A Future Threatened

A Future Threatened

by Winnie Matthews

* * *

Prologue

Susannah Potter thrust spells towards the Death Eaters, ducking behind a building as she did so. Breathing heavily, she looked back towards the Death Eaters as they regained consciousness, searching for her. Pulling herself out of sight, she managed to Apparate to Godric's Hallow, where everything had started--and finished--with her father.

Oh, Dad, why did you have to go? Susannah wondered, sinking down into a chair. Her father, Harry Potter, had been collecting the Horcruxes to destroy Voldemort when Voldemort caught up with him. The battle had gone on for at least an hour before Draco Malfoy showed up with her mother, Ginny Weasley, not even a mere hour after she had given birth to Susannah.

Now Susannah had lost both her parents and her grandparents to Voldemort and she was left alone to be raised by an elderly Muggle could, Mark and Elizabeth Ames, and trying to survive against the Dark Lord's reign.

"Hey, Susannah," a voice spoke up and Susannah looked around, startled as she pulled her wand out of pocket. But she stopped once she saw her biological cousin, Jeremy Weasley, the son of her dad's best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, was leaning in the doorway, looking at her strangely. "Dad said to check on you; said you were in a fight against some Death Eaters today," he said by way of explanation.

Glaring at her cousin, Susannah wondered aloud, "Doesn't anybody in the world knock these days?" But she knew that Jeremy hated knocking because of the Ministry's laws of security questions.

"Some do, I don't," Jeremy said, pulling the window closed with his wand. "So how many this time, Susannah?" His brown eyes focused upon her and Susannah sighed.

"Five," she answered, ticking the Death Eaters off on her fingers. "Lucius Malfoy, Theodore Nott, Bellatrix Lestrange, her husband--what's his name again? Rodolphus?--and Sevreus Snape."

"Adding on the numbers, aren't they?" Jeremy said with a humourless smile. "I don't know how much longer we're going to survive this war, Susannah. Particularly you."

Susannah glared at him, then got up and walked past him. "I think that I may have an angle on how to fix everything, Jeremy," she said quietly. "Even ending this war, ending Voldemort. Mind you, it will be difficult and extremely dangerous. Not to mention that nobody in their right mind would even think about doing this."

"Then I'm your guy," Jeremy said with a shrug. Susannah smiled at her cousin, pulling a potions book from one of the shelves in the kitchen. "So, what are you thinking? Getting rid of the Horcruxes? Fighting Voldemort like your dad did before your mum showed up and--" He stopped abruptly; everyone knew that the night her parents died was a sore subject for Susannah. Their deathday had been Susannah's birthday.

"No," Susannah answered after a long moment. "Actually, this idea is perhaps even more dangerous than going up against Voldemort. Because with the knowledge that we know, about Voldemort and the Death Eaters, then we could do more harm than good."

Jeremy stared at her in confusion; it was clear that he didn't have a clue as to what she was talking about. Susannah wondered if he was sometimes as thick as his mother said that his father was.

"Susannah," he said slowly. "What are you going on about? What knowledge? Mum and Dad won't let me near Order meetings, remember? For the same reason that Remus won't let you hear anything about the Order either. They don't want us getting involved. So what could we possible know that would screw whatever you're talking about up?"

Opening the book to the right page, Susannah said without looking up at her cousin, "I'm going to brew a potion that will take me back to the past before my parents died. I'm going to stop Voldemort from killing them and help Dad destroy Voldemort for good."

* * *

"For the thousandth time, Susannah," Hermione Weasley said in exasperation, staring at her niece in frustration. "What you're doing is against Ministry laws for exactly this reason, so that you don't screw up the balance of good and evil."

Susannah stared incredulously at her aunt. "Aunt Hermione, can you honestly tell me that things will be worse off than they are right now if I do go back and change the past?" she asked as she stirred the potion, which was a bright blue colour.

After Susannah had told Jeremy what she was doing, he had immediately gone off and gotten his parents to come to Godric's Hallow. Ron had been stunned at first, but then he was acting like he had Harry back, which Susannah didn't think was such a bad thing sometimes.

But Hermione--after she had told Ron off--was trying to talk Susannah out of it. "It's too dangerous, Susannah," she said firmly. "For one thing, it's going to be suspicious because you look so much like Harry, right down to the messy hair."

Susannah grimaced and touched her untidy dark hair absent-mindedly before returning her attention to the potion. "And for another," Hermione went on, "you don't know how far back that you're going to be able to go. Which potion are you going to use anyway?"

"It was in one of Grandma Lily's books," Susannah answered, nodding her hands towards the book. As Hermione took the book and read the potion, Susannah added, "As far as I can tell, all I have to do is throw the potion into a fire and tell it when I want it to take me and it should take me right to it. Kind of like Floo powder."

"You hate using Floo powder," Ron pointed out with a grin. "Never did get the hang of it. Just like Harry, you prefer flying to anything else. She's Harry Potter's daughter through and through, Hermione," he added when his wife gave him a look of exasperation. "What do you expect?"

Hermione ignored him and returned her attention to Susannah. "Look, honey, I know that things are really bad here," she said gently. "But changing the past isn't going to fix things. I mean, it might fix some things, but not everything."

Looking towards her aunt, Susannah merely poured the potion into two separate vials--one to leave and one to get back. "I'm sorry, Aunt Hermione, but I've got to try," she said fiercely. "He's going to kill all of us, so if any of you have a better idea, then I'm all ears. But if not, then I'm going back through time. And I'd like to do it with the support of my family."

Hermione stared at her, looked towards the ceiling and shaking her head before returning her attention to Ron. "What do you think about this?" she wanted to know. "Because this is a spell for disaster. It's something that Harry would do and then later regret."

Ron shook his head. "She's as stubborn as her father," he said softly, a faraway look in his eyes. "She'll go with or without our permission and she'll come back only when she's done what she's trying to do. And frankly, she's right, the world can't be any worse off than it is right now. She can save Harry, Hermione, maybe better than anybody else can. Good luck," he added to Susannah, who grinned at her uncle.

Suppressing a sigh, Hermione held Susannah against her tightly, who hugged her aunt back. "Be safe," she muttered to the young girl. "And don't do anything that your father wouldn't do."

"That's not a recommendation, Aunt Hermione," Susannah remarked dryly, thinking of how she had been conceived when her parents were still really young. Harry had been seventeen and Ginny sixteen, at her Uncle Bill's wedding.

Taking a deep breath, Susannah hurled one of the vials into the fire before slipping the one into her pocket. The fire blazed a series of tones of blue and Susannah stepped into the fire. "Take me to the day of Uncle Bill's wedding!" she shouted, making sure that she had enough time before her parents died; almost a year had to be enough.

There were voices and noises as Susannah spun through time before she spilled out onto the floor of her house on Godric's Hallow. But it was unlike the Godric's Hallow that she knew and lived in. It was filled with dust and cobwebs, the furniture broken and thrown everywhere. The house had long since been abandoned, it looked like.

And it was only then that Susannah realised that she had successfully made it through time. To the past. Her mother and father's past, before she had lost them to Voldemort, just as her father had lost his parents and everybody that was like a parent to him. Then she blacked out.