Author's Note:– Italics take on a different role in this chapter to their purpose in others. In the first section (sections are separated by *–*s by the way) they are used for memories. After that they are used to show events happening to the world that that particular section didn't start in. It sounds confusing and it probably is – but honestly, I've tried to make this chapter easier to follow than the last two. Please tell me if I've succeeded or failed.
Combined with my usual incredible laziness, FFN going down, and me going on a 2 week holiday the day before it went up this chapter has been complete for ages now. My apologies.
Tuesday – Training
Sally Potter was a girl who was getting quite worried.
In fact, scratch that, she was getting very worried. And as usual, it was one of her brothers' fault. Except unlike was the case normally, this time it wasn't Ben or Terry, but Harry. She had always kind of respected her older brother, although admittedly he did get on her nerves when he wouldn't stop talking about Quidditch. And she had thought she would never be able to bear being near him again the first time he had come home from Hogwarts. His normal obsession with Quidditch had been doubled and then quadrupled again by the fact that he'd already got into his house team. Big deal, she had thought then and still did.
When she was feeling particularly honest perhaps she might let herself realise that she was just a bit jealous. Dad had been more pleased about Harry and that stupid game then he had about her test results. Never mind that she had got better results than anyone had in the last five years (well, apart from that girl Hermione Granger, but she didn't count).
Still, apart from his Quidditch obsession he was normally all right. And normally he didn't look like he had yesterday. And start saying such things.
She had only just managed to catch him as he collapsed and nearly slumped to floor.
"You said you were alright..." she said accusingly.
"Are my glasses glowing?" he asked, looking up at her with a desperate look in his eyes. His eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment.
"No," she replied, wondering what on earth he was talking about... "Why would they be glowing?"
"Lupin put a Veritus charm on them," he said, his words coming out weakly as if every one was an effort. "They should be glowing..."
She thought desperately and managed to recall the particular charm. If she remembered quickly they made things able to distinguish between truth and lies. If they were glowing then it must be "As if you were seeing truth?" He didn't answer, and instead his eyes went blank again as if there was no soul behind them.
Suddenly he spoke. "You're not real."
For a moment she just stared at him. She had never heard his voice sound like this. There was something very wrong with him – he needed to see Madam Pomfrey. Gently, she tried to take his arm and pull him along.
"Terry and Ben, they're not real either."
"Me, Terry, Ben, Mum, Dad... We're all real," she said quickly, feeling as if she was humouring a lunatic.
Harry laughed bitterly. "Mum and Dad are dead."
Madam Pomfrey had taken him then. She had appeared from the midst of a crowd that Sally hadn't even notice accumulate. The school nurse had taken her brother away quicker than she could recover from her shock and follow him. And so, she had wondered back to the Gryffindor common room in a kind of half daze.
On Sunday she remembered he had been talking about horrible visions and nightmares, and she had told him to go see Hermione Granger. And then later that night Hermione had found her.
"Sally, I'm sorry, but...." Hermione started, in what had sounded then like an embarrassed tone.
Sally had turned around from the table where she had been playing chess against Ginny to see the older girl. "What?" she asked.
"Harry," Hermione said. "He... he came to me about some problems he had been having and...."
Sally nodded slowly. She had suggested that Harry find the girl, much to his disgust. She didn't know why Harry disliked her. Probably just because the girl was about ten times as clever as him. It was Sally's ambition one day to beat one of Hermione's test scores.
Hermione finished hurriedly. "He collapsed. He was saying really strange things before that and then..."
Two days in a row now he had ended his day in one of Madam Pomfrey's beds. She had a feeling that he wouldn't even be allowed out of his bed today. So, against her more logical side which suspected that James Black and Ron Weasley there would probably doing a fine enough job entertaining him on their own, she had decided to go visit him.
When she did get to the hospital wing (and persuaded Madam Pomfrey to let her in) she found that after all he was on his own. She slowly made her way over to him and saw that he was lying quite still. Every few moments his eyes alternated with being wide open and shut. What was he doing? As she closer still she heard that he was muttering "Here" every time his eyes opened.
"Harry?" she said cautiously. His eyes opened, but she had a feeling that was just part of his routine as she heard him mutter "Here" again. She touched her hand to his forehead just as his eyes closed again.
And then it happened.
*–*
Sally blinked. She had been sure his eyes were closing, but instead she saw that they were now in the process of opening.
"Here," he murmured softly.
And, to her surprise, her fingers were no longer touching soft skin. Instead the surface they connected with had a rough but thin jagged line going through it. As she pulled her away she saw that something very terrible had happened. There was a scar there.
She jumped back and stared at her brother's forehead. It was definitely there - a single, crooked line slightly off the centre of his face. It looked a bit like a bolt of lightning almost. Except, as she looked closer she saw that it was not the only thing different. He may be in the same bed, but the sheets he was in were arranged slightly differently. Her eyes searched the room and she began to see that the room, although similar at a vague glance, when viewed with a close examination that the details were almost completely different.
She ran to over to the window, and frantically stuck her head out. Outside Hogwarts looked almost the same as our familiar home. And yet again there were still slight differences. The garden looked a lot more tidy for one thing. She noticed Cho Chang, a girl two years above her walking down a path. Even that girl's walk seemed slightly wrong. Less mischievous and full of life, and more that of a person who had quickly had to grow up.
She walked dazedly out of the hospital wing and towards Gryffindor tower. Surely that would be the same. And yet, even as she approached it she became more worried. People walked past her with curious glances. Alicia Spinnet looked at her as if she had never seen her before. They reached the Fat Lady at almost the same time, and Alicia waited for her to say the password.
"Pazara," Sally said.
The Fat Lady just looked at her curiously.
"Blamana," Alicia interrupted hurriedly, and Sally followed in behind her as the portrait swung open.
The common room seemed almost identical as the one she had been in only an hour before. Certainly the chairs could have moved and changed position the way they had in that time. Then she saw Ron Weasley. He was sitting and talking in a low voice, not to James Black, as she would have guessed would be the case ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, but Hermione Granger. They almost looked like friends.
"Ginny!" she called, finally spotting her best friend sitting in one corner. Ginny's red hair swung up as her head turned to look at her, and Sally saw that it wasn't as neat as normal. It reminded her of what she had looked like when Ginny had first come to Hogwarts. But the hair was nothing to the eyes. The horribly hollow eyes that had no idea of who she was.
"Hello," said the girl who had been her best friend for the majority of her life. "Does someone want me?"
"I..." Sally stopped. "Don't you recognise me?"
"No," said Ginny simply. "Who are you?"
She had been expecting it, but somehow that didn't make it when it came any better. "Not at all?" she asked, somewhat desperately.
Ginny screwed up her eyes. "There's something faintly familiar about you, but... Sorry. Are you new?"
"Familiar," she repeated faintly. Of course she looked familiar. Sally had spent half of the last four years with this girl. She bit her lip, and tried to think logically. What had happened to her?
"You look a bit..." Ginny stopped, sand blushed ever so slightly as if she thought what she was about to say was ridiculous. "You look a bit like Harry. Harry Potter. You've got the same eyes as him and..."
"Someone once told me they looked exactly like my mother's."
Ginny shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know, maybe I've seen her somewhere. What was she called?"
"Lily."
That startled Ginny a bit. "Did you say Lily? I'm sorry, it's just..."
"Your mother is called Molly Weasley," Sally started to intone. "Your father is Arthur Weasley, and you wish he would spend more time at home as he tends to spoil you. You have six older brothers, and it drives you mad most of the time. The one who was always kindest to you was Charlie. You..."
"What?" Ginny exclaimed. Again she asked, "Who are you? Do you know me?"
Sally could feel half the Gryffindor common room watching her. "You can't stand Quidditch, but you pretend otherwise to stop your brothers half killing you. You still haven't figured out what you want to be when you're older, as it changes every other week, although at the moment you like the idea of being a journalist. The first memory you have is Ron's toy turning into a spider and him screaming the house down."
Ginny's eyes were gazing at her with shock in them. "Who are you?" she asked once more. "And ever since Rita Skeeter started her campaign I've gone off journalism."
"I'm Sally. And I'm your best friend." And with that, she couldn't stand Ginny's gaze anymore and so she spun on her heel and ran out of the room.
Behind her Ginny didn't move out of her chair. Her brother Ron walked over to her. "Who was that?" he asked.
Ginny just shook her head.
*–*
"Here."
Harry let the reality that his eyes saw blur for a moment until he found himself in the other world.
"Here," he said once more. That was it, he had done it a hundred times now, and could do it as easy as breathing. He could jump between the two worlds at will. So which should he get up into? He thought back over yesterday and where he had fell unconscious in both realities. At last he decided that his sister probably needed reassuring the most.
He slipped with an effort out of bed, and quickly crept out of the hospital wing. To his relief Madam Pomfrey's back was turned long enough for him to escape. Somehow he didn't think she would let him go, and he knew that he couldn't afford to waste any time cooling his heels in a bed. He needed to figure out what was going on.
He made his way back up to his common room. "Pazara," he told the Fat Lady lazily, and she let him in. He found Ginny on the other side of the common room, currently on her own engrossed in a book.
"Ginny," he interrupted her, "have you seen Sally?"
She looked up, and stared at him, slightly puzzled. "She went down to the hospital wing to see you. Are you feeling better now? Not going to start scaring her to death again by pretending to be insane."
He faked a smile, and shook his head. Ginny had always been very sceptical around him. "I'll try. I didn't see her downstairs, she probably got distracted by something." Of course, he had been quite occupied in the hospital wing, so there was a good chance that is she had come to see him quietly that he would not have noticed her.
Ginny nodded uncertainly. "She looked pretty determined. I'll tell her to find you if she turns up."
Harry thanked her and turned around to find James Black walking up to meet him.
"Harry!" his friend said. "You'll never guess what that lucky idiot Cedric's parents just sent him."
"What?" Harry said, curious.
"I'll give you three guesses," said James, leading him over to the portrait hole.
"A broomstick."
"Yeah, but you've got to be more specific than that. His parents probably saved up to get it for him as a reward for his team actually managing to win a match two years ago. Honestly Harry, you had to let yourself be distracted by Cho, didn't you?"
"Hey! Two years and you still won't let me forget about that? I told you before that Malfoy cursed my broomstick and it had told nothing to do with... Anyway, don't you think it's more likely to be a reward for him being champion in the tournament last year?"
James just laughed. "If I was him or his family, I'd be trying to forget that whole incident. Honestly, coming third after Durmstrang, a school that's been in shambles for the last decade, and that girl from France who had probably never even got a speck of dust on her before...
"Hang on a minute, you're getting me off topic. You were guessing his broomstick?"
"Cleansweep 8."
"Nope."
"Nimbus 2001."
"Wrong."
"2002."
"Still wrong. This is getting boring – let me see if I can make it easy even for you.... Try the letter 'F' as a starting point...."
"No way!" Harry exclaimed, as they walked down the corridor. It was so easy he considered to forget the last three days and fall back into his old life. So easy to forget that the boy he was talking to didn't even exist....
*–*
"Sally?"
Sally looked up from where she had been buried in books to see who had been calling her. It turned out to be Ron. She relaxed for a moment before she remembered that he wasn't her Ron. He was the Ron from wherever this place was. At least the library she was in seemed to be roughly the same.
Ron glanced over the titles of the books she was reading. "'Advanced Reality Distortion', 'Theoretical Dimension Discussion: What the Muggles Think and What We Know', and 'If? A Study of Alternate Universes." His glance moved over to another pile on her right: "'Mental Problems – How to tell when you're insane', 'Dementia' and 'When Memory Charms Go Wrong'."
She turned up to look at him. "So?"
Ron took a deep breath. "Let me guess. Sally, and if I'm wrong please forget I ever said this and please don't always look at me strangely in the corridors when you walk by, but... is your full name Sally Potter?"
Sally dropped the book she was looking at. "You remember me?"
Ron shook his head hurriedly. "No, but.... Harry was going slightly mental yesterday, and.... He talked to us and said that he keeps thinking he's in some other reality or something. And – he told me he had a sister calling Sally." Ron let out his deep breath. "I thought you might be her."
Sally slowly nodded. Had this been what Harry was going on about yesterday? "My parents," she said. "They're dead, aren't they?"
Ron suddenly walked over to a shelf, searched it for a moment, and then brought back another book – 'The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts'. He flung it open roughly on a table and flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for. He showed it to her – it was a picture of a young baby wrapped up in a blanket. After a moments she was sure. "It's my brother, isn't it?"
Ron nodded, and started to quote from the book, "... Although we don't know much about the night when You–Know–Who decided to kill the Potters, we have been able to work out the following rough summary of events. After startling them in the middle of the night he managed to kill most likely first James Potter and then his wife Lily."
Sally gasped. Why her parents?
Ron continued, "However, after those tragedies, an event took place which is as puzzling as it is joyous. The dark wizard proceeded to curse the Potters' boy, Harry Potter. As every wizarding child knows the curse instead of killing him, bounced back onto You–Know–Who. For all practical purposes the rebounded curse's effect was enough for him to lose his body and all his powers. His dark forces as a result, collapsed."
Ron slammed the book shut again. Sally just stared at him. "How? Why? What then? I..."
"Harry was taken to your aunt and uncle," Ron said. "They looked after him until he was eleven."
"The muggles?" Sally was almost as shocked by that, as by the rebounded curse. Her mother's sister and family hated the Potters. They'd only ever met up once, and it was an event that Sally would never forget – especially the fight that had broken out between Harry and her cousin Dudley. She shook her head quickly to clear it. "So my older brother was responsible for You–Know–Who's downfall? That's almost as strange as the situation we're in now."
Ron smiled. "Pretty much."
"How did he ever live up to that at school?" Sally wondered. "You'd never do anything more impressive than what you had done as a baby."
Ron's smile widened as he remembered the last four years. "You'd be surprised. Sally – how did you get here?"
Sally shrugged her shoulders. "I guess it happened when I touched Harry." She shivered as she remembered his scar. Now she knew how he had got it.
"Then if you touch him again you might be able to get back?" Ron suggested.
"Worth a try," she said.
Ron helped her put the books she had been looking at back and then the two of them made their way back down to the hospital wing. Harry was still lying motionless in a bed. Sally walked over to him, and pressed her hand again lightly to his forehead.
Nothing happened.
She pressed her hand again to his scar, harder this time. Still nothing.
Harry smiled as he saw James just manage to edge past Cedric. They had been racing Harry's Firebolt against Cedric's for the last hour. Suddenly he felt a slightly strange sensation on his forehead. His scar?
"And I win!" shouted James in triumph as he passed the tree that had been designed as the finishing line.
Again Harry felt a sensation, but this time it was stronger. It wasn't exactly unpleasant – just different. Then a much lighter feeling on his arm. What was happening?
The other world.
Of course, it must be something to do with that. He smiled at James as he continued to circle in triumph. "Have another go," he shouted up at him. Then he sat back down on the ground against a tree and let his vision blur. One moment he was outside at the Quidditch pitch and the next he was lying in a hospital bed again. Sally, his sister, was just walking away from him. It must have been she who touched him.
Except she didn't belong in this world. She belonged in the other world – he grimaced, the constant change of meaning of the word other was getting confusing.
"Sally?" he asked.
She turned to look at him, and Harry saw to his surprise that Ron was standing by her. With a quick glance he worked out that it was Dumbledore–Alive world Ron. (That was a better way to think of it than Parents–Dead world Ron). But the two of them belonged to different realities – how on earth were they next to each other?
"Harry," she said, and she ran back to him. "You remember me, right? Of course you do, you just said my name... Sorry, I'm babbling, aren't I? But – what is happening to us?"
Ron slowly walked over to join them. "Harry, over there, when did Dumbledore die? Was it before the end of October or not?"
"I... don't know," Harry said at last. "Sorry."
"September the seventh," said Sally quietly. Harry smiled. His sister had always known more than he had.
Ron muttered to himself for a moment. "That must be it."
"What?"
"The day when the worlds changed." It was Hermione. She must have entered the hospital wing while they were all distracted. "Ron and I did a lot of research last night – from what you told us that seemed most likely. On September 7th 1980 something happens to make Dumbledore sacrifice or not sacrifice his life."
Sally looked at her curiously. "You and Ron? You're friends here?" She smiled to herself. "Ginny always said that... never mind."
"All three of us are," Harry told her. He turned to Hermione. "I... I don't treat you well in the other place."
She shrugged her shoulders as if it was the most unimportant thing in the world. Or worlds, for that matter. "Now we know what we need to do. We've got to speak to Dumbledore and see if we can find out what is happening to Harry. And why."
"We've got to do something else first," said Ron. "Get Sally back."
At that Harry was reminded of the curious event of his sister being in this place. Thankfully Hermione too had worked out like Ron who Sally was and so the ensuing explanations did not take as long as they could have.
"I just touched his forehead as he shut his eyes," said Sally finally, describing exactly what had happened. "Then he opened them and said 'Here.'"
A spark of light awoke in Harry's head. "I understand now," he said. "Touch my head again."
Uncertainly Sally walked forward, and pressed her palm lightly onto his scar again. She stared up into his eyes and saw that they were starting to glaze over again...
*–*
Sally looked around her in amazement, for she was no longer standing in either hospital wing. Instead she was lying in one of the hospital wing beds. She saw Madam Pomfrey at the other side of the room, and the nurse came hurrying over to her.
"How are you?"
Sally tried to get up, but the nurse held her down. "I'm fine," she protested.
"We'll see about that," Madam Pomfrey said grimly. After a while though, even she had to admit there was nothing wrong with Sally and so she let her go with a few mutters about Potters who kept fainting all over the place.
With a start Sally glanced at a clock and saw that lunch break was almost over. It seemed a very, very long time since the beginning of that break when she had decided to go visit her brother. Too much had happened.
Wearily she set off to Transfiguration, knowing full well that she would never be able to concentrate