Locked

Katie's mum didn't know that her daughter knew how to pick locks.

She's learned it from her friend Fred, who was just a year ahead of her at Saint Norbert's Primary School for Witches and Wizards. "It's easy," he'd told her, tugging a bobby pin out of Katie's fine blonde hair. Katie yelped, and then sighed as her bangs fell over her eyes.

"I was using that," she said, but Fred had already turned away from her to face the padlocked supply cabinet in the corner of the classroom.

"Don't worry," he said, jamming half the bobby pin into the lock and wiggling it around. "You'll get it back." He glanced at the door, where his brother was keeping watch for teachers. "All clear, Georgie?"

"All clear," George said, sending them a thumbs up.

Katie bounced on her toes as Fred twisted the bobby pin around. "You're bending it," she said, reaching to pull the pin out of his hand. "Oh, Fred, you ruined it!"

Fred looked at her in dismay. "Merlin, Katie, I almost had it."

"Here." She threw the bobby pin back at him; he caught it. "It's useless for my hair now anyway. Unlock the stupid cupboard to your heart's content."

"I'll get you a new bobby pin," Fred said.

"No, don't bother. I have more at home."

"Fine." Fred inserted the bobby pin and wiggled again. "There!" The padlock sprung open. "And that's how it's done." He turned to Katie and dropped the padlock in her hand. "You think you can replicate it?"

"What, that? Unbending a bobby pin and sticking it in the keyhole?"

"That's all there is to it."

"I can replicate that." Katie pried open the cabinet and stepped back to appreciate the supplies with all her eight-year-old wonder. It was mostly colored paper and paints with names like Peacock Green and Snake Fang Silver (their teacher had been a Slytherin at Hogwarts), but at the very top Katie saw what they had come for: a plastic tub filled with confiscated items. "You think you can reach it?" she asked, turning to look at Fred, but her friend was already scaling the shelves.

"Jackpot," he said as his fingers brushed the tub. "Time for justice to be served. It's all here - my dung bomb, George's belch powder . . . a whole mess of other stuff."

"D'you see my lipstick in there?" Katie asked, just as George whipped his head around and said, "She's coming!"

Cursing, Fred jumped down from the shelf and slammed the doors shut. "Lock," he whispered, pointing at the padlock in Katie's hand; she threw it to him, and he caught it and clamped it down on the supply closet just as their teacher walked in.

"Fred? George? Katie?" She eyed her students suspiciously. "Why aren't you three at recess?"

"Katie's lost her bobby pin," Fred said, pointing at her blonde bangs. "We were helping her find it."

"I see." The teacher didn't look convinced as she sat down behind her desk and pulled out papers to grade. "Carry on looking then, I suppose."

"Guess justice will have to be served tomorrow," George muttered.

Katie hid her grin behind her hand.

Katie's mum got home late, as usual.

"Ministry's a madhouse," she said as she kissed Katie's father on the cheek. "This thing is faulty again." She pulled a gold chain over her head and dropped it into her purse, which she kept secured with a tiny padlock.

(Katie had asked several times about that gold chain and the tiny hourglass that hung from it, but her mum had never given an answer beyond, "Ministry business.")

"And the intern has taken it upon himself to critique every little thing I do," Katie's mum continued as she followed Katie's dad into the kitchen. "Last week it was question after question - 'Why do you wear safety goggles, Unspeakable Bell?' 'Why is there a password for the door, Unspeakable Bell?' - and this week it's, 'Are you sure that's right, Unspeakable Bell?' 'You should have given the Time Turner a quarter turn, Unspeakable Bell, not a half turn.'" She lowered her head into her hands.

"Are you hungry?" Katie's dad asked, holding up a pot of pasta.

"I think I'll pop upstairs for a nap, actually." She set her purse on the counter and headed for the stairs. "Weekend can't come soon enough, eh?"

Katie waited until her father was occupied in the living room to slip downstairs and snatch her mother's purse. "Now we'll see what that hourglass is," she whispered, pulling out the bobby pin Fred had unbent in the classroom.

Picking the lock took a matter of seconds, and in no time Katie had draped the gold chain around her neck. She gave the hourglass a gentle tap; it began to rotate, first slowly but then faster and faster, and as the hourglass spun, so did the room around her. Katie tried to duck out of the necklace, but it clung to her skin like a tight turtleneck. The scream that escaped her lips was lost, and as Katie's dizziness made her vision blur into blackness, she wished bitterly Fred Weasley had never taught her how to open locked things.

When she opened her eyes again, the world was still and two very confused strangers were staring at her in horror.

"Erm." The man spoke first. "I don't mean to be rude. But how the hell did you get here?"

Katie blinked. "I didn't move," she said. "This is my house."

"It's our house," the man corrected, pulling out his wand.

The blonde woman next to him gabbed his arm and pushed until his wand was no longer pointed at Katie. "Oliver," she said. "She's just a child."

"Who are you?" the man called Oliver asked, eyeing Katie distrustfully.

"My name is Katie."

"Katie?" the woman repeated, raising her eyebrows.

"Katie Bell."

Oliver had his wand up again. "You have three seconds to tell me who you really are, or - "

"Honestly, Ollie, cut it out." The woman knelt down to Katie's eye level. "Your name is Katie Bell?"

Katie nodded.

"It's very nice to meet you," the woman said with a kind smile. "My name is Katie, too. Katie Wood. That's Oliver, my husband."

"Why are you in my house?" Katie asked. "Where are my mum and dad?"

"Your house?" Oliver began, but Mrs. Wood shut him up with a glare.

"I think you're confused, Katie," Mrs. Wood said. "Oliver and I have lived in this house for quite a long time."

Katie shook her head. "This is my house. My mum is sleeping upstairs. Go check if you don't believe me."

Oliver was looking at her strangely. "D'you think it's a memory charm?" he asked his wife. "Doesn't explain how she got here, but maybe somebody tampered with her mind, made her think she lives here?"

Mrs. Wood shook her head. "I think I know what's going on," she said, looking pointedly at the gold chain around Katie's neck. "Katie, where did you get that?"

Katie looked down at the hourglass. "I found it," she said carefully.

"Inside your mum's locked purse, isn't that right?"

Katie blinked. "How did you - "

"And you're friends with a boy called Fred Weasley, who helped you unlock it, yes?"

She swallowed. "How do you know about Freddie?"

Oliver's brow furrowed. "Fred Weasley's been dead for years," he said, kneeling down next to his wife and examining Katie carefully. "You can't possibly know him."

Katie shook her head. "He's in my class at St. Norbert's," she said. Her curled-up position on the kitchen floor was beginning to make her muscles cramp. "I saw him this afternoon."

Oliver looked thoughtful. "Could there be another Fred Weasley?" he asked his wife. "I know Angelina says she'll name her son Fred if she and George ever have kids, but unless this Katie here is from the future - "

"Honestly, Oliver, you're so dense sometimes." Mrs. Wood rolled her eyes. "Katie's not from the future. She's from the past."

This was news to Katie. "What?"

"What?" Oliver asked.

"This," Mrs. Wood said, tapping the hourglass, "is called a Time Turner. Your mum got it from the Ministry, where she works. It has the power to send people through time."

Katie's eyes were huge. "I'm in a different time?"

"Yes." Mrs. Wood stood up and moved to a padlocked purse of her own. "And luckily for you, Time Turners have advanced a lot since that early model you took from your mum." She pulled out a gold chain - significantly shorter than Katie's, and a little bit brighter in color - and wound it around Katie's wrist.

"Where'd you get that?" Oliver asked. "I didn't know you had that."

"I work in the Department of Mysteries, Oliver, I'm bound to have some secrets from you."

"I don't have secrets from you."

"You do, too." Mrs. Wood pushed her bangs out of her face as she turned to look at her husband.

"Do not."

"Oh? What's the combination to your Puddlemere locker?" Mrs. Wood asked, raising her eyebrows.

"That's different," Oliver said. "Puddlemere rules say I'm not allowed to reveal the locker combination to anyone. Legally, I have to keep that secret."

"I'm in the same boat. Legally I have to keep my work a secret, too." Mrs. Wood pulled out her wand and leaned over to tap the Time Turner.

"You can always pick the lock," Katie whispered. "All you need is - "

" - a bobby pin," Mrs. Wood finished with a wink. "Good idea, Katie." She straightened up. "This'll take you right back to your own time," she said. "But Katie, I should warn you about something."

"What?"

"Time is dangerous." She looked at Katie meaningfully. "You can't tell anyone you came here. Anything you learned must stay a secret. If you tell anyone - if any detail is changed - you could affect the entire future." She glanced at Oliver. "Can you keep these secrets?"

Katie nodded. "I think so."

"Okay." Mrs. Wood gave the Time Turner a final tap with her wand. "Close your eyes," she advised as the room began to spin. "It'll help with the dizziness."

Katie squeezed her eyes shut.

"And do stop wearing makeup to class, you know the teachers hate it and they'll keep taking your lipsticks away."

"How did you know about that?" Katie tried to say, but her voice was lost again.

When she woke up on the kitchen floor, she knew for a fact that she had gone forward in time.

A few months later, she thought maybe it had been a very vivid dream.

After a year, she forgot all about it.

It wasn't until later, when she'd gone through Hogwarts and met a boy called Oliver Wood and lost a boy called Fred Weasley and followed her Mum to a job in the Department of Mysteries and gotten married and purchased her childhood home and lived - it wasn't until an eight-year-old girl with blonde hair and bangs appeared on her kitchen floor, frightened and confused, that the memory unlocked and Katie realized.

"My name is Katie, too," she said gently to her younger self, and she wondered how she had never seen it before.

[Pirate Ship Battles: Time Travel, Katie Bell/Oliver Wood. Prompts: 2(Peacock) 4(Snake) 5(Critique) 6(Justice) 9(Bomb)]

[New Years Resolution Challenge: Time Travel]