Chapter Text
Harry stood locked inside a public restroom stall underground in London. Since his second year, he had known how excellent an abandoned bathroom could be if one wanted to do secret things away from curious eyes. It was a dark night, and the boy had placed a flashlight on the cistern to light his way. Sweat was dripping down his face; he was carefully aligning the Time Turner with the tachometer on the closed lid, being cautious not to tilt it and cause an accidental turn. He had rehearsed this moment many times, so now every movement was smooth and practiced, although his hand trembled. For a moment, he thought of Ron and Hermione—what would they say if they saw him now—but he pushed the thought out of his mind, focusing solely on the task at hand. He didn’t want anything to distract him, since he had already planned everything down to the smallest detail.
When the dial was perfectly connected to the small hourglass, Harry took a deep breath and hung the thin gold chain with the Time Turner around his neck. He pulled his wand from his belt and pointed it at the device. His hand trembled again; he could still change his mind, go back to his friends, and continue his life where he had left off... And continue the hopeless fight against Voldemort where it had ended. No, he couldn't allow that. He clenched his teeth and, in his mind, locked every happy moment of his life so far into a small box he never intended to open again. He was determined to do what he was about to do and would not turn back. He tightened his grip on his wand and then slashed it toward the device.
The Time Turner spun at breakneck speed, and the counter did the same. Both blurred into streaks, but Harry did not mind. He knew he would still have to wait a long time before they stopped at the desired rotation. There was no turning back now. He stood patiently in the booth, listening to the device’s soft whirring and the drip of a faulty water tank, drawing deep breaths. He tried to calm himself, but without success. The more time passed, the faster his his heart began to race. Although he could not make out the numbers themselves, he could see that they had reached the tens of thousands, then soon rolled over into the hundreds of thousands. His heart jolted so hard it hurt. There was not much left. Perhaps only seconds. The counter dial kept spinning and spinning. The boy began to suspect that he had made a mistake, that the device would never stop, or that he had miscalculated and would end up somewhere in antiquity, when a soft click sounded and everything came to a halt. Harry managed to register that the number he glimpsed on the indicator matched his calculations, then he felt a powerful tug backward, as if a gigantic vacuum cleaner had seized him with tremendous force.
This was not his first time traveling through time. He had done it once in his third year, but then he had only jumped back a few hours, whereas now he was leaping back decades. He was not even sure he would survive it. His stomach churned as he hurtled through something like a tunnel, flying backward the whole way and accelerating nonstop, while the colors and shapes rushing past him merged into a wall of silver. Then, without warning, the “vacuum cleaner” spat him out.
His landing lacked elegance; he ended up flat on his back on the cobblestones, and his glasses flew off, but to his relief, there was no sound of broken glass, and he seemed unharmed as well. Dizzy and fighting nausea, he struggled to his feet, felt around for his glasses, and put them on once he found them. It was night here too, but the toilet was gone, and in its place stood what appeared to be a deserted narrow street, at least now, or rather, back then. He needed to make sure he had arrived in the time he intended, so he brushed himself off and set off down the street. On either side stood a bench, with wrought iron lamps beside them, the kind he had once seen in an old museum-worthy piece of a newspaper, displayed back when he attended a Muggle primary school.
Speaking of newspapers, he thought he could get one and learn the date from it. He looked around. No newsstand stood nearby, but even if one had, it would not have been stocked at night, so he searched for a rubbish bin instead, hoping to find a discarded copy. He soon spotted one. He rummaged through it with hope, found nothing, moved on to another, then methodically to the next, until at last he pulled out a scrap of paper coated in some nasty sticky stuff; it was the remains of an issue of the London Times. The letters looked completely different from those in his time, and the sentences were written in a strange, archaic style, and the date was... In the light of a nearby street lamp, Harry could see that it was exactly what he had hoped for. Satisfied, he threw the newspaper back into the bin and continued down the street, searching for his destination.
It all began when he saw Hermione's Time Turner in their third year. When he saw the little golden hourglass, it was just a vague idea that Harry initially toyed with just for fun. Sometimes he played with the idea of "What if...?" but other times he managed to put it aside for long periods of time over the next three years, especially when everything was going well. However, it later resurfaced with renewed force, spread out, began to take shape, and then seized his mind, never leaving him in peace.
When the plan began to take shape, it became frighteningly feasible. As the war situation grew more hopeless, the boy obsessively filled every remaining gap in his idea. During his final year at Hogwarts, he spent countless nights reading every book that seemed useful to his goal. He practiced nonverbal magic from them and learned many offensive and defensive spells. From an ancient small black volume he found in the antiquarian bookshop on Knockturn Alley, he finally gained a clear understanding of the theory behind Occlumency and Legilimency, because the author explained them in an almost remedial teaching style. He once tested the latter on Malfoy from ambush, which led him to learn things he never wanted to know, such as the fact that Draco found his backside quite shapely. From the same book, Harry also learned wandless magic, with varying degrees of success.
However, he still couldn't make the decision until a certain event occurred; Dumbledore's death gave him the final push. The loss of his idolized wizard devastated him and left him completely distraught. He couldn't bear the thought of never seeing him again, never being able to count on his advice, never looking into those blue eyes, so he blocked out the loss and all the memories associated with it; he continued to think of the professor as a living person who had simply gone away somewhere and would return soon.
From that point on, he had no more doubts about the plan.
He lied to his friends, telling them that he needed some time alone to figure out the location of the Horcruxes and work out a plan to find them, so Ron and Hermione only asked occasionally how he was getting on, but he had to swear that he wouldn't take any action without them. He broke his promise guiltily, but he knew that soon he would leave everything behind forever anyway.
During her preparations, he faced only two serious practical problems. One was that the Time Turner could only take a person back one hour with each turn, so as soon as Harry had calculated and thought about how many times he would have to turn it to travel decades, he became uncertain. But he was a wizard, so he knew for sure that this could be solved with some kind of spell. However, since he didn't know what spell would reverse the Time Turner exactly 510,976 times, he got a Muggle revolution counter and set it to the desired number so that the hourglass would not spin any further. Hermione’s help would have been useful, or at least Uncle Vernon’s, but he knew that if he told the girl even a word about the plan, Hermione would lock him in a cellar and refuse to let him out until he abandoned the idea.
The other difficulty was obtaining the Time Turner itself. He knew that everything depended on it, yet he left it until last because he didn't want the Aurors to make things even more difficult for him. Since Hermione had returned the Time Turner to McGonagall at the end of his third year, and all the small hourglasses had been destroyed at the Ministry of Magic in his fifth year, the boy's only hope was that the professor still had the one she had lent to the girl. Harry reasoned that it might be in the professor’s room at Hogwarts. He found out which window belonged to McGonagall and, once near the end of the year, when he found it open, he whispered, “Accio Time Turner.” To his regret, nothing happened.
Harry’s second guess pointed to the witch’s home. He found out where the house stood, then one night at the start of summer he simply Apparated there. For a while he watched the neat little residence from a distance, where the professor lived alone, and assessed its defenses. Several protective and alarm charms guarded it against intruders. Harry managed to disable one or two, but most resisted him. Powerful spells also sealed the front door and the windows, magic he had never seen before, so he did not dare tamper with them. He could not give up, though. He continued to scan the house and sensed the same unfamiliar magic around the chimney and even the small basement windows.
He had never imagined that one day he would want to break into McGonagall’s home. Shame washed over him as he lurked there, even knowing he acted for a good cause. Then he lifted his gaze and noticed something. He sensed no charm near the barred bathroom vent. There lay the gap in the shield.
“Accio Time Turner,” he whispered with hope.
A few minutes of tense waiting followed. Then came a soft clatter, and the hourglass slipped neatly through the grate, straight into Harry’s hand.
The small hourglass now hung around the boy’s neck as he arrived in front of a plain looking building. He had already found out exactly where it once stood, meaning where it stood now, so he Apparated nearby while still in his own time.
He had to hide his wand and invisibility cloak somewhere so no one could find them on him, yet he needed to keep them within reach. He went over to a full garbage bag lying beside a trash bin and dumped out its contents. Then he turned the bag inside out and placed his belongings into the relatively clean interior. A large hydrangea bush nearby looked suitable, so he buried them at its base.
After finishing the task and cleaning his hands, he went through the wrought iron gate and climbed the steps to the door. He straightened his clothes, although the worn-out trousers and shirt he had bought in a thrift store especially for the occasion (after all, he couldn't show up in his grandfather's time wearing a T-shirt and jeans) didn't make him look any better, then took a deep breath and knocked. Nothing happened for a long time. Then a light came on in one of the windows, and after what seemed like five long minutes, Mrs. Cole opened the door; the woman Harry had seen in Dumbledore's memories, who was the head of this orphanage. The young, thin, mouse-like woman was now wearing a worn nightgown, which she had apparently thrown on in a hurry. Mrs. Cole stared at Harry dully, clearly unhappy about being dragged out of her sleep.
"Good evening..." Harry began, but couldn't continue.
"Good evening to you too, son," the woman grumbled as she looked him over. "What are you doing here? And so late at night?"
"I... Please let me in!" Harry stammered.
"Well, it's not that simple," said Mrs. Cole, surprised, but then she motioned for Harry to come in with her. The boy entered the hallway, which smelled of cleaning products and had black-and-white stone floors. They walked down it together, then the woman ushered him into a room that looked like an office.
"What's your name?" asked Mrs. Cole after sitting down behind the desk and offering the boy a seat opposite her on a worn chair.
"Harry Potter," he replied readily as he sat down. The seat creaked mercilessly beneath him. The woman took a heavily salad-like notebook and a pen from the desk drawer and began to write.
"When were you born?"
Harry almost blurted out his own birth date, then caught himself. Even now, he couldn't get over the absurdity of the situation. In his time, this woman might have been long dead.
His nervousness made even the simplest calculations difficult. How much should he subtract from how much? He hadn't calculated his new date of birth in advance, and now it was as if a dark fog had settled over his brain. He began to fidget nervously, and the chair creaked with his every movement.
"July 31," he said at first. The woman wrote it down.
"And the year?"
Harry nearly fainted. He felt so flustered that he could not even tell whether he was a boy or a girl, let alone do any math. But then he had a better idea.
"I don't remember."
The woman looked up at him in surprise.
"You don't remember? How is that possible?"
"I'm sorry... but I don't remember." Mrs. Cole looked as if the gears in her mind were grinding as she tried to decide whether to scold the boy or start worrying about him.
“What are your parents called?” she finally changed the subject, seeing that the previous one led nowhere.
"Potter... I think."
The woman raised one eyebrow at this.
"And where are they now?"
"They're dead," Harry replied.
Or rather, they had not even been born yet, he thought, but the point was the same. He felt himself becoming emotional, despite his best efforts. The woman noticed this and continued her questioning in a slightly softer tone.
"How did they die?"
Harry swallowed.
“In a car accident,” he croaked. He had decided long ago that this was what he would say. In a Muggle setting, it sounded far more believable than “a dark wizard killed them.”
“How did it happen?”
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"I don't remember." Mrs. Cole waited a moment, then wrote something down.
"And when did all this happen?" She looked up again.
"I don't remember that either." Harry hoped she would stop questioning him; it was starting to feel like an interrogation, and he felt exhausted. Mrs. Cole, however, stared at him with interest, as if she expected him to continue. They watched each other in tense silence for a while, then Harry buried his face in one hand. Fatigue blurred his vision, and he only wanted to rest his eyes for a moment, but luckily the woman misread the gesture; she sprang up, went over to Harry, and wrapped an arm around him in a comforting embrace.
“All right, my dear, you don’t have to talk about it now if you don’t want to. I can see how upsetting it is, and how confused you feel. You can tell me later. Calm down, sweetheart, just calm down. I will put you up here for the night. We still have a few empty rooms.”
When Harry finally found himself alone in his new room, lying on his back on the bed, he thought he would spend the whole night thinking about the events of the day and what he had to do the next day. Instead, only moments later, exhaustion pulled him into a deep, dreamless sleep.