In Which The Past Transforms The Future.

'My name,' said the smiling old man, 'is Nicolas Flamel. And you would be Harry Potter.'

They shook. Harry wouldn't have thought it to look at him, but Mr Flamel had a strong grip. His hands looked young, with smooth, firm skin. There were rims of yellow under his nails, though, like Professor Snape had from brewing potions all day. His salt-and-pepper goatee was stained yellow around the mouth, as well.

'You're the man on the chocolate frog card,' Harry said.

Flamel laughed softly at this. 'I've got a few of me in my collection, as it happens. I'll sign one for you, if you'll sign yours for me.'

Harry stared. 'There's a chocolate frog card of me?'

'Very rare- limited edition, actually. Issued for the first anniversary of your defeat of Voldemort.'

'I was baby,' Harry said flatly, suddenly exhausted. 'I didn't do anything.'

That stood awkwardly between them a moment. Flamel recovered his good manners faster than Harry. He removed his long cape and draped it over Dumbledore's chair, set his hat and gloves atop it, straightening his long white collar. 'Ah,' he said then, nodding. 'And this little creature would be Fawkes, wouldn't he. I haven't seen him in a rebirth cycle for, oh, going on two hundred years.'

Fawkes had recovered somewhat from his immolation and rebirth. He was still small, about the size of a quail, and his feathers were more brown than the glorious scarlet and gold they had been when Harry had first met him, but Fawkes seemed happy enough and energetic, too. He shuffled on tiny grasping claws up and down Harry's arms, scaling Harry's shoulders and investigating Harry's hair with a questing beak, chirruping into Harry's ears. He allowed Flamel to stroke his crest and feed him a cracker, but made his preference for Harry clear.

Dumbledore's office felt strangely empty, even with the three of them in there. The big desk with the throne-like chair was threateningly still. The silver instruments that lined the shelves moved, now and then, but even they seemed lethargic. All the portraits were empty. It was only dinner time, but it felt like midnight. Even the light was dim, tired. No-one had been in to tell Harry anything all evening, and he fretted under that blanket of silence. They had moved Harry out of hospital because a fourth year had come in with symptoms of dragon pox, and Madam Pomfrey had determined it warranted testing all Ravenclaw House for contimination. Who exactly had made the decision Harry should relocate to Dumbledore's office was unclear to him, but he'd only been alone for a half hour when the door had opened, and a man in funny short britches and a tall hat like a wide-brimmed bucket had come in, smiling genially.

'I understand you had quite the adventure,' Mr Flamel murmured now. 'And also that you don't recall it. At least not in its entirety.'

'No, sir.'

'I thought perhaps you might like to see it for yourself. As it were. Harry- may I call you Harry?' Flamel waited for his nod. 'Have you heard of something called a Pensieve?'

'I don't think so.' Fawkes rubbed his head against Harry's cheek. Nudging him to the left. Harry turned his head obligingly. Toward the tall cabinet with the stone basin, and all the little phials.

'A Pensieve is a magical tool used in a very specific kind of spell. There is something called immersive magic: it's directed inside, to change the wizard's perspective, to allow the wizard to think and see and feel in new ways, rather than directing a spell outward and changing something else. A Pensieve is a self-contained environment for that kind of magic.' Flamel paused. 'Do you understand what I'm saying?'

'A little,' Harry said, small-voiced.

Flamel seemed to believe that meant not at all, because he began again. 'The Pensieve is that bowl in the cupboard,' he said, rising to cross the floor. He invited Harry to join him with a beckoning gesture, and drew up a stool to the podium so Harry could see over the rim. The bowl had liquid in it- or, well, a kind of liquid, or maybe a kind of light. It all swirled together. 'Textbooks will tell you that a Pensieve allows you to view a memory, but the truth is more complex. What a Pensieve truly does is immerse you in an experience, but with a richness of perspective you could never achieve alone. It is not merely a remembering. It's even more than an a re-living. The Pensieve allows you to examine every detail of an experience.' Flamel looked at Harry for a long time, weighing something silently. Harry, unsure what Flamel wanted from him, tried to just meet his eyes. He didn't know what Flamel saw when he looked at Harry, but it didn't seem to be the right things.

'Imagine your room,' Flamel said suddenly.

'My dorm?'

'Not your dormitory here. Your room at home.'

Harry dropped his eyes immediately. He didn't know if Flamel could do the thing Dumbledore and Snape did, look into his eyes and see things. No-one had said anything yet about Crowhill, and Harry didn't know if that was still a secret.

'It's all right,' Flamel told him gently. 'I am no Legilimens, but even if I were, this is only an example, to help you grasp what we're going to do. Close your eyes. Picture your room.'

Fawkes had found the end of the ear piece of Harry's glasses, buried in his hair, and attacked it with rigour. Harry solved that distraction by plucking the phoenix from his shoulder and dropping him into the side pocket of his robe. Flamel chuckled at this, the last thing Harry saw before he closed his eyes firmly. Picture his room. Well, that was easy. Every room in Crowhill was alike. Plaster walls in the same yellowish beige. They had a window with one cracked pane and peeling grout. And the three beds, two bunked and one single. He wondered if Gaz and Marcus were still there. Gaz had been at Crowhill for three years, Marcus two, and at Harry's age weren't likely to be adopted out, but they might have been sent off to fosters.

'Think about all the small details,' Flamel said. 'Carpet or wood?'

'Wood,' Harry answered, and bit his lip, but couldn't see how anything so general was giving much away. He'd just think before he answered again.

'What colour is the wood? Dark, light?'

'Umm, just regular brown.'

'Does it have variations in tone? Are the planks long or short? Are they nailed or glued?'

'Er...'

'What about your duvet?'

'Blue.' He added the detail before Flamel could request it. 'Just plain blue, well, with a stripe going lengthwise. Light blue.'

'The quality of the stitching?'

Harry's eyes popped open, but Flamel made a little circular motion with his hands, to continue imagining. 'I don't know,' Harry said. 'You mean is it getting worn or is it new?'

'I don't mean how old it is- that's knowledge you have from a source other than observation. Try to remember it solely from interacting with it every day. Is there a loose thread? A snag? A hem coming unsewn?'

'I... I can't remember.'

'Well, it has been a little while, hasn't it. Try to picture me, now. Describe me.'

It was unexpectedly hard. 'Grey hair,' Harry said. 'Um, to your shoulders? Not as tall as Dumbledore, but taller than Professor McGonagall. You don't wear a robe, or not a robe like the ones here, it's shorter and you have stockings and shoes with big brass buckles and a white collar like the Puritans.'

'Not bad, for a mere quarter hour's acquaintance. What colour are my eyes?'

Harry couldn't remember. 'Blue?'

'See for yourself.'

Harry checked. Not even a little blue. They were brown, like his robe, and his hair wasn't really grey, either, more a mix of black and white. And he didn't have a whole beard, like Dumbledore, which went all the way up the sides of his face to meet his hair. Flamel's came to a little point just below his chin and was well trimmed to match the lines swooping from his nose to his mouth.

Those lines deepened a moment, as Flamel smiled again. 'You see the faults of relying on human memory,' he said. He touched the edge of the basin. 'The Pensieve is capable of plunging you back into a place or time as if you were fully living in it. You could see, touch, even smell your own bedsheets, or stand face to face with someone half-forgotten from your past.'

'Why would you want to do that?'

'What do you think?' Flamel returned. 'How might that be useful?'

Well. For starters- 'But I don't properly remember it,' Harry said. 'So if we wanted to see my memory of what Qu- my- the DADA professor did, or what I did for him I mean, we can't see my memory anyway.'

'Ah. In the usual course of things this would be true. However, you do, in fact, have a memory of it; it's just been buried. That which is buried can be retrieved. And I believe Albus retrieved all that could be gotten by means of Legilimency. What we have available is second-hand, but relatively complete.' Flamel lifted a bottle from the shelf. It had no label, unlike most of the others, just a swirling substance of silvery hue filling it almost to the cork. 'Would you like to? Use the Pensieve to see exactly what, as you say, your erstwhile professor did?'

'But I wouldn't just be viewing it. I'd be experiencing it.'

'Yes.'

'It won't... it won't hurt? Or be dangerous? If it's happening all over again?'

'The you of the present will not be harmed. You will be a witness only. No harms that have already happened can be undone within a Pensieve, but you will be safe from their repetition.' Flamel uncorked the phial and dripped the silver liquid into the bowl. It began to swirl about, agitated beneath even as the filmy surface stayed flat as a mirror. 'I will go with you, if I may,' Flamel questioned softly.

Did he want to know? Harry wasn't entirely sure that he did. But the not-knowing had been eating at him for hours, and if he knew, he could do something about it.

'Then follow me,' Flamel said, and bent over the basin to dip his head in.

Wizards. Some things, Harry thought, there was just no getting used to. With a mental shrug, Harry sucked in a breath and plunged his head into the bowl.

It wasn't like sticking his head into water. Harry had been shoved head-first in a few toilets in his time at Crowhill. Some of Hogwarts students swam in a carefully cordoned area of the Black Lake- guaranteed to be free of the giant squid, kappas, grindylows, and merpeople through an ancient treaty, Harry had learnt that in Professor Burbage's Muggleborn Integration sessions- but Harry couldn't swim and anyway hadn't been tempted to learn surrounded by all of that. Fortunately, there was no paddling required for the Pensieve. As soon as he'd broken the surface he was falling, not floating. And only falling for just long enough to realise it was happening. Then he'd landed, crumpling, unprepared, onto the cold floor of his dormitory.

Nicolas Flamel helped him to his feet. 'We won't disturb them,' he murmured, walking Harry to a bed where- where Harry himself lay, sleeping fitfully. 'What do you notice?'

'Are we on the outside because it's Dumbledore's memory, not mine?'

'Clever,' Flamel nodded. 'No. It's a condition of the Pensieve, of immersive magic.'

Harry looked at his own face, feeling uneasy. He had seen himself plenty of times in a mirror, obviously, but it was different, a living, breathing version of himself. The scar on his forehead was livid, and his eyes were open a little, a slit of green showing beneath fluttering eyelashes that clumped with wet. He didn't look at all well from the outside. A quick glance confirmed he hadn't waked the others, at least. Ron was snoring, Dean had curled up in his customary twist of sheeting and pillows, Neville was face-down in a growing stain of drool, and Seamus had somehow flipped so that his head was at the footboard, legs akimbo. The fire in the grate had gone to just glowing embers. It was either very late or very early.

And then the door opened. It swung on creaking hinges- Harry was well familiar with that sound, whenever any of the boys came sneaking back from a pee in the middle of the night- but a hand stopped it just as it began to whinge, and eased it just wide enough to admit a body. Though not especially tall, it was too large to be a student. It was Professor Quirrell. He stood there, his hood drawn even in the dark, over the sleeping Harry, and said, very softly, 'Wake up, Harry.'

Nicolas Flamel touched Harry's shoulder- real Harry, not Memory-Harry. 'It may be disconcerting,' he warned Harry.

Harry didn't know what disconcerting meant, but it certainly felt very peculiar. He watched his double, his past self, come wide awake immediately, and sit up with jerky movements, stiff-limbed. The man in the hood handed him his clothes, and his shoes, and Memory-Harry dressed himself, but for some reason didn't reach for his invisibility cloak, packed away in his trunk and ready for sneaking. They walked out of the dorm together, Memory-Harry and the man, and Harry followed before he wondered if you could even leave a dream- memory- a room that wasn't really there. It seemed he could. He slipped out the door after himself, and heard Nicolas Flamel following, too.

And so he watched, a step behind, as the memory of himself and the memory of a man who must be Professor Quirrell went to the banned third-storey corridor and through a series of strange challenges that took place in room after room. Like the wizarding space of Mr Lupin's house in Beddgelert, Harry could see that these rooms couldn't possibly really fit inside Hogwarts, at least not in the way they were doing- that drop between the room with the three-headed dog into the one with the Devil's Snare was two storeys at least, and he knew the Great Hall was beneath them, not a cave with a troll and a huge vaulted arena as big as the Quidditch Pitch full of nine-foot tall chessmen.

'I tried to warn people,' Harry said. 'I told Dumbledore. I tried to tell Snape.'

'It can be very difficult to learn that someone you've trusted is menacing a place you've counted safe beyond infiltration.'

Harry glanced away from his memory-self agonising over the potions puzzle. Flamel stroked his beard thoughtfully, but when he looked down at Harry his eyes seemed sad. 'You mean the war,' Harry guessed.

'There is always a war, my child. When Dumbledore has lived long enough for wisdom, he will understand.'

'Isn't Dumbledore very old?'

Flamel laughed softly. 'No spring lamb, our Albus, but he has a ways to travel yet to achieve "very" old.'

'How old are you, sir?'

'Old enough to know that very little actually changes,' Flamel replied, and nodded as Memory-Harry solved the riddle, drank the potion, and plunged through the flames.

The last room was a place full of treasures, a cave actually, but one so big Harry could hardly believe Hogwarts stood atop it on the surface. There was wizarding money, lots of gold Galleons, jewellery and antiques and clearly magical artefacts to tempt an intruder with a greedy nature. Quirrell didn't look at any of it, which struck Harry as strange. To not even look around and see what else might be valuable? In fact Quirrell even walked right past the cabinet with a bowl Harry now knew was Pensieve, stacked with dozens of bottles of memories that might be important- 'Hold up,' he said, stopping in his tracks, 'that's Professor Dumbledore's Pensieve, isn't it? The one we're in right now?'

'Correct.'

Quirrell must have known what it was, then. Teachers would be in and out of Dumbledore's office all the time. Maybe Quirrell wouldn't be fussed over gemstones or that sort of thing, but Dumbledore had all manner of important, invaluable things in his office. Harry dropped a hand to his pocket, where Fawkes could nip his fingers. 'Reckon you wouldn't be surprised what's in the Mirror if you already know you don't care about all this,' Harry muttered.

'Indeed.'

They hovered over the shoulders of the two kneeling before the Mirror. Memory-Harry reached for the softly glowing surface without hesitation, as Quirrell stared hungrily at him. They had come prepared. Memory-Harry took a stone from Quirrell, and touched it to the glass. His hand flattened as the stone pushed through, but a different stone came back out again. He handed it over to Quirrell with a soft sigh.

'Play back,' Flamel said, and Harry jumped as everything re-wound like a video tape. This time, they watched from the front as Harry came through the flames into the cave, Quirrell a step behind, and came walking right up to the Mirror. Quirrell didn't even glance aside at the Pensieve or any of the other things that lay enticingly at hand. He was almost thrumming with eagerness, his lips drawn back from his face in a grimace of triumph. His sweaty face gleamed in the blue light of the Mirror as they neared it.

'What do you see?'

'I don't know what he sees. I don't remember.'

'I know. But what do you see? Now, looking into the Mirror?'

'It's... it's only a memory, isn't it? The Mirror won't work for me.'

'Ah. We shall see, I think. But magic, Harry, magic obeys its own rules. Would you look in the Mirror for me?'

'Dumbledore said not to. He said it was dangerous.'

'I will be here to aid you, if it should be necessary. If not me, trust your friend.'

'My friend?'

Fawkes nipped at his hand again. Harry tugged him out of his pocket, careful of his wings, and lifted Fawkes to his shoulder. The phoenix rubbed his crest on Harry's cheek, burbling in the way he did sometimes so that he almost sounded like he was talking. Harry wished he would. He would have liked some advice right now.

With extreme reluctance, Harry looked at the Mirror. It wasn't that he didn't want to see them again... he wanted it more than he'd ever wanted anything. And there they were, waiting for him, just as they'd been at Christmas; his mum and his dad, exactly the same. Exactly the same forever, the way they were in his photographs. They would never get old like Dumbledore or Nicolas Flamel. One day even Harry would be older than they'd been when they died. That thought was agony to him. It would have been a wonderful thing to get the Philospher's Stone for himself- they could all have been together, then, because Voldemort wouldn't have been able to kill them.

But Voldemort had. And Harry had learnt a long time ago not to wish for things he couldn't have. He had more of his parents now than he ever had before Lupin had told him the truth about the Wizarding World. He'd even seen them, thanks to the Mirror. Harry would always have that, even if it wasn't really them. He'd known them for a little while, at least, and he wouldn't give that up for anything.

A strange kind of contentment came to him then. It was true. He'd had more of them, thanks to the Mirror, than he would ever have had otherwise. It wasn't as good as having had them always, but he couldn't change any of it, and he wouldn't spend his life longing for something he would never have. They wouldn't want him to.

Harry looked into the Mirror, and, to his great surprise, found himself looking back. Just Harry. His parents had gone. Mirror-Harry smiled, rather sadly, and put his hand into his pocket. He took out a stone, and offered it.

Flamel was watching the real Harry very keenly. 'What do you see?' he asked quietly, as Memory-Harry leant forward, once again, to take the offered stone from Mirror-Harry.

But Memory-Harry wasn't fast enough. Real-Harry reached over his shoulder, and took it first.

Flamel was staring with his eyes starting out of his head. His mouth flapped, a moment, then, convulsively, he seized the stone from Harry. 'Mon Dieu,' he whispered. 'You are a marvel, young sir. A great working of soul and a great working of magic alike.'

Memory-Harry seemed to have frozen, empty-handed. With Flamel occupied in studying the stone, only Real-Harry noticed: Quirrell turned to face them. His eyes glinted red in the shadow of his hood. And he was looking directly at Harry.

'End play,' Flamel said, and touched Harry on the shoulder. 'We have what we came for, Harry. Let's go.'

There was a reverse-falling feeling, almost like flying backward in a great suck of wind. And then Harry was pulling his head out of the Pensieve, Fawkes flapping off Harry's shoulder and tumbling before Harry could catch him an inch from the hard stone floor. He carried Fawkes back to his perch, setting him in the bowl with a few crackers for company.

Dumbledore said, 'I presume you learnt enough to form a hypothesis, old friend?'

Harry jumped. The Headmaster was at his desk, though he stood behind it, not yet sitting, as if he'd just arrived. There was a black-robed man in a portrait at his left shoulder, whispering softly. Dumbledore nodded at whatever he'd said.

'More than a hypothesis.' Flamel stood at the Pensieve still with hands cradling something. His voice emerged hushed, and there was a look of wonder on his face. 'Albus. This is... this is...' He showed Dumbledore his palms. Dumbledore's eyes widened, and then his head whipped about so fast his hat slipped. He wasn't as fast as Harry. It hit the floor with a little fwap.

'Harry Potter,' Dumbledore said.

'I didn't do it,' Harry blurted, the automatic defence of a boy long used to what came after hearing his full name spoken like that. That tone heralded demerits, detentions, disaster.

'But he did,' Flamel told the Headmaster eagerly. 'He did, and you know what this means.'

'Plurp,' chirped Fawkes, and flung a bit of biscuit at the back of Harry's head.

'The Diamond Soul,' Dumbledore whispered.