Disclaimer: I am not J K Rowling. I do not own Harry Potter. I'm just playing with someone else's toys.

Harry/Alice in the short story which follows are assumed to be 19, and in Harry's case to have gone through all the events of canon in books 1-7 except the epilogue to Deathly Hallows.

Alice exists in a universe which post the fifth year OWLs in 1976 is increasingly different, for reasons which will hopefully be clear.

Further Disclaimer:

This is my first sashay into the world of Harry Potter fanfiction publishing on this site; hope this entertains!

(Updated for some minor punctuation corrections, etc.)

Harry had consulted with Hermione very carefully before engaging in this little project. She had checked and double-checked the arithmancy to the last detail. It was fundamentally impossible, she was certain, after this much time had passed that Harry could cause any serious damage to the universe. Events would just find a way to correct themselves and the broad flow of things would resume, incorporating the few little changes Harry had made.

And Harry had to try. He owed that to the ghosts of his past.

So Harry pointed his wand at the time-turner, incanted the spell, and stepped back to a very precise moment in 1976 after the fifth year defence OWL, and a specific place by the lake. The spell would snap him back to his own time in about half an hour.

He placed a disillusionment charm on himself and sat down, and waited for the principle players in this drama to arrive.

Harry waited for the scene to play out, wincing as it did, and then stood up, breaking the disillusionment charm, before the actors could break up and go their separate ways.

He was the immediate focus of their attention.

"Think of me as the Ghost of Hogwarts Future." he told them, raking them with a glare. "That's a tribute to the muggle writer, Dickens, by the way. And such a bunch of prats I have never seen before, in my life. James, Sirius, Peter, Remus: There are more important things to do than acting like a gang of bullies, picking on other students until they lose their tempers and inevitably do something angry and stupid. There's a bloody wizarding war going on out there, and if you're not already involved, you're all going to be in the thick of it when you leave school. You should be bigger men than this." He glanced at Lily. This was hard. "Cut Severus some slack. He's an idiot, and he hangs out with a bad crowd, but ask him – truly ask him – and you'll find his heart's in the right place." He glanced at Severus. "And Severus, is getting revenge for perceived humiliations really the most important thing you have going for you? Do you actually want to spend your whole life looking backwards, at all the wrongs done you in your past? You're a Slytherin, and you're bloody brilliant, and if you just talked to someone like your head of house, or the headmaster, you could make a real difference to the world."

They all stared at him, but Lily and Severus broke off after a moment to look at one another.

There, Harry thought. It was done. He'd told them all what idiots they were being. Maybe their last couple of years at school could go better, and even though events would still play through, hopefully there wouldn't be quite so much all around bitterness. Severus would still obviously end up as a Death Eater, but maybe this time it would be so because Dumbledore had asked him to do it from the start – to infiltrate them as his agent from the onset. Although Harry wasn't to sure how the prophecy would play through in that case. Maybe someone like Regulus would be hanging around outside the door instead, or – given Dumbledore's propensity to manipulate people – maybe he, himself, would deliberately leak the prophecy, or at least part of it, to Voldemort. Harry was under no illusions about Dumbledore these days. He had all been 'for the greater good' and had possessed no qualms about shoving people who – to be fair – might not have minded, if only he'd asked, into the way of peril.

Lily and Severus were standing next to one another, saying something.

"Excuse me please." Remus approached Harry, a very thoughtful look on his face. "Just who exactly are you?"

"It doesn't matter. Let's just pretend I'm from the future." Harry said. "I can't say much about how things will play out, but I just hoped maybe you'd find things easier if I came back and gave some advice. But if you want a name, you can call me…"

And Harry saw, out of the corner of his eye that Lily and Severus were actually kissing, and the whole future flashed before his eyes, and he felt like he was on fire, and then unravelling and his last thought was that Hermione had not counted on the most dangerous thing in all existence, which messed around with all the rules or just outright flattened them. Bugger.

The dark-haired young woman blinked, and had the strangest sense of déjà-vu. Well, to be fair, Nicolas Flamel had warned her that once she took whatever action was necessary to close the paradox loop, something like this might happen. She looked at Remus.

"Alice. You can call me Alice."

James Potter was miming being sick to Sirius and pointing at where Lily and Severus, Alice's mum and dad, were lost in a world of their own, locked in their first real kiss.

Alice felt a small sliver of pity for James Potter.

"There are some targets around you can prank occasionally." She called across to him. "You don't have to be adult all the time. There's a quite amusing thing you're going to do at some point… well if I give you the details, obviously you won't have all the pleasure of thinking it up yourself – but let's just say that you're close to the top of Voldemort's bounty-list for quite some time."

"I'm reasonably certain that if it is possible to meddle significantly with the past, it's potentially dangerous." Remus said quietly to Alice.

"Not if it's making sure that things happen." Alice replied. "And the deck's already stacked in favour of this, believe me."

Hermione Granger had tried to argue with Alice about this, but Alice was of the opinion, as had been Master Flamel, that there really wasn't much which needed doing, really, when the sort of love mum and dad had for one another was involved. All they'd needed was a nudge, and for Merlin's sake, they even remembered some mysterious traveller being on the scene this day, giving everyone a dressing-down. Combine that with the weird premonitions Alice occasionally had, and it had been obvious what she was always destined to do. This wasn't like that rubbish prophecy Dumbledore had once been given by Trelawney. They all laughed themselves silly about that these days – that a prophecy could be made about the 'Dark Lord' marking someone as his equal, who would have power to vanquish him, when the war had already been virtually over. Between Marauder sabotage, and the sheer duelling power of Lily and Severus Snape combined and unleashed in full battle fury, Voldemort hadn't stood a chance.

The modelling balloon-dog that what he'd thought to be his wand had turned into when he pulled it on mum and dad at the height of the final battle of the wizarding war had been one last humiliation. It had been a dozen years before he'd even attempted to come back from that, and it had been obvious that his heart wasn't ever really in it.

Alice felt the tug of the spell. Mission accomplished, time to go back to what was her present.

Hopefully, with the loop closed, she wouldn't be haunted quite so much now with the nightmares and strange visions of the lonely green-eyed man her own age who had seen so much pain and suffering and loss – and whom she figured was the ghost of what could have been if this hadn't been fixed.

Author Notes:

Assume Harry doesn't take the invisibility cloak back with him because Hermione told him something about it not being a good idea to involve a deathly hallow in this sort of time-travel experiment, hence the disillusionment charm use. Alice, not being a Potter, never had access to it anyway...