A Matter of Time
by Dementis Scriptor
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Dealing with life is never easy, especially when half the world sees you as a savior, half as a Dark Lord in the making, and half as the man who took away their chance at world domination. Yes, that made three halves. Go figure.
Disclaimer: I do not bleeping own Harry Potter. I am not making any bleeping money. Consider yourself bleeping disclaimed. Bleep.
A/N: I posted the chapter two rewrite last week. There are no major changes, but I'd recommend re-reading it anyway. I like the new version a lot better, and I hope you all do as well.
Chapter Three: Distant Shore
"If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind." – Seneca
"Bloody troll," Harry muttered. Truth be told, this thought was quite a bit more literal than Harry would have imagined, but he had no way of knowing that.
He still wasn't entirely sure that it had, in fact, been a troll, but it was close enough. It was big, it was stupid, it carried a club, and it smelled like it had just bathed in Zonko's entire supply of dungbombs. That, in Harry's opinion, made it a troll; albeit a larger version than the ones he was used to dealing with. At nearly twenty feet tall, it was quite the intimidating creature. On top of that was the fact that its club was made of bone, rather than wood, indicating that it had been the alpha male of the region. It seemed that, in true troll fashion (and almost eerily reminiscent of Dudley's old gang), the largest and stupidest of the lot invariably became the leader. Leader or not, however, the troll in question made a mistake it would regret for the rest of its (admittedly short) life: It decided to attack Harry Potter.
In all fairness, the creature had no way of knowing that doing so was normally regarded as a very bad idea. It was from a time when the name Harry Potter held about as much meaning as the term anarcho-syndicalism…that is to say, none at all. So it came as a bit of a shock to the troll when Harry walked away unscathed, leaving it with the nagging feeling that it had just been humiliated rather spectacularly. The beast was understandably confused by the outcome. It was in part due to this confusion that the following events came to pass.
Shortly after Harry left, the troll spotted a passing polar bear and decided to soothe its wounded pride by making a meal out of it. It overlooked several key facts that could have preserved its life for the time being.
One: polar bears do not take well to being attacked. Normally this wouldn't be a problem for a troll, being much larger than any bear. Unfortunately, the troll forgot that
Two: it was currently ill equipped to do much damage to anything larger than a small rodent. This was because of the fact that
Three: after its encounter with Harry, the troll resembled nothing quite so much as an oddly shaped garden gnome, carrying a feather duster and smelling strongly of herbal body wash.
The polar bear left the encounter slightly less hungry than before, and a few days later the trolls began the traditional practice of whacking each other with their clubs in order to determine who would become the new leader.
Harry, of course, knew none of this. Even before the feathers from the troll's duster began to fly, he was hundreds of miles away, looking for some indication of where – and more importantly when – he was. Based on what he knew, the last ice age had ended over ten thousand years before he was born. 1970 indeed.
"Bloody Dumbledore. Why couldn't you have just been born a muggle?" Harry muttered.
Oddly enough, this small bit of griping gave Harry a sense of amusement that he just couldn't explain. Unbeknownst to him, at least to his conscious mind, the reason for this amusement made for quite an interesting story. Demonstrating that the Universe did indeed have a sense of irony, the troll that Harry encountered had been making its way towards a group of primitive hunter-gatherers, one of whom was a very early, very distant ancestor of Albus Dumbledore. This ancestor was actually the very first of his line to show any signs of magic. Had the troll not encountered Harry, it would have attacked the group, leaving no survivors. The loss of this particular ancestor would have caused Albus Dumbledore to become quite different from the man Harry knew.
Instead of a wizard who became one of the most powerful men ever to live, Albus Dumbledore would have been born a muggle. He would have grown up to run a very successful pizza parlor in downtown London, called Al's Place, where he would serve his specialty: Lemon-Seasoned Pizza. Al's Place would later close when its owner died in a car accident in 1945, along with a strange man in a black cloak who stepped in front of his pizza delivery truck.
But that was another story entirely.
Harry sighed in frustration as he surveyed the surrounding area – an area that should have contained Hogwarts Castle. He was in the right place, he knew. Apparition coordinates didn't lie, even in the distant past. And he was sure now that he was in the past, rather than the future. If it had been the future, ice age or not, some part of Hogwarts would have survived, even if it was only a fragment of the wards.
So, while he was where he needed to be, he was several thousand years early for his 1970 appointment.
Harry sighed again, this time more out of resignation. The fact that he wasn't in the right time was somewhat less than surprising, though he had hoped that, just this once, things might have gone according to plan.
There was nothing for it. If he wasn't in the right time, then he wasn't in the right place…or something like that.
"So, Hedwig," he asked as she gently alighted on his shoulder. "Up for round two?"
He was starting to get the hang of this.
After a grand total of seventeen trips to various times, Harry Potter could honestly say that he was an expert on the subject of time travel. At least, on the completely random, cut-you-loose-and-hope-for-the-best method. Why, after that last trip he had almost managed to land on his feet! He would have done it, too, if there had actually been solid ground beneath him, rather than the surface of a lake.
It had been a little over two weeks since he had begun his journey towards 1970, and in that time he had been thrown as far as about two hundred million years into the past. How did he know this? Well, it really wasn't too difficult to figure out when you knew what to look for. Some of the signs were hard to spot, but someone with a keen eye could find them with little difficulty.
Okay, so his first clue had been the dinosaurs.
At the other extreme, some of his jumps had taken him well past his own time. The most memorable of which had probably been when he found himself somewhere around five million years into the future. Whatever those goat-things were, he was glad to get away from them. He still had a headache from that damned "handshake"…
After that, he generally avoided the natives whenever he could.
But that was all over with now. For once, he didn't mind the fact that his landing was less than spectacular, or that he was fairly well exhausted after his second jump that day. He didn't mind that his owl had given him a very dirty look before flying as fast as she could in the opposite direction. He didn't mind that he was in the middle of a lake, watching as his trunk valiantly struggled to make it to shore without sinking. He didn't even mind that his thoroughly saturated robes were threatening to drag him beneath the surface, aided by the fact that he was admittedly not the best of swimmers. No, none of this bothered him as much as it would have any other day.
He was where he needed to be. And it was when he needed to be there.
Just a few hundred yards away stood the massive oak doors of Hogwarts. To the east he could see the Forbidden forest, looking somehow less intimidating than he remembered it. Looking west he saw the Quidditch pitch, its golden hoops glittering in the summer sun. To judge by the blooming begonias visible by the greenhouses, Harry figured it was probably mid-July or early August, but that wasn't important at the moment. The thing that really caught his attention was located midway between the castle and the forest.
It was a tree.
A willow, to be precise. It was around twenty feet high, and its branches were swaying in the light breeze. Despite its unassuming appearance, Harry knew it to be quite dangerous, but that didn't matter to him now. What mattered was that the earth surrounding it was still freshly turned.
The Whomping Willow had just been planted.
A small smile spread across his dampened face, and an instant later he was standing on the north shore of the lake, his clothes showing no sign of having ever been wet. For a moment, he simply stared at the tree, hardly daring to believe that he had finally made it. Behind him, his trunk crawled out onto the shore and vigorously shook itself.
With a slight spring in his step, Harry started up the path toward the castle. It was a path he knew well, although, chronologically speaking, this was the first time he was walking it. To him, it hadn't even been a month since he had last sat by that same lake, far from the prying eyes of the world, and just thought about…well, everything. He found that watching the water often helped calm his thoughts. The lake was chaotic, yet followed a pattern that could almost be seen if one looked closely enough. Order in disorder. It was a concept Harry found strangely appealing.
He paused in front of the doors and placed the palm of his right hand flat against the wood. A silvery liquid spread from the point of contact, flowing outward until it covered the whole door. It rippled slightly before solidifying into the flat surface of a mirror. Lowering his hand, he considered his disheveled and unkempt appearance. It wouldn't do to be seen like this. Aside from the fact that he still looked like Harry Potter, if he met with Dumbledore looking as though he had just escaped from Azkaban, he could forget about getting the job.
He blinked, and suddenly someone else was looking back at him from the mirror. This someone looked around twenty years old, and had a head of thick brown hair. His eyes were a deep, royal blue; darker than could possibly be natural, but alive in such a way that they couldn't be anything but. His face was refined, and he bore the look of a man who had seen the very worst the world had to offer, and no longer had anything to fear.
This was the form he normally took whenever he went out in public. He found the intimidating qualities quite useful.
He was about to leave it at that when he was struck by a sudden inspiration. This was a chance for him to choose who he would be for the next ten years. Right now, in this moment, he could change everything and anything about himself. He could change his looks, he could change his age, he could change his personality…he could quite literally become anyone he wanted to be.
He blinked again, and this time a thirty-something man with coppery auburn hair and hazel eyes stared back at him. His face was slightly rounded, and a carefree smile gave him the appearance of a man who enjoyed his life to the fullest.
With a shake of his head, he discarded that look. It was far too cheerful.
He blinked a third time, and his reflection changed to that of a man in his mid-twenties. He had long blonde hair that was pulled back into a ponytail, and light yellow eyes like those of a cat. His stance spoke of a feline grace, and his eyes sparkled with the knowledge that, while he was calm and peaceful most of the time, he could be very dangerous if provoked.
He strongly considered keeping himself like that, but then common sense kicked in. He had to appear the same now as he had that day in Diagon Alley. If not, then Dumbledore wouldn't recognize him as Evan Esare, Ollivander wouldn't connect him to Harry Potter, he would never find out that he had been a professor ten years before he was born, and the paradoxical nature of time travel would come back to bite him in the arse.
With a sigh, he blinked one last time. His features returned to the brown-haired, blue-eyed individual he would need to be seen as. He had originally taken this form to go unnoticed. Now, he took it so he could be recognized. The irony was not lost on him.
With a few quick switching spells, Harry was clad in a set of lightweight black robes. They were nothing fancy, and would undoubtedly pale in comparison to one of Dumbledore's getups, but they were comfortable and didn't restrict his movement, and that was what mattered to him most.
Satisfied with his work, Harry raised his hand again and gave the mirror a tap with his index finger. For a moment, the silvery substance resembled a waterfall as it cascaded down the ancient oak door. It hit the ground and simply evaporated.
He stood there in silence for a few moments, mentally reviewing the plan he had come up with a few days before his departure. He already knew that Dumbledore would end up hiring him, but he also knew things would go a lot more smoothly if he approached it the right way. First and foremost, Dumbledore cared about the students entrusted to him. Therefore, Harry's best bet was to convince the man that hiring him was in their best interests.
Satisfied that he remembered all the details, he grasped the handles and pulled. The front doors opened easily and Harry strode inside, confident but not cocky. He wondered briefly whether or not Dumbledore would be there. While he knew that the Dumbledore of 1998 stayed at Hogwarts year-round, the Dumbledore of 1970 had only just been appointed headmaster, and Harry doubted most heads stayed at their schools while everyone else was on holiday.
He needn't have worried, however. No more than half a minute later he passed the open doors to the Great Hall, and what he saw very nearly caused him to make a remark likely to end his career as a professor before it had even begun.
Albus Dumbledore, Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Sorcerer, Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards, Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, and all around the most famous wizard of the age, was juggling.
With bowling pins.
He had no less than six of them in the air at the moment, and was keeping them that way with apparent ease. He seemed to be having the time of his life, to judge by the broad grin on his face. It was a side of Dumbledore Harry had never seen before (though it did explain where he got his reflexes), and he was saddened by the knowledge of what would happen to this world in just a few short years.
"Hello there," Harry said, the sight of the juggling headmaster inexplicably reminding him of a chef tossing a pizza in the air. He quickly shook off the thought as the man in question whirled around, his wand appearing in his hand almost instantly. The effect was somewhat lessened when one of the bowling pins came down on the man's head, knocking off his hat. Dumbledore didn't seem to notice.
"Hello," the headmaster said with an almost imperceptible edge to his voice. Harry got the impression that no one had been able to sneak up on him in quite some time, and it was only his years of experience that kept him from resorting to more colorful language. "My name is Albus Dumbledore. If I may I ask, who are you and what are you doing in my school?"
The question was asked politely, although a buildup of magic could easily be felt coming from the (not quite so) old man – a reminder that he was not to be taken lightly. Harry supposed most people would have been intimidated by the action. Personally he found it rather amusing.
"Hello, Albus Dumbledore," said Harry, completely un-phased by the headmaster's obvious distrust. "You may indeed ask, and in this case I shall answer. My name is Evan Esare, and I'm here to offer my skills to your students."
A/N: There we go, chapter three is up and ready for your enjoyment. I think it came out pretty good, and I hope you all agree. As I said up top, I posted the revised version of chapter two last week, so you might want to check it out if you haven't already.
I may decide to write a few one-shots detailing Harry's experiences in a few of the different times he visited. I doubt I'd do more than two or three, but there are a couple of ideas I think I could have some fun with. What do you think?
A big Thanks to Lil Miss Potter, Silverscale, Eltrut, diddlysquatness, Lady Phoenix Slytherin, and antares520 for reviewing the last chapter.
-D.S.