Author's Note: To those about to embark on this venture, two notes. One, this is a side fic to "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" and if you haven't read a good portion of that you'll be dreadfully confused. Two, this is obviously NOT CANON. With that, enjoy.

"Oh my god," Lily said, standing in the once familiar streets of Little Whinging, looking across at a young red headed girl who was staring forward at the burning Number 4 Privet Drive with a somewhat chagrinned expression, wincing at the sight of the flames bursting out of the windows as well as the sirens of the fire engines.

Now, the story of how and why Lily was standing in front of Number 4 Privet Drive, staring at what appeared to be a younger version of herself on a day Lily very clearly remembered, was a somewhat complicated story.

Complicated, mainly, by the fact that Lily had absolutely no idea how it had happened.

One moment she'd been in Hogwarts, minding her own… Well, no, she'd been battling Wizard Trotsky, who had taken over the prepubescent Hogwarts female population thespian style. Although battling was really an overdramatic word, one could not simply battle a hydra, no she'd been in the scheming phase of all of it.

Well, Wizard Lenin had been in the scheming phase of all of it, in History of Magic, until a future version of Lily had kidnapped him down into the basement, and they'd been confronted by Wizard Trotsky wearing Gilderoy Lockhart like a particularly gaudy hat with Dumbledore right behind him, and it'd all gone south and blurry from there.

To the point where, waking up alone on the black pavement of Surrey, blinking into awareness and clutching at her head, wandering down the street like a drunkard, she'd really had no idea what the hell had happened.

Except, that, apparently, Lily was back in time, back in 1986 during the great conditioning experiment disaster which had ended in Dudley burning down the house. The other Lily, the younger smaller Lily (and Lily couldn't remember being that small, well, she did, but at the time she'd always thought of herself as much larger than she the younger Lily seemed now… She also hadn't remembered being quite that adorable), hadn't noticed her yet.

Judging by her expression this was the point where Wizard Lenin had lost his shit altogether. They'd still been more or less getting used to each other then, in fact, if she remembered right, just after this would be the point where he threw some sort of a temper tantrum over her raw abilities.

To Uncle Death no less.

Right, Lily was getting distracted. She looked down at herself, her Hogwarts uniform had seen far better days, in fact, younger Lily in trashy Dursley handouts was looking significantly better than Lily the school girl.

No, that wasn't important, she was still getting distracted. Right now, if Lily still had Wizard Lenin in her head, rather than her younger self just having Wizard Lenin inside of her head, he'd be telling her to haul ass to London and not let little Lily see her since Lily didn't remember having seen an older Lily today.

At least, Lily didn't think she had. Granted, she had been distracted by Dudley's sheer incompetence at the time. And Wizard Lenin's ranting. That was as good of an excuse as any to not notice your future-self arriving in a blood-stained and muddied school girl uniform sporting several dashing tears.

Well, except Lily would notice the other Lily if Lily just kept standing here all day, and then that would cause a paradox… Except, if paradoxes were that bad then it shouldn't be that easy to make them happen. Surely, if all Lily had to do was stand here like a shmuck with a headache, then it couldn't be that disastrous for the universe if little Lily saw bigger Lily.

Or it was just another sign that the universe was falling apart anyways, since Lily was capable of doing this in the first place. Spontaneous time travel wasn't supposed to be a thing in a healthy reality, surely, if Lily was waking up in 1986, it had long since gone to hell. Besides, it wasn't as if, just by standing here, she was going to murder her father or something and somehow prevent her conception.

Although, there was a thought. Right now Lily, the younger Lily, was an impressionable five-year-old who had yet to even be attacked by Severus Snape as he tried to erase her memories. She hadn't gone to Diagon Alley yet, hadn't gotten into that whole Lily Riddle business, and was six years out from stepping foot into Hogwarts at all. Hell, even Rabbit wasn't around yet.

In other words, right now, this younger Lily still had whole worlds of possibilities open to her. And if Lily, the older Lily, was being honest then looking back on some things, well, hindsight was twenty-twenty, and she might have made a few different choices.

Wizard Lenin had to get a body, sure, but they didn't have to do that whole stone thing with Squirrel. In fact, Squirrel could suffer some horrible accident before school even started and be put out of his stuttering nutty professor misery before Hindenburg possessed him out of house and home. And then there'd be no weird meetings with Dumbledore, no fleeing the school early after having her head bashed in and then rising from the dead in front of Hermione Granger…

More, they could hunt down Wizard Trotsky now and… Well, they couldn't burn him, or the notebook, or whatever, because Wizard Lenin would probably object, but they could at least prevent him from taking the dread form of Tequila. The point being, they could prevent that whole heir of Slytherin thing from happening in the first place.

In fact, Lily could just skip Slytherin altogether and go straight to Default, screw Snape and his house points and his house cup and all that garbage.

Lily nodded to herself, yes, perhaps this idea of changing history, of seemingly inalterable events, wasn't such a bad idea after all. Maybe Lily had been presented a priceless, if somewhat alarming, opportunity here on this humdrum day in Little Whinging.

The house rebuilt itself, neighbors and firemen blinking as the memory disappeared, shuffling back to their lives and the younger Lily turned to face the older one, stopping completely when she caught sight of her.

For a moment they just silently stared at each other, each waiting for the other to say something, anything, and finally Lily herself (the older one), said, "It's complicated."

The younger Lily tried to nod, then stopped herself, frowning, and then point blank asked, "Now, are you my resurrected mother or me from the future? Because, according to my imaginary comrade, you could be either."

"Really?" Lily asked, inspecting her red curling hair with a slight frown, "Everyone says I have James Potter's hair texture…"

Lily herself could see the resemblance between her and Lily Evans, but it wasn't something she frequently thought about, and while there was almost an eerie resemblance, the overwhelming amount of curly hair was supposedly straight from the Potter line, even if it was red.

"Right, well, it's the second," Lily said, "About six years in the future give or take, 1992."

"You could also be a clone," younger Lily noted, eyeing her with a remarkable interest, the recently restored house seemingly completely put from her mind, "Or a replicant…"

"Well, I could be, I suppose, I have been having weird memory issues recently and I haven't exactly sat down for a voigt kampff test recently. You know, that would make a lot of sense actually, or, well, maybe more than spontaneous time travel," Lily paused, frowned to herself as she sat on the pavement and considered her own existence, "Although, to what end?"

"To what end?" the younger Lily asked as she sat next to her on the curb, brushing off her pale knees as she did so.

"Well, sure, to what end? Clearly, if I am an automaton, built to believe I am Eleanor Lily Potter, or, well Lily, you know all of that, and I'm sent to you in 1986 then there must be some reason behind this elaborate scheme we've found ourselves in. I'm either a rather convoluted distraction, a sleeper agent, or…"

"Or perhaps you're like the Terminator," the younger Lily finished for her with delight, "You're a replicant of me made in the future who has been reprogrammed by the resistance and sent back in time in order to protect me from Skynet."

Lily nodded slowly, she was a bit unclear on who the resistance was or why they would make an Eleanor Lily Potter replicant of all things complete with Lily's own memories, but it was possible… Only, she stopped, considered it further, a more fundamental problem with all of that, "Only, I feel very sentient, I think quite a bit, and if I'm thinking then clearly I exist, so for all I know I am the one who has entered a false replication of 1986 and you are the automaton."

"Well, I also feel very sentient," the younger Lily said before sighing, then pausing, thinking over an issue before asking, "How can one… not feel sentient?"

Well, that was an excellent point, and the trouble with philosophy. Sure, each Lily could verify to herself her own existence, but everyone else's… Now, that was all risky business.

"We could always ask Dudders," Lily pointed out but the younger Lily didn't even need to give her a response to that. Dudders, was such a cheap cardboard imitation of mankind, that he couldn't even fake a good response to that kind of a question.

"Right, well, let's assume, for argument's sake, that we're both real, and that we're both well and truly Lily née Eleanor Lily Potter, simply from different times," Lily started, seeing how well her younger self was willing to go along with this, but the younger Lily seemed more than willing to take this at face value which was… Oddly refreshing, even Wizard Lenin or Death would have balked at this point, Lily wondered if anyone had ever truly kept up with her before.

"Does it change anything, fundamentally, I mean, if this assumption is not true?" Lily asked, because as far as she was concerned, no. If this wasn't real, if Lily was currently hallucination courtesy of Wizard Trotsky, then pandering to her imagination at the very least wouldn't hurt anyone.

It was like reality itself, in a way, you could question it all you liked but sometimes it really was best to just go with the flow, because if you were wrong you were wrong no harm no foul but if reality really was this thing worth paying attention to then it wasn't prudent to simply ignore it.

"No, I don't think so," the younger Lily said, "Besides, time is a loose thing, I think, it's entirely possible, I mean, with the way reality itself seems to be tearing apart at the seams."

"Exactly, nothing to be concerned about, it just is what it is," Lily said with a grin of her own feeling some tension she hadn't even known she'd had roll off her shoulders.

"So, how is the Hog… Warts…" the younger Lily asked with distaste, taking in her uniform, and clearly parroting Wizard Lenin inside of her head, who was likely dying with embarrassment at Lily's parsing of Hogwarts' ridiculous name.

"Terrible, I hate it, it's filled with murderers, thieves, and scoundrels," Lily said quite bluntly, "Mostly derivatives of Lenin, sorry, Lenin, but it's true, the other three quarters of your soul are comprised of terrifying assholes."

"Lenin doesn't agree with that," the younger Lily noted with a slight wince.

"Lenin can kiss my ass," Lily shot back much to the younger Lily's wide eyed surprised, "Also, I can remind him, that he left his stupid giant death snake alive in the basement and that Trotsky, the other half of his soul he shoved into a diary would take a lot of advantage of that in the most overdramatic manner possible, leaving me, as usual, to be the janitor."

"Lenin has a death snake?"

"Had, well has here, had in 1992, until I had to kill it," Lily stopped when she saw the other Lily cringe, hands flying to her head, which… Lily had not missed those headaches.

"Lenin, it had to go and you know it, it was eating the children… Well, alright, it was petrifying the children, but Trotsky was pinning the blame on me and it was going to eat one of them eventually and everyone knew it. And it wasn't like you could blame Hagrid twice!" she then paused, practically seeing Wizard Lenin fuming through the younger Lily's eyes, and added, "And if you cared that much about the goddamn snake then clearly you wouldn't have left it in the basement!"

"Well, that sounds nothing like the Hogwarts Lenin says he attended," the younger Lily noted diplomatically.

"Right, well, I don't know what Hogwarts he went to. I mean, I haven't even gotten into Squirrel."

"Squirrel?"

"There's this professor, he teaches something called Defense Against the Dark Arts, it's as ridiculous as it sounds. Anyways, he stutters, unbelievably awfully, so badly that it will cause you physical pain to be near him. That, and, well, he's also possessed by Lenin's other half."

"Trotsky?" the younger Lily asked.

"No, the other other half… He also concussed me to death in 1991, it was fun."

They sat together in silence for a bit after that, the younger Lily considering this, until finally she noted, "I don't think I want to go to Hogwarts."

"Don't, it is mostly an aggravating pain," Lily said, "Although Dumbledore will throw some sort of a fit if you don't, along with Lenin, and maybe even uncle Death… But if you do go, skip that whole being sorted into Slytherin thing and just go straight to Default. And avoid Hermione Granger until she almost gets killed by a troll, she's unbearable before all of that. And just avoid Ron Weasley period, and especially Ginny Weasley when she rolls around."

The younger Lily nodded slowly, then asked, "Should I… Should I be taking notes on all this?"

Lily paused, considered this, stared out at the suburbs, looked briefly behind her at Number 4, at Dudley now running in the yard in a daze, looking as if he still wasn't quite processing what had happened. However, more than anything else she noted the quiet, how… peaceful it all seemed, as if nothing at all were wrong with this picture.

More, how dangerous it might be to propel herself forward into a future that could no longer exist.

"You know what, we'll go over all of this again at length, for now… For now, I think I'll need a place to stay for a little while."

And perhaps it was simply because Lily was looking at another younger Lily, but she swore that the five-year-old version of herself smiled at her, before reaching out and taking her hand, pulling her inside and up the stairs to her newly won room from the Dursleys courtesy of psychology text books and the best kind of experimentation.

And even if she couldn't hear Wizard Lenin inside her own head, even if she could only imagine the migraine inducing rant he was giving her younger self, she still couldn't help but feel that it'd be more than alright to hang around… At least, for a little while.

Author's Note: For Lady Elya, the 3800th reviewer of "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" who asked for a fic where a younger Lily has a conversation with an older one and they share a moment of understanding. And so we have this charming thing, where Wizard Lenin gets to deal with not one, but two Lily's for the price of one. I'm sure he's thrilled, and very confused, and horrified by the implications.

Thanks for reading, reviews are splendid.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.