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After the battle of Hogwarts in early 1998, Harry had rather happily gone to bed in the hall with all the other combatants, knowing that it was all over, that he would never have to deal with Voldemort again.
His head hit his pillow and he was out like a light.
Harry dreamt of strange things that night, of aliens and intergalactic wars, of time and space being breached.
When he woke up the next day, he was back in the cupboard under the stairs, eight years old once more, and a sense of urgency lingered in his chest.
He looked around with wide eyes, and instead of freaking out, he decided that it must be a blessing from magic.
Go back and do it again, this time without so much death.
And so, he did.
He went through the years he'd previously lived, sorted into Gryffindor once more, for his determination to do things better this time, but no less bravely.
In 1998, when Voldemort was once again defeated, this time with all his friends and family safe, he slept in the hall, a smile on his face.
Harry woke up in the cupboard once again.
This time he was sorted into Hufflepuff, his hopefulness that this time he'd do it right, he'd work hard to make sure of it!
He woke up in the cupboard.
Slytherin this time, his ambition to end this once and for all shining through.
1998... No, 1988...
Ravenclaw, maybe learning everything he could just might help?
The cupboard again.
Harry raged, and this time there was a bloodbath as he tore into the Death Eaters with no mercy.
He woke up in the cupboard once more, it kept cycling, and he was pretty sure he should be around two hundred by that point...
Do It All Again
He was still eight, he was trapped in the same nine and a half years.
This time, Harry decided, he just wouldn't go to Hogwarts, he'd leave the Dursleys come morning and just travel, it was a school day, his relatives wouldn't realise he was missing until it was time to come home.
And so that's exactly what Harry did and before he left, he took some money from his aunt's purse, he didn't take anything else.
Harry caught the bus into London with the money and quickly went to work, pickpocketing unsuspecting tourists, something he'd learnt how to do well after his fifth cycle.
Once he'd gathered enough money, he made his way to a local supermarket and grabbed some of the cheaper children's clothes and shoes, making sure to get a coat too.
He also grabbed a children's backpack with dinosaurs printed on it, just big enough to fit the clothes.
The cashier was very indulgent with him, thinking that his parents had let him go and pay by himself.
Once it was all bagged up, he made his way into the toilets, locking the stall behind him and got to work changing out of the ratty clothing that had belonged to his cousin.
So what if a lot of his clothes had dinosaurs printed on them, he wasn't ashamed to say that he liked them.
Once he was changed, he put his new clothes in his backpack, tossing the coat on over himself as rain was forecast, and slipped the bag on his back.
He put his old clothes in the bag and slipped them in the bin by the bathroom door on his way out.
And then Harry Potter disappeared into the midst of London, heading towards a train station to get as far away from the area as he could.
Do It All Again
In 1991 he successfully avoided all of the owls addressed to him, something rather difficult due to the sheer number of them.
On the night of his eleventh birthday, he snuck onto a freight train going from the northern part of England all the way down to Cornwall, knowing they didn't have many stops and when they did stop, he was able to hide well enough to not be spotted.
The wizards and witches that were sent after him, not so much, getting chased away from the freight yards when they stopped.
Once in Cornwall, he was constantly on the move, with help from busses, taxis, and trains.
They gave up after a week.
Do It All Again
In 1994, he didn't feel the cup's contract attach itself to him, proving a theory of his that he'd had since his seventh cycle.
Barty Crouch Jr had in the past managed to get his name, written by him, with his magical signature from his work and homework.
Without them, he wasn't able to be entered into the cup.
He continued moving across the United Kingdom, worried that they would somehow try and force him to participate anyway.
They never did.
Do It All Again
In March of 1996, when Harry was squatting in an abandoned building of flats, he met a rather strange man.
The man was wandering around the outside of the building, waving a strange device about, muttering about anomalies in time.
He knew for a fact that it was him.
The fifteen-year-old watched for a while as the man who wore a leather jacket kept walking around outside before he shrugged and boiled some water in the flat he'd picked out to stay in.
It had a gas cooker, and the building for some reason still had running gas and water, which was great because that meant he could drink water, have a shower, put the heating on, and cook food.
Ten minutes later, Harry had a nice cup of tea in his hands, when the man walked into the flat, the device pointed in his direction, beeping happily.
The two stared at each other for a moment, until Harry bought his mug up to his mouth and took a large mouthful of the drink.
The man continued to stare at him, and he bought the mug down from his mouth, holding it in both hands to warm them.
"Can I help you?" he asked him.
"No, but I can help you."
Do It All Again
The man took him to a police box, which he'd explained was actually his spaceship, and that he was an alien, something Harry took as a fact, remembering the strange dreams he sometimes had ever since this started.
He took him to the medical bay and attached a bunch of sticky pads to his chest and back, he also put something on his head which reminded Harry of a colander, but with suction cups all over the inside.
All of these were attached to some strange machines.
The man had the answers that he'd been looking for since his third go-around after half an hour.
"Well, it seems that you've got a very small bit of time itself in that noggin of yours, something that shouldn't be possible for humans."
Harry looked at the man in confusion, jumping slightly when he felt a prick at his skin, "ow," he hissed out, noticing that the man now had a syringe filled with his blood.
The man slotted it into another machine, cleaning Harry's arm as it worked.
Once it was done, the man looked over at the screen and whistled.
"Oh yeah, that's pretty far back."
Harry stared blankly at him, "want to share with the class?" he asked sarcastically.
"Well," he grinned brightly at him, "it seems that one of your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents was a Time Lord or Lady."
"And that means what exactly?"
He stared at Harry for a minute, before asking him a question.
"What exactly did you do before you were sent back to whenever it was that you were sent back to?"
Harry tilted his head, "I went to sleep, why?"
He shook his head, "no, before that."
"Won a war."
He looked at him sharply after that, "did you die?"
"What?"
"Did you die?" he asked again, looking at him sternly.
Harry looked at him nervously, "why doe-"
"Did. You. Die?"
"Yes, fine, okay, I died, happy now?" he yelled out, at the man.
The man looked at him, guilt written across his face.
"No," there was an awkward silence before he continued speaking, "You'd somehow managed to see a little bit of time itself, which managed to reactivate a very small amount of the Time Lord DNA inside of you, it's not enough for it to all be activated, or for it to help you regenerate."
He sighed, "you regenerated without regenerating, it would have caused a paradox, as you were existing when you shouldn't have been, as the person closest to the paradox, or the paradox itself, you were thrown to the nearest stable point before it happened, over and over again."
"So what, don't die?"
He snorted, "that would be impossible," he sighed, "no, the solution would be to find a tear in time that's just big enough for you to look in, get the rest of that DNA activated so that time won't crumble again."
Harry stared at him, wide-eyed.
Do It All Again
It took the Doctor, which was the man's name, a year to track down an appropriate tear, he had Harry sit at the open TARDIS door and stare at it for around half an hour, monitoring his blood through some sort of two-way filter system as it went because it was a small tear and nothing like the schism thing that he kept talking about.
After that, they stayed in the Vortex for another three months as Harry got used to feeling time itself, which was really weird, and he wouldn't recommend it.
When he was mostly alright and no longer wanted to throw up whenever the mildest change happened in time, they went to 1997, to begin stopping Voldemort.
In 1998, he was dead on Hogwarts grounds, just like the first time.
This time there was no cupboard the day after, and Harry's eyes were blue and his hair a silvery-white.
He went with the Doctor who picked up his friend who'd been visiting her mother, just a day later for her.
He was finally free from Voldemort.