Chapter Text
Harry wasn’t quite sure what to do in this situation. It was a little unprecedented, even for him— his dead dad falling out of a busted-up cabinet alongside younger versions of his former professor and godfather.
Stupidly, he’d believed for a moment that this man might actually be his dad. His wild dark hair, hazel eyes, and brown skin— a few shades darker than Harry’s own— resembled the photographs Harry had seen of his James Potter. If he were to make a guess, the fake-James was around his age, or a year or two older. Yet he’d died at twenty-one, so even if this was some kind of resurrection, there was no reason for him to be so young.
“What do you mean he’s dead?” Not-Sirius said, aghast. His hair was clean and straight, much shorter than Harry was used to, but still extending below his chin. The matted, greasy locks that hung to his waist were gone. His skin, too, was no longer waxy or pale, but healthy; a tad tan from the sun.
As if Azkaban had never happened. Here his godfather stood, looking like a completely normal bloke in his school robes. When Harry had first met Sirius at the Shrieking Shack (really met him, he meant; that time he’d seen Padfoot at Privet Drive hardly counted), he’d thought that the man must’ve been handsome, once. And he was— though Harry didn’t have the words to define why, exactly. It was more of a factual statement: Sirius Black was handsome.
“That’s not possible,” Remus murmured, almost to himself. His former professor (or rather, the mysterious boy who resembled him) wore a too-big sweater; the frayed sleeves hung past his bony wrists. He was the tallest of the bunch, obviously, gangly and long-limbed.
The Remus Lupin Harry knew moved through the world as if he were already dead. This Remus seemed…not happy, exactly, but less haunted. When he looked at Sirius, it was with warm affection and slight annoyance, not regret and guilt. He hadn’t so much as flinched when Sirius, on his tip toes to reach, had thrown an arm over his shoulders.
Seriously, what the fuck was going on?
James, for his part, was squinting at Harry, bewildered and seemingly offended.
“Oi, don’t go killing me off! I’m not dead!” His maybe-dead-dad crossed his arms and glanced at the other two, perhaps for support.
Sirius, frowning, cupped James’s face, moved his head around a bit as he examined him, then let go and nodded. Remus pinched his nose and sighed.
“I concur,” Sirius said with an air of gravitas.
“Brilliant, you concur,” Harry muttered. “James Potter has been dead for nearly as long as I’ve been alive. You’re not him.”
“That doesn’t make any—
“What is today's date?” Remus interrupted, taking a step closer with furrowed brows.
Harry’s heart stuttered in his chest. He wasn’t implying— no, he couldn’t get his hopes up. Time Turners didn’t go forward that far. It wasn’t possible.
That didn’t stop him from hoping.
“It’s November second.” Harry swallowed. His mouth had gone dry. “1994.”
The trio froze. Remus was the first to recover.
“I see. Time travel, then. Improbable, but not impossible, I suppose.”
Sirius glanced at Remus sideways, as if he thought the boy might be joking, while James stared at Harry in disbelief, mouth agape.
Harry stared back at him blankly, mind racing.
He examined fake-James again. The messy hair, wire glasses, long nose— it was like looking in a mirror. You’re a spitting image of your father. That was all Harry had heard since he’d entered the Wizarding World. He hadn’t realized how true it was, until now.
And for the first time, Harry let himself believe that fake-James was, in fact, not a fake at all.
James gasped. “Merlin’s beard! Are you my son?”
Harry fainted.
James didn’t know what to think. The day had started out normal— singing You’re the Witch of My Heart to Lily as they walked to breakfast (he did not let himself be deterred by her efforts to outpace him!), joking with Sirius during class, making fun of Remus for telling a first year no spellwork in the halls! as if he hadn’t broken the same rule that very morning, etcetera, etcetera.
How the day had taken a turn! If Mini-Him was telling the truth, they were in the future!
Also, he was dead. Not great— he would much rather not die, thank you. But he was trying not to think about it.
His mum always told him to chin up and face his problems head on. How one faces death “head on”, though, wasn’t clear (especially when the circumstances of said death were a mystery) so he decided to ignore his mum’s advice for the moment.
Sirius gently poked the boy (who was now laying on the floor, passed out) with his shoe while Remus bent down to hold his hand. Wait, what?
“What’re you doing, Moony? This is no time to flirt with my son!”
He got an annoyed look for that. “First of all, I cannot even fathom what on earth you mean by that. Secondly, I’m checking his pulse. I don’t know the spell for it, so I’m doing it the manual way.”
James hadn’t even known there was a manual way. Next they’d be telling him you could do a blood transfusion without magic! Really, Muggles were amazing. However did they do it?
“I knew that,” he said lamely, crossing his arms. Sirius was continuously glancing between him and the boy. Back and forth, back and forth. Then, he said—
“Blimey, Jamie, I think you’re right. Mini-James is an actual Mini-James! Merlin, do you think we have kids by now, Moony?” Remus paused, hand slipping off the boy’s wrist.
“We should get him to Madam Pomfrey. His pulse is fine.” Another pause. “Probably.”
“Probably? This is my son we’re talking about!”
“It’s just, I know how to take a pulse, but I’m a little hazy on what’s a normal resting heart rate.” He had the decency to look sheepish.
Sirius tilted his head, baffled. “Then what good is knowing how to do it?”
“Well, I can tell he has a heart rate, which is good.”
“Good?” James's voice came out as more of a squawk than comprehensible English. His hands flew to his hair.
“Are you just going to keep repeating everything I say?”
“This is my boy we’re talking about, Moony!”
“Merlin, James, you don’t even know his name!”
“You’ll understand when you’re a father,” James replied solemnly. Sirius, meanwhile, poked the boy in the face for no discernible reason.
“He’s got your cheekbones, Jamie.”
“You’ve been a father for all of fifteen minutes!”
“Well, Moony, I’m not sure I like your tone—”
“Let’s get him to Madam P. He’s looking a bit wan,” Sirius cut in. That was true— the boy was fidgeting restlessly in his unconscious state and the angry flush had drained from his cheeks.
“My boy!” He knelt beside him. “Help me carry him.”
Remus could’ve done it— werewolf strength let him carry his friends when he wished, a boy who must’ve weighed seven stones soaking wet was hardly a challenge. But James felt oddly responsible for this boy, his maybe-son, so he would help carry him.
Sirius hadn’t seemed to process the situation at hand yet. He was, presumably, trying to forget that little tidbit the boy had dropped: James Potter is dead. They had collectively decided to ignore it, apparently. As the dead man in question, James very much wished they would continue to ignore it.
“Hold on. If we’re in the future, it might be dangerous to go walking the halls,” Remus said.
“Oh, Lily told me about a movie like that once!”
Sirius rolled his eyes. Merlin, he didn’t talk about Lily that much, did he?
“Jamie, enough—”
“If you run into your past self, you implode.”
“What?”
“Or something. I don’t know, it’s not important."
“It sounds pretty bloody important—”
“I have an idea,” Remus said suddenly.
When Harry woke up, it was to the face of one anxious Hermione Granger.
“Guh?”
“Oh, Harry, you gave us all such a fright!” She slapped him on the chest, expression going from concerned to furious. “Don’t do that again!”
“Do…uh, what, exactly, did I do?” He struggled to remember what had happened that day. Thinking felt a bit like fighting against Devil’s Snare— nearly impossible.
Hermione huffed. “You passed out. If you didn’t want to eat in the Great Hall, you could’ve asked me or Neville to bring you something!”
In addition to skipping lunch, Harry, in an effort to avoid Malfoy’s mocking sneers and Ron’s angry scowls, had skipped breakfast. It hadn’t seemed a big deal at the time— after all, there were full days where he went without eating back at home. When he was younger, sometimes the Dursleys simply forgot to let him out of his cupboard, and Harry would enter a state of lethargy until one of them remembered he existed.
It seemed, though, that as he grew older, his body grew used to being fed regularly. Bloody annoying if you asked him (which no one ever did.) He sighed and groped around the bedside table for his glasses.
“Where did you find me, again?” Harry asked. He blinked, fighting through the fog in his mind. Hermione tucked a curl behind her ear and sat on the end of the hospital bed. Through the slit in the curtain, Harry could see Madam Pomfrey tending to Seamus, who had black ash smeared on his face and a burn on his wand hand. Another of his explosive accidents, he assumed.
“Mrs. Norris found you in front of the Fat Lady,” she explained. Harry subtly felt his face to make sure the cat hadn’t tried to bite off his nose. Was that how Voldemort lost his? A face-eating cat?
Hermione shoved a pumpkin pastry into his hands.
“You should eat.”
“Where’s Ron?”
Her lips thinned. “Ronald is likely heading to class, as I should be.”
Harry felt a bit guilty. For Hermione to risk missing class, she must’ve been worried. With a final nod of acknowledgement, she left, practically running out the doors.
He relaxed into the pillows. Fainting was embarrassing, sure, but getting to skip Potions was a fair trade off. It was nice and quiet in the Hospital Wing. His mind wandered from homework, to Ron, to the Tournament, to Ron… to his godfather…to Ron…to Remus…his dead dad…
Harry sat up so suddenly that his stomach lurched, threatening to reverse the pumpkin pastry all over the stone floors.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
“Madam Pomfrey, I’m feeling a lot better, so I’m going to head to class.”
“Oh, dear, are you sure? No one will mind if you miss one class.”
“It’s Potions,” he explained.
“Ah. Professor Snape. Go on, then. But I expect you to attend dinner tonight! Don’t you dare go fainting on me again Harry Potter!” She wagged a finger at him, and he dipped his head slightly before slipping out the door. Once in the hall, he legged it.
His dad was alive somewhere in the castle.
Harry had to find him.
“Stop elbowing me!”
Remus was feeling a strange sense of deja vu. Sirius’s hair brushed his nose, soft and silky. He sucked in a breath.
“Don’t you dare sneeze, Moony!” James whispered furiously. Sirius clapped a hand over his mouth, which Remus didn’t mind in the slightest.
“Why? You’ve already cast a silencing charm,” he said, though it came out rather muffled with the hand in the way.
His friends had no trouble understanding him. Why would they?
“Hush! Didn’t your mum ever tell you? Sneezes can disrupt magic—”
“That’s a myth, James.”
“— and silencing charms sometimes fail, depending on the circumstances of the circle!”
“Circumfrence, James.”
“I’ve heard it both ways.”
“That doesn’t even make sense. What circle? This is a bed.”
Sirius looked like he was itching to say something. Remus nudged him in a go on way, though he agreed with his other friend that it would be best if they all stopped talking immediately.
Still, he found himself incapable of denying Sirius anything at the moment, when they were pressed so close together.
After dumping James-maybe-son in front of the painting of the Fat Lady (who was, thankfully, taking a nap), they’d waited around a corner until someone found him— Filch, unfortunately, stumbled upon him first. Mrs. Norris tried to take a bite of the boy’s ear, but thankfully the old caretaker acknowledged that as being too far, even if he had no reservations about the devilish beast scratching misbehaving students.
Fifteen minutes later, a different boy appeared and woke up the Fat Lady. After reading the password off a slip of paper, he entered the Gryffindor common room, and, ten minutes after that, left. Sirius and James with their useless human ears hadn’t caught the password, but Remus’s enhanced senses had heard Gingerbottoms quite clearly.
Now, they were hidden in a dormitory. James had suggested laying on one of the beds and closing the bed curtains so that if anyone walked in, they’d be safe. Remus had reluctantly agreed. Sirius had grinned and secretly squeezed his hand when James was distracted with examining his hair in the mirror.
There were surely better places to hide in the castle. But moving around too much risked discovery, so this would have to do until they could find Mini-James again.
In retrospect, it might’ve been a better idea to dump the boy on one of the other empty beds and just wait for him to wake up. But since they didn’t know what was wrong with him, it seemed risky— what if he were seriously ill? Remus doubted the poor thing fainted from shock alone. No, better to let someone else take him to Madam Pomfrey.
James was on the leftmost side of the bed with Sirius in the middle and him on the far right. It was not made with the intent of fitting three fifteen year olds, which was made evident when Sirius’s knee kept driving into his, and James complained about his arm falling asleep.
Sirius began to speak. “That boy—”
The door opened. The trio fell quiet.
A faint sound of a trunk clicking open caused Sirius to relax. He slumped into Remus’s side. Some rustling followed, then—
“Where did I put it? Gran is going to kill me…”
Without warning, the curtains were flung open. Sirius cursed under his breath. James sprung up and grabbed the curtains, hurriedly shutting them in the face of the gaping boy on the other side of the fabric.
“Okay, what do we do now?” James said.
Before anyone could reply, the curtains opened again, slower this time. The blonde boy standing beside their bed— well, his bed, probably— had a round face and wide eyes. He looked strangely familiar, though Remus couldn’t quite place him.
“Um, excuse me, but I think this is my bed?”
“We’re having a private conversation, so, if you could come back later…” James shut the curtains. “The nerve of him!” He said to Sirius.
“What is the plan here, exactly? Remus asked, exasperated. “We can’t go to the Ministry, or any professor who would turn us over to the Ministry.”
“What’s wrong with the Ministry?” James frowned.
“The timeline is delicate,” Sirius explained calmly. “The Department of Time, according to some of the older members of my family, deals with discrepancies in the timeline caused by travelers such as ourselves.”
“Deals with?”
“Kills,” he elaborated.
“Oh, sod off. Why would they kill us? Wouldn’t that do more damage to the timeline?”
Sirius seemed unsure of how to answer that.
The curtains opened again.
“Excuse me, sorry to bother you again…”
James closed the curtains.
The curtains opened once more.
James closed the curtains, and held them in place this time.
The boy on the other end struggled for a second, then requested, hesitantly:
“Um, please, let me in. I’d like to talk to you.”
“It’s alright, we can hear you just fine.”
“That’s not really the problem, but okay. It’s just, this seems to be my bed.
“Your point?”
“Um, you’re not me? Are you even Gryffindors? I don’t recognize you— I mean, I do, but not really...”
James opened the curtains.
“Why, hasn’t Dumbledore talked to you about the reassignment yet?” He blurted. Sirius, always one to go along with his friends' improvisation, nodded along as if he had any idea what he was talking about.
“Uh, what?” The blonde asked nervously.
“Dumbledore. He’s assigned you to…to Hufflepuff. The hat was wrong the first time around— come off it, he really hasn’t stopped by and told you yet?”
Remus put a hand over his eyes. He couldn’t watch his friends embarrass themselves so thoroughly.
“I…I, uh…”
The boy backed out of the dormitory slowly. When the door shut, James asked—
“Do you think he bought it?”
“No,” Remus snapped. “You couldn’t think of a better excuse than that? The three of us are, what, transfers in this scenario? Sharing one bed in a school that can magically make more with a swish of the wrist?”
“Obviously you’re the transfer to Gryffindor. Sirius and I are in your sheets because…”
“We’re breaking in the bed,” Sirius finished with a suggestive grin. James laughed.
Footsteps sounded outside the door.
“Aw, shit, we forgot to run away,” Sirius said.
“I thought it was you at first, Harry—”
“What, you thought I’d be cuddling two random boys in my bed?”
“I…dont’t think you want me to answer that…and it’s my bed, actually…a-anyway, there’s one that looks like you, and another that looks like Professor Luipin. I can’t place the third bloke, but, blimey, he’s handsome.”
Professor Lupin? James mouthed to himself, brows furrowed. Remus blinked.
Handsome! Sirius mouthed back, grinning, all too pleased with the compliment. He ran a hand through his dark hair and winked at Remus, who kicked him on instinct.
“Ow!”
“Thanks, Neville. Don’t mention this to anyone.”
“But—”
“Seriously.”
“Sure, Harry,” the blonde said, sounding defeated. “I’ll head off to class now.”
The door opened to reveal Mini-James. Harry.
“I just searched the whole bloody school for you lot, and you’re in my dorm. Jesus Christ.”
“Who?” James asked. His glasses were askew from laying down and his hair stuck up in every direction. It was almost impressive, how much of a mess he managed to look.
Remus sighed. This was going to be a long, long day.