Chapter1: Rebirth
The Nameless Place, ERROR: TIME ANOMALY
Sakura and Elric searched through the glowing lines of time. All of them strange yet familiar. There was many timelines, all unique through either mundane or elaborate differences. Sakura and Elric would normally stay away from the truly alien ones, the ones where they did not exist, the ones where the Wizarding World only exists in stories written by muggles, although Elric has suspected Sakura of sneaking into the Star Wars ones. But this time they searched everywhere, as they had done for the past 7 years. They searched for a specific timeline.
And at last, they found it.
A faint strand. In it existed a world that was dark. A world where Voldemort ruled and destroyed everything his enemies fought to protect. Everything except Harry Potter. But this Harry Potter had lost all hope and will to fight on. He only continued because it is what he has always done. He no hope for a better life. But they, they shall give him hope
Harry's Shack on the Rock, 2004
"Harry?" Harry Potter turned in his chair, wand held ready
"Who are you? Show yourself!" He ordered. Sakura and Elric took off their Invisibility Cloaks and stepped into the light."Sakura, Elric, Is that... Is that really you?" Harry said in disbelief. Sakura nodded. "But you two are dead! How - ... It's a trick, your really spies!"
"Ah, so we did exist in this timeline at one point." Thought Elric as his twin sister spoke to the unfamiliarly older Harry Potter. After all the last they had seen him was during the final battle against Voldemort.
"NO!" Sakura said before Harry could attack. "Harry..." She said. "Were not spies. There's no way to prove it though just... just trust us."
"Why should I?"
"Because we're her to offer you something. A choice."
"What? Death maybe?" Harry said with a harsh laugh. It was then, when his face was more detailed by the angle of the light, that the twins saw the scars on his face, the anger, the hate that lined it. "Not like I can, not as long as he's alive." Elric spoke up.
"You mean Vold-" Harry clamped his hand tightly on Elrics mouth.
"SHHHH! Do not say that name!" Harry's voice had become a soft whisper, he looked around as if listening for something. After a few seconds he let go and sat back down again. Elric rubbed at his jaw.
"Surely you of all people aren't afraid to say his name?" Sakura asked.
"No, no..." Answered Harry "It's just his name is tracked seeing as I'm the only who would think to say it instead You Know Who. Doesn't deserve to be called what he wants anyways, call him Tom if you must, but only Tom." A pause. "Now I believe you were offering me something?" The twins stared blankly for a second.
"Oh, right" bursted Elric "Harry..." He took a deep breath. "Harry what if we told you that you could find peace and happiness if you left this world with us?"
"I'd say when do we leave?" Harry responded with a smirk
"Right now if you want." Harry's smirk suddenly became a frown.
"Oh my god, your serious aren't you?"
"You would have to leave this place forever..." Sakura stated "But..." she added "You would see Ginny again." Harry grabbed her hand and gripped it tightly. He stared into her eyes, and she into his. She saw a glint in them that had not been there beforehand. They sat in silence for a few seconds before he spoke.
"You mean that, wherever you're from Ginny's not... Ginny's... Ginny's still alive?"
"In our time, yes. It is not the same Ginny you knew but then she will seem no different." Harry stood without a word, grabbed his few possessions, and hurriedly threw them into a large duffel bag.
"Let us go at once then." He said. The twins stood there and stared. Sakura began to speak even though she already knew what Harry's response would be. "But is there no one you must bid farewell to? No one for whom you might be missed?" Harry laughed his cold, dark laugh again. "No, the few who have had the courage to house me won't regret my departure. I'm the only rebel in this world."
"Very well then" Sakura turned to her twin brother "Elric?" she said. Elric peeked out the door to the outside.
"Come on" He reported "It's clear." The three walked out into the cold air.
The sea around the rock was calm that night but still very cold. The twins guided Harry down a sandy path to a small copse of trees that barely clung to life on the rock face. Harry looked up at the tree tops which were just a few feet above there heads.
"I nursed these trees since the day I came and found them here." He said "I thought that if life could grow out on a miserable rock such as this one that there might be hope against Voldemort yet. These trees will probably be the only things I miss here." The twins did not say anything, they knew what to say and also they had come to the most dangerous part of there mission. Elric turned to Harry.
"Now Harry, remember Hermione's Time Turner?" Elric stopped himself and then asked "You did do that in this time right?"
"Yes" Harry answered
"Okay, good" Elric said "well this form of time travel is nothing like that. In fact it's more time travel then that was, seeing as with the Tempus Dial your actually going to another timeline and with the Time Turners your-" But Harry cut him off and asked
"What do you mean by timelines?" Elric opened his mouth to answer but was beaten to it by Sakura
"Parallel Universe's, only we see them as lines of time in the Nameless Place, They exist simultaneously and all around us." She pulled her wand from it's Baldric, her wand was a massively long sixteen inches and so she kept it in a leather sheath on her back. It was made from a fine, dark red bloodwood and the handle was wrapped in a soft, white leather. Inside, at the core laid the crystallized spittle of a Silk Dragon, one species of the many minuscule Butterfly Dragons native to East Asia. She waved her wand slowly through the air. "You see, I just touched an infinite number of universe's." Harry thought on this.
"What is the Nameless Place?" He asked
"It's where we are able to travel among the timelines, You see they appear as sorta glowing strings floating in darkness, We don't know exactly what it is nor how it really works-".
"Not asking either." interrupted Elric.
"We only know we can travel through it, So we never have really come up with a good name for it." Sakura finished.
"Is that safe?" Harry asked.
"No" The twins said together casually.
Harry had still not had his curiosity fulfilled.
"How exactly do you do all this?" he asked. Sakura sighed.
"Did we in this timeline never explain it to you?" She questioned back
"No, Not at all." Harry replied.
"Very well then, he deserves an explanation before we continue. But it must be brief. Elric, can you tell him?".
"Yeah sure" Elric said.
"Long ago, before the fall of the Greek Empire to the Romans, there were seven great wizarding cultures; Greece, Persia, the Celts, India, China, the Yamoto who would later inhabit Japan, and the people who would later become the Lakota Nations of Native America; An explorer from each of them traveled together in a party to explore the more unknown lands of the world. These explorers were the first to discover what is known as the Sands of Time. The Sands of Time some sort of naturally occurring magical phenomenon. About a thousand grains of sand that, when harnessed properly, contained the power to truly move through time." He pulled what looked like a very large pocket watch from a pouch he wore on his belt. It was made from a lacquered and painted wood. The flip top was painted white with the Japanese Kanji Character for Time (Harry didn't know this of course, to him it only seemed like a collection of black lines). Elric opened the object. Inside was a strange clock. It had many hands, and dozens of Japanese Characters around the edge where numbers normally were. And embedded in the very center was a single piece of silver colored sand about the size of a half a grain of rice. "This," Elric continued "is a Tempus Dial, It contains half of one of the last remaining grains of the Sands of Time." Sakura explained the rest.
"The other half is in mine" She pulled hers out, an exact copy of the one Elric held. "The Tempus Dials give the user an unbelievable control over time. The seven explorers, each representing their culture, knew they could trust their cultures in the use of the Sands and so they destroyed all but seven grains, and split them between each other. They would secretly meet once a year where they would discuss the events occurring in their lands and how they should act with their powers. They came to be known in the legends as The Tempus Council. Ever since then the council members have passed down the power through their family lines, as only the descendent's of the originals can use it. The Japanese Explorer was Sakura Otomo, my namesake. And ever since her in our family line there has only ever been two children. Twins. A boy and a girl."
"Why?" Harry asked.
"We don't know, some side effect of our grain we guess. It has never happened with the other families. We don't care anyways. If we tried and meddled with it we might fix the magic and then their wouldn't be twins all the time. Anyways enough talk, it's really about time we were getting back, I hate spending too long in another timeline and I'm getting really cold." Elric handed Harry a silver chain.
"Keep hold of that tightly" Elric said as he wrapped the other end around his hand "It'll keep you from drifting from us. Now when we do this it's going to feel a lot worse for you than Disapparating, Floo Powder, or Portkey travel so we'll be as quick as we can about this." They both held their Tempus Dial's in their hands and stared at the clock faces of them. Then without warning they whispered "Tempus." !-- page size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in P margin-bottom: 0.08in --
The Nameless Place, ERROR: TIME ANOMALY
The world seemed to pop away from Harry leaving him floating in darkness. Though he felt none, all he could hear was the sound of rushing wind around him, as if he was falling through the air. Harry struggled to breath, it felt like everything around him was a vacuum. He began to see threads of silver all about the area. They were some of the most beautiful things he had ever seen, shining in the darkness. He suddenly relieved he was floating uncomfortably but tried as he might, nothing that he made it any more comfortable. Harry looked around and saw Sakura and Elric floating nearby. They showed no signs of being affected the same ways Harry was. Most likely they weren't as they had this many times before. Harry continued to fight for every bit of air he could, his lungs began to heave. Sakura and Elric were talking, or least Harry guessed they were he heard nothing of the rushing sound but he did see their lips move. They continued to look back and forth between the threads floating around them and their Tempus Dial's. Elric pointed at one thread and they both wound the hands on there Dial's. Harry's vision began to get blurry, he was suffocating, he tried to say something to Sakura. She turned to Harry and shouted something. Sakura and Elric closed the lids to their Dial's and the world popped again.
Godric's Hill, 1 September 2004
Harry curled over onto his hands and knees and puked onto the soft grass.
"You okay?" Elric asked as he took the silver chain from Harry's hand. Sakura look around at the area.
"Time Differential Sickness or TDS," She said "with such a change in time like that one your body is trying to reject it. One could say jet lag is like TDS, only nowhere near as bad." Harry sat up only to be attacked by a brain splitting headache. He screamed out and fell on his back. A flood of memories came at him, tearing at his head. Sakura ran to Harry as he laid on the ground, back arching.
"What in Merlin's name is going on?" She exclaimed.
"Don't ask me!" replied Elric. The pain in Harry's head stopped as suddenly as it had begun. He looked up at Sakura who was kneeling over him.
"Are you all right, Harry?" She asked. He looked at her. Ha saw her clearer, almost as if he had been looking at her without his glasses this whole time. All her features now stood out to Harry where before she was just, well, a familiar face. !-- page size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in P margin-bottom: 0.08in --
Her hair was neck-length and very straight. Ever since the day he had met her it was dyed the color of snow, it reminded him of Hedwig, his old owl that died in the war. Her skin was pale, not sickly but a healthy pallor. Her eyes were almond shaped with the hint of epicanthic folds, suggesting her Japanese heritage. Her pupils were constantly changing in different light, and not only natural colors either, but ones like red and purple, even occasionally metallic colors. Once he had asked her how she did that
"Do what?" she said
"Your eyes"
"Oh yeah, thats natural, purely natural, or supernatural at least." thats the only answer he ever got. !-- page size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in P margin-bottom: 0.08in --Along her face, just below the eye's, was a scar, wide and deep, left behind from the first Battle at Hogwarts. Sakura wasn't very attractive in the traditional sense, but she did have a fair, pixish look to her. Her face was not the only thing he dwelt on. She was tall, impressively tall for a woman of Asian descent. Even with her height she still had the thin, lanky, spritish look of her young teenage years, despite the fact she was same age as Harry. Harry looked over at Elric, Sakura's brother was the like an exact male copy of her. Their biggest differences, besides different genders of course, was obvious, were obvious. Elric had bright, yellow-blond hair, and bright, blue, eyes which he swore were both natural.
Looking at them this way, Harry thought back to their past together. They had first met the twins on the Halloween of his first term. The twins had helped distract the Troll that had entered into Girls Bathroom. Harry, Ron, and Hermione soon became close friends with the Otomo twins, and they were there beside Harry for everything. In their third year, The twins were able to connect closely with Harry when they learned that Sirius Black was their father. By their fourth year, Dumbledore had revealed to Harry that the twins were students at Hogwarts because they had been assigned as Harry's Bodyguards. During the battle of the Ministry, Sakura nearly killed Harry in her rage when she attempted to kill Bellatrix Lestrange and avenge her father's death. He remembered his sixth year when Sakura finally got on the Gryffindor Quidditch team as Chaser (out beating Delmeza Robins by miles). And during the search for the Hocruxes, Harry remembered that the twins believed in Harry's obsession and search for the Deathly Hallows.
Harry focused on the good memories of course, though there were many bad ones. The Twins were far from perfect, even if Sakura sometimes acted like she was. Sakura's rage and blood thirst went too far many times, almost causing her to be expelled when she attacked Malfoy in their second year. And Elric was sometimes the exact opposite of Sakura, and had little to no self-esteem, and he and Hermione seemed to constantly argue come final exam time, debating the finer points of Arithmancy or something. But just like Ron and Hermione, Harry's relationship with them was tested again and again, and yet he still knew he could trust them with his life. Harry soon came to realize that these memories of them were from this world, for the Sakura and Elric he knew in the other world were very different. Harry suddenly feared if this Sakura was capable of the horrible things Harry had witnessed the other one commit, and if this Elric would be able to control Sakura, unlike his own Elric... No, that wasn't the way to think about it, these two were his own, this was now his world, he would let himself become foreign to it.
"Harry? Harry? Harry. Are. You. All. Right?" Sakura said for probably the sixth time. Harry looked back at her.
"What? Yes, yes I'm fine. I feel different, I suddenly see you clearly, like I hadn't been wearing my glasses or something, and I remember things I didn't remember before." He said. Sakura's eyes widened.
"It worked!" She exclaimed.
"What worked?" asked Elric.
"Don't you see? He has our Harry's memories, He sorta transferred timelines so to speak." She to Harry and hugged him, tears in her eyes. "Oh brother, it's so good to have you back." Harry hugged her back and laughed
"But I'm not your brother." he said
"My god-brother, our god-brother!" She stood there hugging him for several minutes. Then stepped back and brushed away the last of her tears. "Come, lets got back to the others." she said finally, sniffling. Harry looked around and recognized where they were.
"Are we at Godric's Hollow?" He asked.
"Yeah" Elric answered. "And it's the first of September, 2004. Our house is just there down the hill, it was our mum's. When we left we had invited Ron and Hermione, who live next door. Oh, and Ginny's staying with us until her house is built. You had left a will, in it you left your money to her and Hogwarts to help rebuild it, you also left your parent's house hoping she would use it if she raised a family. The Dark Magic thats been left there is making it a little hard to build however." Harry cried out happily in his mind Ginny!... but then he asked,
"Ginny is married then?"
"No, but that will be explained later. It's 9:30 now so it'll have been about 20 minutes since we left, Sakura." They walked down to the twins house.