friends in the world, brilliant and principled....and it was wonderful to experience, um, some of the things we experienced together for the first time with someone who made me feel so safe and accepted. It felt so natural to go from being friends to being friends who had a physical relationship. The trouble was--"

"So we weren't in love," she said softly. He shook his head.

"I'm afraid not."

She nodded. "I suppose that's why you were with Ginny in this life." He drew his lips into a line.

"She was the only one who ever made you feel insecure about us in my other life. I think you already suspected I had feelings for her..."

She shrugged. "So why weren't you with her instead?"

He sighed. "I should have been, I suppose, if I hadn't been such a prat--if I'd seen her for herself before someone else did. But I didn't. And then the person she was with did something--he sacrificed quite a lot--in part to be acceptable to her family, so they wouldn't be upset about their being together. There was a lot of bad blood between the families. It would have been more than a little awkward for me to sweep in then and say, 'Oh, Ginny, I'm ready to reciprocate that little crush you had on me when you were ten, and oh, by the way, Draco, I'm planning to make off with your girlfriend now after you put your dad in prison to prove to her family you deserve her, which caused your mother to disown you, and which is the reason why you're now a charity case....'"

"Draco? He was Ginny's boyfriend? But I thought your sister was his girlfriend."

Harry spoke very quietly. "My sister didn't exist in the other time, remember?"

"Oh," she said simply. After a minute's reflection, she asked, "Does he know?"

"Know what?"

"That Ginny was his girlfriend?"

"No idea. I haven't exactly been keen to tell him."

She nodded, grim-faced. "I can see that." She looked thoughtful. "What if you fix the timelines, get the old world back, and you find that Ginny is still with him and you're still with, er, the 'other' me. What will you do? Will you try to get her away from him? Will you break up with me? I mean--"

"--the other you. I understand." He looked down at his hands. "I don't know what I'll do about Ginny. Mostly I just want to see her alive again. To know she's safe. As for us--" He hesitated. "It's rather complex. See, there's Ron to factor into all this..."

"Ron Weasley? What's he got to do with it?"

"Oh, Ron? Only that he's our other best friend--the three of us are pretty close--and he's completely in love with you. That's all."

"Ron Weasley? That prat?"

He grinned. "Yes. That prat. The prat you practically attacked when you found that he hadn't died in a terrorist explosion in the village near our school...."

She raised her eyebrows. "I did?"

He nodded. "And you weren't too thrilled when he and his girlfriend--um--when they--"

She drew her lips into a line. "I get it, I get it."

He let this sink in before continuing. "And," he went on then, "I knew how he felt about you before I--before we--did anything, but I conveniently forgot about loyalty to my friend and--"

"--and behaved like a typical teenage boy," she finished for him. He flushed.

"Exactly. Plus, the last time I saw him I was very hacked off at him because he told me I should break up with you. Actually, it wasn't that so much as the reasons he gave for our being together in the first place. I won't bore you with that, but basically, since he thought they were bad reasons, therefore we shouldn't be together. That and the fact that we weren't technically in love, although we did love each other."

She nodded. "But--since you were with Ginny, it seems that you also thought we shouldn't be together..." she said softly.

"Well--actually--that's true. That's another reason I was so hacked off at him; when it came down to brass tacks, he was right. There's nothing more annoying. Although I don't agree at all with his reasoning, in the end, I suppose we both came to the same conclusion anyway...."

"So," she said, looking very curious. "What's your reasoning, then?"

"What?"

"For why you were with me. I mean, the other me."

He swallowed and looked at her earnestly, trying to imagine she was the Hermione from his other life, trying to imagine how he might eventually say this to her. "We--we needed each other very much. We needed another person to cling to, to talk to in the most intimate of ways....And I think we needed it to be a person we weren't in love with, because otherwise, everything matters so much more, doesn't it? But with friends....We were able to be so comfortable together, so free. I've felt alone all of my life, and suddenly I wasn't anymore, in the most concrete of ways. I'm not sure I can ever really regret anything about what happened between us, although at times I did feel a little regretful that I couldn't say--"

"--that you loved me," she whispered. He nodded.

"And then there was deceiving Ron. I hated that. Worst of all was after he knew, when he had this look, this look that seemed to say, 'Oh, well, what should I have expected, Harry always gets everything and I always get nothing.' I felt so dreadful, and like the world's worst friend...."

They were silent, then finally Hermione stood and went to the door. "Well, I'll go see what there is for breakfast. What do you fancy?" She seemed determined to shake off the melancholy mood, but her upbeat voice sounded a little forced.

He shrugged. "I'll eat anything."

She looked at him wistfully, and he thought it was just possible she wasn't talking about food when she asked him what he fancied. She nodded and left.

* * * * *

They worked all weekend at painting the flat, finally finishing late Sunday night. On Monday, the three of them moved furniture back into place and started helping Hermione pack framed artwork and other things to be shipped to America. When they were eating dinner, Harry said to her, "What's the best way to get to Dover? For people who are walking?"

"Walking?" she said, incredulous. "You do realize that it's about eighty miles from here, I hope?"

"Oh," he said quickly; that was farther than London was from Sywell. Alicia had driven them down in about an hour-and-a-half; it probably would have taken them four or five days of walking and flying, possibly longer with their injuries.

"What do you want to walk for? I can drive you. It should be less than two hours."

He jerked his head up. "You'd do that?"

She nodded, chewing. When she'd swallowed she said, "Think of it as payment for the painting assistance. I'd have been working on the place all this week still if it weren't for you."

Harry grinned at her and resisted the urge to kiss her. "That's great! Thanks. And then, after that, I guess we just have to work out how to get to Wales...."

She rolled her eyes. "I can take a hint. All right, I can take you to Wales after that."

He was horrified. "No! I didn't mean--"

"It's fine. A little less than two hours back here, and then between two and three hours to Wales, depending on the traffic. We might want to do the trip to Dover and back in one day, and then the trip to Wales after a good night's sleep, since that'll be almost six hours round trip, allowing for stops."

Harry hesitated for a moment; she didn't realize that for him and Draco, the trip to Wales was one-way. He nodded. "That sounds fine."

Draco looked at the two of them, that odd expression that Harry didn't like behind his eyes again. He went to his room without saying goodnight, leaving Harry and Hermione to watch television in a living room that still smelled unmistakably of paint. They didn't get up to go to their bedrooms until it was nearly midnight, and when he was about to turn the knob of his bedroom door, Hermione suddenly raised herself on her toes and kissed his cheek.

"Good night, Harry."

He did not kiss her back. "Good night, Hermione," he said softly, and when he was in his room, he closed the door and leaned on it with a sigh of relief.

* * * * *

"Here we are!" Hermione announced, making a right turn onto Park Street. Harry looked around.

"Where?"

"Dover!" she said, grinning.

"Erm, I probably should have said, but--I didn't mean the town of Dover. I meant The White Cliffs of."

She nodded. "Oh, I see. Well, that's only about another fifteen minutes. You want to go northeast, right?"

He hesitated. "Actually, I have no idea. Do you, Draco?" He turned to his best friend, sitting in the back seat again. He'd been very disgruntled during this trip, since, unlike Alicia, Hermione did not have a large expensively comfortable Range Rover. When he first saw her battered yellow 1972 Volkswagen Beetle, he almost bolted. The front fender looked distinctly like it belonged on another car, and the curving pieces of metal over the two front wheels were turquoise blue on the driver's side and kelly green on the passenger's side.

"We're supposed to go to Dover in that thing?"

Hermione had crossed her arms and glared at him. "Would you rather hobble there and back?"

He wasn't using the crutches any more, but he still had a pronounced limp. He had glared back.

"I get the back seat. So I can put my leg up," he had snarled at her.

"Fine," she'd snarled back. Harry rolled his eyes. It was as though they had something to prove, he thought, the way they bickered. He was reminded strongly of Ron and Hermione in his old life--and of how many times in this life Draco had reminded him of Ron and Ron of Draco. He also remembered the way she had immediately responded to his lips on her neck....

They returned to Maison Dieu Road in order to reach Castle Hill Road, and after a little while they saw a lighthouse in the distance, and more than a few cars and tour buses.

"Oh, I remember this!" Hermione said excitedly as they pulled into the car park. "This lighthouse has something to do with Marconi....We're at South Foreland."

"Are there always so many tourists?" Harry asked irritably. She shrugged. He turned to Draco.

"I don't remember a lighthouse, do you?"

Draco looked thoughtful, and for once, like himself. "Maybe the Death Eaters turned it off while we were here."

"That's dangerous!"

Draco looked at him as though he were the world's biggest idiot. "And Death Eaters care about that because--?"

"Yeah, yeah," Harry muttered. Of course Voldemort and his followers didn't care whether Muggle ships ran aground or ripped open their hulls on the rocks. Harry looked at the undulating line of the cliff edge, disappearing north and south, a seemingly infinite thing. He realized that they were probably going to have to comb the coast for miles looking for the configuration of rocks he'd laid out to look like a mouse with a curving tail. He didn't really have any idea where the meeting place of the Death Eaters was. 'Dover' was the best he could do. And how was he going to fly in his griffin form with a bunch of tourists crowding about that stupid lighthouse?

They walked to the lighthouse, then discreetly avoided going in the door with the other tourists and continued walking toward the edge of the cliffs. Hermione put her hand on Harry's arm. "Don't go too close," she cautioned. "It's about a three-hundred-foot drop, and there aren't any railings."

"I know, I know; I'm keeping well away," he said. They walked on the springy grass, scattered with red and yellow wildflowers, scanning the land around them for the sort of rocks Harry had described. He decided rather randomly to begin the search by walking south; if they came to the city before he found what he was looking for, they would return to the lighthouse and start searching north of it. They stayed about fifteen feet away from the edge of the cliffs. In a little while, the lighthouse had disappeared behind a rise of ground (that must be how I didn't see it before, Harry thought). Several times, he investigated a collection of rocks only to discover that the arrangement was a natural formation, or at least, not the one he'd created. When they'd been walking along the cliffs and going back and forth looking at rocks for over two hours, Harry came to something that looked familiar. Something about the way the cliff looked here....

He walked slowly to the edge, ignoring Hermione's terrified howl. He looked down; even though it had been dark, he knew this was it; it was where he'd thrown the body of the heir into the sea. He turned, having a vague idea where the circle of Death Eaters had stood. He thought about where he had stood and started walking away from the cliffs purposefully, then stopped. He looked all around the landscape; there wasn't another human visible on the vast expanse of wind-blown grass, and they were well away from the road. He concentrated hard, feeling the transfiguration ripple through his body, and when his paws hit the ground, he heard Hermione gasp, but he couldn't concentrate on that. He spread his wings and leapt into the air, moving his wings slowly, staring down at the landscape, and soon he was sure he'd found it.

He circled down, vaguely aware of Draco and Hermione running over the long spring grass to catch up to him. He immediately changed back into a human and ran his hands over the one large stone and six smaller stones, pressed into the earth on the night of the winter solstice. It was almost midsummer now, and they had become firmly rooted, scoured by the sea wind on one side only, just as though they'd always been there. With some difficulty, he removed the third rock from the soil just as Draco and Hermione reached him. He could see the dark tip of the end of the wand. He tried to grasp it but it wouldn't come out.

"Help me!" he said to the two of them, and soon all three of them were scrabbling in the dirt with their fingers, moving more and more of the soil away from the wood, until finally, Harry tugged on it and he fell backward, Voldemort's wand in his hand, dirt still clinging to it.

He sat staring at it in amazement. I've got it, he thought. And then, Maybe this is really going to happen.

Suddenly, he heard someone--not Draco or Hermione--cry out his name.

"Harry!"

He jerked his head up; had he been tracked down?

But he saw someone he never thought he'd see again, and someone he thoroughly welcomed seeing. He rose to his feet, feeling like laughing, then ran to meet the tall, thin man with the black hair and hooked nose.

"Dad! What are you doing here?" Then he saw that Charlie was behind his stepfather. "And Charlie! How--how on earth did you know?"

His dad picked up Harry's wrist, thereby raising Voldemort's wand. "This is how I knew. Albus told me about you stealing the wand. It's easier for us to avoid pursuit than you, since we can Apparate--although that can be detected, so we have to run very quickly after arriving somewhere...."

Harry panicked. "Did you Apparate here?"

"No," he smiled. "We Apparated to Dover some time ago, and we've been coming out here every day to see whether you'd made it yet. Sometimes we stayed the night down in the magazine."

"The what?"

"We're not far from Fan Bay here," Charlie explained. "There were a number of underground tunnels built a few hundred yards back from the cliff edge during World War II. The abandoned magazine and battery are still there. It's not bad as abandoned tunnels go, really. They're square and have plenty of headroom, and we swept out some debris."

"I found them by accident when I was younger," his stepfather explained, "when I first became a Death Eater and came out here for--well, you know."

Charlie put his hand on Harry's shoulder. "How've you been, Harry?"

Harry grinned at him. "I'm better now than I have been for a long, long time. My wrist is healed, for one thing." He waved it around; just the day before, he'd stopped wearing the sling and the ace bandage. "I sprained it in Northamptonshire."

"Oh, is that where you went after Manchester?" a superior voice drawled behind him.

Harry spun around; he hadn't heard the sound of people arriving by Apparition, since the sea was rather loud. His heart leapt into his throat. No, he thought. It can't be...

"Dad!" Draco cried, and Harry could see that he was trembling. Hermione instinctively reached her hand out to him and he held it. Standing next to Lucius Malfoy was Barty Crouch, Jr.

"My man went to that park--what was it called? Birchfields?--but he said no one was there. It was the first solid lead we'd had since you sent the Longbottoms on a merry chase to Inverness and before that, mucking around a bit with a golf game in Fraserburgh. My man there followed one of the golfers to a football match, thinking you might be there, but he didn't locate you." Harry's jaw dropped; that was why Roger Davies had been there! "Yes, we discovered the signatures from the wandless magic you did, although until now, I didn't understand how it was that you'd escaped from Azkaban. So. You're a golden griffin Animagus...."

"You saw?" He couldn't stop himself. Then Mr. Malfoy held up what was clearly an Invisibility Cloak; perhaps he hadn't Apparated after all. That was why he hadn't seen anyone else around when he'd decided to transfigure; Lucius Malfoy had been under the cloak; perhaps Barty Crouch, too.

"We tracked you two down," he pointed to Charlie and his dad, "weeks ago, and found that you were coming out here regularly to just sit around and wait. We figured that must mean you expected Harry to be here at some point. So we decided we could bide our time too. Except, you never knew that we were waiting here with an Invisibility Cloak." Harry stared at his dad and Charlie, who looked chagrined that they'd led Lucius Malfoy to him. Mr. Malfoy addressed him now.

"Now, normally, I'd say it's a shame to waste something like the talent to be an Animagus. Especially since you're in the service of the Dark Lord...."

"I'm not," he said, hate roiling through his body.

"Oh, yes you are. You see, what you don't know is that when you were a baby, the dark lord put an Obedience Charm on you. What this means is--"

"I know about the charm, and I know what it means!" he said impatiently.

Mr. Malfoy gave him a lopsided smile. "Oh, you do, do you? Well, if you say you don't want more information, fine, I won't burden you with it...."

Draco pulled his wand out and pointed it at his father.

"Get the hell out of here and swear you will not tell anyone about our being here."

His father looked at his son dispassionately for a few seconds before breaking out into peals of delighted laughter. "Or what?" he said to his son. "I'm here to do several things. First, I shall turn Harry Potter in to the Ministry of Magic. The fact that it has become public knowledge that Barty here is a Death Eater--although no one can trace any crimes to him--and my turning Harry in could very well mean that I will be the next Minister. Once I am, I will have the power to truly serve my Master, who will be the true Minister of Magic. Poor old Crouch is in disgrace, between the revelation about his son, setting dementors on Harry in court and then being unable to apprehend him after his escape. The only thing keeping everyone from showing Crouch the door is the lack of a decent replacement." He held his arms out as if to present himself for inspection to a buyer. "Behold the replacement."

"You?" his son said, incredulous. "The Minister of Magic? More like the Minister of Mayhem..."

"Silence!" he cried suddenly, pointed his wand at Draco, and a moment later, Draco was clutching at his mouth; his lips were apparently sewn shut. He grunted through them at his father, and Harry had the feeling that if he had the power of speech, he'd be using every swear he knew. But everything stayed behind the sealed lips.

"Of course," he continued, his wand pointing at Harry now, "once you're in Azkaban, it will be quite easy to replace you with a decoy and to have you serve the dark lord. Remember though--refuse his orders, and you will die....Plus, I will get to present my Master with his stolen wand. I will be honored above all of his other servants...."

He turned and nodded at Barty Crouch, Jr. They pointed their wands at Severus Snape, Hermione and Charlie; thick ropes shot from their wands, and the three were tied together, facing outward, their arms trapped in the dark ropes that bound them. Their ankles were tied as well. Then both Malfoy and Crouch cried, "Crucio!" and pointed their wands again, Crouch at Draco, Lucius Malfoy at Harry. Harry was vaguely aware of Draco's anguished cry as he sank to his knees, pain blossoming seemingly along his spinal chord, so that it could then be fed into every nerve ending in his body. Draco's mouth was still sewn shut, but Harry could hear a cry resonating in his throat....

He tried to concentrate, to separate himself, but he was out of practice, and hadn't had the chance to separate his mind from his body before the curse had hit him. Finally, with a wrench and a final cry of agony, he pulled away from his corporeal self and looked down at the scene in fascination, seeing once again that slow-motion crackling of light between the wands and his and Draco's body. Draco was writhing on the ground and Hermione, trapped with his stepfather and Charlie Weasley, had terrified tears inching down her cheeks, not understanding what was happening. Then he saw that her face looked like it was getting redder and redder, and he realized now that she looked angry not frightened or sad. She was practically purple with rage now, and suddenly the bonds which held the three of them burst and went flying slowly in all directions (although Harry realized it was probably really happening very fast).

His dad and Charlie didn't waste any time; even though, to Harry, they were moving slowly, it seemed that they still managed to pull their wands out of their Muggle clothes rather quickly, and immediately aimed, his dad at Crouch, Charlie at Mr. Malfoy. In his strange out-of-body state, Harry saw their lips move. Then he saw the wands fly through the air into his dad's and Charlie's hands, saw that Draco was lying on the ground again, panting, his mouth open again, seemingly free from the pain. As he sank down into his body, he was aware of Crouch and Mr. Malfoy flying backwards, and he knew what would happen, but he was powerless to stop it.

He slid back down into his body and time sped up again, and suddenly, Crouch and Mr. Malfoy were sailing over the edge of the cliff, screaming, their faces contorted in terror. Harry knew that, since they were moving, they could not Apparate. He knew it was a drop of several hundred feet onto a beach that was merely a shingle. He knew they could not possibly survive the fall.

Harry jumped when he heard the impact. He stood very still, staring at the air above the cliff where they'd each been moments before. Draco and Hermione came to stand on his left; his dad and Charlie to his right. Evidently, none of them felt compelled to look down at the bodies. Harry turned suddenly and said quietly, "Thanks, Charlie."

Charlie looked a bit shell-shocked, but he shrugged. "You saved Ron's life. And you're my friend. It's the least I could do."

Draco turned now, looking, Harry thought, about nine-years-old. "Th-thanks, Professor Snape," he said nervously. Harry's stepfather smiled at him.

"A good son deserves a good father," he intoned, looking earnestly at the blond boy. "You didn't have one."

Draco nodded, not disagreeing. Hermione shivered, even though it was a warm spring day, and Draco put his arm around her shoulder. She didn't object. Her face was still wet and she still had far more color in her face than she normally did. Harry turned to her. "And thank you for having very bad control over your magical abilities. And a terrible temper," he said, smiling, and she finally smiled back.

Charlie whistled through his teeth. "If that's what she can do without a wand, I'd hate to see her with one."

Harry laughed. "A terror. A complete and utter terror." He grinned at her some more, and now she wasn't flushing because of her rage at Lucius Malfoy.

"Well," his dad said, clapping his hands together. "Albus tells me the two of you are going to Wales. May I ask why?"

Harry looked nervously at Draco and Hermione. "Er--we have to do something--"

"Are you sure you have to do it? Because we've gotten fake Muggle passports for the two of you. We're going to France. Charlie's already sent Ron on ahead. It wasn't safe for him here any longer. He's with his brother Percy."

Harry wavered. It was tempting. Perhaps he could just forge a new life there, try to make the best of things....But then he thought of the war again, and knew he could not.

"We--we may do that. But we have to go to Wales first, we have to at least try to do--this thing..."

His stepfather put his hand on his shoulder. "All right. But please be careful. And here--" he withdrew an envelope from his jacket pocket. "Here's money for your plane tickets. We'll watch for you every day."

Charlie suddenly seemed very urgent. "But right now..." he said, "we need to break out the Polyjuice Potion. Before Aurors arrive and find those bodies. They're sure to pick up on the Cruciatus Curse and the Disarming Charm...."

"Polyjuice Potion is--"

"I know, dad. You don't have to explain."

"Well--all right then. We've been using it every so often. We have some little snippets here and there of various anonymous people's hair." He removed several envelopes from his pockets, and Charlie took a large thermal carafe from the bag slung on his back. He poured some of the viscous liquid into a cup and his stepfather added a hair from one of the envelopes, handing it to Harry.

"You're going to drink something with a hair in it?" Hermione exclaimed, horrified.

"It is necessary, young lady," his dad said to her stiffly. Then he furrowed his brow. "And you are--"

"Hermione Granger," she said, with her chin up. "Muggle-born witch," she added proudly. He smiled at her.

"Good," he said, taking some scissors out of his other pocket. "Cut off some of Harry's hair for me."

"What?"

"Just do it," Harry said to her gently. She did it with her tongue between her teeth, handing his dad the small lock of hair she'd removed.

"Good. Now Charlie and I can masquerade as you. Two Harry Potters running about--who know how to Apparate--should confuse them for a bit."

Harry smiled, then drank the potion. Charlie had poured more in the meantime, putting a hair from another envelope into the cup and handing it to Draco. Harry began to feel strange and queasy as Draco was drinking. The world looked odd, and he realized it was because he'd become someone who didn't need glasses, so he took them off and put them in his pocket. He looked down; he didn't appear to be all that different. The hair on the backs of his hands was very pale, and he thought he saw blond hair hanging down on his forehead.

Draco, however, was changing more drastically. He shrank by several inches and his hair became grey but looking as though it had once been black; his back hunched over and his shoulders and hips broadened, as well as his legs; he was straining against his clothes now. Finally, he grew breasts that hung to his waist, and Harry fought the urge to laugh at his wizened face. Draco had transformed into an old woman.

He looked down in horror and said, his voice no longer his own, "What have you done? I'm an old hag!"

Hermione covered her mouth, but her eyes were merry. "Come on, Nana," she finally said, laughing. "We'll walk you back to the car."

In the meantime, Harry's dad and Charlie had put his hairs in some potion, and now there were two Harry Potters standing before them, identical down to the last eyelash, except that they didn't have glasses. They both squinted a little.

"I forgot about the eyesight," his stepfather--he thought--said with his voice.

"We don't need perfect eyesight to Apparate," the other Harry said.

Harry grinned at them. "How can I ever thank you?"

"Just show up safe and sound in France," the first Harry said, giving him a firm hug. A second later, both Harrys had vanished, and Hermione, a young blond man and what seemed to be her elderly grandmother (a very grouchy old woman she was, too) began to walk over the grass back toward the South Foreland lighthouse....

* * * * *

The drive back to London was uneventful except for when Harry and Draco changed back into their own bodies about half-way through. As soon as he was thoroughly himself again, Draco started telling Harry what he thought of Charlie and his dad turning him into an old woman...

Harry and Hermione listened, but had secret smiles on their faces they wouldn't let him see. It had been funny....

When they rose the next day, after eating breakfast, they packed the tent, all of their clothes, the paper sack and the carafe and Invisibility Cloak into the little boot of Hermione's car. Harry felt his stomach leaping about in him as they set out for Wales. It's finally happening, he thought. We're going to do it...

It felt like a long drive, even though it was only a little longer than the trip to Dover. They started at ten o'clock, so by twelve they decided it would be nice to stop for some lunch. They managed to get off the M4 and drove into a little village called Leigh Delamere. They pulled up outside a smart-looking pub that looked like it was hoping to get a lot of American tourists as customers. They slid into a small table in the back corner and ordered fish and chips and ginger beers while the bar began to fill with locals who didn't seem put off by the shiny newness of the decor.

They took almost a full hour for lunch, having grown very weary of being in the cramped little car. Harry wished he knew how to transfigure it into a Range Rover (and that doing so wouldn't be likely to bring the Ministry or Death Eaters down upon them).

After they'd eaten, Harry looked up at Draco and said suddenly, "Sorry about your dad." They hadn't spoken about it at all. Charlie Weasley and Severus Snape had killed Barty Crouch, Jr., and Lucius Malfoy. Draco's dad was dead.

But Draco shrugged and looked at Harry with hard, opaque eyes. "It's nothing he didn't deserve. I'm not mourning him, I'll tell you that." Harry swallowed; even though he'd caused his own mother's death, and she'd been about to do a terrible thing, he had still mourned her--was still mourning her. He looked at Hermione for help, but she raised her eyebrows as though she had no idea what to do. Harry sighed.

"I just hope they don't trace it to Dad and Charlie. I hope they make it out of the country..."

Draco nodded. "We'd better go," he said briskly, as though afraid that someone might expect him to start crying over his father. They paid their bill and returned to the car. They didn't have far to go now.

Once they'd arrived in Cardiff, they quickly found another pub, and Hermione went inside alone to ask for directions to Godric's Hollow. When she returned, she was silent, starting the car again without looking at the boys or speaking. Harry thought she looked reluctant for the journey to end; her eyes seemed to be a little moist.

Soon the city gave way to a crisp, green countryside. Rolling green hills receded to severe mountains in the distance. It was a perfect spring day, with a periwinkle blue sky dotted with scudding clouds. Harry respected Hermione's need for silence, which, judging by the torrent of conversation not coming from the back seat, was Draco's need, too.

At length, they drove down a bumpy, rutted road, the green of the landscape so vivid it almost didn't seem real. Finally, they saw the cottage in the distance, and Harry's heart felt like it was going to burst from his chest, it was going so fast. When they pulled up in front of it and Hermione turned off the engine, the three of them just sat, staring at the little house for a few minutes before anyone dared speak.

"How long has it been?" Hermione asked softly. Harry was startled by the sound of her voice.

"What?"

"Since--since your parents were killed."

"Halloween night of 1981."

"Oh," she whispered, turning her head to look at the overgrown ruins again. "And no one's bought the place since then?"

Harry thought about this. "I suppose people aren't too keen to buy a property if they're told a murder has taken place there. Mum might have gotten offers, I don't know. I suppose she never wanted to sell. It's abandoned like this in my other life too. I suppose I'd be the legal owner now, both in this life and the other. My aunt and uncle who raised me could have sold it, possibly, and kept the money, but it's possible they didn't want anything to do with something connected to my parents. They thought it was bad enough they had to let me live with them."

She nodded. Harry looked back at Draco, who was also regarding the house. His expression was inscrutable. Harry decided they needed to stop sitting around and start doing something. He opened the car door with his left hand, still not favoring his right, and said, one foot out of the car, "I'll get the tent and the clothes from the boot. Can you get the rest, Draco?"

"Huh?" His best friend turned his head to look at Harry, and he saw a brief flash of red. Not yet, Riddle, he thought. You can't have him yet. "Oh, right. Yeah, I can do that."

Once he'd retrieved the tent and bag of clothes, Harry looked at the house. At first he'd thought they could set up the tent inside the roofless walls, but now he decided that might not be too smart. If someone came here looking for him, being right inside the house would just make it too easy. He looked at the copse of trees that began about five yards from the house's chimney. "We'll set up the tent just inside those trees. Perhaps ten or twenty feet in. That way we'll be close to it, but we'll have cover."

Draco nodded and followed Harry into the trees. Hermione followed the two of them somewhat aimlessly, watching them set up the tent while nibbling nervously at her fingernails and sometimes twirling a piece of hair between her fingers. When the tent was up, they carried the gear inside. Hermione didn't follow. Harry emerged from the tent after a few minutes.

"Draco's going to have a lie-down, he says. I'll walk you back to the car." She nodded and walked back through the trees with him. They swung their arms while they walked, and when their hands collided, she reached for his, and he remembered when they'd done the same thing on the way to the hospital wing when Ron had broken his leg in fifth year. They proceeded to the car hand in hand.

Harry opened her door for her and was about to help her in, but she turned to him, standing very close, looking up into his face with a strange expression in her eyes. "Harry," she said softly, "are you sure you don't want me to stay?"

He looked down at her, thinking how comforting she could be, how nice it would be for her to stay....and how dangerous for her if Riddle emerged from the diary and found a "Mudblood" present. It was lucky for her Lucius Malfoy had simply bound her to his stepfather and Charlie instead of killing her on the spot. It was dangerous for him, as well, since Riddle would know he'd lied about quite a lot if she were there.

"I would like you to, if I'm being honest," he said, putting his hand on her elbow, "but it wouldn't be safe for you. You need to behave as though everything's going to go on as it has done. You need to pack your bags and fly to America, and buy your mum a birthday card, and make plans for a nice trip to some beach this summer....We don't know whether this is going to work, after all. There's no guarantee. You can't just assume."

She nodded, then slid her arms around his waist, surprising him, and also pillowed her head on his chest. "Goodbye, Harry," she whispered into his shirt. "I'll never forget you."

He wrapped his arms around her, wishing he didn't have to let her go. He was worried about Draco and nervous about Riddle. But that was exactly why he had to make her go. She had to be far away, where she'd be safe. He leaned down and brushed his lips against her cheek, but then she turned her head and he felt far softer skin. Another pair of lips. He drew his head back immediately.

"Harry," she whispered. "It doesn't have to mean that you're not still mourning Ginny. It's just--something I wanted to do before I said goodbye for the last time. Please?"

He looked down at her pleading eyes; she seemed so much more vulnerable in this life than in his other one. She hadn't been hardened by repeated encounters with dark magic in this life. She hadn't been kidnapped by dark wizards in Bulgaria, and she hadn't put up a wall of protection around herself as a result. He gave her a small smile and cupped her cheek in his hand.

"All right. Just a quick kiss." He leaned down and caught those soft lips with his own once more and felt as though he'd traveled through time again as she slowly opened her mouth and he felt her body go liquid in his arms. After an agonized minute, during which he felt like every hair on his body was standing to attention, he tried to pull away gently, but her arms were locked around his neck firmly. Finally, he had to put up his hands and grasp her wrists and take them from around him.

He stepped back and looked at her. "Maybe--maybe if this doesn't work, I'll come to America, look you up. After going to France, that is."

She smiled. "That would be nice." That's all she said. She entered the car and closed the door, started the car and moved it down the road without once looking at him again. Harry touched his lips with his fingers. Well, he remembered, Hermione always was a good kisser...

He returned to the copse of trees and hesitated before entering the tent. The arboreal world around him was teeming with life; squirrels and foxes ran through the underbrush, birds of all sorts twittered from branch to branch, carrying paraphernalia for building nests. He saw a large spider sitting on a web slung between two thorny bushes, the fine strands glittering with moisture that made it seem like a beautiful jewel. It was a perfect spring day, and he had to go into a tent and wait for Draco to be ready to write in a diary. There was something very wrong here....

When he entered, Draco was already sitting at the table writing. Harry thought, He should have waited, but then he realized how exhausted he was and lay down on the bottom bunk where he had thought Draco would be resting. Draco turned his head to look at him.

"Don't you want to see what I'm writing?"

"S'Okay," he said with a tired wave of his hand. "We're here now. I trust you."

Draco still looked at him, then shrugged, turning back to the diary. When Harry awoke much later, they had some lunch, and then Draco spent the afternoon writing in the diary some more. After that they ate dinner, wrote some more, and when it became too dark to see, they went to bed, to conserve energy (the torch was to be used now only for an emergency).

The next day they found a stream about ten minutes walk away which seemed to be in an area where other humans never came. They decided to make this their outdoor bathing room, and Harry was glad to be able to start each day clean again. Now that it was May, the weather wasn't an impediment to washing outdoors. (Unless it rained.)

For three days they rose, bathed, had Draco write in the diary, ate breakfast, lunch and dinner to break up the long bouts of writing, then went to bed when it became too dark to see. Each day Draco looked weaker and weaker. Finally, Harry couldn't take it any more. He had to ask him before it became too late and Draco was too weak to answer.

"Draco," he whispered in the dark on the fourth night, "why don't you try to use Voldemort's wand to do the spell with me? Then when the timeline changes back, you'll remember this life. You'll remember Jamie..."

He heard a choking noise and thought his best friend might be crying.

"But I don't want to remember..."

"Draco," he said again, imploringly, "Why are you doing this?"

He didn't answer right away. "Doing what?" he finally said. His voice sounded very loud in the dark, somehow.

"Writing in the diary. Sacrificing yourself."

"You know why, Harry. So you can fix the timelines."

"But--what I mean is--" he stammered. "You said you were no friend; that you'd done something awful. And I've thought and thought about it, and I can't for the life of me figure out what could have been so bad."

Draco was silent. "You'll hate me if I tell you," he finally said.

"No I won't. And even if it's as dreadful as you say--you're obviously trying to make up for it."

"No matter what I do, Harry, even this, there's never really any making up for it. You don't understand...."

"Then try to get me to understand. What were you talking about?"

Silence again. Then Draco's voice, slow and quiet. "My dad was afraid someone would target my mum. Which turned out to be right. He wanted to make sure that if Ginny didn't write in the diary, there'd still be a way to get her and leave me in the clear. So he sent me this egg..."

"An egg?"

"Yeah. Supposed to be a basilisk egg. I wasn't too thrilled about that. I mean, what if I was the one there when it hatched? One look and I'd be dead. So I asked my dad how to make sure the thing attacks a particular person instead of me, figuring there wouldn't really be a way. But he comes back and says, there is a way. He said I had to get some of her hair, bore a small hole in the shell, and put the hair in. The hair would act like a homing device and the creature would zero in on that person if they were anywhere in the vicinity. Of course, it still wouldn't stop the thing from attacking other people--" Harry remembered the merpeople in the lake fighting the creature "--but if the person whose hair was put in the egg was around, it would definitely go after that person. Well, I put her hair in, but as soon as I did, I had second thoughts, and I tried to get it out again. I couldn't. I was afraid to break the egg to get the hair out, in case the thing was really close to being ready to hatch, so I decided to chuck it in the lake and claim to my dad that it broke or was discovered and thrown out or something. I was so relieved to get rid of the stupid thing...."

Harry drew in his breath. "So you--"

Draco sounded like he might be crying. "I was trying to throw it away! Honestly! I never meant for Ginny to be hurt. Like I said, as soon as I'd put her hair in it I decided I had to get rid of it. I thought, What the hell am I doing? Trying to get my best friend's girl killed? I didn't know the stupid thing would get--I don't know--stuff in it once it was underwater that would change it into that weird creature you described in the lake. I guess that happened because of the hole I'd already bored in the shell...."

Harry tried to keep his voice steady, unsuccessfully. "Well," he said, his voice wavering, "normally a basilisk's egg is hatched under a hen. Who knows what kind of creature decided to take on the egg once you'd thrown it in the lake? Maybe the squid got all motherly and decided to sit on it until it was ready to hatch."

Draco didn't answer.

"Draco?"

"I'm sorry, Harry, I really am. I never meant for Ginny to be attacked like that...I didn't know that thing would still become a monster..."

"Sssh..." Harry said softly, understanding now. "It's over and done. We're fixing everything. Don't worry. Just--thanks for doing this. Thanks for your help."

Harry waited. Eventually he heard a soft, "You're welcome."

They didn't say anything else that night.

* * * * *

On the sixth night, Harry woke suddenly. Draco hadn't written much that day; he'd felt very, very tired so often in the past two days that he'd probably slept in the bottom bunk more than he'd written.

Now Harry heard someone bang into one of the chairs and swear softly.

"Draco? Is that you?" Silence. "Draco?"

"It's not Draco."

Harry froze, lying in the top bunk. He hadn't heard that voice since his second year of school in his other life, but he had no doubt he knew who had spoken to him. Harry sat up cautiously and swung his legs over the side of the bunk, sliding cautiously to the ground. He slept with both his wand and Voldemort's wand in his pocket, and he took out his wand now, although he didn't light it. Then he thought better of this and put the wand away again before Riddle could see it. He walked cautiously to the table and felt around for the torch, turning it on when he found it.

He wound up shining it directly into Riddle's eyes; the other boy covered his face and yelled, and Harry mumbled an apology and set the torch down on the table, shining upwards, the tent walls reflecting the light. Harry saw Draco lying in his bunk, pale and barely breathing.

"You can open your eyes now," he said, sitting at the table. Riddle uncovered his face and continued to squint at the torch, but he pulled out a chair and sat next to Harry, examining him warily. Harry fought the urge to squirm.

"You're Harry Potter," he said suddenly.

"Yes."

He motioned to the bottom bunk where Draco lay, breathing very, very shallowly. "And that's Draco Malfoy, right?" Harry nodded. "So; you two are trying to make it so I don't get killed by your mum, the Auror. Right?"

"Right."

Riddle nodded. "Where's the wand?"

Cautiously, Harry withdrew the wand from his pocket and laid it on the table. Riddle looked at it and whistled through his teeth.

"That's my wand all right. How'd you get it?"

"When you fell, I hid it at Dover. I pushed it into the ground and covered it with a rock. It wasn't easy getting back there, especially with Aurors, Dea--I mean, with Aurors and Muggle police both looking for me."

"Muggle police?"

"The Ministry told the Muggle Prime Minister I was very dangerous, and he agreed to have Muggles alerted to look for me too. It was on television and the radio...."

Riddle frowned. "What's television? Is that the box with the films in it that Malfoy was telling me about?"

"Oh, he told you about that? Yes. That's not a bad way to describe it."

Riddle picked up the wand with both hands, rolling it between his fingers. "I've waited so long for this...."

"We didn't want it to be--to be too soon. Before we reached Godric's Hollow. Now that we're here...."

"I know," Riddle interrupted, and Harry started to wonder whether Riddle knew things he didn't want him to know.

"Did I ever mention, er girls to you, when I wrote?"

Riddle sat back and smirked at Harry. "You don't remember, do you?"

Harry drew his mouth into a line. "Did I?"

The smirk was still there. "I was--curious. I needed to live vicariously for a bit, after all. I made it so you wouldn't remember afterward, so you wouldn't be embarrassed. No harm done."

"Except that you evidently told Draco about it...."

"No; I didn't."

Harry frowned. "What about--"

"Oh, that. In the girl's flat. The Mudblood. That wasn't Malfoy speaking, not really, although he remembered saying it afterward. That was me. I was able to possess him now and again before attaining this body; it only lasted briefly, though. Very clever to use the Mudblood, by the way. To get here. Did you two shag?"

"No!"

He shrugged. "Pity. She clearly wanted to with somebody...." Harry fought the urge to hit him.

"I just did it for fun in my other life," he told Riddle, feeling his stomach lurch as he dismissed Hermione so casually. "I didn't feel like repeating it."

Riddle nodded. "Better to wait until you can find a pureblood girl. I know what you mean." Harry didn't correct him. It didn't matter. He needed the bastard to like him and do what he wanted him to do.

"I told you about needing to change the timelines," he said to Riddle, who nodded.

"Right. Your dad shouldn't have been killed because he was loyal to me, and your mum should have because she wasn't. We have to both concentrate on that and say this spell and we'll travel back in time to a moment when that can be taken care of. Well, I'm game. Shall we try it?"

Harry nodded and pushed up his sleeves. Riddle saw the Dark Mark on his left arm. "What's that?" he wanted to know.

"The Dark Mark. You gave it to me when I was initiated. Draco has one, too. It's the mark of all of your servants."

Riddle grinned, very pleased with himself. He held the wand loosely but he gave the impression that it would be very, very hard to pry it from his fingers. He pointed it vaguely in Harry's direction.

"Shall we?"

Harry's breathing grew very shallow. They put their wands together. Harry thought furiously of the night his parents were killed, hoping Riddle was doing the same. He'd told him the date when he'd written in the diary. That reminded him; he picked the diary up from the table, and, clutching the book to him, he took a deep breath before saying the spell. Their two young voices intoned it solemnly together:

Tempus Bonae Voluntatis.

Swirling blackness. A rushing wind in his ears. A disorienting buzzing. Then--

Silence.

He deliberately squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. It was very dark. A half-moon was just beginning to rise; it wasn't high enough in the sky to make it down through the trees, leafless though many of them were, to illuminate the leaf-strewn ground in the copse. Harry looked around, breathless. Draco and the tent were nowhere to be seen. Had it really worked? Had they gone back in time? Was it really Halloween night in 1981?

He swallowed. If it hadn't worked, he'd lost his last chance to fix things. And if it had--he had to get Riddle out of the way as soon as possible.

He looked at the other boy, whose dark eyes darted around the clearing in which they stood, also assessing the situation.

"Malfoy's gone," he noted, as Harry had. "And that tent. I think we did it."

Harry nodded. "Looks that way." How to do it? he thought. Riddle looked quite real, quite solid. He was real enough that he'd done very complex magic with a wand. That was definitely real, Harry thought. He looked down at the book clutched against his chest; and yet--he wasn't real. Not truly. He was a memory that had been stored in a book for over fifty years. If he put the killing curse on him, no one would care. It wasn't like killing a real person.

Still--he didn't like the idea of performing that particular curse. What if--what if he just stunned him? That would get him out of the way while he did something to prevent his other self from putting Imperius on his mother. That should work.

"Do you know which way we should go?" Riddle asked him suddenly, and then smiled. "After all, we have a mother to kill."

Harry's stomach lurched. The way he said that, so cavalierly....It made his blood run cold. But then he remembered that this boy had loosed the basilisk on the castle, killing poor Myrtle. Already a heartless killer at sixteen. Harry shuddered.

"I'm not sure." He wasn't lying, not completely. He pretended to glance around, when he was actually trying to see what Riddle was doing out of the corner of his eye. Riddle was squinting into the darkness, looking like he was concentrating quite hard. Harry continued to turn his head this way and that, all the while continuing to note Riddle's actions, and surreptitiously removing his wand from his pocket.

"I think it's this way," Riddle said. "I thought I saw a faint light through the trees..."

He turned to tell Harry this, only to be confronted by Harry's wand. A split second later, Harry cried, "Stupefy!" and a crackling light zoomed out of his wand. It would have struck Riddle were it not for the fact that at the last second, just as he was pronouncing the final syllable of the spell, his wand jumped to the left, changing the angle ever so slightly so that the spell hit a tree trunk and bounced off harmlessly.

Riddle dropped his jaw, then whipped out his own wand. What the hell happened? Harry wondered. He dropped the diary on the ground, balling up his left hand into a fist. The two of them circled each other suspiciously, glaring malevolently.

"It didn't take you long, did it Potter? I already figured out a bit from Malfoy--I knew the two of you weren't being completely honest with me--but perhaps you'd care to tell me why we're really here?"

"That's my business."

"Is that so? I think you've made it my business. So you don't really want your mother killed?"

"No, I want her killed. Otherwise the spell wouldn't have worked."

Riddle frowned. "Then what?"

"I'm here to prevent someone else from interfering with the timeline. And I also don't want you wandering about in the world, wreaking havoc."

"I thought you were my loyal servant? You had my wand. You have the Mark."

"I stole the wand. And plenty of people have the Mark who don't truly serve you. You never heard of spies?"

Riddle stood still, and so did Harry. "Then it's really your mother who's my true servant, and that's why you want her killed?"

"No."

Riddle was looking more and more frustrated. "What then, dammit?"

Harry was tired of talking. He quickly pointed his wand again and cried, "Expelliarmus!"

But once more, at the last second, he felt the wand in his hand move over ever so slightly, and the spell missed Riddle by a wide shot. Watching the beam of light shoot past him, Riddle then turned to regard Harry with a smug expression.

"Aim not very good, is it?"

"My aim is fine!" he said with frustration. "Every time--I can feel the wand moving away from you..."

Now Riddle looked absolutely fascinated. "Really?" Harry could see him thinking furiously, then he appeared to have an epiphany, and immediately after, he began laughing uproariously.

"Oh, that's wonderful!" he cried. "I am so clever, you have to admit...."

"What are you talking about?" Harry fumed, gripping his seemingly-useless wand tightly in his fist. How was he going to pull this off if he couldn't use his wand?

Riddle was grinning from ear to ear. "Malfoy told me about the Obedience Charm. I knew which one he meant, too. I discovered it in a dusty book in the Restricted Section of the library at school."

"So?"

"So? I know that I put the Obedience Charm on you when you were a baby. Just after sparing your mother's life. Malfoy told me all about it. By doing so, of course, I must have cost myself some power, and must have cost myself a bit more by having already put it on Malfoy when he was a year old. But in spite of that, it has definite advantages...."

Harry swallowed. "But--but you're not the one who actually put the spell on me or Draco. It was you when you were older, but--"

Riddle looked very superior. "Hmph! You don't understand anything. Idiot! I am the same person. We have the same identity. The same blood and bone. The same brain. We're the same." He laughed again. "This is wonderful! You have the Obedience Charm on you, you're subject to me, and I didn't have to give up any power to do it!" he chuckled, making Harry shiver all over.

No, he thought. No no no no no... He had to do whatever Riddle said. Whatever he said! If he refused a direct order, he'd drop down dead. If he agreed to follow orders, he would do whatever he'd agreed to, if it was at all possible. He had to do whatever he could to avoid receiving a direct order. He had to try one last time to get rid of Riddle. He couldn't risk Riddle telling him to do something heinous, like the orders Voldemort had given the heir....

He tried to forget his objections to the curse and concentrate on every hateful emotion he could muster and funnel it into his wand; he screwed up his face and pointed his wand at Riddle again, crying fiercely, "Avada Kedavra!"

Harry felt his wand arm shaking; he had never felt such power surging through him before. But then, just as when he'd tried the spell to stun Riddle and the spell to disarm him, his wand veered off at the last second. The green light shot from the end of his wand, striking a tree twenty feet away, which promptly turned black and shriveled; all of the leaves which had still been clinging to the branches immediately fell to the ground, and Harry thought he heard a faint cry as of the tree breathing its last. He looked desperately back at Riddle, who hadn't ducked or flinched, but who had stood with his feet shoulder-width apart, his arms crossed, watching Harry with a bemused expression and the edge of his mouth curling up.

"You can try that all night, if you like," he said merrily. "I could pretend you've managed to give me a toothache, if it would make you happy."

Harry was breathing quickly, still clutching his wand. "It's the Obedience Charm, isn't it?"

Riddle threw back his head to laugh. "Oh, we finally figured it out! Of course it's the Obedience Charm, you dolt! You can't put any spell on me that would cause me to be hurt. I was standing near quite a large tree when you tried to disarm me, for instance, and so I would have hit my head on it if your spell had worked. You can't hurt me, Potter. I'm your master; you're my servant. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about it."

That was what Lucius Malfoy had been referring to when Harry stopped him talking about the charm; he had been about to tell him that neither he nor Draco could hurt Voldemort--or, in this case, Tom Riddle.

Harry felt like the world was caving in around him. Nothing you can do about it. His mother hadn't known, he was sure, or she would have told him. It made so much sense, of course. What good would an Obedience Charm be if there wasn't some protection from being harmed by the person on whom you'd put the spell? Otherwise you just might be empowering them to kill you.

"Oh, you also can't put Imperius on me. And naturally, Cruciatus is out, since that would hurt me quite a lot. So. Why don't you just come with me, nice and quiet, and we'll see about killing your mother, shall we? And then I can decide what you're going to do for me next. I have a feeling I'm going to enjoy the nineteen-eighties...."

Riddle turned and started walking in the direction in which he'd seen the light. When he failed to hear Harry crunching through the leaves following him, he turned. "Coming Potter? Oh, that's right; I have to give you a direct order. I order you to follow me. Now."

Harry took a deep breath. If he refused, he'd die. If he agreed, he'd follow Riddle anywhere he went. All right, he thought. Nothing wrong with that so far; walking through some trees is just walking through some trees. "Fine," he said bitterly. "I'll follow you."

"Excellent!" Riddle grinned. He turned and strode toward the edge of the copse, and Harry took a step, but he fell when he stepped on something that slid along the ground on some damp leaves; his foot went right out from under him and he landed painfully on his rear. Riddle turned around now, surveying him with distaste. "Stupid--" he mumbled, upon seeing Harry sprawled awkwardly on the loamy ground; then he turned his face toward the cottage again. Harry started to get up, but then he saw that it was the diary that had made him fall. He'd stepped on it and slid--

His brain lit up with an idea.

He watched Riddle's retreating back, feeling an incredible urge to follow him. It's just the charm, he reminded himself. He picked up the diary again and rose to his feet once more, jogging slightly to catch up. When he was finally only about ten feet from Riddle, he threw the diary onto the ground in a spot that was devoid of leaves; just packed earth with a slightly damp smell. Riddle turned when he heard the slap! of the book hitting the ground, but he didn't realize what was happening until Harry was done uttering his incantation. Harry's wand did not waver this time; he hit his mark sure and true.

"Incendio!" he cried, pointing his wand at the diary. The small book immediately burst into flames. I'm not putting a spell on Riddle, he thought with satisfaction. I'm putting the spell on a book.

"Noooo!" Riddle cried, trying to lunge for the burning book, but in moments he was too insubstantial to do this, and Harry blinked, seeing a wispy, ghostly figure of Tom Riddle one moment, and absolutely nothing the next. His cry died on the still night air. Voldemort's wand clattered to the ground.

Harry sat down breathlessly, wanting to cry tears of joy. He watched the book burn itself out. At last, the final orange glow had faded and there was nothing but a pile of ashes where the diary of T.M. Riddle had been.

He looked up; now he could also see light through the trees. Although he felt exhilarated by his victory, he couldn't rest; he still had work to do, and he had to hope that no one had heard Riddle's cry as the diary burned and the bond between book and boy was broken.

Harry crept through the trees until he had a view of the side of the cottage. He saw two figures there, himself and Voldemort. His other self was peering in the high window next to the chimney, and Harry knew that he was seeing his father in an armchair, his feet up, doing a crossword puzzle in the Daily Prophet, and his mother lying on the couch on the other side of the hearth, reading a book with one hand protectively on her slightly rounded belly.

Jamie, he thought for a moment. That's Jamie inside her, this very instant.

He shook his head. He couldn't think about that. If he didn't change the timelines back, Jamie still wouldn't exist. Thinking about the fact that he had to let Voldemort kill his mother and his sister wasn't going to do any good. He had to make sure events unfolded this evening as they had the first time, when his family members were all killed--his mother, his father and his sister. He had known Jamie for fifteen years and had some wonderful memories of her. That was more than he'd had last September when he'd come here for the first time. It would have to be enough.

He watched himself step back from the window and turn to the dark wizard, saying something inaudible from where he was in the trees. He's asking whether he can save them both, he remembered. Or rather, I'm asking...

The other Harry looked in the window again, then said something else to Voldemort. Voldemort looked up at the sky, then he saw Voldemort's lips move as he answered his other self.

The pair went to the front garden; Voldemort stationed himself behind a tall, dark tree that hid him from the house perfectly, and the other Harry crouched behind the rose bush near the tree. He had to be very, very careful. He thought about what Riddle had said about the Obedience Charm. What spell could he put on Voldemort to keep him from interfering that wouldn't be repelled by the charm? Stunning him wouldn't work, he already knew. The charm didn't like that one. It might not do much good to make him feel like he was hanging upside down in mid-air; knowing Voldemort, he'd still probably be able to cope. (Harry remembered Aberforth teaching him to do this when he had been taking Professor Flitwick's place.) And technically, they couldn't duel. Harry had to make sure whatever he did was something that caught him unawares. If the magic from their two wands actually collided, they would experience the strange golden web of light again, which would undoubtedly draw attention to them and cause his parents to come outside and destroy all hope of replicating the original timeline.

He wished he'd known about this aspect of the Obedience Charm! Whatever he chose to do, it had to be unobtrusive enough to get past the Obedience Charm and yet serve to incapacitate Voldemort....If only he dared use the Tempus Fugit spell, then he'd be moving much faster than Voldemort, and--

Suddenly, he lit on the solution, and he smiled. It was the next best thing. Rather than making himself move many, many times faster than Voldemort, he would fix it so that Voldemort was moving many, many times slower. It was just innocuous enough that it was possible the Obedience Charm would let it through.

He crept through the trees and silently approached the fence around the garden. The tall thin wizard and his other self were just inside the fence. Harry pointed his wand and said softly, "Impedimenta!"

His other self turned, his eyes widening in shock; he pulled out his wand and uttered an incantation that was too soft to hear. Harry remembered Hermione talking about people who'd fooled around with Time Turners, people who'd killed their future selves out of confusion and panic. He leapt out of the way of the spell, then pointed his wand at his other self and quickly said, "Stupefy!" watching in amazement as the other Harry fell over.

He approached the fence with caution, shying away from the statue-like Voldemort whose face registered no reaction; he still seemed to be waiting placidly for his other self to appear and try to kill Harry's father and mother. He saw that the stunned Harry from September first still had his wand clutched in his right hand. He aimed his wand at him and said quietly, "Mobilicorpus," guiding his own body up and over the fence, then into the copse of trees a good distance, so that they couldn't see the cottage. Harry knew what was going to happen, and he'd already seen it partly, once in Snape's Pensieve and once on the previous September first.

When he felt they had gone far enough into the trees, he let the levitating body sink to the ground. He had been seen, and he had tried to attack himself. If he revived his other self, would it be safe? Just to be certain, he took the wand out of the stiff fingers, pulling his hand away as soon as possible; there was just something too eerie about touching his own fingers and arm, a self that had traveled here from another time and created the reality in which he'd been living....

He sat down on the dead leaves and stared at his own face in repose. There was the scar, the scar he would receive in just a little while, once Voldemort killed his parents and attempted to kill him. The scar he'd always hated, which had given him nightmares and horrible radiating pain. The scar he now wished he had with every fiber of his being. He swallowed and cautiously pointed his wand at the prone figure, whispering the word.

"Ennervate."

The other Harry blinked, looking up at the dark canopy of trees; faint moonlight now filtered down to where they were and Harry could see that his other self was frightened and unsure of what to think. He was convinced of this because he knew that was how he would feel and, well, this was him, after all.

The scarred Harry sat up slowly, staring at the scarless Harry, who saw in the green eyes looking back at him something which others had seen before and which he had not; the look of Harry Potter thinking about how to handle the situation he was in, the wheels of his brain turning swiftly, calculating, running through his list of options. It was a rather frightening look, he thought, secretly wondering if that was something else that had helped him succeed in becoming the captain of the Dueling Club. Somehow, he thought, one just didn't want to know what was going to happen after a person looked like they were thinking that intently about how to hurt you or outsmart you.

"Don't be alarmed," he said quickly. "Please just listen to what I have to say." The other Harry glared at him. He did not look trusting. "Who are you?" he said simply. Harry's first reaction was that he sounded rather stilted and upper-crust. A bit posh. Then he realized that it was the English, rather than Scottish, accent. Is that what I used to sound like? he thought. Andy MacRae was the first one who'd called his Scottish accent to his attention, but since then he'd quite forgotten he'd ever sounded like anything else.

Grasping a wand in each hand, he swallowed. "I'm you. If you change the timelines, I'm you. Actually, you did change the timelines. You did it once, anyway, last September. I've lived in another world, in another reality since then. Or rather, you have. Or rather, I've lived in it for the last fifteen-and-a-half years. But--it's wrong. And it's been very hard for me to manage to get back here, but now I am, and it's very important that you let things play out tonight as they did the first time, when both of your--our--parents were killed," he stammered awkwardly. "It all has to go back. All of the things that have happened in the new timeline....It's all wrong. None of it should ever have been. I know it seemed--" his voice caught "--it seemed like you were saving a life. Saving your mother's and your sister's lives, that is. But--but you just have to accept that they're gone."

His other self still did not look trusting. He nodded at the wands. "You have my wand," he said stiffly in his Surrey accent.

"Yes, well--you tried to attack me back there by the cottage. I couldn't take any chances. Will you please listen to me for a minute? Then I'll give it back to you, I promise."

He reached up and touched the scar on his forehead, then looked at the smooth forehead of the person confronting him. "You don't have a scar," he said softly. "And you sound strange."

He touched his smooth forehead. "When mum wasn't killed by Voldemort, it was because she promised me to him. He put an Obedience Charm on me. He put it on Draco Malfoy, too. And we lived in Hogsmeade. I grew up there, so I sound Scottish."

The scarred Harry nodded, looked a little less like he was scheming. "I--I wanted to tell him no. I really did. But when he said Mum had been expecting a baby--"

"I know, I know," he said softly to his other self. "And Jamie was a wonderful sister...."

"Jamie?" his other self said wistfully.

"Mum named her after our father."

"Then--then how can you just let her and Mum die out there?" he demanded, his voice going up.

"Sssh! Because--" Should he tell him? He took a deep breath. "Because they're already dead. And there's more bad besides that, things that aren't just about my life. The world is--well, I won't tell you right now. When the day comes, sometime in May, that I come back to your world, you'll remember everything then. I think it's better that you don't know right now. Maybe you'll have something like a normal time in school this year..."

The other Harry smirked. "Normal. What's that?"

He smiled in agreement. Indeed; for Harry Potter, what was a normal year in school? A year when Voldemort wasn't living under a professor's turban or a basilisk wasn't being released from a secret chamber? A year when dementors weren't all round the castle or there wasn't a magic tournament? A year when black-trimmed owl post wasn't being delivered to students every five minutes, recruiting more and more Death Eaters, and a year when numerous girls weren't placed under Imperius and ordered to pursue him? What was "normal" for him?

He watched himself push up his glasses and rub his eyes, fighting the impulse to do the same thing. Watching him do this was rather eerie. He watched the other Harry settle his glasses on his nose again, then run his fingers over his scar for a second. "What now?" he asked.

"Now," he told the scarred Harry, "we wait. With no interference, everything should be as it was before. We have to stay out of the way and wait for everything that's supposed to happen."

The other boy looked down, then up again. "I'm sorry. Has it been rough?"

In response, he pulled up his left sleeve, revealing the mark. He heard a hiss as the other Harry drew his breath in sharply.

"When?"

"Winter solstice. Draco at the same time."

"You call him Draco?"

"We're both in Slytherin. We've been best friends since we were wee."

"Wee?" The other boy smiled. Harry grimaced; the Scottishness was coming through more than he'd intended. "Best friends, huh? Well, I suppose Mrs. Figg didn't need to put memory charms on the two of you."

"No; but I'm used to calling her Nanny Bella here."

The other Harry shook his head. "This is so strange. And in a few months--"

"More than eight, actually."

"In about eight months, I'm suddenly going to remember all this?"

He nodded. "On September first, I suddenly found myself in my bedroom in Hogsmeade with fifteen years worth of memories. They were a little hard to get at, at the beginning, but eventually it became easier. You might want to ask Sirius for your own Pensieve, just to get ready for May. It might be easier in the long run, to put some of this life in a sort of separate place. But a place where you could still--experience the memories."

The other Harry nodded. "All right. I'll do that."

They were both silent for a while, listening to the wind in the trees and the small animals scampering over and under the leaves. He saw his other self reach for the basilisk pendant and finger it lightly, and he remembered he had one too, and did the same. The metal was warm again! He held it tightly, and closed his eyes, seeing Mrs. Weasley, looking much the same but just a little younger, holding a squirming red-haired bundle on her lap, wrapped in a towel. The baby was pink and clean, fresh from her bath; Harry had no doubt at all that it was Ginny. How old would she be today? He thought about it; tomorrow, she'd be seven months old. He smiled at the image of the mother and baby. He opened his eyes and saw that the other Harry was also smiling while holding the pendant. What was he seeing, he wondered?

At length, the other Harry opened his eyes and said, "Slytherin?"

He was startled. "What?"

"You said you--I mean we--I mean--" his other self sighed, trying to get a handle on the pronoun situation. "Slytherin. You said Slytherin. How did that happen?"

He shrugged. "They sort the M's before the P's. Draco went into Slytherin, and he's my best friend, so I wanted to be there too. The hat gave me sort of a choice."

"Again?"

"Yes. And I also wanted to be in Slytherin because my da--" He stopped himself suddenly. How strange would that be, to find out that Snape was his stepfather? Or at least, to find out like this? "Er," he said, trying to recover. "There were other reasons, too."

"What did Ron think of that? And Hermione? They're still your--our--friends, right?"

He grimaced. "Ron didn't think very much of me in this life. I'm a Slytherin, after all. He's a Gryffindor prefect. If we weren't going to destroy this reality, he'd probably would have been Head Boy next year." And if he weren't hiding out in France, he thought. "And Hermione..."

"She's not my friend either?"

"Oh, you could say she's my friend..." he hedged, furrowing his brow.

"Is she in Ravenclaw?"

"Ravenclaw? Er, no. Listen, I don't think I should tell you any more. Too much has happened in the last fifteen years for me to be able to just tell you about it. It'll be easier when you can just access the memories yourself. I'm afraid I'll tell everything out of order and confuse you...."

They were silent again, and each reached instinctively for his basilisk amulet. Suddenly the other Harry looked up and noticed that he was holding something too, and he asked, "What's that you've got there?" Harry opened his hand and showed it to him silently. "Where did you get it?"

He laughed. "If I told you, you wouldn't believe it. I noticed you were smiling when you held it. Did you--see anything?"

His other self looked surprised. "Yeah, I did. Usually I just feel sort of calm and comforted, but this time I saw something. I never did before. It was very faint...."

"Was it Mrs. Weasley? With a baby?"

Harry watched his own jaw drop. "Yes!"

He nodded. "I saw the same thing, but mine wasn't faint. It was very clear." Suddenly, he had an impulse, and he took off the amulet, holding it out. "Take it. Here."

His other self hesitated, then reached out for it, making sure their hands did not touch. He looked up into the face of the scarless Harry. "Why?"

"Just--if you manage to make it back with it, give it to someone else."

"Who?"

He hesitated. "I can't tell you that. You have to decide. But you'll know when the time is right."

He held up the amulet that had been resting on his sternum and compared the two. "They're identical."

"No, they're not. They're actually the same amulet. There's only one in each world. That's why I'm not sure you can take that one back, but it's worth a try."

His other self was still staring in fascination at the second amulet. Then he pocketed it. "You need to give me something else," he said.

"Oh; right." He handed the wand back to himself, which was also pocketed. They turned their faces toward the cottage in unison, ever so subtly holding their breaths, waiting, waiting....

When it finally happened, they both jumped. They heard James Potter shouting his wife's name and his son's name, too. They began creeping cautiously through the trees. "Do nothing," he told his other self, who nodded. They reached the edge of the trees; they could see the side of the cottage where the chimney was, and they could dimly make out the figure of Voldemort, still under the Impediment Curse. They saw the front door fly open and Lily Potter run into the garden in her night dress, carrying the baby, who was crying non-stop. He heard his father scream as he was being tortured and instinctively covered his ears; he looked up and saw that his other self was doing the same.

His mother had stopped upon hearing her husband being tortured. The green light flashed in the window of the cottage, they heard the sound of speeding death....

Harry knew it was coming, but still he jumped when the explosion erupted and sent the roof flying into the air. Voldemort stepped purposefully out the front door of the house. Flames were clearly visible through the windows flanking the chimney, and when Harry felt something squeeze his wrist, he was surprised; it was his other self, tensely gripping his arm as he stared at the flames, tears running down his face. He set his jaw, trying not to start crying too, finding it very hard to look away from the scar on that other forehead. He'd never really seen himself as others saw him. It was very, very strange.

His mother pleaded with the dark wizard, "Not Harry, not Harry, please not Harry," and he called her a silly girl and told her to stand aside. She sank to her knees. Harry waited for her next words. She needed to say them, or the timeline wouldn't be fixed. He watched, his heart in his throat, waiting, waiting....

"Not Harry, please no, take me, kill me instead--"

Then Harry had a sudden thought: What if together we did it? What if we killed him?

But then he remembered: he couldn't do it, because he was subject to the Obedience Charm. Only the other Harry could do it. But could he? Others had obviously tried, with no success. It was only the power of Voldemort's own curse, rebounding on him, that even came close to defeating him, and even then he wasn't completely killed.

No, Harry thought. No more changing things. Everything is to go back to how it was. He looked at his other self and tried not to wince as the grip on his wrist became tighter and tighter.

He looked up just in time to see it happen; the green flash and the sound of speeding death filled his eyes and ears; he winced and closed his eyes, for only a moment, he thought, but when he opened then again, she was dead, lying at the madman's feet, a pile of white nightgown, as though a mannequin in a shop had fallen over; there was no more life in her than that.

The baby sat next to his mother, seeming stunned. Baby Harry looked down at the fallen woman, then up at the tall figure before him. Harry was waiting for him to cry, but he did not; he calmly regarded his parents' murderer as though he knew he was safe now that his mother had sacrificed her life for him.

He forced himself to keep his eyes open, so he could see it, really see it. The terrible words were uttered and the screaming green flash raced once more from the dark wand, pointing right at the tot's face. Then the baby was seized with an unearthly tremor and a glow emanated from him which was so bright as to be almost blinding; both Harrys shielded their eyes against the light coming from their younger self. The baby's body seemed to be absorbing the curse and assimilating it, then drawing on some core of power in him, altering it and sending it back along the crackling green arc of light connecting the wizard's wand to the child.

They could see Voldemort's arm shaking uncontrollably as the curse went through the wand and then his arm--this was when he was uttering the other-worldly scream that Harry and Hermione had heard in Snape's Pensieve, and as both Harrys heard this again, their hands went instinctively to their ears, covering them in vain, as the sound went on and on, a death cry more horrible than any in the universe, because it came from someone who had thought he could never die. His entire body seemed to be vibrating so fast that it must surely dissolve into its individual atoms. And then--that was very close to what happened. His tall, thin body seemed to lose corporeal mass and his wand dropped to the ground. Harry could see through him now, and while he seemed at first to be a grey ghost of the same size and shape as the terrible wizard who had just killed his parents, he very quickly dwindled down to a cat-sized cloud of smoke which flew up into the air, then blew over the trees where they lurked, still wailing that terrible cry, worse than any banshee, but finally receding with distance until it was no longer in their heads, and they dared to uncover their ears.

All was still.

Little Harry now had the scar; it was dripping a thin ribbon of blood onto his nose. He stood uncertainly, looking down at his mother and then looking in the direction of the front door of the cottage. Suddenly, a figure appeared in the road without warning, and he jumped in surprise, then started crying piteously from the shock, as he hadn't when his mother was killed and he had been under attack by Voldemort.

A small young man had Apparated in the road about thirty feet away from the garden gate, then began to run frantically toward the cottage. Harry had thought, when he was here on September first, that he was hearing Snape's running feet, but now he knew that it was this man. When he and Hermione had been in the Pensieve, they had reached the cottage at about the same time as Snape, but all of them had apparently arrived after this man, whom none of them had seen. He didn't notice the tall still figure in the shadows near the tree by the fence; the figure blended in with the tree very thoroughly, it was so tall and thin and so still.

The man was very awkward, stumbling up the garden path and coming to stand next to the child; despite his thinning hair, he was probably no more than twenty-one or twenty-two. He looked around in wonder, down at the body of Lily Evans Potter, at the crying child with the bleeding scar. Then he stooped, picking up something which Harry recognized very well.

The wand.

Peter Pettigrew pocketed his master's wand, then vanished. And yet he didn't. Harry saw that a medium-sized rat emerged through the slats of the fence. It went toward the back of the cottage, and then ran easily across the moon-dappled field behind the Potter place toward a spinney on the next rise of ground, disappearing into the darkness of the trees.

Then Harry heard the second set of running footsteps, and saw Severus Snape coming down from the moors, where he'd just suffered the Cruciatus Curse at the hands of Barty Crouch, Jr. The tall thin man ran through the garden gate and went to his knees by the side of his beloved Lily, taking her in his arms; Harry was having a hard time not crying again. There was no way around it; in both of his lives, Severus Snape was doomed to hold the body of his dead Lily, still almost warm with life, keening and mourning over her, lamenting that they would never grow old together....

Then Harry looked up, startled. The Voldemort who was under the Impediment Curse was gone. Was he going to do something? Had the spell slowing him down worn off? Harry knew it wasn't permanent. (He and Ron hadn't really needed to take the spell off Crabbe and Goyle that time in the entrance hall). Then he turned to comment on this to the Harry who'd been standing beside him, and found that he was gone too. He turned around frantically, as though he just hadn't looked hard enough for his other self. What was going on? he wondered. He looked over toward the cottage again; Snape and the baby were as he remembered them. Then suddenly he felt as though a rug on which he'd been standing had been pulled out from underneath him quite violently, and he felt himself falling, falling, falling, falling.....

* * * * *


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