Heroic Perversions

PART II

Chapter 7

Back to the Past

The hallway rang loudly with the smack of Harry's hand to his forehead.

"Why the bloody hell didn't I think of that? Third year!"

"What?" Ron said, frowning at the two of his friends. "Oh you mean that thing you had when you and Harry disappeared in the hospital wing?"

"It was only three years ago!" Harry said as he continued to abuse himself. Then he suddenly and looked at the girl in front of him in awe. "Hermione, you're a genius!"

"You really are, Hermione," Ron breathed. "I mean, we say it all the time but..."

"Genius enough to break into the Ministry of Magic, into the Department of Mysteries and finally the Time Room to steal a Time-Turner?" Hermione said.

Harry's expression of awe vanished, and he stared quietly at her. "Didn't you--You didn't get to keep that one you had?" he asked a little weakly.

Hermione shook her head morosely. "I was lucky enough to have it in the first place; McGonagall had done me a huge favour applying for it at the Ministry for me because I was taking more subjects. They don't just hand out Time-Turners, Harry - these are dangerous devices. So dangerous I don't know why I suggested it."

"Because your schoolmate is dead, that's why," Harry said resolutely. "I think we have a right to use it to save someone's life."

"But we don't know if it could work," Hermione countered.

"We don't know if it can't work," Ron rebutted. "Let's try it. Like Harry said, it's a life we're talking about here."

Hermione threw the boys a questioning glance and looked ahead of her, her mind clearly working furiously. Harry stared at the side of her face intensely, willing her thoughts to go in the direction of his own. But he knew Hermione was a good person who would not sit back and do nothing if she could help.

Hermione released a small but no less insane laugh. "Are we really going to break into the Ministry?"

Harry and Ron kept quiet for several moments and exchanged glances. "Let's see," Harry said finally. "We've nearly died trying to out-think giant chess pieces," he began, counting with his finger, "mashed into pulp by a tree, and mauled by a basilisk and a werewolf. This should be a right field trip in comparison."

"Yes but, Harry, most of that was luck!" Hermione demurred.

"And at least we'd be facing wizards this time," Ron interjected, "not animals with fangs. Or plants with deadly branches. Or chess pieces that are four stories tall and have utterly no concept of human mercy."

"We do it," Harry declared suddenly, hoping the robust resolve in his voice was more convincing to the other two than it was to him.

Ron nodded half-heartedly but Harry nevertheless appreciated his visage of courage. "Yeah, let's do it, Hermione," Ron said. "It's Malfoy - the git. But... he was a git... you know?"

Quite clearly Ron's awkward articulation of how he exactly felt about Malfoy and the faintest suggestion it carried that he cared - unsavoury character though Malfoy may have been - went a long way in making Hermione burst out, in a half-shrill, half-terrified voice, "Oh all right! We don't have a choice now anyway, do we? We already know about the murder and we haven't reported it to the authorities: we'd be no less guilty than the murderers themselves!"

"Right," Harry agreed, gulping at this frightening truth. "Now, how do we break into the Ministry of Magic?"

***

Harry came to the disillusioning realization that Hermione was no genius - she never was. Together with Ron they spent the days that followed floating in and out of the library during every waking minute they could spare outside of class, discussing their plan or, as it happened later on, for the sake of gathering. While Harry had thought that with Hermione's lead they would hammer out a doable plan to infiltrate the Ministry of Magic without detection in fairly good time, by the next Saturday they still barely knew how to make it past the elevators.

She was, however, very apt at pointing out their limitations.

"Map plans of the Ministry are top-secret of course," she told them, taking every opportunity to evince her knowledgeableness in a situation where she knew very little indeed.

Since Harry had not yet seen a group of important-looking people marching up to the higher floors he assumed Dumbledore had not believed him about Malfoy. And the headmaster was no longer as visible as he was before he had to deal with the monumental disaster of the escape of twelve Death Eater prisoners from Azkaban, which in a perfect would have been handled by a competent Minister of Magic.

They made several attempts to draw pieces of information out of the other students, enquiring as casually as they could if they had ever been inside the Ministry of Magic with their parents. Quite a few had seen the inside of the Ministry but fewer had ventured beyond the elevators; the only intel they therefore had managed to gather, apart from the fact that the Department of Mysteries lay on the sixth floor underground, thanks to Ron, was that the elevators rattled violently, information which did not advance their plan much.

Harry was certain Ron grew up a little as well after realizing Hermione could not provide all of the answers. She was not just a machine that one fed a chalked instruction and out came a footnoted essay: there was a mind behind the process which had its limits for calculations, which sometimes returned no result and could not solve every problem it was given. Indeed their desperate week was a sobering experience for both Harry and Ron, and suddenly Hermione seemed uncomfortably human for the first time since they met her on the train. This did not allay Harry's growing sense of panic.

"Let's just go through it all over again; maybe we're missing something or overlooking something," Hermione sighed at their desk in the back of the library. Ron sagged in his seat, dropped his arms to his sides and smacked his lips rapidly. With a hand under his chin Harry gazed quietly at the parchment in front of Hermione, upon which was all their pathetic stabs at formulating a plan that was remotely enforceable. He did not know whether he wanted to rip the parchment to shreds or pour his tears on it.

Each day that passed made him grow sicker and his stomach heavier. It was a physical weight in his gut he could not shake, as solid as was his knowledge he knew of someone dead in a cupboard on the seventh floor. It was a deadening feeling, spreading from his middle outward; twice he had hovered above a toilet seat and hurled only air. He had not returned to the seventh floor since that Sunday. And they all felt that with each passing day the hope that they could save Malfoy dwindled further.

"We can't go like ourselves 'cause they'll ask where our parents are," Hermione rattled off. "So we can't get in, then Imperius a worker there. And of course they'll know Harry Potter when we go to weigh our wands, like Ron says."

"We can't use Polyjuice 'cause a month's too far away," Ron drawled.

"And we can't use my Invisibility Cloak," Harry finished, "'cause if we copy it the copies lose some of the properties the original had and the Ministry's security measures will detect us."

There was a pause before Hermione said slowly, rather wonderingly, "And you can't go alone..."

The patent question in her words came as a surprise to Ron, judging by the stare he fixed on her, and indeed Harry, both of whom knew they had had this discussion many a time before and always came to the conclusion that the task was too complex for one person to handle; the three of them could barely come up with a working plan as it was. But it sounded like Hermione had since grown more desperate.

"What if I could?" Harry asked with a vague sense of intent behind his question.

Hermione shrugged ambivalently, looking down at the piece of parchment in front of her. "Maybe you could slip in, sneak into the elevators into a corner, go down to the sixth floor and get to the Time Room."

"Harry can't do it alone, Hermione," Ron abjured as he remained sprawled on his seat, though his gaze had grown a little sharper.

"Do you see us getting anywhere with a plan to get there?" Harry asked. Ron turned to him, throwing him a puzzled expression. Harry saw the question in his eyes. "I mean, we haven't gotten anywhere yet. Maybe I should do this alone."

Hermione bit her lip guiltily. "But, Harry--"

"You suggested it, Hermione, and I think it's a good plan," Harry said, defending her against herself; he knew she would feel guilty about her hint. "Besides, it's not like you two were involved in the first place: I'm the one who saw the Slytherins kill him; I'm the one who saw his dead body in that cupboard."

"They stuffed him in a cupboard?" Hermione blurted out in horror. "They actually touched the body and stuffed it in the closet? Goodness, have they got a strong stomach."

"Harry, we're not going through this again, mate," Ron said, almost grinding the words through his teeth. "We do things together. We're in this together. We'll find a way to make it happen and get in the bloody Ministry."

"In what, another week or so?" Harry shot back. "We wasted too much time trying to find a way in and look what we got to show for it. Time's up! I say I go alone. Give me a better idea and I'll be glad to hear it." He folded his arms and sat back in his seat expectantly, gazing at the pair in front of him under a raised pair of dark eyebrows.

"Say you wanted to do that from the very beginning," Ron finally said.

Harry looked at him quietly, and during his pause of silence he tried to smother the flame of anger that had suddenly leapt from inside him. But it was stronger than his will. "I wanted to include you in all of this but you didn't want it!" he shouted.

Hermione closed her eyes and did not even bother to look around for Madam Pince; they could hear the click of her heels approaching them. "Students are not to shout in a place of quiet and academic endeavour!" she shrieked behind her horn-rimmed glasses. "Out!"

The three briefly looked at each other and had an inkling it was the last time they would visit the library to discuss possible plans.

"So it's settled then?" Harry said breezily as they trooped back to Gryffindor Tower.

"Harry, I don't have a good feeling about this," Hermione replied.

"Do you have another plan?" Harry countered promptly. When she remained silent he turned to Ron. "You?"

Ron shook his head. "At least let us escort you there, mate," he suggested weakly.

"That'll be fine," Harry replied with no small amount of satisfaction.

***

His mouth fell open in sheer awe and his eyes were narrowed against the brilliant, diamond-sparkling light. His heart felt as though it were pulsing in tune with the controlled cacophony of the synchronized ticking from the countless clocks in the room. Upon every surface were clocks of all kinds and sizes, small carriages and towering grandfathers alike. But what had grabbed his eyes, the source of that diamond-sparkling light, was the giant bell jar of glass standing at the far end of the room: tall, majestic and the point of the entire room's existence.

Ron and Hermione had come along with him but had not entered the Ministry as neither of them had an Invisibility Cloak, which allowed Harry to slip past every security measure with which the Ministry building was rigged. Hermione rattled off last-minute instructions, pieces of advice and warnings before she fiercely hugged him and pushed him away. When Harry told them they could go back to Hogwarts as he felt he was competent enough to find his way back outside, Hermione pretended she was too fraught with worry to hear him.

It had taken Harry several attempts to land in the room. He had just emerged from a dark circular room bearing a dozen identical doors which blurred together when the room revolved very quickly, randomizing the room to which they led. Fortunately the Time Room was so distinct Harry could not have mistaken it and closed the door again to set off another dizzying spin.

He took another step forward as he draped his Invisibility Cloak around his neck. He approached the bell jar cautiously, slowly pasting a foot on the ground in front of the other and peeling it off. When he came within a couple of metres of it he just stared at it, as its spotless glass curves and its grandness. But he knew what he was looking for was considerably smaller, so he tore his huge-eyed gaze from the sparkling bell jar and looked around on the various surfaces and between the clocks, searching for something he could hold in his palm. His eyes jumped from carriage clock to pocket watch to wrist watch before, with a burst of joy in his heart, they landed on a tiny hourglass whose very long and very fine gold chain made a loop on the polished wood like a fine crack or a stroke of a quill. It looked extremely similar to the one Hermione had used in their third year to attend her overlapping classes.

Harry raised his hand slowly and made to take the hourglass when he spotted, two clocks from his hand, three hourglasses standing together varying in size. When he took a closer look he noticed that they were in fact a set, connected by the same fine, long gold chain as the standalone hourglass had. Harry, his heart racing inside his chest, carefully took it in his fingers and studied it more carefully. The leftmost hourglass was the smallest, the middle one was the largest and the size of the one on the right was between the two other hourglasses: clearly they all stood for days, hours and minutes. He gingerly dropped it into his pocket and made his way towards the door after stealing a final glance of the towering bell jar.

"Where do you think he is now?" came Hermione's anxious voice ahead of Harry, who was crouching in his Invisibility Cloak towards the pair.

"He probably mixed up the floors," Ron answered. "He might be in the courts."

"It took eight tries but I finally managed to get there," Harry said as he threw off his Cloak.

Hermione let off a noise of fright. "Harry, there you are!" She slammed into his him and wrapped her arms around him before pulling off and asking, "How was it?"

"Let's just say my brain could do with a massage after it was in free fall the whole time that room was spinning," Harry replied. He told them all about his journey to the revolving room and having to guess the door which led to the Time Room. As he spoke he had a hard time trying to quell the constant chime of small marching footsteps still in his head.

"Let me see it," Hermione said. When Harry handed the necklace to him she gasped. "Harry, this isn't what I said it looked like!" she shrieked. "You saw the one I had in third year, didn't you? I knew I should've gone with you!"

"But look, isn't it more sophisticated?" Harry pointed out nervously, fearing the necklace did not hold the same function as the one he had first grabbed. "I can choose the time I want to go back to, to the minute!"

Hermione release a huff of anger and shook her head. "Well it still looks like a Time-Turner, I guess."

"We have to get going now though," Ron warned them.

Harry glanced at his wristwatch and noted it was just over half past two o'clock on a Sunday morning; they had decided on a very late departure time should the Ministry building still contain employees working very late, and those working throughout the night on the weekend would probably not be in alarming numbers. In fact, Harry encountered no one.

"Right, let's get out of here," Harry sighed. "All things considered, it was surprisingly easy to get in."

"Only because your Cloak is one of a kind. Without it we couldn't have dreamt of doing this," Hermione pointed out.

They mounted their brooms - the latter rather clumsily. They shot off into the dark sky and headed for Hogwarts.

They barely spoke in the air: their robes flapped noisily as they zoomed across the country. As soon as they alighted safely on Hogwarts' grounds, Harry asked Ron and Hermione if they thought he could activate the Time-Turner now.

"Don't you want to maybe wait a little?" Hermione asked, rather like a fed-up mother seeking to quash her child's excitement until he could safely play with his new toy at home.

"Why the ceremony?" Harry replied, panting a little as they scaled the inclining ground.

Hermione seemed short for answers. "Well you can't just activate it right here, right now! First of all you need a secluded place and a time when you aren't surrounded by a lot of activity."

"My bed sounds perfect then," Harry said. "It's late - the blokes are asleep, and my bed's closed off."

Hermione did not look satisfied with his answer. "I'm not allowed in the boys' dormitory, remember?"

"You won't need to. Neither will Ron."

"Oh come on, mate, yeah?" Ron sighed. "We barely got in on any action tonight. Why can't I come with?"

"Finally you two wanna get all involved, do you?" Harry seethed, in spite of himself. "Where was all this motivation when I asked you to come with me to the seventh floor and see the body? You took a bloody long time to believe me."

"Okay we're sorry for that, Harry," Hermione said as they crossed the Entrance Hall. "We should've been on the ball with you from the get-go."

"Besides, mate, we're talking about actual murder here," Ron pointed out. "We knew the Slytherins were slimy gits but... not murderers. Fuck, I need to keep one eye on them and the other on my workbook during Potions - we don't know what they're capable of now; they killed one of their own."

"Forget about it. I'm doing this alone," Harry said abruptly. "It's okay. I didn't--I didn't think about you guys and how you'd feel. But I think I should do this alone too. Besides, it'll be a whole lot easier inside Hogwarts. All I have to do is just go back in time and get Malfoy out of the way before his sunny Housemates can get to him."

They journeyed up to Gryffindor Tower. Harry and Ron went up the stairs while Hermione watched them from the bottom. "Things never worked out that easily, Harry, you know that. But good luck still," she said. Harry nodded at her. "Remember, a turn is a full day."

The boys entered the dormitory. Ron went over to his bed and pulled off his robe, all the while keeping an eye on Harry, who began dragging the curtains across his bed. The rest of the boys, Neville, Seamus and Dean were soundly asleep in their own beds.

"Harry, you're sure you want to do this alone? Hermione doesn't have to know."

Before Harry closed the final curtain he paused and looked at Ron, seeming to reconsider. "It'd be really great with you but I think we need to keep things as uncomplicated as possible. Hermione said time travel is very dangerous and very finicky. So I wanna involve as few people as possible and have as few things going wrong as possible, all right?"

Ron sighed, slouching in his bed. "All right. Good luck. Tell me all about it when you come back -- hopefully."

"Right," Harry replied. He closed the curtain and thereby closed himself off from the rest of the world. He performed a locking charm on them as well as a Silencing Charm for extra measure. Now that Ron and Hermione were nowhere near him, and after his insistence to do the mission on his own, he became aware of a certain hollowness inside him; he felt oddly lonely with his bed and the darkness around him. But he told himself that doing it alone was the best thing to do.

"Lumos."

A narrow beam of light illuminated the small space inside the wall of his curtains. He climbed onto his bed with his shoes, made himself comfortable and once again checked for the Marauder's Map against his stomach, secured into place by the waistband of his underwear. He glanced at the robe lying on his bedside table and thought on whether he would need it. He decided the woolen jersey he was wearing, bearing a large letter 'H' in red for Harry and made by Mrs Weasley, would be sufficient alone. With a surge of panic he remembered his Invisibility Cloak and thought it wise to take it along: he draped it around his neck to keep his hands free.

Harry looped the hourglasses over his head and wore it like a necklace under his Invisibility Cloak. He glanced at his wristwatch. It had been exactly a week ago that Malfoy was murdered. He had woken up a little after nine o'clock that Sunday morning. He remembered the sudden change in the way the Slytherins regarded Malfoy. Where the previous year he was, as Harry saw it, nothing more than a jokester counted upon to ridicule the "Golden Trio," this year he was nothing short of the hero of the House. Something happened in the intervening summer.

Barely breathing, Harry began carefully turning the hourglasses, and as he completed the final turn of the smallest hourglass he barely finished his gasp when the world moved and swirled and was engulfed by a brilliant golden shimmering light. He felt like his body was being rolled up and squeezed into a long cylinder.

The light suddenly fell out and was replaced by a thick darkness so complete he thought he felt its weight on his eyeballs. And just before his lungs collapsed and he suffocated, his body expanded back to its original proportions and the darkness quickly receded, chased away by the shimmering golden light that rushed towards Harry as though he were approaching the surface of a pool on a bright afternoon. He closed his eyes when the light grew too dazzling and opened them when he felt its strength fade.

Structures gradually began constructing themselves around him: pieces of a scarlet curtain, a dark wood pole slowly extending towards the floor, scarlet fabric stretching out from underneath him like sped-up vine. Moments later he was in the very same place he had left behind. The only difference was that he could see through his curtains the sunlight streaming through the window as opposed to the moonlight.

Harry climbed out of his bed as quietly as he could, lest he find out that there is someone else in the dormitory. Before he attempted to remove the two spells he had cast on his curtains, he realized that they would not be present since he cast them in the future. Slowly he pulled aside one curtain to find Ron's and Dean's beds empty. He slipped out and tiptoed around his bed to confirm that the other two beds of Seamus' and Neville's were empty.

Breathing considerably easier, but still with a healthy amount of caution, he walked out of the room. The common room was deserted. In broad daylight it was a rather strange sight Harry had not witnessed in his five years at Hogwarts. But he had to remind himself that it was before term started, so there were no students at Hogwarts. Perhaps not even teachers. Even Dumbledore. Upon remembering this name not a small amount of anger roiled up inside Harry. This plan was completely his own. He did not need Dumbledore.

As empty as the common room was Harry still descended the stairs and crossed the floor towards the portrait hole as quietly as a mouse. But he took his Invisibility Cloak off his neck and threw it on; the Fat Lady had a sharp eye for wandering students, and a veritable talent to spread news very quickly. He stepped out of the hole and heard the Fat Lady squeak in surprise.

"Who's there?" Harry heard her croak from behind. "Answer me this instant! No kids before school starts! No kids before school starts!"

There was a note of desperation in her voice.

Despite the fact that he had had a small taste of it before, the bright sunlight streaming through the glass ceiling of the corridor shocked Harry; it was only moments ago that it had been pitch black at three in the morning. He did not know exactly where he was going. Various ideas sprung up in his head but never assumed full form. But he thought he should go with the one that sounded most complete, and one that he had began working on before he turned those hourglasses: he headed for the broom shed and swore at himself that he had not brought his Firebolt with. Flying to Malfoy's home was going to take a little longer.