Title: The Curious Tale of Harry Potter

Author: Raposa

Rating: T, rating might go up for later chapters.

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, neither do I own a multifunctional screwdriver (either sonic or magical).

Summary: Everybody thought Harry's adventures would end after the defeat of Voldemort. Curiously, this was not the case. After an unfortunate incident with a magical screwdriver Harry finds himself in 1989, and he has to find his way back one day at a time…

Spoilers: Contains spoilers for all seven books.

Notes: When the story progresses it will become less similar to the original.

Prologue

"Time goes, you say? Ah, no! Alas, time stays, we go." Henry Austin Dobson

~o~

Of all the magical objects in the world, you would have got to have Harry Potter's luck get into an incident with a magical screwdriver.

Wizards and Witches generally learn to expect the unexpected, causing incidents with magical books, jars, mugs, carpets (either flying or immobile), dices, and socks to be considered unsurprising.

Screwdrivers, having originated in the Muggle world as recently as the 18th century, are but rarely found in traditional Wizarding households; Wizards have perfected their own methods for carpentry and remodelling centuries before. Those Wizards and Witches that did have a screwdriver were mostly Muggle-born and considered the tool plenty useful on its own, repressing the impulse to enchant it.

Considering all this, it was a curious incident that not only there was a screwdriver enchanted with dangerous experimental magic, but also that Harry Potter was the one to accidentally misuse it. Although it would be Harry who would get in such a situation; he and Lady Fortuna did always have a temperamental relation.

~o~

Harry should have been warned of the screwdriver's dangers by the place where he bought it; nothing in Knockturn Alley was both legal and harmless. Since an enchanted screwdriver was only illegal when it was brought into contact with Muggles (as per regulation of the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office), alarm bells should start to ring the enchantments on the artefact.

However, after some inspection Harry had declared the screwdriver "dead useful" because of its many useful functions; not only could the screwdriver be used for screwing and unscrewing screws, it could also be used to open and close locks, to wind and unwind balls of yarn, to roll a cigarette, to flip a coin, and many other things which include some rotating movement.

Apparently it could also wind the fabric of time; while trying to put up some shelves in his renovated house in Godric's Hollow, Harry accidentally switched on some unknown function on the screwdriver that caused Harry's lifeline to reconnect with his life at the age of eight.

Only Harry's soul was affected however, and after some restless drifting it found its way to the body it had already inhabited once. At least, this was what Harry suspected; he had lost the screwdriver in 1999, while his soul was now present in 1989, making it quite difficult to investigate the circumstances that brought him there.

All the problems didn't end there, however, since Harry's magical capability was greatly reduced; magical proficiency was linked to the soul, and to the body as well, and a change in either influences the magical capability of a Wizard or Witch.

~o~

The cupboard where Harry found himself was larger than he remembered. He was still quite small and skinny at the age of nine; he wasn't even taller than the width of the cupboard yet.

Besides himself, all of his possessions could be found in the cupboard as well: two piles of oversized clothes, in one pile they were in a relatively good condition and in the other pile they were rather threadbare; a pair of shoes, quite tattered; a small mattress, still large enough for Harry, but thin and lumpy; a small cushion and a thin blanket, old but still warm and comfortable; some books, his favourite of these books had been the old copy of Treasure Island that originally had belonged to Dudley; a couple of toys, either broken or boring enough that Dudley would forget about them; an alarm clock he had stolen from his cousin, enabling him to wake up on time to do his chores; and, last but not least, some pencil stubs and a stack of barely used paper.

This was everything Harry Potter owned in 1989 (except for the unreachable Galleons and artefacts in his vault in Gringotts Wizarding Bank of course), and was everything he could safely use to figure out what he would do, how he would get back to remodelling his house in Godric's Hollow (which he didn't own yet, because it was held in trust by Albus Dumbledore until Dumbledore died or Harry came of age).

"It's all bloody useless," Harry muttered. He thought of making his way back to Knockturn Alley to buy the screwdriver again (if it was already there), but quickly discarded the idea as useless; he still remembered Hermione's explanation on time travelling devices: "legally time travelling devices can only travel to the past, since the incident with Almerick the Foolish in the 17th century; he would have saved an entire village from the terror of a chichevache, a monster that preys on virtuous women, if he hadn't travelled ten years into the future, causing the village population to be reduced to many men sharing a handful of women without virtue. Nowadays the punishment for travelling to the future ranges from imprisonment in Azkaban to the Dementor's Kiss."

Also, he could not leave in good conscience when there was a world that needed to be saved… again. Now seemed a good moment to speculate what would happen if he changed things from the past (in the future).

"Boy! It's time to prepare breakfast," Aunt Petunia shouted, interrupting Harry's thoughts. He would have to get used to doing chores again, fighting dark Wizards for years had left Harry's priorities quite far from household chores. "Yes, Aunt. I'm coming," Harry responded. Opening the cupboard he noticed it hadn't been locked, apparently they hadn't started with that yet.

Harry hadn't actively remembered anything from his non-magical time with the Dursleys, mostly because nothing was worth remembering compared the magical moments he'd had afterwards in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Already, things were not quite how he remembered them to be, such as the size of the cupboard and its unlocked state, and did Petunia Dursley just smile at him?