comment_fic | Thursday - Future, Present, Past

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Moving this week right along, we come to Thursday, and today I'd like to play with time.

Future, Present, Past...could be someone gets stuck in the past, in their head or for real. Could be future version of someone comes back for a visit, to set something right or fix a mistake, or just to try to recapture a moment...could be a day that stretches on forever, or a moment that we want to....Have fun with it.

As always, please follow the rules: no more than 5 prompts in a row, no more than 3 per fandom. No spoilers in the prompt, and if your fic response has spoilers, please warn and leave adequate space.

Play nice and leave prompts that make the codemonkeys job easier:
For example:
Leverage, Nate, the five things he would tell his 20 year old self
Stargate SG-1, Daniel, the sacrifice he wouldn't make again
Criminal Minds, Hotch, the faces haunt his dreams

theme=future, present, past

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

tigriswolf

Harry Potter, author's choice, twenty-year-old Harry wakes up in his Hogwarts dorm the day before Sirius dies

From:

inkvoices

Harry wakes up with a pounding headache and vows that that’s the last time he ever helps anyone from the Department of Mysteries to investigate anything, even if Hermione is involved. Somehow it never ends well for him.

He squeezes his eyes shut against the daylight fighting through the crack in the curtains surrounding his bed, rubs at his temples, and counts up to ten and back down again repeatedly until it feels less like a game of bumper cars is going on inside his skull.

When he opens his eyes and realises that he’s not in his own bed he vows to spread the word throughout the whole Auror department about how these things never end well. That ought to cut down on volunteers for the Department of Mysteries and it’ll serve them right.

He pulls apart the curtains and stares around at the Gryffindor boys’ dormitory.

There’s the initial shock of being in an entirely different place than he was five minutes ago, the shock of somehow managing to appear inside Hogwarts, and then the shock that the dormitory looks exactly as it did when he used to live here, right down to the football poster by Dean’s bed. There’s also the Playwitch calendar that Seamus had put up in January of their fifth year and Harry’s stomach drops as he clambers off the bed to take a closer look at it.

He’d known that the Unspeakables had been messing around with time since the destruction of their Time Turners, but he hadn’t expected his latest bout of volunteering to end with him travelling in time himself.

Still, there’s no escaping the fact and there’s no escaping the date.

Today Sirius is going to die.

Maybe.

Harry forces himself to take a deep breath and analyse the situation as his Auror training and experience have drummed into him. There are a lot of things he could do right now. He could stop himself from leaving Hogwarts, he could go to Grimmauld Place and make sure Sirius is there when his younger self attempts to contact him, he could go to the Ministry and steal the prophecy, he could wait until the last minute and stop Sirius from falling through the veil. There are a lot of things that he could do.

The problem is that there are a lot of what ifs that follow.

What if the Time Turners aren’t destroyed? Harry might not be here now to change anything. What if Umbridge doesn’t have a run in with the centaurs? She might end up teaching here for longer than a year. What if Sirius lives? Would he let Harry, Ron, and Hermione spend a year in constant danger whilst they searched for Horcruxes? Would Remus and Tonks bond without their grief? Would Teddy exist?

The problem is that Harry’s done a fair bit of growing up since fifth year, which isn’t a surprise since he’s five years and a war older, and he’s got a much better idea of the consequences of his actions.

There are too many variables, so what he has to do is focus on the worst-case scenario and decide if he can live with it. He rests his forehead on the wall next to Miss June and imagines the war never being over, the Horcruxes never found, Voldemort alive.

“Neither can live while the other survives,” he tells himself and a broken laugh forces its way out of his throat.

Harry makes his way back to his old four-poster bed, shuts the curtains, and lies down, closing his eyes against the world and hoping that Hermione and her team get him home sooner rather than later.