In a cave somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, there was a sudden swirl of unexplainable wind. Dust and stone particles were blown across the floor, collecting in the centre of what appeared to be a ritual circle set in lead. Lines of mercury and silver swirled and crossed in complex patterns. If one looked hard enough, they could see multiple different Egyptian hieroglyphs represented by the crossings of the metals.

The stone and dust began to swirl and rise into a ball. The wind picked up, spinning and condensing the stone so tightly that it appeared to be sparking light. But no, it wasn't sparks caused by friction, because light began to shine and flash from the ball, lighting up the cave, revealing dozens of hieroglyphs repeated over and over again around the ritual circle that were also shining with a golden light.

The light in the centre of the cave spun erratically once more before it flickered and died, sending the particles of dust and stone to be thrown back. A thud of bodies making contact with the stone floor replaced the light.

There was a muttered swear and a barely muttered, "Lumos!" said in a boy's voice.

A ball of bluish-white light flickered above an incredibly skinny and fragile-looking pale hand, bathing the previous lit up the cave in light. The light revealed the hieroglyphs etched into the ground, the glinting ritual circle, and most importantly, two dark-haired boys.

Harry winced from the brightness of his wandless Lumos and toned it down with the ease that only hours of practice with wandless magic could do. Squinting against the light, he took in the cave that he had just been in a few seconds previous and filled with hooded people. Now, it was completely empty save for him and his Auror partner.

Turning to said partner, he froze almost comically as he met the gaze of Theodore Nott. Theo was staring at him with surprised ice blue eyes before he swore. Violently.

Despite the current situation, Harry found his brows rising. It wasn't often that one caught the usually silent pureblood swearing. Hell, barely anyone outside of Harry even heard him talking more than a few words in a soft voice, and that was only when they had to report to their superiors or talk to witnesses or suspects for their job. Harry had figured that it had been ingrained in Theo since he was a child that such crass language wasn't appropriate for an heir of a Most Ancient House.

When Theo finished swearing, Harry pulled himself to his feet and sent his hovering ball of light into the air so that they could see better. He abruptly realized that he was several feet shorter than normal, and after a glance at Theo—who looked exactly as he did in the vague, early memories of Harry's life at Hogwarts—he realized that he must have been de-aged, too.

"We're children," Harry stated after a few moments before turning his eyes to the hieroglyphics etched carefully into the stone floor.

"That much is obvious," Theo stated in that quiet, blunt voice of his as he, too, picked himself off the ground. He stumbled slightly, not used to his now lower sense of gravity, before regaining his balance. His shrewd eyes flickered around the ritual circle as he very carefully made his way out of the ring as if afraid that it would come back to life and do something to them again, but Harry could feel that there was only an echo of latent magic that proceeded a completed ritual. The circle wouldn't activate again unless someone said the incantation to bring it to life and there were none of those linen Egyptian-style cloaked people to be seen. Not even their lingering magic, which Harry searched for with a spell he learned in the Auror Academy, was anywhere to be found.

Harry, after sharing his findings—or lack thereof—with Theo, recalled the ritual they unwillingly partook in as he looked at the hieroglyphics on the ground. They were Egyptian, that much he recognized from his studies into various Egyptian spells and rituals. The long incantation that the cloaked wizards had spoken hadn't been in Latin, Greek, or Middle English—the languages Harry had studied thoroughly for his spellcrafting and wardcrafting hobby—but Egyptian (whether it Archaic, Old, Middle, Late, Demotic, or Coptic Egyptian was a completely different matter), too.

He recognized some of the words in the chant due to the few discussions he'd had with Bill about various wards, curses, and rituals the man had learned about in Egypt before moving back to England, and from the various books he'd read in the Black Library in Grimmauld Place—because that place was kitted out with books of varying subjects, ranging from Muggle hunting to household charms—on the subject and also from his trip to Egypt before he started with the Aurors.

"These hieroglyphs—?" said Theo quietly, glancing at Harry with a quirked brow.

"Egyptian," confirmed Harry, finding nothing wrong with the quiet way Theo spoke. Theo was a similar quiet to Harry. They didn't see the reason to fill the quiet with small talk and usually spoke when they wanted or were required to. Though, Theo often used his body to hold a conversation more than Harry did. A simple head nod and raised brow was an easily interpreted question, and a head tilt and quirked lip was a retort or silent but dry remark. When Theo was willing to hold a conversation, though—which happened more and more often as they got comfortable with one another—he did make quite an engaging conversationalist.

It had taken a day or two to get used to Theo's constant silence and full conversations through body language when they'd first been paired together, but Harry had gotten used to it quickly. He had tried to speak as he usually did to people who wanted to be friendly to him, but he had quickly adapted to Theo's silence, not daring to tell Theo how to converse or by getting annoyed.

He'd understood.

Harry had always been a quiet child, but he had crawled out of his shell during Hogwarts because he wanted to keep his first friend happy and Ron liked friends who joked and played Exploding Snap and chess with him. He had also been forced out of his silent moments because of Hermione, too. Hermione had always needed Harry to verbally express whether or not he'd done his homework or what he'd thought about this lesson or what he'd gotten on that question on the test.

After the war, however, when Harry had drifted away from Ron and Hermione, he had become silent again. He thought it was nice, but it was a bit lonely with only a barmy house elf and an old, decrepit house for company. Teddy and Andromeda didn't really count as company no matter how much he loved his godson, he was as awkward around a grieving Andromeda as he was around the similarly grieving Weasleys.

Harry had also been forced out of some of his self-induced silence during Auror training before he and Theo had been paired together.

That had actually been something of a surprise. Gawain Robards, the head of the Auror office, had paired the silent Slytherin with him during their Auror training. Harry had actually been against the assignment at first, but not for what most would think. (Harry had long since learned the difference between Slytherins and Death Eaters, and he had also learned that there was no such thing as just good and bad, and Light and Dark, and that the world was actually in shades of grey, some of which happened to be lighter or darker shades than the others.) In actuality, he had refused to be assigned to Theo because Robards was a suspicious bastard and Theo's father had been one of the few Death Eaters that hadn't been killed or caught after the Battle. Robards had wanted Harry to keep an eye on Theo and to see if Theo knew anything about his father.

Eventually, due to Robards' wheedling and Harry finding himself without a partner after Ron dropped out to join George in the joke shop (just another reason their relationship depleted), Harry had accepted the assignment.

"The incantation?" Theo said after a few moments, breaking Harry out of his thoughts. He shook his head and glanced at Nott's tilted head.

"Egyptian, too," Harry said, frowning as he remembered the chants. He hadn't understood most of the chant as they had been spoken too fast and Harry's only knowledge of Ancient Egyptian being spoken was from his visits to Egypt and the few words Bill picked up from the older and far more experienced curse-breakers he'd worked with.

Harry's eyes trailed over a hieroglyph that he happened to recognize and jolted slightly as the chants when through his mind again. "I don't know much of the spoken language," Harry volunteered slowly, "but I do recognize the hieroglyphs and the pronunciations for the words 'travel', 'back', and 'time'."

Harry let that sink in for a moment—because it only took a moment for Theo to understand what he'd just said, his partner was sharp as a tack—and waited for his reaction.

Theo's face blanked slightly before he turned slowly to meet Harry's eyes. "We were sent back in time," he stated. It wasn't a question. He trusted Harry's intelligence enough for that and his own observations had most likely only backed up Harry's statements.

"Yes," Harry said slowly, "I'm pretty sure." Harry then flicked his wrist because he didn't have his wand—in fact, he didn't have any of his Auror or wizarding stuff on him and he was actually wearing Dudley's cast-offs and a pair of Vernon's too-big socks, he'd just realized—and said, "Tempus." This was one of the first spells Harry had created, which he used to tell the time and date, the latter of which Harry thought was particularly useful for this situation.

Numbers and letters hovered above his hand, proclaiming it to be—

03:01

Friday

21st June 1991

Theo frowned as he stared at the blue flames hovering innocently over Harry's fingertips. (Harry may or may not have made his spell model the effects of the spell that Diary Riddle used when he drew his cleverly thought out anagram because he thought it looked cool.)

"Exactly ten years," Theo said thoughtfully, "on the Summer Solstice, during the witching hour, and chanted in Ancient Egyptian."

"Egyptian wizards were well-known for dabbling in time travel," Harry commented dryly. Theo sent him a look at his poorly-timed humour.

"Have you ever heard of an Egyptian time travel spell or ritual that worked?"

Harry, who had admitted to Theo a few months ago during their conversation about time travel that he had spent the few months after the battle at Hogwarts searching for a way to travel back in time, shook his head. His search for time travel spells or rituals strong enough to bring a person's mind or memories this far back in time had actually been the reason he'd gotten into spellcrafting, wardcrafting, and curse-breaking.

He had actually visited Egypt for a few weeks, searched the magical portion of the Great Library of Alexandria that Tom Riddle had studied in decades earlier, and had even weaselled his way into a study of one of the tombs Bill had told him about that had mentioned time travel and Necromancy. It had been an interesting and educational trip that jump-started his three new hobbies (and while Necromancy fascinated him in some twisted sort of way, no way in hell was he about to touch black magic with a ten-foot levitating pole, and probably not even that), but it hadn't yielded any useful results for his time travel search.

That was probably why he was currently feeling more than a little miffed. He had spent months of search for a way back and suddenly the coven of witches and wizards they were tasked with tracking down not only had a ritual to send people back in time, but they had actually managed to send them back in time.

Theo sighed silently and then said, "Well have to research this."

Harry merely nodded, not bothering to reply verbally. It was apparent where his thoughts had gone. While Harry hadn't done an in-depth search on time travel since he'd left Alexandria, he had browsed the Black library shelves (and even the bookshops down Knockturn) when the thought struck his fancy. He hadn't had any headway with any of those, either, much to his despair and frustration.

The thought of going back in time, to prevent Voldemort from rising a second time and to stop so many people from dying, had often lingered back in his mind; plaguing him through nightmares after a particularly gruelling session at the Academy or after a rough case involving the death of someone's loved one. It was particularly painful when those cases involved newly orphaned children or children with one less parent.

Now that they'd stumbled upon this, it was going to take them years to figure this out.

"I know," said Harry, closing his eyes. Theo kept silent. He had to know how difficult this was for Harry. He had finally gotten what he had wanted, to go back in time to before all of the bad stuff happened, but they still had to see if this ritual was permanent, what it did to them, what it could do, and potentially, how to reverse it.

Harry scrubbed at his face tiredly, not bothering with the mask he usually wore in public or on duty since it was just the two of them and there was no longer a cult of witches and wizards that they were tracking down—not yet, at least. They wouldn't show up until ten years in the future, now, and they'd be ready for them if they wanted to become Aurors again. Maybe they'd take up investigating it themselves if only so they could see what kind of information they had. Harry hadn't been the only one interested in those few scrolls they'd recovered from one of the groups' ritual sites.

"Let's just—go back to our houses—" Harry stopped talking immediately and his eyes snapped open as a thought suddenly occurred to him. They had travelled back in time, they were currently eleven-years-old (or about to be, in Harry's case), and that meant that their current places of residence were not available at the moment and that there were people who would notice if they disappeared. That reminded Harry that he would have to wait a few years if he ever wanted to see Grimmauld Place again (which he had become fond of and he would definitely be preventing Mrs Weasley from throwing out all of the Black stuff if the Weasleys stayed there this time around) and that he currently lived with not only Muggles who were unaware that he knew of magic, but also Muggles who hated him and magic, and had the last name Dursley.

Harry swore. Colourfully.

Going back to the Dursleys meant snide comments, yelling, slaps and kicks and punches, little-to-no food, and the cupboard under the stairs—and fuck Harry had only just gotten used to the large master bedroom at Grimmauld because Kreacher wouldn't let him, the apparent master of the house and the new Lord Black, sleep in a mere guest bedroom.

When he had finally stopped cursing out his hysteria, Theo was staring at him with cool blue eyes. He was standing stiffly on the stone floor—with no socks, and since Harry couldn't feel a chill through his own threadbare, too-large socks, that meant Theo had had the foresight to cast a warming charm on the ground without his notice—and though his face was set in stone, his jaw had developed a tic and his one cheek was slightly more sunken in than the other which meant that Theo was probably biting his cheek hard enough to draw blood.

This was as close to dropping his mask that Harry had seen in Theo do and Harry wasn't about to demand that Theo act a little more visibly to make himself feel better. He knew from what little discussion they'd had about their childhood that Theo had been trained to hide his expressions from everyone since he was a young child.

This reminded Harry that he was not the only one who had lived (or were living?) with people who had no qualms causing them pain.

Harry didn't know much about Theo's childhood, and Theo didn't know much about Harry's childhood, but they knew enough. They both knew the signs of abuse (because that was what it was Harry now realized after a couple of helpful—but not to mention mandatory—therapy sessions when he joined the Aurors), and that meant that they could recognize it in others. Harry didn't know how far Theo's abuse had gone at the hands of his father (because one of the things Harry learned about Theo's childhood was that his mother had died and Theo had witnessed it), but he knew it went far enough. He could recognize the scars on Nott's back because he, too, had those scars.

Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, Harry closed his eyes and began a breathing exercise to gain control over his emotions. He forcefully shoved them behind his formidable Occlumency shields (and one thing he would not forgive Snape for was his horrible instruction and mind-rape during his Occlumency lessons) to filter out later.

Harry had learned personally that it was a bad idea to lock your emotions away and not deal with them because you might end up blowing up half of the Auror office with accidental magic. Which was both terrifying (Theo's description) because only powerful witches or wizards lost control of their magic post their magical maturity, and embarrassing (Harry's personal thoughts) because he had lost control over a silly comment that he usually ignored.

That poor assistant had been unable to look at him in the eyes since and that had been two years ago.

After a long few minutes of meditation, Harry opened his eyes, feeling significantly calmer. Theo was still staring at him, but the clear look in his eyes told Harry that Theo had also taken the previous few minutes to meditate.

"It's a damn good thing that we'll be starting Hogwarts in two months," Harry murmured. "Not that it helps much since that's still two months with them." Theo hummed in agreement.

"We should… go back to our current residences now," said Theo reluctantly after a few moments. He nodded to the hovering blue numbers and words that Harry still had hovering in the air despite the tidal wave of hysteria he'd just been through. They'd been in the cave for nearly an hour, making it almost four in the morning. Harry allowed a grimace to cross his face, remembering the early wake-up calls he'd received to cook for the Dursleys like some sort of housemaid, meaning that he'd get at most four hours of sleep and that he'd also have to go school.

Harry mentally shuddered at the thought of sitting through numerous boring hours of primary school. But if he remembered correctly, and Harry had always had a good memory but it had gotten startlingly better with Occlumency, then the school would let out in a week or two for the summer hols. Until then, Harry could simply memory charm his teachers to mark him present for roll and charm Dudley to think that he'd been in class.

He smirked to himself then. The urge to screw with Dudley, and his parents too for the matter, was strong.

He'd met up with the bastard about two years ago and Dudley had been a complete arse to him. Apparently, he'd forgotten that Harry had once risked his own hide to save his life. And it was such a good thing that the Trace was connected to the wand rather than the wizard, wasn't it? And that he happened to be quite adept at wandless, nonverbal magic?

Harry's grin grew.

Objectively, he knew that he should probably not pick on an eleven-year-old since he was mentally twenty-one, but Harry quite frankly didn't care.

He'd lost some of his inhibitions during the war where he'd literally killed, maimed, and tortured people (the memory of Carrow screaming still sent a thrill of satisfaction through him), and then his inhibitions had lowered even further during his dabbles into dark magic. (This had resulted in Harry's already unstable relationship with Ron and Hermione to shatter to the point where it didn't hurt him much to think that he'd never be able to reconcile with them and that they were currently eleven and completely oblivious to his knowledge of them.)

It wasn't just Harry's interest in the darker magics that drew them apart, either, Harry thought. The three of them had been very different people after the war, and while they had tried to string together their relationship and keep it as it once was, it simply fell apart. Hermione had gone back to Hogwarts to do her NEWTs, Ron had dropped out of the Auror Academy after a few months to help George with the joke shop, and Harry had not only gained his NEWTs, but he had also finished his Auror training months early and very quickly gained the reputation as a brutal and unforgiving Auror who wasn't afraid to toe the line of dark magic that wasn't necessarily illegal but also wasn't completely legal, either.

They were just… too different.

But that didn't matter now, because if Harry had any say in it, then Hermione wouldn't be tortured by Bellatrix Lestrange in Malfoy Manor or have to Obliviate her parents for their own safety, and Ron wouldn't have to know what it was like to lose his brother or fear for his life.

The plans were already running through his mind and Theo clearly saw that if his expression was any clue.

"You're thinking of changing everything, aren't you?" he asked anyway.

Harry looked into Theo's ice blue eyes with his blazing green ones, a fierce smile beginning to crawl across his face.

"And you're not?" he said simply.

Theo's answer was a slow, feral grin.

They may not have the same exact goals, but they would be changing the future. If not for the better, then it was for themselves.