The chapters for this are probably - read probably - going to be based around the 100quills prompts I have left. This one is prompt 22 - Lost. (My claim is Ariana Dumbledore).

A Century to the Past

Harry didn't have many friends. At school, his bullying cousin Dudley scared away all but the most persistent children, and those were the type of girl too naïve to think the large blond boy would hit any one of them without remorse. Besides, at six years old Harry didn't like girls in the slightest. They giggled, they played with dolls, they liked pink and hated sport and were just so girly…

Well, there was one girl Harry liked. She didn't go to his school, and he'd never seen her around Little Whinging whenever Aunt Petunia took him to the town centre. He only ever saw her when he was toiling in the garden, and she would often talk to him then from behind the shed or the side of the house where no one else could see her.

Harry wiped a frustrated, tired tear from his cheek before it could mingle with the sweat caused by toiling outside at the end of July – normal boys didn't cry, Uncle Vernon said, at least not because they'd been made to do some good, honest work – and hoped his friend wasn't there to see it.

"Are you crying, Harry?" a voice piped up, and Harry flushed.

"No! Only girls cry," he retorted. He knew that the Dursleys wouldn't hear. Ariana never came to see him when they were close enough to hear, and once she was talking to him they never approached to see who he was talking to. It was like magic, Harry often thought wistfully, a special Dursley-repelling spell. Maybe when she wasn't with him, Ariana liked to dress up in black robes and swoop across the night sky on an old broomstick with a black cat perched on the end. Harry giggled at the thought.

"Let's play follow the leader, Harry!" Ariana exclaimed. Harry scowled.

"That's so boring, it's a girls' game," he complained. "Couldn't we play football instead?"

"But I have somewhere really special to show you!" Ariana said. "And you can't come unless you play with me," she said firmly.

"Where is it?" Harry asked, his curiosity piqued.

"Follow me and see!" Ariana said. Harry knew he'd been beaten. He dropped the trowel on the grass without a second thought, having decided that even playing follow the leader was better than weeding Aunt Petunia's pansies.

They hopped along to the bottom of the garden, then sashayed sideways behind the fence. Every time Harry tried to slouch and look as macho as a six year old could, Ariana poked him until he gave up pretending to be cool. They skipped down the road in a strange routine interspersed with jumps or cartwheels whenever Ariana had another idea, and none of the passing adults thought anything to be amiss. After all, what could possibly be wrong with two children enjoying such an active outdoors activity? Summer holidays were purely for play, and that was certainly what Harry and Ariana were doing.

Of course, the adults would have been more worried if they'd known that the little girl had been born in 1845. But they didn't know, and no one saw the two children loop a golden chain around their necks. Ariana, and then Harry, spun the miniature grandfather clock pendant around… and vanished.

--

They fell to the floor with a thump. Harry sat up after a moment and saw Ariana rubbing her knee gingerly.

"Er, are you going to cry?" he asked nervously. "It doesn't look that badly hurt." Ariana shook her head fiercely.

"I don't cry," she insisted. "Albus said big girls don't cry."

"Albus is your big brother, isn't he?" Harry asked.

"Yes, let's go and find him!" she said, and jumped to her feet. Harry did the same, then stared around him.

"We aren't in the park any more!" he said, suddenly scared. "What happened? Where are we?" Ariana grinned happily.

"My brother taught me how to time travel!" she said proudly. "Albus is the cleverest person in the whole world!"

"Time travel?" Harry asked. "Ha ha ha. Where are we really?"

"I told you, in the past. Well, it's your past, anyway… it's 1852," Ariana told him. Then she looked around. Her lip trembled. She bit it hard. It was obvious she as about to cry.

"What's the matter, dear?" a woman said. Both children spun around to stare at her. The lady was tall and not very old. She was blonde and cuddly-looking, and her black dress made her look like a witch. A good witch, Harry thought. Ariana lost the battle with her tears, and started crying noisily; the lady bent down and picked Ariana up, murmuring comforting words and patting her back.

"I tried to get us home and it didn't work and now we're in the past and I want Albus and he's going to be so cross because the time-turner didn't come to the past with us and I want to go home…" Ariana wailed. The lady made a surprised sound.

"You hail from the future?" she asked, looking at Harry. He shrugged. He wasn't sure he believed in all this time travel stuff, even if magic seemed to be real.

"I was taking Harry to my house because his was nasty and now we're not there and I want to go home," Ariana sobbed.

"Well, we'll have to see about finding a spell to send you home, won't we," the lady said. "Now, why don't we introduce ourselves? My name is Helga. Helga Hufflepuff." Ariana stopped mid-sob and stared at her.

"Really? You're really Helga Hufflepuff? Wow!" she exclaimed. "I'm Ariana Dumbledore and that's Harry Potter!"

"I'm very pleased to meet you both," Helga told the exuberant child with a smile. "But there are people with your surnames, so maybe it would be better for you to call yourselves other names while you're here."

"You mean like when we play spies?" Harry asked, his imagination caught by the prospect. He was already thinking of the names he could go by. "Can I be James Bond?"

"That's so boring," Ariana said scornfully. "That's not even your own idea." Harry glared at her.

"How about you both having a think, and I'll take you to meet my… friend," Helga said. Harry and Ariana both agreed happily and ran ahead of Helga to the cottage that appeared when she waved her wand.

--

The cottage was a small stone affair with a thatched roof, reminiscent of the one on the farm that Harry had once visited on a school trip. Instead of animals in a farmyard, there was a garden full of strange looking plants – some of which seemed to move in a direction not commanded by the breeze – and a few birds that looked almost like chickens.

"Where did you pick those up, Helga?" a man asked. He looked different from the blonde in everything but age; his black hair, brown eyes and tanned skin contrasted starkly against the freckles that stood out on Helga's pale face.

"They had an accident with time travel," Helga explained. "Now they're thinking up some names to go by while they reside here."

"Give them time to think," the man said with a laugh. "They can't be more than five, either of them." He was assaulted by two scowls.

"We're six," Harry said mutinously. "How old are you?"

"Sixteen," the man said with a grin. Harry was awed. When he was that old, he'd be a grown-up! Aunt Petunia always said he wouldn't be a grown-up till he was eighteen… well, most of the time she said he'd never grow up at all, but still… that was two whole years less to wait! "I'm Salazar Slytherin," Salazar said proudly.

"I want to be called Rowena," Ariana announced. She looked at Salazar and Helga as if she expected a challenge, but none came. "And Harry is going to be Godric."

"If you like," Salazar said in amusement. "Helga, show them where they can sleep. Don't children need afternoon naps?"

"Only when they're little," Harry said firmly. Salazar laughed, and shrugged.

"Right you are. But you should still know where to go if you do get tired." Harry had the feeling that Salazar was laughing at him, but he let it pass and followed the other two up to the attic room.

--

Two days later, the fun of having such a luxurious room still hadn't worn off. It was the nicest room Harry had ever been in, even though it was just a cottage attic. The colourful tapestries and toe-enveloping carpet were nice, but the enormous beds… with identical yells of joy, the two children launched themselves at the four-poster beds and jumped as high as they possibly could.

"Godric! Rowena!" Salazar snapped. "Get down from there before you hit your heads!" The two chastised children slid down to stand sulkily in front of him. Salazar sighed. He wasn't cut out to look after such young children.

"Salazar?" Harry asked nervously. Salazar mentally hit himself. Now he'd gone and scared the poor child. "Er… can I call you Dad?"

Salazar stared at him. Why did the boy want to call him that? He certainly wasn't doing a good job of being fatherly.

"Only, you're like a dad to us and I don't have one and Dudley did but I never did, and…" Harry babbled.

"What do you mean, you don't have a dad? Everybody has a father, Harry," Salazar said in confusion.

"My father died in a car crash when I was one year old," Harry said in a monotone obviously copied from whoever told him that. Salazar frowned. A six year old shouldn't understand or accept death in such a way.

"Er… yes, you can call me dad," he said, feeling more out of his depth than ever. But for the sake of a child who had never had a father, he decided to try.

I hope you enjoyed that :) If there's any constructive criticism needed, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks for reading!