Disclaimer: Harry Potter is the property of J.K. Rowling, Bloomsbury Publishing, Scholastic Corporation, and Warner Brothers.

Singularity: 1. the state, fact, or quality of being singular; a peculiarity

2. a point in space-time in which matter and energy are infinitely compressed to infinitesimal volume; a blackhole

Event Horizon: 1. the boundary at which gravitational pull becomes so strong that escape is impossible

2. a point of no return

When he reappeared after apparating from the field, Harry was in London in the same alleyway that Hermione had brought him and Ron to nearly a year before (or rather twenty years from then). He stepped out of the alley on to the street. He chose a direction and began to walk. As he walked, he garnered many strange looks. It made him slightly paranoid. Though he had practice ignoring strangers that stared at him, he knew that no one should be staring at him in this time. He was just another man walking along the road, not famous or infamous. He was just Harry here. But people were still staring at him. And it was making him nervous.

He looked down to examine himself and realized what had been attracting the attention. He was wearing torn and bloody clothes from the Battle of Hogwarts.

He quickly dipped into another alley and mended and cleaned his clothes with magic. When he finished and walked back onto the street, he had no trouble blending with the crowds.

He walked aimlessly for several hours, trying to decide where to go. He did not have enough muggle money to rent a room and he would not risk going into Gringotts. He figured his best choice was to camp out in an alley and cast a few charms for protection. It was not as if he did not know had to camp. He, Hermione, and Ron had been doing just that for the several months prior.

While he was looking for an acceptable alley way, he came across a man in a top hat, an outrageous vest, and a tail coat. As he got closer to the man, the man turned to him and said, "Pick a card, any card," as he waved a deck of cards in front Harry.

Harry paused for a moment, and the magician said, "Aw, come on now. Don' be a Joanie. Jus' pick one."

Amused at the 'Magician', Harry picked a card.

"Memorized the card yet?" the magician asked.

"Yep," Harry replied. The King of Hearts. A bit ironic, Harry thought, I'm the boy whose power the Dark Lord knew not was love and now I happen to pick the King of Hearts.

"Well, all right, then. Put it back," the magician ordered.

Harry placed the card back in the deck.

The magician shuffled the cards, handed them to Harry and had Harry shuffle them. He then threw the deck on the ground and the only card that landed face up was the King of Hearts.

Harry was slightly impressed.

"And there's your card, man. You dig it? That's far out, ain't it, cat?" the magician said.

Harry merely nodded and continued on his way. Until he stopped short. He could do tricks much more impressive than that muggle 'magician'. Now there's an idea, he thought.

On his fourth day in London, Harry found a tea shop (Sheena & Kripali's Tea Emporium) that was looking for someone to clean up and close the shop every evening. Harry, who was an expert at cleaning and was desperate for money, was the perfect man for the job. The Gupta sisters offered to pay him £10 per day if they could pay him off the books. This agreement was better than Harry could have dreamed of because he had no documents to recommend him for a legitimate job, so an off the books job was his only option. Harry agreed to the terms and had been working at the tea shop every day of the week for the past three weeks.

Harry had been living in muggle London for nearly four weeks. For the first few days he lived as a vagabond. During the day, he performed 'magic tricks' on street corners for spare change and at night he would transfigure a blanket, cast an Impervius charm, a Warming charm, and a notice-me-not while hiding out in an alley to sleep. He was pleased. When he did magic tricks on the corner, he would get few fifty pence pieces, a couple of quid, and the occasional fiver. Then he'd go to the shop and get another ten quid. Harry now had a place to sleep and enough money to scrape by. This, however, did not change the fact that he was twenty-one years into the past with no friends or allies.

After the first week, he had given up hope that this adventure was just a hallucination, and after two weeks, he had accepted that it was not an elaborate scheme plotted by the Death Eaters to disorient him. After the third week, he acknowledged that he was in fact back in 1977, and now, in his fourth week, he had finally resigned himself to the horrible truth that if he was going to go back (or forwards) to his own time, he would have to tell someone because he knew he was incapable of solving the problem on his own.

His problem now was figuring out a way to travel forwards in time besides waiting for the time to pass naturally. He knew that he would never be capable of figuring out how to on his own, so he needed to tell someone in this time about his situation. But who in this time could he trust? One name immediately came to mind: Albus Dumbledore.

But could he trust Dumbledore not to meddle in time with the information he would be given? Dumbledore himself had told Harry that he was easily corrupted by power. And what is knowledge of the future if not power?

Unfortunately, he had no other choice. It was a risk he was going to have to take. Dumbledore was the only man in this time that he knew for certain he could trust to both help him and not send him to the Department of Mysteries or the long term patient ward at St. Mungo's.

But if he was going to tell anyone in the Wizarding World, even Dumbledore, he was going to need a disguise. He looked far too much like a Potter to not draw attention.

So Harry walked to the drug store on the corner of his block and bought a bottle of hair bleach. Though he feared that the blonde hair might make him look like a Malfoy, his options were limited. He walked back to his cheap flat and carried his purchase to the bath. He carefully read the instructions on the label and followed them to the letter.

An hour later, Harry Potter was a blonde.

He stared at his face in the mirror, contemplating. He did not look like a Malfoy in the slightest, which surprised him. He figured a characteristic as defining as bleach blonde hair would draw immediate parallels, but he still looked like Harry Potter. He needed something more. Something about him still screamed 'Harry Potter' and he could not for the life of him figure out what it was.

He shook his head, giving up trying to determine what it was, and walked over to the cheap mattress lying on the floor. He sat down on the mattress and pulled the moleskin pouch out from under his white t-shirt.

The pouch reminded him of Hagrid. It reminded him of his seventeenth birthday, the last happy event he had to remember his friends by. It reminded him of his eleventh birthday when he and his relatives had been hiding on that godforsaken island. It reminded him of when Hagrid broke down the door and introduced him to a whole new world. That memory in particular had become very dear to him in the past few weeks. He had, once again, been taken from everything he had ever known and brought to a new world. He remembered that day very well. It was the first time that he had been told, "You have your mother's eyes."

I have my mother's eyes, he thought as an epiphany hit him.

That was it. That was the thing that screamed 'Harry Potter' about him. His green eyes and his circular wire-framed glasses were two of his most defining characteristics. He needed to get rid of his glasses and change the color of his eyes. His immediate thought went to contacts. But he had no idea if contacts had even been invented yet. It would cause quite a bit of trouble if he were to walk into the optometrist's office and ask for something that did not yet exist.

Harry looked to the watch on his wrist. It was nearly time for him to go down to the shop and clean up. He would have to worry about finding contact lenses another time.

Five days later, on the 10th of August, Harry Potter was walking back from the optometrist's without glasses and with blue-green eyes. Contact lenses had indeed been invented before 1977. Unfortunately, they were hard contacts made of glass and had a tendency it dry quite quickly, but Harry wouldn't complain. A simple lubricating charm quickly solved the problem.

As he was walking, he was thinking, as he was prone to do. He could now go into the wizarding world without raising too much suspicion. He knew his first foray into the wizarding world would be a meeting with Albus Dumbledore, but he was unsure of how to contact the man. As a man of great importance, Dumbledore probably received dozens of requests for meetings per day. Harry had yet to figure out how to gain Dumbledore's intrigue.

The irony did not escape Harry that just as he had finished hiding out from Voldemort, he had been forced to go into hiding again. And this time, he was hiding from the entire Wizarding World instead of just Voldemort and his army.

Harry was distracted from his thoughts by rain. It was not at all unusual for it to rain. He was, after all, in London. But this particular downpour was torrential and he needed to get indoors to avoid being completely drowned in rain.

He entered the first building he saw, which happened to be a lecture hall at Imperial College London. The board posted next to the entrance to the hall read:

Stephen Hawking

10 August 1977

10:30 to 12:00

The Penrose-Hawking Singularity Theorem

Harry looked to his watch. 11:00. He shrugged and walked through the door. The hall was packed to the brim to hear the world-renown physicist's lecture. There was an empty seat several rows into the auditorium. Harry sat and turned his attention to the man. Harry had heard of Stephen Hawking before. He knew that the man was a physicist of some sort. Hermione had talked about the man almost reverently. A wistful smile crossed his face as he thought about Hermione. He missed his friends. During his time on the run, he had grown used to missing people, but he had always had Hermione and Ron. Now he was missing everyone. He had no one in this time. He handled the loneliness well for the most part, but every so often the loneliness would strike him unexpectedly.

He remembered sitting with Hermione in the tent on one of those days that seemed to drag on for years. He had annoyed Hermione so much with his sighing that she threw one of her books at him and Harry, who was so tired of being bored, actually read the book. When Hermione turned to him 20 minutes later her jaw almost hit the floor from the shock of seeing Harry reading a muggle history book.

Harry had found the book quite interesting and extremely relatable. The Second World War was the title of the book. Because he had been raised in the muggle world, he had already known some about the war, but he learned so much more from the book. It astonished him how similar World War II was to the war he was fighting against Voldemort. The parallels were uncanny. The appeasement of the governments to the aggressor, the bigotry at the foundation of the war, the charismatic-but-deranged leader of the aggression, the devoted army of followers the leader possessed.

If anything, the muggle war was worse than the war against Voldemort. The muggles lost an unbelievable number of people in the war. Nearly 70,000,000 dead. Harry's war had not killed anywhere near as many people. And besides the death toll, the muggles developed weapons of mass destruction. Incendiary bombs, atomic bombs, and lethal gases which could kill people by the thousands.

After reading up on World War II, Harry began to ask Hermione for more and more of her books. He even got around to reading Hogwarts, A History: the Unabridged Version which had flown from Dumbledore's office with the horcrux books at the end of sixth year. Hermione had said that it was the most extensive version of the book she had ever seen.

Harry picked up many interests while on the search for horcruxes. He studied muggle history, chemistry, and even Ancient Runes. Harry had a natural affinity for Ancient Runes, he discovered. Hermione postulated that his natural affinity had something to do with his close relationship with his magic which had saved his life a myriad of times. She thought that his relationship with his magic allowed for an instinctive understanding of its application.

Something Dr. Hawking said commanded Harry's attention and took him from his thoughts.

"Because of general relativity, we know that gravity bends space, and therefore, time. Using the Singularity theorem, we can determine that a time-like singularity can work backwards in time by bending space-time with immense gravity."

Backwards in time?

A hope grew inside Harry that it might actually be possible for him to return to his own time. If muggles were capable of time travel, he would not even need to go into the Wizarding World. He would be able to go back to Hermione and Ron. He could go back to Ginny. He could see Neville and Luna and McGonagall and all the Weasley's. He could see everyone who he cared about again. Muggle science might be able to send him back home. (In the back of his mind, Harry thought that it would be the ultimate irony for the Savior of the Wizarding World to be rescued by Muggle technology.)

Harry's rising excitement was quashed by what he next heard Dr. Hawking say.

"Though we understand the physics of singularities, we are not doing experimental study, nor, I think, will we ever. It is all completely theoretical and will remain so for the foreseeable future. We are simply incapable of controlling something with that much energy, with that much power. And even if we were capable of controlling such energy, we still would not be able to create a singularity unless we fully understood the nature of an atom. The fusion involved requires a complete quantum theory. And Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle tells us that we never will understand everything about a physical object," the physicist explained.

The muggles could not create a time machine. He should have known that. If muggles had invented a time machine anytime between 1977 and 1998, he'd have known about it because he was (or would be) alive to have heard (or hear) about it. An errant thought passed through his head that all of these verb tenses were starting to confuse him. But the majority of his mind was distracted by the rush of hopelessness he felt.

If the muggles cannot get him back and wizards cannot get him back, then he resigned himself to the fact that he could not go back. Muggles are not able to create a time machine because they cannot control the energy. Wizards rarely use time travel because they do not understand how to do it; it is mysterious.

As he sat there, drowning in sadness, he was hit by a startling realization.

If he combined muggle time-travel principles with wizarding energy control principles, it might be possible. Muggles understood the mechanics of time-travel and wizards understood the energy control. Because what is a spell if not controlled, directed, purposeful energy?

He was elated. He could hardly control himself. He had a plan. Something tangible. Something to cling to. A had weight lifted from his shoulders, a weight that he had not known he was carrying. He knew what he had to do now. The only problem was how to do it. All he knew was the first step, which was, for the moment, enough. He needed to find Albus Dumbledore.

Albus Dumbledore was happily humming to himself in his office. He did love the month of August. He loved preparing for all the young minds soon to enter the walls of his school. Summer was his least favorite time of year, if only for the fact that he missed the ever constant stream of voices and laughter emanating from the classes and halls of his school. He was absentmindedly stroking the soft feathers on Fawkes' head when the magnificent bird raised his head and disappeared in a whirl of flames.

The headmaster stared at the perch where the phoenix had been resting in surprise. The surprise soon gave way to alarm. Fawkes rarely used fire to travel. Fawkes preferred to fly. He loved to soar though the air. He only used fire travel when he there was an emergency. So what was he doing? What was going on?

His questions were soon answered as Fawkes reappeared in another whoosh of flames. In his beak was a note that he dropped on the headmaster's desk.

The professor picked up the note and stared at it in confusion. It was written on muggle paper instead of parchment. With a shake of his head, he ignored his bubbling curiosity for the moment. The content of the letter was far more important that what it was written on. As he read, his curiosity only grew.

Professor Dumbledore,

I'm terribly sorry if I scared you by calling Fawkes. I didn't mean to worry you on purpose. I summoned Fawkes because I really need to speak with you and having Fawkes deliver the letter was the only way I could think of to make sure that you read it.

I need your help. I know this is odd coming from a stranger. Even worse than a stranger, someone who didn't even have the courtesy to introduce themself in the introduction of a letter he wrote to someone who views him as a stranger. I know that in times like these it's difficult to trust someone you've never met, but I hope that Fawkes' trust in me is enough to make you believe me. I am sure that I'm not the only person who has asked for your help, what with Voldemort around and all, but I have no one else to turn to and you are my only hope.

I cannot tell you much about myself, and what I tell you, I will only tell you in person, to prevent the information from falling into the wrong hands. Please be satisfied that your phoenix believes me to be a good man because I cannot tell you anything more.

I would like to meet with you, so that I can tell you more. If you can (and are willing to), please meet me for lunch tomorrow at Sheena and Kripali's Tea Emporium in London at noon. If you cannot meet then, I ask that you send Fawkes back with a time and place you can meet me. If you will not meet, then I am sorry, sir, for having wasted your time.

Sincerely,

a friend

P.S. I will make sure to have raspberry jam on the table. Also, your tea will be served with lemon and four lumps of sugar.

After he read the letter, he read it again. And then he read it a third time for good measure. After the third reading, the professor sat back in his chair. He turned to Fawkes and the phoenix merely stared back at him. He looked away from the bird and pulled out a piece of parchment and a quill.

"It appears that I'll be rescheduling my meeting with the minister. This letter has made me far too curious to postpone a meeting with this stranger," he told Fawkes as he began composing a letter to the Minister for Magic.