"You know, you look so familiar."

"What?"

"I know I'm probably making a complete fool of myself. I do know you! You defeated Voldemort!"

"You must be joking..."

"Unfortunately, I'm serious. I'm terrible with names! I know you, but I don't remember names... Harry Potter!"

The thin-nosed, pretty woman smiled triumphantly. Her dark brown hair blew into her face, and she pulled it behind her ear.

"I have to admit, Monica, you're the first person I've met in a long while who hasn't recognized me nor known my name," Harry said with a slight chuckle. "Not a terrible feeling, actually. A pleasant change from the norm."

She smiled. "Well, I did know your name... eventually. I'm really interested in history, just not recent history. But, I do know who you are." They laughed into the cold night air, walking past darkened windows of muggle shops.

Even though the two of them had only met earlier that evening, they laughed as if they were long lost best friends. Monica had been at muggle pub, sitting at the bar with an untouched bottle in front of her when Harry came in and joined her. The two of them had made idle muggle talk at the bar, when Monica slipped up and said that her Quidditch team was doing poorly this year. She embarrassedly tried to explain herself when Harry told her that he, too, was a wizard. In order to escape curious muggle ears, they left the pub and continued their conversation outdoors.

It wasn't until they were outside when Monica had recognized Harry for who he was.

After that, the conversation turned to their years at Hogwarts. Monica was a year younger than Harry, and had been in Ravenclaw, but was admittedly socially withdrawn during her years there.

"I grew up alone with my mother," she explained to Harry. "She wasn't exactly the best influence. She wouldn't let me out of the house at all. I was pretty much stuck in my room every day."

"Unfortunately, I know what you mean," Harry replied sullenly.

"She was mad, though. And I didn't realize it until I went to Hogwarts. My first year was the year the Chamber of Secrets was opened."

"Ah yes," Harry remembered. "'Enemies of the Heir, Beware'."

"Well, this is going to sound really sick," Monica said cautiously, "but when I was a little kid, my mother convinced me that I was the Heir of Slytherin."

"Why?" Harry asked, awestruck.

"She had some kind of obsession with her bloodline. She had books filled with unpronounceable names, and at the very beginning of it all was Slytherin himself. When the Chamber was opened, I thought that I must have had something to do with it, even though I didn't even do anything. Then I found out that Voldemort had really been the heir, and he certainly wasn't my grandfather, so I knew I wasn't the heir, and that my mother had been lying to me my whole life. She might have even written the books herself."

They both fell silent as they walked hand-in-hand.

"Listen to me," Monica laughed nervously, "talking about my insane mother to Harry Potter."

"Don't feel bad," he reassured her with a squeeze of his hand. "You're in good company if you want to talk about insane relatives."

But they didn't talk about insane relatives at all for the rest of the night. They reached Harry's house, and he invited her inside.

"I don't know," she said. "I'm due back in London early tomorrow--"

"You can apperate, can't you?" Harry asked slyly.

"Of course I can--"

"Then you've got nothing to worry about."

Monica tried to look serious, but a smile managed to break through.

"Okay."

The next morning, Monica found herself in a frantic rush to get ready. Monica worked at the Ministry of Magic, in a branch of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, specializing in the regulation and protection of time travel and time travel devices. Ironically, Monica wished for more time as she was late for work. With a quick kiss goodbye, she apperated away from Harry's house outside of her own, which was miles away. She quickly got dressed and was almost ready to disapperate from her home when she realized she was wearing two different colored shoes.

'Darn! How could I have lost track of time like that?' she thought. Not that she hadn't enjoyed herself with Harry, but she should have left a few more minutes for herself to get ready. She hurriedly pulled a different shoe onto her left foot, blowing her brown hair out of her face.

She disapperated and appeared directly into her office, something she didn't normally try to do because the office wasn't very large and a slight miscalculation could send her into the men's toilet next door. Not to mention the nasty memo she'd receive from the head of her department, reminding her to apperate in the atrium and not into her office.

As she sat down at her desk, a woman with a thin nose and brown hair entered the room. It looked like an exact replica of Monica.

The Monica sitting at her desk turned towards the door.

The Monica standing up smiled and said, "9:30 one turn. For Dr. Fillmore" She then left the office.

The Monica sitting at the desk began looking through her files until she found Dr. Fillmore, a highly respected brain surgeon. He had needed a time-turner before, to perform two necessary and life-saving surgeries that would have otherwise overlapped with each other. Monica predicted this was the case again.

The clock on the wall ticked to 9:15 and just as her double had warned her, an owl swooped into Monica's office bearing a note from Dr. Fillmore. She checked his records again, to make sure he had been keeping with the law since his last ownership of a time-turner. He hadn't made any sort of infractions, so Monica unlocked the bottom drawer to her desk, and pulled out the time-turner.

It was part of her job to make sure the time traveling devices were safe and in proper working order, so every time someone needed a time-turner, Monica was required to test the device on herself.

Monica draped the thin gold chain around her neck, and glanced at her watch. 9:30 -- right on time -- and gave it one turn.

When the sensation of flying backwards ceased, Monica set her watch to 8:30, put the time-turner back into the drawer, and went to the ladies' room to finish putting on her makeup. If there was one advantage of being in the time-travel office, it was the extra hours of break time on certain days.

Very few people had ever been trained in the concepts of time-travel. It had always been a fascination of Monica's. She had owned one book about time-travel as a child, and when her mother kept her locked in her room for days at a time she found solace in the intricacies of the theories involved with time-travel. When she joined the ministry, she went through extensive training, some of it concerning how to cope with seeing a double of herself. It is very dangerous to meet with one's self after time travel, but Monica became used to it, and she had even figured out ways of helping her past self through the day.

Monica was about to take Dr. Fillmore's file out for herself, so that it would be ready for her when she got there, but realized it hadn't been taken out for her earlier, so she shouldn't do it. At 9:00, Monica went to her office to alert herself that at 9:30 she'd have to make one turn, for Dr. Fillmore.

It took a certain kind of mind to be in Monica's profession.

This day was far less dull than Monica's normal days. Since Dr. Fillmore didn't need the time-turner for an extended period of time, she went to the hospital herself to deliver it, and stuck around, making sure both of his bodies were kept far away from each other during the operations to prevent him from seeing himself.

When the day was over, Monica locked the time turner back into the drawer and sighed. She thought about what Harry was doing, and whether or not he would ever remember her. While she hoped it hadn't just been a one-night-stand, her logic took over and somehow knew it wouldn't have worked out between them. So it was with every relationship she had ever been in. She was a beautiful young woman, but her odd obsession with time travel and her strange inability to keep friends for a long period of time kept her from becoming attached to anyone in her world.

As Monica got ready for bed, her thoughts drifted from Harry to a familiar, strange yearning to live in medieval times. Her dream was to travel back in time many years and live out her retirement in the past. She promised herself that if she was sent back, she would let her future self know. Unfortunately, she never found anything to suggest that she ever got sent to the past, so her dream had always remained a dream.

The next day was dull, and so was the the day after that. Nobody required a new time-turner, and the few who had access to one were using it responsibly, so she had nothing to do except busy herself with paperwork.

It surprised her when she received an owl around noon, bearing a note from someone who wished a time-turner. It was a witch named Annie Harr who was prescribed an extra hour of daylight due to seasonal depression. If Monica had tested a time turner, she would have warned herself, or given herself some kind of clue as to when she'd need to have a time-turner records ready. Perhaps Annie Harr wouldn't have the best criminal record and Monica wouldn't have to test it. But Annie Harr was responsible and without criminal record, and the time came to test the time-turner.

Monica knew she couldn't travel while in her office, because she had been in the office an hour earlier. She needed to find a good place, where she wouldn't bother anyone, or anyone who might be around that area an hour before. She reminded herself that she couldn't make contact with herself at all, so she went far from her office, into the oldest section of the Ministry building that had been there for decades. She found herself a broom closet, where she wouldn't appear into anybody's past self, and prepared herself for travel.

For a fleeting moment, she considered not testing it, but the moment passed, and Monica held the tiny time-turner in her hand. While she was flipping it upside down, she noticed a thin crack in the glass. Though it was thin, a few miniscule grains of sand trickled out of the time-turner.

Monica gasped, reaching out to try to catch the magical sand. She dropped the time-turner so that it hung loosely around her neck. She felt more grains of sand fall down her shirt.

"No!" she exclaimed, as the familiar sensation of backwards flying took over. Monica was flying back faster than she ever remembered, and the familiar sensation was replaced by a frightening one. Monica felt as if she had fallen all of the way backward, but there was no floor to hit so she kept spinning backwards as if gravity was pulling her in giant circles, and it seemed like ages until the feeling stopped.

When she was done, surprisingly still standing on her own two feet, the time-turner was completely empty of its small supply of magical sand.

'Oh no,' she thought frantically, looking at the old-fashioned door. It hadn't been the same door she had used a moment ago. The closet was no longer as dirty, nor as full as it had been. In fact, it looked like it was being used as a real broom closet, and not just for storage. The names of some of the brooms were carved into the wood.

"Pegasus 20?" she gasped aloud, reading the unworn letters on the broom closest to her. The Pegasus series had been phased out in the late 1930's, and yet here was one, new as it could possibly look.

The brass handle turned, and Monica jumped. She swallowed dryly, unsure of who, or when would be on the other side.