2 July 1988

I don't know when I decided to erase the memory of them meeting me, but as I coalesced into shape in 1988, I knew that I was going to do it. I came once more to the Burrow. It reached crookedly toward the sky, and I could hear the shouts of happy children. My mum and uncles, no doubt. It was the summer holidays; Uncle Bill and Uncle Charlie might even be home. Though... they might have graduated school already. I wasn't sure.

I paused, only halfway back to a physical body. I stared hard at the bushes; they rustled, but no one was there. Just gnomes, I told myself firmly. I continued to walk down the lane, unable to shake the feeling that I was being followed. You're being paranoid, you moron. It was odd how I was far more nervous in 1988 than I had been in 1981. It was relatively safer now; Voldemort was gone and most of his followers were in Azkaban.

A month seemed like a long time to be in the past while I only really came back to do two things, neither of which should take more than a day. It was a bit of a hassle to know that I had thirty days to kill -- from new moon to new moon -- and hadn't much to do with it. Maybe I'll go torment the Dursleys, I thought.

Once I had fully formed, I spun on my heel and Disapparated to Godric's Hollow. I'd be damned before I let Albus and Severus lock me up again. And I only knew of one place that was relatively safe. And empty.

Granddad and Grandma Potter's cottage looked remarkably the same. The little yard had been cared for, and I wondered if the Ministry had laid an enchantment on it out of gratitude, or if a friend (Remus Lupin, perhaps) maintained it on their own. Glancing around quickly, I pulled out my wand and muttered the diagnostic spell that would tell me the answer.

A uniform Ministry spell. I was fairly confident that I wouldn't have visitors. Still, I cast protective charms that would turn away even though most curious guest. I frowned. I would have felt safer had I been able to stay in the Room of Requirement. But considering the fact that I needed to Obliviate the headmaster and his spy, I thought that might not be the best idea.

The cottage was fit for human inhabitants, though I was exceedingly grateful that it was July and not December or January. A part of the roof had been blown up, after all, and while the breeze blowing through felt pleasant in the summer, I imagined that it would be pretty damn cold in the winter.

I had a quick tour of the house. While I was upstairs, I dragged the bedclothes off of my grandparents' bed; I didn't want to actually sleep in it. I'd kip on the sofa. But I did need a blanket of some sort. I kept my head turned away from the door that led to Dad's old room. When I passed, I reached out blindly and pulled the door shut. I didn't want to be reminded of my failure. Just being back in the past again burned in my gut.

Failure.

I gave my head a good hard shake. "Focus, Al, focus," I said out loud. "You don't have time to be stupid." Unfortunately, I couldn't trick myself that easily. I already knew that I had about a month to brood about my own stupidity. It's going to be a long one, I thought glumly.

My stomach rumbled. I'll go steal some food before I get started on Memories Unbound, I thought. I pushed myself up off the sofa and left.

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08 July 1988

My fingers trembled violently, and my legs were shaky as I stepped out of Ariana's portrait and back into the Hog's Head Inn. The entire morning had been pretty wild. I had to admit to a little procrastination. I'd finished the book about four hours after I'd arrived in 1988, and I'd spent the next few days trying to muster up the courage to seek out Albus and Severus once more.

They'd been suitably shocked.

I'd used the door from the Room of Requirement to enter the office once more. Albus had been alone, and I'd lifted the Disillusionment Charm. His eyes had gone round with shock. "I'm back," I'd said.

And now, several hours later, I had erased his memories of ever meeting me. And Severus'. I thought about how the Potions Master looked now. He was sallow-skinned and greasy-haired and his face was harder and colder even than it had been in 1981. But it was unmarred by Fiendfyre.

Please stay that way.

"You again?" someone said gruffly. I whirled around. I'd thought that Aberforth was gone today. "You're lucky I recognized you."

"Er," I said.

"It's been a long time since I found you on the floor of my bathroom," said Aberforth. "Passed out drunk."

"Don't you mean since you stunned me?" I asked. "You stunned me and took me to your brother."

He gaped at me. "Didn't," he said.

I just stared at him. I hadn't even made it to the bathroom before I'd been hit in the back with a spell. I remembered it clearly. And since I'd woken up in Dumbledore's office, I'd sort of just assumed that Aberforth had wanted to stop me from doing any more damage than I had already done.

"I'm not serving you," he said. "I'm not as thick as people think. I've an idea who you are, and you aren't going to wag your lips in my bar again."

When I had jumped to the original timeline, before my parents had even used the Tears of Merlin, I had taken vindictive pleasure in stunning him. And even though he could not possibly know that had happened, I couldn't quite blame him for kicking me out of his bar. Not that I could've gotten drunk anyway. I was trying to follow my own guidelines.

I huffed out a sigh.

"Don't know what you were thinking," he continued. "Opening your mouth like that in a bar full of Death Eaters--"

"Death Eaters?" I asked suddenly. "There were Death Eaters in that bar?"

"Just one that I know of," Aberforth said. "Augustus Rookwood. But there could've been more."

Rookwood. His name had been cropping up a lot lately. Had he stunned me? I felt a wave of disorientation that may or may not have been due to a memory charm being challenged. I stared at Aberforth. He stared right back at me. "Obliviate," I said, almost distractedly. The older wizard's eyes unfocused and his mouth went slack.

As I left the Hog's Head, I knew that I should have felt a small measure of pride that I had managed to convince Albus and Severus to swear the Unbreakable Vow to not tell anyone about the prophecy, and that I'd managed to take their memories away. But my mind raced. What if... what if there weren't a bunch of little puzzle pieces that Voldemort had placed together after all? What if there was one gigantic piece that we'd been missing all this time?

There was only one way to know for sure. And Augustus Rookwood was in Azkaban.

Shit.

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17 July 1988

I didn't do anything rash. I didn't immediately run off and break into Azkaban to find Rookwood and force him to tell me what he knew. I tried not to think about it, because once I got started, I'd find myself plotting ways to get in and out of the fortress without getting caught and having my soul sucked out by dementors. The prospect didn't sound very pleasant.

I wafted through the days. I alternated between hiding at the Burrow and watching my uncles and my mother playing. I think I might have even been there the first time my mum snuck into the broom shed and stole Uncle Charlie's broom. At first I was quite careful to Disillusion myself, but I eventually stopped, despite the fact that I sometimes felt like I was being watched.

I also spent time tormenting the Dursleys in some small ways. One morning, I flattened the tires in Vernon Dursley's new car. After watching him struggle to change the tire, I made large cracking noises with my wand, just to embarrass him in front of his neighbors. Another time I tracked muddy dog prints up and down their front walk. Petunia Dursley's squawk of indignation and rage was quite fun, but Dad was forced to clean it up. As the days passed, I spent more and more time at the Burrow rather than at 4 Privet Drive.

"Hello?" said a small voice.

I spun around, ready with excuses as to why I was sitting and watching children playing. I couldn't immediately see anyone.

"Are you Merlin?"

I looked down. A young girl with hair so blond that it was almost white sat cross-legged inches away from my feet. It was apparent that she'd been there for quite some time. She was very young; I doubted she was even seven. But her eyes were wide and alert as they looked at me. They sort of reminded me of Dumbledore's eyes. They were also blue.

And it struck me that they were very familiar blue eyes.

"Aunt Luna?" I said incredulously, before I could stop myself.

"Oh, you are a time traveler!"

It wasn't my miniature godmother that spoke this time, but an older man. I realized that I'd seen him before; his dandelion hair was quite familiar. He was the father that had been quite polite as he'd picnicked with his family in 1981. I gaped at him, trying to decide whether or not to run away.

"I wondered, you see," he prattled on. "You still had a bit of the silvery memories clinging to you -- after all my studies of Merlin, they say that's the first thing to look for. Imagine my delight that I finally saw it! And my wife... she said that your aura had been like nothing she'd seen before"--I began to wonder if this man needed to breathe--"and you must be quite a while from your time. Now. I've had a question for you for years and years."

I was stunned. He'd seen me? I supposed it was possible. And if he knew that the silvery mist that had clung to my body was the memories binding me to the past... "Er, okay," I said cautiously.

"Is You-Know-Who really gone?" he asked. "Because you've got the look of the Potters about you, and young Harry defeated him just a few days after I saw you."

I tried to remember everything I'd ever heard about Luna's dad. He'd owned the Quibbler, a newspaper devoted to the weird. I think I was lulled by the fact that his eyes were so open and honest, and he looked slightly insane. And there was Aunt Luna, who was actually a very cute child, and I knew that I could trust them. And they weren't nearly so entwined in the thick of things as Albus and Severus... Dad wouldn't tell Luna until his fourth year. But I think it was mostly the fact that it had been days since I'd heard a friendly voice.

"Why did you call me Merlin?" I asked Aunt Luna.

"Because Daddy says that you're Merlin," she said proudly. "He tells me about him all the time."

"Well..." I said. I decided to use different names for Dad, Mum, and Uncle Ron. "You've got to promise you won't tell anyone."

"Of course we won't, Merlin!" Xeno Lovegood thrust out his chest. "Luna knows how to keep secrets."

Her eyes were very wide. She nodded solemnly. "I won't tell."

"It all begins with King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, and Lancelot," I said. She'd always loved the Arthurian legends; my earliest memories of my godmother was of her reading stories to us about the age of chivalry. I thought back, realizing with a start that before I had gone back to 1981, she had done no such thing. Perhaps her father's brief glimpse of me and subsequent interest in the Burrow and the area around it (for I now realized that he had probably been watching for my reappearance for quite some time). And for the first time in what felt like years, I smiled fully.

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29 July 1988

It was with great reluctance that I wrote the article. Be the butterfly, not the hurricane, I thought. Be the butterfly, not the hurricane. I had to be subtle; I had to meddle. I had to prevent the Order of the Phoenix from forming too soon. I desperately hoped that I would not find another massacre upon my return from the future. And Xeno's words had struck me. It was true. The press had a certain power that went far beyond magic. It galled me to write words that would (hopefully) stall people from choosing to side with Dad, but I was pretty desperate.

So I dredged up some memories of the books that had been written about Dad, and the discussions that I had overheard about the nature of prophecy. I used quotes from books that would not be on the shelf in Flourish and Blotts until years, sometimes even decades, into the future.

HARRY POTTER, THE PROPHECY, AND HE-WHO-MUST-NOT-BE-NAMED

In the six years since the fall of You-Know-Who, the Wizarding world, both in Britain and abroad, has viewed young Harry Potter as a savior. It is true that You-Know-Who could not kill him on the Halloween night that resulted in the deaths of James and Lily Potter. The child survived the Killing Curse – a feat that is unheard of – and You-Know-Who disappeared. These are the facts that led to the celebrations throughout Britain, and also why Harry Potter and his scar are famous. The fact that it was revealed that there was indeed a prophecy that foretold this happenstance – in which Harry Potter was named 'the Chosen One' – only made the downfall of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named even more a cause for joy after so many years of darkness.

And yet experts on prophecy are troubled. One Regan Forthill, son of renowned Seer July Forthill, expressed his misgivings on the matter. "Prophecies and oracles and things of that nature have never been predictable, my mother always said. She told me of many times throughout her lifetime when she Saw something, was certain of the meaning, and yet turned out to be completely wrong," he said, speaking to me from his home in Devon. This is fact. It is said that there is a Hall of Prophecy within the Department of Mysteries in our own Ministry of Magic. It is also fact that the great Nezenam Institute in Russia has an extensive library relating to prophecies and prophets, and they have always maintained that no human mind could possibly consider all the ramifications of any prophecy. An even more damning source is that of the centaurs, known to possess the skills of reading the stars that humans lack. A centaur that lives with the herd in the Forbidden Forest discussed with me at length what he had read in the stars. At this moment in time, the Wizarding world lies between two great wars. He claims that this time of peace is a brief respite, and one that will not last another even another decade. The centaur prefers to remain anonymous because of the sensitive nature of these claims, but they are true nonetheless. Due to the unpredictable nature of prophecies, I am certain that it would be a wiser course to be watchful rather than jubilant, careful instead of automatically trusting, and cautious instead of open-armed.

Less cautious witches and wizards will point to the fact that Harry Potter is, at the moment I am writing this, aged seven years old, and only just experiencing accidental magic. However, in four years, the child will be attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and there he will learn power, and tools that he may use for good or for ill. The first part of the prophecy has been well-known almost since it was made. And it seemed to come to fruition with the downfall of You-Know-Who. But I am suspicious of this 'terrible' power that Harry Potter is destined to have. What about that baby could stop the most powerful dark wizard in centuries? Have we seen the last of it, or will this second war that the centaur predicted be against Harry Potter, thought to be the savior of the Wizarding world? Given all that is unknown, I think it wise to consider these possibilities.

Again, I will point out the fact that Harry Potter is only seven years old. But He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was a child once as well. There are curious likenesses between the two: Harry Potter is also an orphan, and it is safe to assume that he will grow up to be a powerful wizard. Even the very nature of the prophecy made about both of them hints that there is an odd connection between their two destinies. The question must be asked: is Harry Potter responsible for the defeat of You-Know-Who, or is he the next You-Know-Who? Or even worse? The likelihood of him become a great wizard is shared equally with him becoming a threat the likes of which the world has never seen. The fact that the entire Wizarding world believes him to be the epitome of good is even more disturbing. You-Know-Who had to work to gain his followers, but every wizard, witch, and child knows the name of Harry Potter. He is known throughout the world. He will not have any problem at all gaining followers – unless we are careful.

I wrote it quickly and I did not reread it. I was careful to transfigure my face; Xeno Lovegood was relatively harmless, but I did not need anyone else recognizing me and knowing me for what I was. I was pretty sure that Xeno wouldn't tell anyone. And I was likewise certain that even if he did, no one would believe him. I walked through Hogsmeade in a sort of determined daze; I couldn't help but feel that the parchment I carried in my hand had a special importance.

I hoped it worked.

I spent the last hours of my time in 1988 sitting in the living room of Granddad and Grandma Potter's cottage. I stared out the window; everything appeared so... normal. Except that it wasn't. I was far out of my time, and despite the fact that I knew that in a very short time, I'd feel that my head would be torn asunder and packed again with yet another set of memories, I felt an overwhelming relief that I would soon be home.

I didn't bother to clean up the food I had stolen. I had the feeling that I would be back.

When the voices started whispering, signaling my return to future, I met them with a mixture of dread and hope.