Living inside Yesterday
Potter47
Part One
The Shadow of the Past
"...a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."
— Churchill
Chapter Three
Riddle Me This
"His eyes are as green as a fresh pickled toad,
His hair is as dark as a blackboard,
I wish he was mine, he's really divine,
The hero who conquered the Dark Lord!"
The words danced and danced round and round Ginny, and she was in a cage in the circus, and little grubby dwarves were jeering at her from all directions. She covered her ears but that did nothing at all to block out the sound.
"His eyes are as greeeeeeeeen—"
She swayed from side to side, her eyes clamped shut and her ears smushed against her head by her hands, and she wanted the dwarves to just go away, just—
"Leave me alone!" she shouted, but they did not hear.
"—as a fresh pickled toooooooooad—"
"JUST SHUT UP!" she screamed, and then—quite abruptly—they did. She opened one eye, and then the other, and then removed her hands from her ears and she found that she was no longer in the cage at all, but in the Gryffindor common room, watching the fire from the comfiest sofa, and she reckoned she must have been asleep.
But then—
—what was that flicker of red out of the corner of her eye?
She turned, slowly, hesitantly, to see herself snogging Harry.
To see WHAT?
Ginny's face burned, and her ears burned, and she tried to put out the flames but she only managed to set her hands alight as well, and she began to cry and somehow the tears put out the flames and she could open her eyes and—
"Ginny!" Harry muttered, sprinting to her and dropping to his knees. "Ginny — don't be dead — please don't be dead —" He flung his wand aside, grabbed Ginny's shoulders, and turned her over. Her face was white as marble, and as cold, yet her eyes were closed, so she wasn't Petrified. But then she must be —
"Ginny, please wake up," Harry muttered desperately, shaking her. Ginny's head lolled hopelessly from side to side.
"She won't wake," said a soft voice.
Harry jumped and spun around on his knees.
A tall, black-haired boy was leaning against the nearest pillar, watching. He was strangely blurred around the edges, as though Harry was looking at him through a misted window. But there was no mistaking him —
"Tom — Tom Riddle?"
"No Gin, it's me."
Ginny's eyes snapped open, and she heard her breath rattle slightly, that first breath upon waking, the second... then she blinked, and leaned up, propping herself with her arms—no dwarves, no snogging, no fire—but there was Harry.
He was standing in the door of Ginny's room—she knew this the moment he had spoken, of course, and hadn't needed to see it—and he bore a fearful, wide-eyed expression on his face.
She wanted to say something but she didn't know what to say, so she just looked at him a minute, at the way his black hair was all messy instead of neat and perfect like Tom's had been, and she thought, also:
What in hell was that?
She was positive that she had never, ever had a nightmare—or any dream, for that matter—of the Chamber from Harry's point-of-view before, and although the details were quickly fading, she was quite sure that that last bit of her dream had been from his vantage point.
"Sorry, Harry," said Ginny, finally, as she reckoned she must have woken him up. She said, then, in a tired voice: "I just had a nightmare, that's all."
But Harry didn't react the way she'd expected him to—she'd expected him to ask if she was all right now, perhaps offer her a glass of water, since he was a nice person and all, but he didn't do either of those things; instead, he said, in a strange voice:
"So did I." He paused, looked pensive for a moment as though in thought, and then: "With good reason."
Perhaps Ginny was simply not yet entirely awake, but she didn't understand him in the least:
"What do you mean?"
"We're in nineteen forty-five, Gin—Dumbledore even said the Head Boy was a Slytherin—"
And then it clicked in her brain, and she was awake completely in a moment, the sleep gone from her eyes, and she said, so quickly that she cut him off in the words that had come before her revelation:
"You mean that Tom—"
"Yeah. Tom Riddle is here—in this school. Right now." He whispered the last words, as though the young Dark Lord would be able to hear them even now, and then there was a moment of silence, during which the words he had spoken sunk into both of their brains. And then, wryly: "Out of all the years that bell jar could have taken us to, it had to be..."
"You think there's a chance we won't even see him?" Ginny asked very quickly, with false optimism. "That maybe we'll get out of here before that could happen?"
"With my luck?" said Harry. He laughed a humourless laugh, which Ginny didn't like, just didn't like, even if it really shouldn't have affected her all that much. Harry added: "You must be joking."
Silence. The red curtains on Ginny's four-poster shivered slightly in an imaginary wind, and Ginny suddenly couldn't quite catch her breath—She won't wake, said a soft voice—She saw nothing, and it saw her, and she had to blink and blink and blink before she could even tell she was blinking and then it went away. She took a deep breath, and then:
"You said you had a nightmare too?"
"Yeah," he said, nodding. "It was—I was in the Chamber of Secrets, you know, like in second year—your first year—"
Like I don't remember when it happened—
He continued, oblivious: "You were on the ground, cold as ice. And he was just standing there—Riddle, I mean." He paused, and shook his head slightly. "You have no idea how frustrating it was, him just leaning against a—a whatever, a pillar—calm, not a care in the world—"
Ginny stared at him, could not look away, for more than one reason—
First there was the initial reaction, the reflexive thought that she could not help herself thinking: He thinks HE had it bad that year...?
And then, she thought of that cold, lonely, echoing place, and the cold stone ground and—and she thought of the dream that she had just awoken from, and she said:
"But I do." A pause, and she glanced back at her pillow, as though the image of her night-terror would still be emblazoned upon its soft surface. She added: "I just dreamt the same thing."
His gaze—which had been unfocused, and directed toward the ground—focused on her, suddenly, so quick that his neck surely must have hurt from it, and his eyes widened and he said, in a hard voice:
"What?"
"I don't know how," Ginny began, so that he didn't expect some sort of explanation from her, "but I just had a dream of the Chamber—of Secrets, of course—from your perspective. I saw myself on the ground, you were saying something like, 'please don't be dead, Ginny please don't be dead.' And Tom said,"—the three words chilled her to the bone as she said them aloud: "'She won't wake.'"
Ginny smiled wryly, then, and said, "Then I woke up."
Harry bit his lip, and shook his head slightly. "That's... odd."
They were silent for a long time, and the night sky outside the lone window began to turn a deep, dark purple, signalling the sunrise. Ginny blinked twice—had they only slept an hour or two? It certainly seemed that way, as it had to have been well past midnight before.
"We should try to get some more sleep," Harry said, reading her thoughts.
"I don't think I'm going to be able to," said Ginny, and she recalled her dream, and her cheeks turned red along with her ears—she thought of the couple that they had seen in the common room, and wondered about them. All they were to her was a pair of names... and two remarkably familiar faces.
Harry seemed to be in deep concentration as well, but Ginny very much doubted it was for the same reasons. She watched him silently, and then after a long while he turned to her and said:
"Ginny, what—what happened, when Grindelwald was in power?"
Ginny blinked—she had not been expecting that question at all. She took a breath, and said:
"No one ever told you?" A pause, and then: "Well, that's not all that surprising, though, is it?"
In Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, no one spoke for a long, long time—each person was thinking very different thoughts, and no one could quite find the words they wished to voice aloud.
Ron was thinking about how sudden everything had been—one moment, they had all been full of adrenaline, searching for whatever it was that Harry needed to find, and then in just a few moments... everything changed.
Hermione was thinking about a book she'd read back in third year, about time-travel. She had read... she had read that if someone went back in time... oh what had it been...?
Luna was trying to figure why Ginny had never told her that she knew Stubby Boardman—but then she wasn't going to hold it against her. Luna glanced at Ron when he wasn't looking, and then decided to make it a stare instead.
And then, finally, Lupin broke the silence:
"How do you know that—that they're in nineteen-fo—?" he said, looking at Dumbledore, and shaking his head. "How on earth do you—" And then, having been broken, the silence left for good.
"You remember it, don't you?" said Tonks, then, biting her lip and watching Dumbledore's face. "You were there, and you remember them showing up."
Dumbledore blinked, as if he had been caught in a reverie, and finally looked up. He said: "Yes, Nymphadora."
Tonks winced at the sound of her given name—
"Oh, come now Nymphadora," said Dumbledore, his eyes back to twinkling, now, and his mouth forming a little smirk. "Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself, you know—how terrified you must be of yourself..."
Lupin snorted, but the rest did not react much to the joke.
"How do we get them back?" asked Sirius now, and although this was all he had thought about during the silence, he had not inched any closer to a solution.
"We don't, Sirius," said Dumbledore, and he glanced then at his wristwatch. "They must find their way back themselves." And then: "The students and I had better be off—Hogwarts will be missing us."
"Grindelwald..." began Ginny, looking quite far-away in her own mind as though attempting to recall something long forgotten, "Grindelwald was, Dad said, once, he said: 'Grindelwald was the worst thing anyone could imagine, anyone wanted to imagine'—of course, Voldemort came along and proved everyone wrong, but no one wanted to imagine that happening. But Grindelwald was..." Ginny shook her head, unable to find the words. "I wasn't there, obviously, and I..."
"But what happened?" said Harry, impatiently. Ginny narrowed her eyes at him.
"I was getting to it, Harry, can't you see I'm trying?" And Harry felt bad for his insistence, but no less curious.
"I was saying," said Ginny primly, and she crossed her arms round her chest as though she were cold, "Grindelwald was... really bad." She sort of half-smiled. "That's not a great way to put it, but he was. No one... no one likes to talk about it, really. You wouldn't get much more out of someone who was actually there. But... from what I've heard, it was just like it was now, except worse because there was a Muggle war on at the same time, that... that Lither person—"
"Hitler," corrected Harry.
"You know about it? Then why are you—"
"All I know are the basics," said Harry. "Hitler killed a lot of people, concentration camps, all the bombings, like in London. But I dunno any of the details, they don't tell you much in Primary school—"
"Well they tell you even less if your Mum's the one teaching you," said Ginny grimly. "I really don't know too much about it, only that it was really, really bad—well, and that Dumbledore defeated him. No one goes into any details, but... I remember that Dad said his... great-aunt, was it? I dunno... she was killed horribly, that was the last Weasley woman till me—he found her, he said..." She bit her lip, and shook her head to clear the image. "He didn't go into details, though, no one does, like I said—it's sort of like the wizarding world's dirty secret, when you think about it. No one talks about it, they pretend like it never happened, and—"
She fell into silence then, and she just was looking somewhere, just staring at nothing in particular. Then she said: "That was odd."
And Harry didn't have a chance to ask what was odd, because at that moment his scar burst into flames.
"AAAHH!"
Harry was on the floor, now, his hands on his head, pressing harder and harder onto his scar to try to ease the pain, but it didn't help, it didn't help at all, and he was—
—all right now.
That was odd, he thought to himself.
He breathed oddly for a moment and then realised that his eyes were closed, so he opened them; he realised that he was on his back, so he got up into a sitting position; he realised that Ginny's hand was on his arm, so he looked at her.
"What happened?" she said, eyes wide in fear.
"Scar," said Harry, rubbing the offending mark with the arm she was not holding.
"Is it all right now? Or does it still hurt?" she asked, and Harry noticed that she was very close to him—which made sense as she was holding his arm—but still struck him quite strongly for some reason.
"No, it stopped," he said, and he blinked a moment and breathed in and out once again. He shook his head, and said, "He was confused," in a strange voice that surprised himself.
Ginny did not need to ask who he meant.
She seemed to tighten her grip on his arm, then, moving her hand up to his shoulder, and said, "But does that mean now... or then?"
That was a good question; if his scar hurt him now, in nineteen forty-five, did that mean that Tom Riddle was feeling particularly emotional, or that Voldemort did, back in ninety-six?
"I dunno," he said, and he noticed that she was rubbing his arm now—he didn't think she even realised she was doing it, as though it was just something her hands did when she was thinking about other things. It felt good, really—and although his arm hadn't hurt him before, it felt better now for some reason.
And then, a moment later, she offered her other hand to him, and said, "No reason to stay on the floor all day," and helped him up, although he was slightly reluctant; her touch had felt good, again, and he didn't like seeing it go. Suddenly all his other joints ached as well, and he thought that perhaps they had been doing so all along and he just hadn't noticed.
"Thanks..." he said, and he meant it very much, "Gin."
"You're welcome," she said, and she smiled at him. They held each other's gazes for a moment, and Harry felt suddenly very thankful that it had been Ginny that the bell jar had fallen on with him—there was just something calming in her presence. And she understood, didn't she? It was an almost selfish feeling, but no one else should have been there in that year, because no one else had met Tom Riddle before, had been in the Chamber—they were the ones that had gone through it all, they were the ones that deserved to be—
It startled Harry that he was thinking of the time-travel as an accomplishment—surely just a few moments ago he had felt that he would rather be anywhere else in the world? It was a strange, strange feeling, and Harry wondered what it—as well as the mysterious pain in his scar—meant.
Dumbledore emerged last from the fireplace in his office at the school; Hermione, Ron, Luna and Neville had gone through before him, and just as soon as the bearded wizard appeared, a rousing chorus rung out from the walls:
"You're back to stay?"
"Could it be true?"
"Ha! Told you he'd be back before summer, Dippet!"
"I'll speak with all of you later," Dumbledore told the former headmasters, gesturing to the four students.
"Right, sir, I anxiously await the tale—"
The group left the office amongst all the delighted murmurings of the portraits.
"If you could just stay in your common rooms for the time being," Dumbledore told them as they stood upon the moving staircase—Luna walked back up a couple steps once or twice to prolong the journey; "I believe that a certain Professor needs rescuing from a herd of centaurs."
And he disappeared off down a corridor as soon as they had reached the bottom.
"He's going to save Umbridge?" said Ron disbelievingly. "Harry and Ginny are missing and he's going into the forest for that bloody cow? Don't you think that—"
Hermione cut him off: "How did he know that the centaurs had Umbridge?" Her head was tilted to one side as she stared off after Dumbledore.
That was a good question, and like all good questions—and some of the more obscure bad ones—they had no idea of the answer.
"Let's go," Hermione added, then. "It'd be best to get into Gryffindor Tower before everyone wakes up..."
They began the journey, and before anyone knew it, they had parted ways with Luna and reached the portrait of the Fat Lady—they had all been too deep in their own thoughts to even notice the passing of footsteps, and Ron—muttering something along the lines of "How in the bloody hell are they gonna get back here?"—nearly walked straight into the portrait. The Fat Lady looked affronted.
Hermione said the password, "Fata viam invenient," but the Fat Lady didn't hear; she was too busy trying to think of words to properly snap back at Ron with—
"Fata viam invenient," said Hermione again, louder and beginning to get frustrated—the Fat Lady finally noticed her, and swung wide rather quickly, as though hoping to strike Ron with the edge of her frame.
The common room, not surprisingly, was empty. Hermione—suddenly overcome with fatigue—walked straight to the girls' stairs, yawning and stretching, and went up quickly. The two boys went towards the opposite stair, after a moment.
Harry and Ginny got up properly a long while later—after what was probably a few hours of silence and staring out-of-windows—having waited until the common room had fully cleared out. They weren't looking forward to confronting John and Virginia once again, especially not in broad, uninhibited daylight.
They walked very carefully on their way to Dumbledore's office, making sure not to complicate the whole mess by running into anyone that they should not run into; they double-checked round corners before turning, and tried not to take any of the main routes through the castle.
Finally, after much ado, they arrived at his office door.
Harry spoke the password quietly, so that no one in any of the surrounding rooms would hear him (although they were very unlikely to do so anyway): "Every Flavour Bean."
It took Harry a moment to realise that the door did not open.
"Every Flavour Bean," he asserted again, a bit confused, but then Ginny remembered:
"He said he needed to change the password, remember?" she said. She shook her head. "Why did he have to do it already?"
"He's Dumbledore," said Harry. "How would I know how his mind works?"
An uncomfortable silence rung through the empty corridor, and Harry felt incredibly visible. He looked back and forth without realising, unconsciously making sure no one was looking.
Ginny knocked on the office door a few times—each reverberated quite loudly, in Harry's opinion—but there was no answer. Either Dumbledore wasn't inside, or he couldn't hear.
"What are we supposed to do now?" Ginny said. "Do we go back to—"
Harry had an idea, and although he didn't know if it was a good one, it was the best he had; after all, if Dumbledore's office was what Harry thought of as McGonagall's office, then surely Dumbledore's classroom...?
He walked, in some absurd attempt at a spy's stealthy movements, to the door of the Transfiguration classroom—carefully, he turned the knob, and opened the door just enough to peer inside. He shut it abruptly, so that no one would notice the excursion.
"He's teaching!" he hissed to Ginny, who was somehow by his side already. "It looked like sixth- or seventh-years—"
"Should we wait for him, then?" said Ginny. "I mean, the class'll be over eventually, and then we can get in while nobody's paying attention—"
Harry shook his head. "But if we wait out here, Filch's sure to catch us—well, whoever it is now, anyway. We'd better... er..."
"Go inside?" Ginny finished, and Harry nodded. They were both hesitant, of course, for the same reason; if these were seventh years, then it would be quite likely that Tom Riddle would be among them, and...
Then Ginny said: "We might as well, right? I mean, no one'll recognise us—they'll think we're whatever-their-names-are—"
Harry nodded; that did make sense.
"—and we could pretend like we had to deliver a message to Dumbledore or something."
And then Harry thought, just as Ginny confidently opened the door, that while this was all well and good, a better plan would have been to hide in a broom closet until Dumbledore's class had let out. They didn't have anything particular to say to the headmaster—er, Transfiguration professor—anyway, did they? They just wanted to know what to do—
But it was too late. Ginny had already entered the room, and Harry had no choice but to follow her. Every eye in the class jumped up to them immediately, including Dumbledore's own, and she sort of stopped in her tracks at the abrupt attention.
"Yes?" said Dumbledore, over what looked like a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—"Magickal Malevolence," the cover read—and he seemed to peer into the two of them deeply, even from across the room.
"Er," said Ginny, "um. We—we had a message—"
"What, did you lose it?" said one of the students, and a few others laughed.
"Yes?" said Dumbledore again, raising his eyebrows. As Ginny continued to flounder for words, he added: "Perhaps you'd like to wait in my office, then? I'm sure a sugar quill or two will get that kneazle right off your tongue... help yourselves to the stash on the desk." He said the words rather meaningfully, and smiled at them pleasantly.
Harry blinked, still standing in the doorway, and a moment later Ginny turned round to leave—
—only to stop sharply as her eyes fell on something. Harry turned to see what it was, and he froze in place as well.
Sitting in the front row of desks, was a tall, black-haired boy, who stared wide-eyed from Ginny, to Harry, and back. He seemed completely uncomprehending, as though he had just seen a ghost lay down on the ground and play dead; something seemed to very much not click in the boy's head.
"Tom..."
Harry was not sure whether Ginny had said the word aloud or he had thought it, or she had thought it and he had heard it, which seemed just as likely, for some reason; the three of them, Harry, Ginny, and Riddle stared at each other in a twisted sort of triangle, and it was only when Dumbledore spoke once again that the gaze was broken:
"Ten minutes till the end of the class period," the professor said, "please finish up your essays—"
Riddle blinked, and returned his gaze to his completed essay, and he seemed to be fervently forcing himself not to look up once again.
Someone, it seemed, did not believe that they were John Potter and Virginia Arden.
Harry and Ginny hastily continued their way out the door.
"Sugar quill," said Ginny to Dumbledore's office door, and the two of them entered rather numbly, and sat down before the desk; Harry's gaze fell on the tray of crystalline candies, and could not imagine attempting to consume one.
"Did he recognise us?" said Harry after a moment.
"I dunno how, but it certainly seemed like it."
A million thoughts raced through Harry's head as he sat there, waiting. How could Tom Riddle have recognised them? It made no sense whatsoever—unless, of course, Riddle had travelled through time and spotted the two of them, which Harry did not find particularly likely.
They sat in the office, mostly just thinking, and occasionally one of them would voice a thought aloud; they found no answers, however. After what felt a very long while, they heard the bell ring, and Dumbledore came through the door adjoining the classroom to the office.
He sat down opposite them, and said in that tired voice of his: "What was that, may I ask?"
"What was what?"
"Your staring contest with our Head Boy. Do you know him, in your time?" Dumbledore had a curious look in his eye.
"We've... we've met," said Harry, and as he said it, images flashed through his head: turban, Chamber, graveyard, Cedric, Quirrell, diary, Mirror, dome—
"A few times," he added.
"I probably should not ask more, of course." Dumbledore straightened the half-moon spectacles on his nose. Harry remembered how Dumbledore had always been suspicious of Riddle. "As for your situation... as I'm sure you have come asking what can be done... I have no answer at this time. I do not know how to get you back, if indeed, you can go back. I did do a bit of thinking on the subject, and I plan to look into it more fully; however:
"For now, you should just lay low. Obviously, you will not attend any classes, as that would arouse far too much suspicion. I will contact you if and when I make any advancements, although for now, I am... a bit preoccupied with very important matters—"
"Grindelwald," said Ginny.
"Yes, Grindelwald," said Dumbledore, nodding. "Good to see you can say his name, Miss Weasley—there are not many who dare it." He paused. "Times are very dark right now, my young friends. The two wars have reached a fever pitch, and the Muggle terrors are becoming even worse than the wizard ones. There is... much still to do, and I do need to devote my time—"
"I guess there's no need to hurry," said Harry then, realising it was a bit of a selfish thing to think that Dumbledore would take much time out of his schedule to help two teenage wizards return to their own time when there was a war on. Harry added wryly: "After all, we have all the time in the world, don't we?"
Next morning, Ron awoke far earlier than he would have liked—of course, he would have liked to stay in bed till the holidays began—and he found himself awake only a little later than usual despite his ungodly bedtime. But it seemed unlikely that he could reclaim slumber within the near future.
Ron could easily notice the absence of his best mate—the snoring level in the fifth year dormitory was noticeably low. In fact, Ron was pretty sure that Neville was also awake, because he was—normally—even louder than Harry was.
So, Ron sat up in bed, opened the curtain that surrounded the four poster, and saw that Neville's bed was indeed empty. Neither of them had had much sleep, then.
Ron wondered if Harry and Ginny had gotten any sleep at all—they might be wandering somewhere, looking for somewhere to go, to rest, and Ron abruptly felt guilty for being ungrateful for the sleep he had got.
Ron got out of bed, then, and made his way toward the stairs—passing Harry's vacant bed, he realised that Harry had basically nothing with him—his wand, and the robes on his back, that was it; no invisibility cloak, no map...
No food.
Ron's stomach growled mightily; he hadn't eaten anything for a long while. Walking down the stairs, he wondered if Hermione was up to a trip to the kitchens, as it was well after breakfast and surely everyone would already be about on the grounds, enjoying the peace after exams.
Neville and Hermione, Ron found, were both in the common room before the needless, heatless fire—Hermione was mumbling under her breath as she looked at a parchment., and Neville stared at her, as though she was insane.
"What's up?" asked Ron, walking up to the two.
"She's going over the OWLs. Has been for hours. Don't think it's a very good idea to disturb her," Neville told him.
"Signs to identify a werewolf... one... the snout..." Hermione was biting her nails as she went over the parchment in her hand.
Ron walked in front of her, and waved his hand in front of her face. She didn't seem to notice. He wondered if she had even noticed Neville.
"Hermione?" he asked cautiously.
She did not acknowledge him in any way.
He raised a hand, and slowly moved it toward the parchment.
Neville's eyes grew wide. "No—don't Ron—she'll kill you," he warned.
"Nonsense."
He grabbed the sheet and pulled it away from her. Neville ducked.
At once, Hermione's expression turned to pure anger, and even as she toppled backward off the chair in surprise, she pulled her wand.
"Accio!" She caught the parchment, stood up, and glared.
"How dare you! You prat! What possible reason did you have to do that?" Her gaze was deadly, and, from Neville's point of view, intimidating, even from its position at a foot below Ron's.
"I'm hungry," said Ron. "You wanna go down and ask the house elves for breakfast?"
"Are you insane? You come down here—interrupt me—and—and—for food? No!" She seemed to be fighting the urge to hex him, and her conscience probably would not hold out long—
"What were you doing, anyway? We finished OWLs—"
"I know we finished the OWLs, Ron, I am simply going over them."
He looked at her blankly. "Why?"
"Because I want to! Leave me alone!" She sat back down, and locked her gaze back on the paper, and her eyes travelled back and forth, back and forth determined to continue pouring over the papers...
Ron looked at her, and quite forcibly it hit him why she was obsessing like this: she was worried, and when she worried, she revised. This was the closest thing to revising she could do now, what with classes finished—
"I'm sorry," Ron said then, and he meant it. He added, softly: "I miss them, too."
She lowered the parchment, and he could see now that her eyes were red, and all blotchy; she had been crying. She spoke in a very soft voice:
"We all do."
See If You're Human After All
"Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us."
— Wilde
Revised Version
Coming Soon
