Chapter Text
Prologue
June, 1943
The Time-Turner was warm in his hand and he was running.
Third floor corridor, two in the morning, no one around. His footsteps too loud on the stone. He didn't slow down. He had three minutes before the portrait at the far end did its hourly check and he needed to be through the tapestry on the left before that happened — the alcove behind it, the gap in the wards he'd found six days ago by accident and had been thinking about every waking hour since.
He wasn't going to think about whether this was a good idea. He'd done that part. He'd sat in the dormitory for three nights in a row turning it over from every angle he could find and arrived at the same place each time: he was a Horcrux. He had been a Horcrux for fifteen years. Dumbledore had known, or suspected, or known enough to be very carefully evasive when Harry had stood in his office three nights ago and put the evidence down piece by piece and watched Dumbledore's face do something complicated and sorry and — the part Harry kept coming back to — prepared. The expression of a man who had been waiting for this conversation. Who had already decided how much to say.
He ran faster.
The tapestry. The alcove. He pressed himself into the shadow and held his breath through the portrait's hourly circuit and didn't move until the footsteps faded entirely. His heart was loud in his ears. His hands were shaking, which he noticed and filed away. He opened his left hand and looked at the Time-Turner.
Hermione had told him, once, that Time-Turners required an anchor point. You set the destination — the number of hours, the intended return — and the magic oriented itself around that anchor and brought you back. Without one you were unmoored. Without one there was no guarantee of where or when you'd land, no guarantee of return. Hermione had said this as a warning. Harry had listened to it as information.
He hadn't set an anchor.
He thought about the Pensieve. About the memory Dumbledore hadn't chosen — the small boy in a cupboard under the stairs, sitting very still in the dark, learning not to make noise when he was afraid. He thought about the Ministry file he'd taken from the Department of Mysteries, the cross-reference that said classified, refer only to AD, the initials he'd recognised immediately. He thought about Dumbledore sitting across from him three nights ago, sorry and measured and already knowing what Harry had come to say.
He thought about a Horcrux. About a fragment of originating consciousness bound to an unintended living host. About fifteen years of being told the connection was complicated, was deep, was something to be careful with — and none of those words ever meaning what they should have meant, which was: there is a piece of him inside you and we are going to have to destroy it.
He pressed the Time-Turner.
The corridor went white.
—
He hit the ground hard and lay still for a moment, face against cold stone, waiting for the world to stop moving.
It stopped. He pushed himself up. He was in a corridor — different corridor, stone walls, low ceiling, early morning light coming through a narrow window to his left. His head was ringing. He checked himself in order: arms, legs, wand still in his pocket, Time-Turner still in his left hand, Invisibility Cloak somehow still around his shoulders. Good. He got to his feet and stood there for a moment with his hand on the wall.
His ears were ringing. His vision was doing something strange at the edges. He waited for it to stop. It stopped.
The window. He went to it.
Outside: a street. Narrow, cobbled, a row of terraced houses on the opposite side. A woman in a long wool coat walking quickly with her head down. A boy on a bicycle. A postman with a leather satchel over one shoulder, moving door to door. The clothes were wrong. Not wrong-wrong — wrong-era. The silhouettes, the cut of things, the particular absence of anything synthetic. The style of the bicycle, which was of a type that didn't exist anymore.
He pressed his forehead against the glass and looked further down the street. A news board outside a closed shop. He squinted.
June 30, 1943.
He stared at it for a long time.
He'd known this was possible. He'd known the Time-Turner had no anchor. He hadn't quite believed it would be this far. Fifty-two years. He was in 1943. Both wars on at once — he could see that just from this window, could see the boarded glass two houses down, the absence of certain things, the particular texture of a street that had been managing on less for long enough it showed in the brickwork and the expressions of the people moving through it.
Voldemort was sixteen. Tom Riddle was sixteen. Still at Hogwarts, still before any of it, still at the point where none of the permanent damage had been done yet.
Harry sat down on the floor of the corridor, back against the wall, and looked at the Time-Turner. Still warm. No anchor set, which meant no way to know if it would work again, no way to know how to orient a return. The magic had brought him here — to this specific year, this specific day — and he had no idea why, whether that was randomness or something else, whether the connection had pulled him somewhere adjacent to it without him understanding what he was doing.
He'd done this. He had actually done this.
He sat there for a while and let that settle. The street outside moved through its ordinary June morning. He sat in the old corridor with his cloak pooled around him and tried to work out what came next, and thought, not for the first time, that things might have gone differently if he'd asked Dumbledore more questions and fewer accusations three nights ago. If he'd been calmer about it. If he'd given Dumbledore time to explain rather than standing up and leaving.
Then again.
He thought about the cupboard. The small boy sitting very still in the dark, learning to make no noise when he was afraid. He thought about the Ministry file. He thought about the word Horcrux, which he'd only found twelve days ago and which had rearranged everything.
Then again, maybe not.