Chapter Text
Standard Disclaimer: I own nothing in regards to Harry Potter or the Marvel Universe. All properties herein are those of their creators. I am only a writer working on my skills with worlds and characters that I love.
Note : Was messing around with possible ideas for a Doctor Who crossover when this idea popped into my mind. I’ve always been curious about the prospect of a straight up time travel fic, but never got around to writing one. Well, here I am now, with an idea that might have come about from going down an old rabbit hole and rewatching X-Men Evolution….
Note : The only pairing currently set in stone is Storm, but I’m open to two or three others if a good enough reason for their inclusion is provided.
Chapter One - A Canadian Walks Into A Bar
“One more.” Harry slid his empty glass onto its side and rolled it across the surface of the bar to its tender, who was busily wiping another one clean with a towel. “And can you make it cold this time, Hagrid?”
The large bartender raised a bushy brow and huffed into the depths of his beard. It had been several years since the half-giant had taken over the running of the Leaky Cauldron from Tom, but the big man had never lost his need to see to the care of others; which was why, instead of doing as requested, the man merely flipped the towel over his shoulder and rested both hands flat on the hardwood, leaning forward until he and the boy he’d once introduced to the Magical World were staring eye-to-eye. It pained Hagrid more than he could ever vocalize that both of his own could now only stare into one of his patron’s. That sweet little boy of years past wouldn’t be able to recognize himself in the mirror now if he tried for a hundred years. “Aven’t you had enough there, Harry?”
The wizard shook his head and leaned forward to rest his weight on his crossed elbows. “No such thing anymore, and you know it. If it’s about my tab, I’m always good for it.”
Hagrid shook his head. “I aint charged you for years and you know it. Veterans don’t pay in my place. But this… it aint good for you, boy.” Always a bit worried when one of his last living friends got so in the dumps, the lovable giant offered, “Maybe you should just go home and-”
“And do what, Hagrid?” Harry’s head shot up and his one remaining eye started to blaze with rage-induced arcane light, while the fake number that was latched to his left socket behind its patch began spinning wildly in time with his labored breathing. “Sleep!?!? Rest?!?!? Relax?!?!? How in God’s name am I supposed to do that without-” He stopped as a heavy hand plopped down on his shoulder and a fresh creak beside him announced the weight of another body, heavier than it should be, settling into the stool next to his own.
“Better just pour him one more for the road, Big Man.” A gruff North American accent spoke up. “He’s already good and worked up now; might as well dim him as much as possible before he makes a scene later.”
Hagrid eyed his new customer and nodded warily. By now he was used to the short, well muscled, and overtly hairy figure that often drank with Harry, but it didn’t stop the half of himself that was near-animal from shrinking away from the guy on sheer instinct alone. It was hard not to recognize an apex predator when one saw it. Once again he reminded himself that the short man was a veteran, same as Harry, and he wouldn’t let his old fears stop him from providing service Tom would be proud of were he still alive to see it. “Fine, but you’ll be responsible for him after?”
The stranger nodded. “When haven’t I been in the last twenty years?”
“Fair enough. The usual for you then, too, Logan?”
“Hell yeah.”
In short order, the Canadian had three fingers of Jack Daniels waiting in a snifter while his friend had another pint of Guinness waiting before his nose, magically chilled this time as ordered. “Damn, Hagrid, would it kill you to get a mason jar to serve the good stuff in?”
The big man shrugged. “If ye got a line to America for a shipment let me know. Aven’t been able to get anything new in months. I’m mainly running off the stock Tom had in the cellar, and when he served whiskey people wanted to drink good scotch outa good glasses. You get what you get.”
The Canadian grumbled but took a hearty swig nonetheless. One more inconvenience that had sprung up since atlantic travel had become near impossible. Humanity prided themselves on being ‘genetically pure’ these days, but the war it took to get them there had caused so much structural damage to the global infrastructure that the world had basically reverted back into the near-stone age. Ideas like combustion engines, electricity, and air travel were things of the distant past. God, he’d kill for a hot bath one of these days. Those few of the surviving ‘weird’ and ‘different’ variety just ‘existed’ wherever they could now, many just setting their feet up wherever their last battles had ended. Sure, they’d lost the war, but it wasn’t like the winners had any ability left to continue the hunt regardless. Really, it had all ended up as one disastrous tie. Meanwhile, most of the magical survivors had receded behind enough Fidelius charms to make Underhill jealous of their secrecy; closing off their borders for good. They’d likely stay there until the end of the world if their past actions were anything to judge by.
Clinking their glasses together, the short man said, “For our comrades.”
“For the fallen.” The corner of Harry’s mouth twitched as he joined his friend in clapping the buts of their glasses to the bartop.
“And may they never meet in the next life to compare stories about us.” The men chuckled without mirth as they raised the glasses to their lips and drowned healthy lungfulls, completing the toast. Once they were done, Logan looked over at the younger man and asked, “Still can’t sleep?”
“Can you?”
“Never could, but I wasn’t asking about me. Now, Charles would say you’re being defensive.”
“Charles is a know-it-all busybody who can never seem to mind his own business.”
“Doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be right. Those of us left from the old unit all drink, but you’ve been taking it to a new level, kid.”
Harry rested his head on the bar and replied, “I have to, Logan. It’s the only way I can feel anything from the stuff. You know why.”
“Yeah, a transfusion of my blood will do that to you. But still. Are you in that much of a hurry to kick the bucket? What are you trying to do, make yourself so out of it that any bozo on the street can take a cheap shot at ya?”
“Course not.” Harry still didn’t raise his head. “Wouldn’t work anyway. I’d just heal up in a few minutes.”
“Don’t mean it wouldn’t hurt.”
“At least I’d feel something for once.”
Logan, once known as the Wolverine, leveled hard eyes on his friend. “I’ve heard shit like that before, kid. And every time, the person that said it was dead within a week. You’re better than that.”
“Am I?”
“Luna thought so.” Harry grew very still beside him, and the mutant suddenly realized that he’d gone too far. And small wonder. When the war with the humans had broken out, most magical societies had voted to stay out of the conflict, but Harry, backed by a bunch of his old classmates, had seen the writing on the wall. He’d realized that once the mutants were all gone, the humans would come for the magicals next, so he’d defied the will of his government and led a battalion of aurors into the field to back up mutantkind in the struggle for both independence and survival. But war had a way of tearing down the best of intentions and ideals, and many were the nights that Logan had seen his British friend staying up late to write letters to his sweetheart back home, a woman that Harry called Luna. Someone that he declared he was fighting to give a better life for… her and the child she was carrying within her. And then the bombs started falling…. And the Brit lost all pretense of honor.
Harry’s bar stool fell to the ground as he stood up, chugged the rest of his draft in one glug, and then turned back toward the door. “Enjoy your drink, Logan.”
“Hey, kid, I’m sorry I-”
“No.” Harry stopped a few feet past his friend, not turning to look at him. “You didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. I just… I can’t talk about that shit. Not now.”
Logan stared down into his glass. “So is it a bad time to mention that Forge thought he figured ‘it’ out?”
The Brit was all set to start moving toward the door again, but those words stopped him cold. “Bullshit.”
“I’m serious.”
“He said it was impossible.”
“No, he said he didn’t ‘think’ it was possible. With a mutation like his, that’s a world of difference. Problem is, he says it’ll only work once; which means we have a single shot.”
With jerky motions, Harry forced himself to move back to the hairy man’s side. “You going, then?”
Wolverine shook his head in a negative motion. “Adamantium skeleton makes it impossible. Forge had to pretty much rebuild the thing, and now he says that only organic matter will make it through, and even then… he’s not sure what the passage will do to the passenger’s body. At best, it’ll be like getting hit with weapon’s grade radiation poisoning, at worst, exposure to antimatter tearing the body limb from limb at the atomic level.”
Harry understood at once where the other man was going with his explanation. “So the machine needs a regenerator?”
“Yeah. I was thinking about asking you, but if you’re too busy moping there’s always Deadpool. He’s been lobbying for the trip since he first stole that busted thing from Cable.”
Harry leaned heavily against the bar as the import of those words finally settled into his mind. “All this time… I never thought it could happen.”
“Most of us didn’t.”
“What would I even do? You know the theories, the same as me. We change something and it won’t affect the lives of the people living here. It’ll only make a new continuity. A new future. You’ll-”
“Get left behind. Yeah, kid. Command already thought of all of that. And they’d rather ‘a’ future where our people survive than one where we’re destined to die out. There aren’t enough of us left to carry on the population past a few more generations. There’s just not enough time or resources.”
On some level Harry understood that. But one thing was bugging him. “Why me? There’s at least five other regenerators left on this continent. Any of them could do the job without my baggage holding them back.”
Wolverine smiled sadly into his glass, knowing his friend would hate it if he leveled that look back at him. “You saved my life, Harry. More than that, you saved Laura’s. It’s a favor that I can never repay for you after everything that went down. But I can offer you a life where it never happened. I can give you a future where she’s still alive.”
The wizard forced down the ache in his chest those words elicited and replied, “She won’t know me there. It won’t be ‘my’ Luna, and I won’t be ‘her’ Harry. It wouldn’t be fair to her. And the things I’ve done, the man I am now… my Luna wouldn’t even be able to look at me.” He’d be the first to admit that after the carpet bombing of London he’d gone a little bit off the deep end wreaking vengeance.
“But you still want to know she’s safe, don’t you?”
Harry didn’t answer, all of his focus kept locked onto running through all of the possible scenarios for how things could go wrong or… how they might go right. “What’s the time frame?”
“The Council can only keep a lid on the operation for another day. After that, we’re expecting a herd of agitants to come running after us, all looking for their shot at a second chance. You have until the morning.”
“That’ll be long enough.” Harry finally turned back to the door, but before heading out he said over his shoulder, “Logan… thank you.”
Wolverine chuffed in the back of his throat and downed a healthy swallow of whiskey. “You never need to thank me, kid. Not you.” He turned to look at his friend, but the wizard was already gone. “I hate it when he does that.”
Meanwhile
The silence of the British countryside was broken by a sharp ‘cracking’ noise as Harry Potter suddenly appeared in front of the burned out remains of a modest two story home. After dating long enough to consider moving in together, they’d decided that the Potter Manor was just too big for them alone. So until they had at least five of the seven children they wanted, they’d elected to move into a far more reasonable number that would be easier to maintain and make their own.
When the war finally ended and he made his way back home, walking the length of the property without Luna had just filled him with rage; and in the end he’d left nothing behind that could remind him of what he’d lost. Nothing except for a cairn of stones in the backyard that he slowly made his way over to now.
Luna wasn’t in there. There hadn’t been enough left of her after the conflagration to even piece together with a ‘point me’ spell. But he’d still made the grave to have somewhere to come talk to her. A part of him thought that she would have wanted that. Even if what he came to say was goodbye.
“Hey, Luna.” He knelt in front of the cairn and brushed a few stray weeds and dead leaves away from its surface. “Sorry it’s been a while. Logan needed some help with rescue missions in Africa, and then… I just didn’t like thinking of you here.”
For a while he just stayed like that, running his hand back and forth over the smooth stones. Then he said, “I’m gonna to be going away, Love. Probably forever. Where I’m going, you’ll be, but I don’t think we’ll be together there. You’ll be amazing in any time or reality, but if I came to you there, I’d just be hoping you would become the person I knew. The one I loved. And that’s not fair to you.”
Taking a deep breath, Harry forced himself to say the words he’d been dreading. “But I still want to be happy. It’s been so long, and I’ve been so alone, and this journey might be a chance to start over, but I don’t want to hurt your memory. So please, Luna, give me a sign. Show me that it’s okay to move on. Show me that it won’t hurt you.”
Harry honestly didn’t expect a response. He’d merely felt the need to get things off of his chest, and beg forgiveness for the future. So when a brush of movement caught his eye and he looked down to see a small white rabbit hopping over from the remains of the garden, he was rather shocked. Even more so when the thing grabbed a branch in its teeth and dragged it over to the cairn before leaning it against the side and burrowing underneath it for cover.
“The land is always reclaiming its own, and being reborn into something else.” The wizard breathed with fond remembrance. It had been something Luna had said often when they would go on nature walks to try and find the ever-elusive crumple horned snorkack. The message couldn’t have been clearer. “Darling, you chose one strange angel.”
The Next Morning
Harry stood at the end of the Royal Pier in Wales and didn’t react even a little bit as a massive submarine frothed to the surface ahead of him. Perhaps the only piece of motorized equipment left in existence, Forge’s home, and the unofficial headquarters of the Council of Mutants, finally surfaced and moved into a glide that carried it to the edge of the dock. A testament to the skill Kurt had developed as a Captain.
It didn’t take long to come aboard, descend the raised hatch, and be met with the usual crowd of Charles, Erik, Logan, and Emma. The Council of Mutants that mentally monitored the world, or what remained of it, and worked to send aid wherever they were able. Erik, or Magneto as he’d once been called, had saved thousands by manipulating now-useless electronic items into new weather-proofed shelters.
“So this is it, huh?” Harry dropped into the seat that had been prepared for him and breathed a sigh of relief as its cushions automatically conformed to his shape and reclined him back to a resting position. He’d been told that he wouldn’t be able to take anything with him, so all he’d brought was the clothes on his back.
As Forge appeared from somewhere in the rear of the craft and started hooking up wires to his head, Charles asked, “Are you sure you’re ready for this, Harry?”
“As ready as anyone can be. Why, got a message for yourself?”
Charles frowned and tapped the arms of his hoverchair. “I’m not sure what information would be useful. The device was too damaged to predict a particular date of arrival. All we know for sure is that you’ll appear somewhere between now and fifty years ago. There’s a lot that went wrong in that time. Too much to cover in a simple message.”
“Too much to circumvent completely.” Erik noted with a sad nod. “Charles, If I could take back all those years of fighting-”
“I know, my friend.” The bald man patted the holocaust survivor's arm in a gesture of platonic affection. Addressing Harry again, he said, “We were all different men in the past, Harry. Far different than when you met us. Life hadn’t yet taken its toll or informed us of its harshest lessons. Wherever you end up, please, I ask only that you be patient with us.”
Harry looked at the blonde, who merely huffed and threw her hair over her shoulders. “I was always perfect. But for the time I was alive I was always doing my own thing. I’ll be alright in any time.”
The wizard understood. Emma was letting him know that her past self likely wouldn’t believe him if he told her he was from the future. Best to steer clear of her if possible. Out loud he said, “I can’t guarantee anything, you know. I’m only one man.”
Wolverine crossed his arms over his chest. “You were only one man when you broke the lines in Calcutta. You were only one man when you burned Tuscany to the ground. You were only one man when you crushed the insurgents in Bogota. You were only one man when-”
“I get it, Logan.”
“No, you don’t. In terms of raw power you’d easily be classified as an Omega level mutant, man. You are The Man . But even without all that power, one soldier can change the course of destiny. A single grain of rice-”
“Can tip the scale.” Harry finished with a smile, his first real one of the day. Before the electricity had failed worldwide, Laura had always made the survivors of their unit join her on Friday evenings for a movie night. Whenever it was her turn to pick she always chose Mulan. “Tell the kitten goodbye for me, eh?”
“You got it, brother.” Logan shuffled forward and rested a thick hand on his shoulder. “It aint gonna be the same drinking without you, but I’ll keep your stool reserved all the same.”
“Appreciate it. But enough with the touchy-feely shit. We doing this or what?”
Beside him, Forge finished some final tinkering with the machine, formerly the size of a watch, but now expanded into a wider matrix set into a chest-length leather band. “It’s ready when you are. Lose the shirt.”
“For the last time, man, I’m not into dudes.”
“And I stopped trying to turn you the first time Luna sent me a very pointed letter. This is about science.”
“Sure it is.” Masking his nerves with banter, Harry unbuttoned his shirt and shimmied out of it before lying back down. A moment later the device was laid flush against his chest hair and the wires on his head were attached to its base.
Clearing his throat, Forge noted, “Just a reminder, be prepared for anything. All we have for an idea of where you’ll end up are hypothesis and-”
“It’s all good, my friend. I trust your work.” The wizard smiled up at his technologically inclined comrade. “And if things go wrong, then what’s the problem? I’ll finally see my wife again. I’m good either way this turns out.” His eyes traced back over to Charles and Erik. “I’m guessing that’s the real reason I was chosen.”
Before the older men could muster up a response he ordered, “Punch it.”
Forge offered his friend one last military salute, one mirrored quickly by Logan, and a second later the mutant lowered the same hand to the dial and spun it twice. Then the world disappeared and all that remained in its place was agony.