I'm in love with Caroline B. Cooney's time travel series. After having re-read I decided I wanted people to read it as a Harry/Draco story.
Summary; Imagine changing centuries – and making things worse, not better, on both sides of time.
Imagine being involved in two love triangles in two different centuries.
Imagine discovering that, no matter which direction you travel in time, you must abandon someone you love.
Meet fifteen year old Harry Potter, a romantic living in the wrong century.
When he travels back a hundred years and lands in 1895, a time privileged young ladies wear magnificent gowns, attend elegant parties, and are courted by handsome gentlemen, Harry at last finds romance. But he is a trespasser in time. Will he choose to stay in the past? And if he does, will he be allowed to stay?
Disclaimer; None of these characters are mine, I have changed a few names and edited a few things. Enjoy :]
Chapter 1
It was Harry's agenda that summer to convert his boyfriend, Oliver, into a romantic man. It would not be easy, everyone agreed on that. Oliver was far more likely to be holding metric wrenches than a bouquet of roses for Harry.
Harry did not know why he went out with Oliver. [Not that you could call it "going out". It was more "going to."]
Oliver's spare time involved the repair of mechanical objects, or preventive maintenance on mechanical objects. There was always a lawn mower whose engine must be rebuilt, or an '83 pickup truck acquired in a trade whose every part must be replaced.
Harry would arrive at the spot where Oliver was currently restoring a vehicle. He would watch, and he would buy some cokes. Eventually Oliver would say he had to do something else now, so good-bye.
Nevertheless, on this, the last half day of school, Harry planned to hold hands for cameras, immortalized as boyfriends. But Oliver, the least-romantic handsome boy in American, had skipped.
His group of friends met in front of class rooms, of course, to take pictures and say they're teary-eyed goodbyes. Usually everyone dressed up in their uniforms, but today everybody dressed sloppily. It was almost embarrassing to look sloppy for a change. Harry Potter had worn his white button up t-shirt for years on end. It didn't even look white anymore.
Everybody was exuberant and giddy. The moment school was exchanged for summer, they'd converge on the beach for a party that would last all afternoon and evening.
Harry attempted to brush his thick dark hair into a somewhat decent look.
"So where is the Romance Champion?" asked his best friend, Hermione.
"He's at the Mansion," Harry explained, "getting his cards ready to drive away."
Oliver would be at the old Malfoy Mansion, getting his stuff off the grounds before demolition. Oliver loved destruction. Even though it was his own home being torn down. Oliver didn't care. He couldn't wait to see the wrecking balls in action. It was Harry who yearned for the Mansion.
The town had decided to rip it down. They were right, of course. Nobody had maintained the Mansion. Kids had been rollerskating in the ballroom for decades. Roof leaks from the soaring towers had traveled down three floors and ruined every inch of plaster. To the town, it was just a looming dangerous hulk.
But oh, Harry Potter loved the mansion.
The whole half day was silly and frivolous, Harry decided that he was okay with silly and frivolous, and it was a shame that school wasn't this way every day. School ended with hugs, and seniors got weepy and the freshmen vanished, which was the only decent thing for ninth graders to do, and everybody shouted back and forth about afternoon plans.
"See you at the beach," called Hermione.
Harry nodded. "First I have to collect Oliver."
"Good luck."
That Oliver would agree to play beach volleyball when he had a car repair deadline was highly unlikely, but Harry would certainly try.
When the school bus dropped him off, he didn't even go into the house to change his clothes, but retrieved his bike from the garage and started pedaling. The white cotton t-shirt billowed like a tent on him, as the wind blew. His hair looked dark and romantic against the white cotton t-shirt.
Harry didn't have to change into a nicer t-shirt, he knew perfectly well Oliver was just going to change the oil on some car and he'd want Harry to help.
I'll help you, he promised the absent Oliver. I will repair your entire personality, you lucky guy. By the end of the summer, you will have worth.
Lately, Harry had been reading every advice column in existence. He'd become unusually hooked on the radio and television talk shows. He knew two things now;
A. You weren't supposed to try and change other people. It didn't work and afterward they hated you.
B. Mind your own business.
Of course nobody ever obeyed those two rules; it would take all the fun out of life. Harry had no intentions whatsoever of following either A or B.
He pedaled through the village toward Malfoy Point. The land was solid with houses. Hardly a village now that eighty thousand people lived here, but the residents, most of whom had moved from New York City, liked to pretend they were rural.
It was very warm, but the breeze was not friendly. The sky darkened, they were in for a good storm. Harry thought about the impending thunderstorm at home, and then decided not to think about it.
Passing the last house, he crossed the narrow split of land, two cars wide, that led to Malfoy Point. Sometime in the 1880s, a railroad baron had built his summer "cottage" on an island a few hundred yards from shore. He created a yacht basin, so he could commute to New York City, and then built a causeway, so his family could ride in their splendid monogrammed carriage to the village ice cream parlor. He added a magnificent turreted bathhouse down by a stretch of soft white sand, and carriage house, stables, an echo house, and even a decorative lighthouse with a bell tower instead of warnings.
Decades after the parties ceased and nobody was there to have afternoon tea or play croquet, the Mansion was divided into nine apartments and the six hundred acres of Malfoy Point became a town park. The bathhouse was used by public now. The Garden Club reclaimed the walked gardens, and where Mr. Malfoy's single yacht had once been docked, hundreds of tiny boats cluttered the placid water. Day campers detoured by the echo house to scream forbidden words and listen to them come back. I didn't say it, they would protest happily.
The nine apartments were occupied by town crew, including Oliver's father, whose job it was to keep up roads and parks and storm drains. Nobody kept the Mansion up.
Harry pedaled past parking lots, picnic areas and tennis courts, past Sunfishes and Bluejays waiting to be popped into water, past the beach where the graduating class was gathering in spite of the look of the sky. He passed the holly gardens and the nature paths, more parking lots, woods, sand, meadow, and finally the bottom of the Great Hill. The huge brown shingled mansion cast its three-towered shadow over the hill.
Pity the horses that had to drag heavy carriages up this steep curve. Biking up very difficult. There were days when Harry could do it, and days he couldn't.
This was a day he could.
Stretching up into the hot angry clouds, the Mansion's copper trimmed towers glimmered angrily, as if they knew they were shortly to die. Harry shivered in the heat, vaguely afraid of the showers, steering around them to stay in the sun.
Oliver would be parked on the turnaround, getting his nonworking vehicles working enough to be driven away before the demolition crew blocked access to the Mansion.
At the crest of Great Hill, the old drive circled a vast garden occupied by nonworking fountains and still valiant peonies roses. There was Oliver, flawless in white t-shirt and indigo jeans, unaware that his boyfriend had arrived. Derelict vehicles were so much more interesting than Harry.
It won't work, she thought dismally. I can't change Oliver. Either I take him the way he is, or I don't take him.
Harry wanted the kind of romance that must have happened in the Mansion, back when Lucius Malfoy made millions of railroads, and fought unions, and married four times, and gave parties so grand even the newspapers in London, England, wrote about them.
He imagined Oliver in starched white collar, gold cuff links, and black tails, dancing in a glittering ballroom, gallant to every beautiful woman over whose hand he bowed.
No.
Never happened.
I am a romantic in the wrong century, he thought. I live in the 1990s. I should be in the 1890s. I bet could have found true love a hundred years ago. Look at Oliver. All I'm going to find around here is true grease.
Harry stood straddling the bike, and leaned against a stone pillar to catch his breath.
The first falling happened.
It was a terrible black sensation: that hideous feeling he had when he was almost asleep but his body snapped away from sleep, as if falling asleep really did involve a fall, and some nights his body didn't want to go. It was always scary to fall when you were flat on the mattress. It was far, far scarier to fall here on the grass, staring at Oliver.
His fingertips scraped the harsh stones of the wall. He couldn't grab a hold of them, they raced by him, going up as he went down. He fell so hard, so deeply, he expected to find himself at the bottom of some cliff, dashed upon the rocks. He arched his body, trying to protect himself, trying to tuck in, trying to cry out, and it stopped...
Stopped completely.
Nothing had fallen. Not Harry, not his bike, not the sky.
He was fine.
Oliver was still kneeling beside his engine block, having heard no cry and worried no worries.
Did my heart work too hard coming up the drive? Thought Harry. Did I half faint? I didn't even skip breakfast.
The hot wind picked up Harry's hair in its sweaty fingers. Yanking his hair, the wind circled to get a tighter grip. Just a breeze, he said to himself. His heart was racing.
There was something wrong with the day, or something wrong with him.
"Hey, HJP!" yelled Oliver, spotting him at last, Oliver referred to everything by letter. He drove an MG, listened to CDs, and watched MTV, did all his A-II homework.
Harry's real name, depressingly, was Harry James. Every September, he asked himself if this school year he wanted to be called Harry James, and every September it seemed more appealing to go to court and get a legal name change to Harry.
Oliver had adopted his initials and called him HJP. Everybody thought it was romantic. Only Harry knew that Oliver's romance was with the alphabet. When he removed his hand from his head, the wind recaptured it.
The leaves on the old oak trees did not move, but his hair swirled horizontally as if he were still biking. For a strange sliding moment, he saw no decrepit old cars under the porte cochere, but matched chestnut horses with black manes and tails. They were alive, those horses, flicking their tails and stamping heavily. He could smell the distinctive stable perfume of sweating animals.
What is going on here?
"They've sold the marble floors, the fireplace mantels and the carvings on the staircase, HJP," said Oliver happily. "Antique lovers love this place. Town's probably going to get enough money from the fixtures to pay for demolishing it."
It was so like Oliver not to notice his clothes, not to comment on the last day of school, and not to care that good things were ending forever.
He climbed the high steps onto the covered porch. The immense double oak doors were so heavy he always felt there should be a manservant to hold them for him. Of course, the doors were padlocked now, the windows boarded up, and...
The doors were not padlocked. The handles turned. What a gift! Harry slid inside.
The front hall still had its marble floors, giant black and white squares like a huge cruel chess game. Antique dealers had taken the gryphons from the staircase, little walnut madmen foaming at the mouth, but nobody had yet touched the mirrors. The house was heavily mirrored, each mirror a jagged collection of triangles, like the facets of diamonds. Fragments of mirror dismembered Harry. His hands, his face, his body were reflected a thousand times a thousand.
It was not dark inside and he's expected it to be. Light from the stairwells and light wells filled the house.
This is the last time I'll ever be inside, he thought, going overboard emotionally, as if this were also his Last Visit to the Potter Family As It Ought To Be.
Don't think about home, he ordered himself. Don't dwell on it, because what can you do? Mind your own business. That's the rule, everybody agrees.
Outdoors the rain arrived, huge and heavy. Not water falling from the sky, but thrown from the sky, angry Gods taking aim. He expected Oliver to come inside with him, but of course he didn't. He angled his body beneath the porte cochere and went on doing whatever mechanical thing he was doing.
Harry resolved to find a boyfriend with interests other than cars and sound systems. He'd be incredibly gorgeous and romantic, plus entranced by Harry.
The stairs loomed darkly.
These were stairs for trailing ball gowns and elbow length white gloves, the sweet scent of lilac perfume wafting as you rested your fragile hand on the arm of your betrothed.
It was difficult to think of Oliver ever becoming someone's betrothed. Oliver had a hard time taking Harry to the movies, never mind getting engaged. He was the sort who would stay in love with cars and trucks, and end up married quite accidentally, without noticing.
Harry walked into the ballroom. Circular, with wooden floors, it had been destroyed by decades of tenants' children's birthday parties. The upholstery on its many window seats was long gone. Only the tack holes remained.
I wish I could see the Mansion the way it was. I wish I could be here a hundred years ago and have what they had, dress and they dressed, live as they lived. Oh, he knew what they had: smallpox, and tuberculosis, and no anesthesia for childbirth. No contact lenses, no movies, no shopping malls, no hamburgers. Still, how nice to have both centuries the way her father was having both women.
I try not to hate him, or Miss Bartten either, he thought, but how do I do that? My mother is this wonderful woman, who loves her family, loves her job, loves her house, and Dad forgets her? Falls in love with the new gym teacher at the High School where he teaches Music.
The musical dad has put on last year was West Side Story, which he'd postponed for years because you had to have boys who were excellent dangers. There was no such thing.
But when Miss Bartten joined the faculty, she convinced the football coach that the boys needed to study dance for agility and coordination, and now had in the palm of her hand a dozen big terrific boys who could dance. This was a woman who knew how to get what she wanted.
James and Miss Bartten choreographed West Side Story, and on the side, they choreographed each other. Mom suspected nothing, partly because Dad was knocking himself out trying to be Super Husband. He bought Lily dazzling earrings and took her to restaurants, and told her he didn't mind at all when she had to work late, especially because Wall Street was forty-five minutes by train and another thirty minutes by subway, and that meant Lily's days were twelve hours long. Dad and Miss Bartten knew exactly what to do with those long absences.
Harry sat on a window seat. How odd, thought Harry. I was sure the windows were boarded up. But none of them are.
From here, he could not see the wreckage that tenants had made of the gardens and fountains. In fact, the slashing rain had the effect of a working fountain, as if the stone nymph still threw water from her arched fingers. Rain stitched the horizon to the sea. Oliver of course noticed nothing: he was a boy upon whom the world had little effect.
I want romance! He thought. But I want mine with somebody wonderful and I want Dad's to be with Mom. Fragmented sections of Harry glittered in the old ballroom.
Violins, decided Harry, putting the present out of his mind. And certainly a harp. A square Victorian piano. Crimson velvet on every window seat, and heavy brocade curtains with beaded fringe.
Harry left the window seat and danced as slowly and gracefully as he knew how. Surely in the 1890s they had done nothing but waltz, so he slid around in three-beat triangles. His reflections danced with him.
The second falling came.
It was strong as gravity. It had grip, and seized her ankles. He tried to kick, but it had her handles too. It had a voice, full of cruel laughter, and it had color, a bloodstained dark red.
What is happening? He thought, terrorized but he thought was only air, and the wind that had held his hair in its fingers now possessed his thinking too. He was being turned inside out.
It was beneath him, the power was from below, taking him down. Not through the floor, but through what?
The wind screamed in circles and the mirrors split up and his grip on the world ended.
Or the world ended.
"Hey! HJP!" bellowed Oliver. "Get me my metric wrenches."
But HJP did not appear.
Oliver went inside. How shadowy the Mansion was, with so many windows boarded up. The place had a sick damn scent now that the tenant families had been moved out. It did not seem familiar to Oliver, even though he had lived there all his life till last month. He had a weird sense that if he walked down the halls, he would not know where they went.
"Harry?" He had to swallow to get the word out.
Oliver, who did not have enough imagination to be afraid of anything, and could watch any movie without being afraid, was afraid.
"Harry?" he whispered.
Nobody answered.
He went back outdoors, his hands trembling. He had to jam them into his pockets. He'd gone off without him noticing, that was all.
He couldn't concentrate on the cars. Couldn't get comfortable with his bare back exposed to the sightless dying Mansion.
He threw his tools in the back of his MG and took off.
Harry's bike lay in the grass, wet and gleaming from the storm.