Chapter 7
Overwriting
It was a little over a week later when the hurricane of people, activity, and sound that was Potter Manor calmed down enough, even if only for an hour, that the Golden Trio could talk about Important Things. They gathered in their bedroom and warded the door, letting Euphemia know that they had their mirrors with them and could be contacted in that way if need be. Then, sitting on the bed facing each other, they began to discuss.
"We need to do something about the breakdowns and flashbacks. They seem too weird here because no one here has just been through a war. Back home everyone was dealing with something similar, but here it makes us stand out." Hermione wasted no time in starting.
"is there anything we can do?" Harry seemed skeptical. "They are already a lot better than they used to be, and we've tried just about everything."
Ron looked around at his friends, before realizing that neither of them had any ideas either. "There's got to be something that we can do, right?" he pleaded.
"I'm sure there's something, Ron. I just have no idea what." Hermione flopped down on the bed in desperation. The trio sat there for a while, trying to come up with something. Suddenly, Hermione shot up. "We can work it into our cover story!"
Harry and Ron looked at each other in confusion. "What?"
Hermione sighed. "Look. If we can't make the flashbacks and breakdowns stop, we have to find a way to cover for them. Since we can't just tell everyone that we are here from the future to save the world, we need a cover story. We can combine those two facts and make a cover story that incorporates the right kind of trauma that would make our flashbacks and breakdowns still uncommon, but expected and not questioned."
"That makes a lot of sense, and sounds like it could work fairly well." Harry started tapping his wand on his thigh in a thinking habit that Ron was trying desperately to break him of. "But what should the story be?"
Ron reached out to still Harry's hand. "You'll blow something up like that," he scolded. Harry gave him a halfhearted glare, but stopped tapping.
Hermione ignored the whole interaction and continued the discussion. "I was thinking about something with child soldiers."
"I'm not sure, 'Mione." Ron seemed, for once, to be deep in thought. "Where would we have been fighting?"
"Good point. Anything we could come up with for that would seem to be too implausible, and we don't want to make anyone suspect anything."
Once again they all fell into thought, not speaking for a few minutes. Finally Harry spoke up.
"Tom is already on the rise now, right?" Getting a nod from Hermione, he continued. "What if we were to say that the Death Eaters destroyed our village and we were on the run for about a year. To keep it easy to remember and harder to mess up we could keep the facts as similar as possible. My parents died on Halloween when I was one, and I lived with my aunt who wasn't very friendly until I was about eleven. At that point I basically moved in with Ron's family, and lived there most of the time until the town was destroyed."
Hermione's eyes lit up as she worked on a plan. "Brilliant, Harry! We'll say that it was a mixed muggle and wizarding village, and that my family was muggle, but the two of you saw me doing magic one day, and Ron's parents started teaching us all. That way there will be no questions about transferring records or anything. Homeschooling records are already not great and they would have been destroyed with the town."
"And my family doesn't have to change much either. I can still have siblings interested in all the same things and all the same ages in relation to me, and there shouldn't be too many questions about names since Mum and Dad opted for some of the more normal names in our family." Ron's usual excitement was dimmed slightly by the fact that he wouldn't be seeing any of them again any time soon, a fact that both Harry and Hermione noted and shifted closer to him, offering hands to hold as support.
The silent exchange took barely any time at all, and so Hermione continued with barely a pause. "And the year on the run is a perfect idea. That way we can still reference it and it will fit perfectly into our story."
Harry smiled at his friends, who were really closer to siblings than anything else. "Well it looks like we have ourselves a plan."
They sat together, simply relaxing and reveling in the silence and each other's presences. Ron was the one to break the silence.
"I still have a question. How is us being here and changing stuff not making us disappear like people do in those moving picture stories you showed me?"
Hermione jumped off of the bed and began rifling through the bookshelf that Fleamont had given her when he learned of her love of books. She pulled out a worn notebook, and returned to the bed, opening it to a page near the middle.
"Now, I'm not completely sure, but this is the most likely theory. I made a diagram here." She pointed to the adjacent page before beginning her explanation in earnest. "When we left our time, we were effectively 'clipped' from that timeline. That means that we are no longer affected by changes to that timeline, but will remember it as we lived it. That also means, though, that it does not create a paradox for us to be here, and instead means that starting from the moment that we got here, we are overwriting the timeline."
"So we can affect it, but it can't affect us?" Ron still seemed a bit confused, and Harry wasn't much better.
"Not quite. We are still very much affected by what is going on around us, but what we change can't affect our pasts. They are set in stone."
"I think I get it now." "Yeah, me too." Hermione smiled at her boys, no longer annoyed when they didn't get things as easily as she did, and proud of them for listening to her and trying to understand.
"I love you both so much."
"Love you too, 'Mione" the boys chorused back, turning to each other and laughing when they realized what they had done. Hermione joined their laughter, and the three just laughed for a while, releasing the stress of the past few days. Suddenly, Hermione's mirror went off, and they stopped laughing looking to see who it was.
They exchanged a glance, and Hermione picked up. "Hello, Lily. It's good to see you."
