Breathe in... Breathe out.
With every slow, rattling breath they took, they could feel the paper thin walls of reality shudder around them.
In... Out.
They could feel the fractures in said walls, so impossibly tiny that an atom would be the size of the universe compared to them. Yet, they were there all the same.
In... Out.
Though their body was at rest, their magic was not. With every breath they flexed their power, forcing it deeply into the walls, through the fractures, into existence itself. Intertwining with Everything as much as they could.
It was almost a religious experience to them, or as like one that they would ever have. They were both One and All at the same time. In this instant, they were both male and female, gendered and not, multiple and singular. It was hard for them to truly comprehend, and all they could do was let it wash over them.
The cracks in the universe that their magic flowed through did not merely flow through space, but through time as well. Reality was fractured, deeply and horribly fractured. Everything in existence, every being, every object, every concept had the cracks throughout the entirety of them. It was simply part of them.
It had been since that night. They could still remember the laughter of the others, the pain in they felt as their own throat was torn apart by their screams of denial. The rage that had infused their entirety. That was still part of them, simmering hatefully even now.
They could remember it all.
In... Out.
They only had one chance to fix it. To put it all right. And they could not fail.
In... and hold.
Reality itself froze. So deeply intertwined was their magic that as they held their breath, so too did the universe hold itself. Creatures across the world frozen in place, rain drops hovering in the air, the very stars themselves stuck in a single moment...
And out.
The universe broke and reformed around them, taking the same form that it had many many years ago. Or rather, almost the same form, as this time they remembered everything that had happened.
Their magic shattered...
And Harriet Potter opened her eyes.
Harriet Dursley woke up on a day that seemed off a bit from the very start.
Oh, it wasn't anything obvious, nothing that she could point to and say "That, right there! That's wrong!" And yet, as the day passed her by and she continued with her assigned chores, she could not help but feel that something was off.
It wasn't her Aunt or Uncle, the Dursleys still pretended that she didn't quite exist until they had to interact with her.
It wasn't her cupboard, as that was as cramped and dusty and full of spiders as ever.
It wasn't even Dudley, he still smiled softly at her when she saw him, and passed her extra food beneath the table when the Dursleys weren't looking.
No, it was something she could not quite place her finger on. It was incredibly frustrating, the same feeling you get when you're just a smidge away from getting an incredible revolution, the same feeling of something being in the tip of your tongue. Yet no matter how hard she thought about it, she could not find something wrong!
It was only later that night, as she was thrust back into her cupboard and heard her Uncle lock her in that she finally got the answer to her unasked question.
She watched from her cot, staring perplexed at a small glowing crack in front of her. She could see it, and yet could not see it. It was attached to nothing, floating in the air, yet she very clearly understood that it was a crack in something, and instinctually understood that it was wrong.
Be afraid, it seemed to cry out to her.
And yet even as she knew that it was wrong and horrible and she absolutely under no circumstances should touch it, she felt it calling out to her. She could barely hear it, not as a noise but as something tickling the back of her mind.
She never even realized when she touched it.
Instant searing pain flowed through her as for an infinitesimally small moment she knew. Everything was revealed to her and yet, being human, her mind could not grasp it all. With the amount of knowledge that was slamming into her, erasing everything she was, her mind latched onto the only familiar thing it could.
Harriet Dursley died that night, and Harriet Potter took her place.
The first breath, Harriet thought to herself, is always the hardest.
It had taken years of practice to intertwine herself with Everything the way that she had, and decades more to become proficient enough to even think about attempting what she had just done. Even now, all that time later, the process of waking up again and coming back to herself was as painful and terrifying as ever. There were some things that the mind just could not get used to.
She gasped and drew the dusty air of the cupboard into her lungs greedily, her brain shouting at her that she had gone a literal eternity without oxygen despite the fact that the body she was now inhabiting had been breathing moments ago. The rush of oxygen caused her to become somewhat lightheaded, but that was immediately overshadowed by the overwhelming throbbing of her mind and body as it was forcibly changed to allow her magic to inhabit it.
When she had come up with this insane plan to return, she had not been exactly... well... sane. She still wasn't, technically speaking, though now that she was here she felt remarkably more level headed, as if a fog had been lifted from her mind. She could remember every gruesome death that she had caused, every throat ripped out with a smile on her face, and while she now felt some modicum of disgust at her actions, she still couldn't feel any regret.
They had deserved it.
She enjoyed this new feeling of clear mindedness even through the pain wracking her body for a while, and eventually her need for oxygen diminished sufficiently that she could take in her surroundings. She was in her cupboard, after all. That was good, she had been aiming to return to her time at the Dursleys. It would give her some modicum of freedom to move around.
Taking only a small moment to mentally prepare herself for the pain, Harriet sat up and reached blindly above her to where she knew the cord for her light hang. Despite decades between the last time she had been in the cupboard her hand still managed to unerringly grasp it and give it a soft tug. A dim bulb flickered into existence above her, barely chasing away the shadows of her small room. She could not withhold a wince as it did, dim and dirty the bulb may be, but even that small change in light was enough to cause her eyes severe pain. Turns out that breaking the fabric of space-time to rewrite reality and take over a younger version of yourself was not easy on the body. Not surprising, actually. Given that this wasn't even the body that had done that, she could only imagine how bad it would be if she was still in her old one.
Okay, focus.
While she had planned out her return almost obsessively, there was no way to get the specifics completely correct because of the fundamental uncertainty of the universe itself. Thus, she had made many different variations of the plan depending on when and where she had ended up.
First things first, she had to figure out when she was. She stood up as much as she could in the cupboard, standing on the bed. She was short enough to stand almost at her full height, only having to bend her head a small amount to stop from hitting the steps above her. That meant she was anywhere between a year from Hogwarts to just after her first year. She was still in the cupboard so it was unlikely that it was after first year, as the Dursleys had finally been kind enough to give her the spare room about a month after she came back from Hogwarts, after Dudley spent the whole year attempting to convince them to do so.
Sitting back down on the bed, slowly as to not make her headache any worse, she inspected her surroundings more closely. It had been so long since she had been here that it was difficult to remember the layouts. Though there was one thing that she remembered very clearly. After receiving her wand, she had been terrified that Uncle would break it, so she had hidden it away just in case he would check her cupboard.
She flipped around and crawled over her bed to the far end of her cupboard, where the tallest stair was. She reached up along the back side of the stair below it, until she found a very small crack that was just the right length to fit a stick into. It was empty.
That... was not good. If she did not have her wand yet, then the plan was going to require some serious reworking. While she could preform some small wandless magic, the vast majority of things were beyond her. Talented she may be, but true wandless magic was the domain of Merlin and had not been seen since his time. Nobody, not even Dumbledore had been able to do much more than parlor tricks since then.
In addition, getting a wand was going to be tricky. She could not go to Ollivander's, that was certain. As she had been using her magic for decades, it had molded the way it was focused to fit her old wand perfectly. She wouldn't be able to use any premade wand, and that was what the cranky old man specialized in.
So, she was going to have to get herself a wand and needed it to be custom made. That was expensive, which means that she needed access to her Vault. That was also very much an issue, as she did not have her key. Dumbledore had of course been kind enough to keep it safe for her until she had asked for it at the end of her second year. The goblins, spiteful bastards that they were, would not give her a new key or provide any service to obtain it. According to them, whatever happened with their key was the fault of the owner of the vault and none of their concern. They'd let anyone have access to your vault as long as they flashed the key to it and enough gold to bribe them.
She shouldn't complain really, that was how she had gotten a majority of her fortune to support herself, after...
She refocused.
If she could not get her key and access her vault, then she had no money with which to pay for her wand. She couldn't threaten the custom wandmaker either, she was too small and nonthreatening and again, no wand.
She could transfer some muggle money into wizarding money, but the transfer rate was outrageous, around a hundred pounds per galleon. The goblins despised muggle money on account of it being made of paper, and with a custom wand costing around 500 galleons, her options were precariously short.
She would make do. She had to.
Finally feeling that she was able to properly move without being in pain, she turned towards the door to her cupboard. If she wished to get a better handle on exactly when she was in the timeline, a simple way to do so would be to snoop around the house. When she was younger even this door was an insurmountable foe to her. She was powerless against it, unable to escape the long cold nights locked away. She was no longer powerless however. She never would be again.
With a small smile, she held her hand up to the door where on the other side she knew the lock was, and focused hard. She might not be able to to anything flashy without a wand, but the unlocking charm was taught in first year and required very little skill to pull off.
There was a dulled click through the door as it unlocked itself, and then moments later the sound of metal being ripped apart as the door burst open.
Harriet stared at the remains of the lock which had flown across the corridor and imbedded itself in the wall across from it with a look of shock on her face. She had not meant to do that. Not only had she not meant to do that, but she shouldn't have the ability to do that.
She put that to the back of her mind. The lock exploding like it did had made a lot of noise. There's no way her relatives hadn't heard it.
As if to confirm her thoughts, she heard a door slam open on the floor above her.
Okay, time limit. Think fast.
She had no ability to hide what had just happened. Shards of the lock were in the wall opposite her cupboard and the door very clearly had part of it blown up.
She could not talk her way out of this situation. Her Aunt and Uncle had never cared enough to listen to her pleas before and wouldn't now, especially as this time she had damaged something. They were going to hurt her again. She couldn't do anything about it.
She shook her head, confused as to where that thought had come from. She was powerful, they couldn't hurt her. Evidence: the remains of the lock.
She couldn't hurt them either without making the situation far worse for her in the future. She needed a place where she could live for the time being and she did not have anywhere she could go other than here. In addition, anything she did now would eventually get back to Dumbledore. The more she did, the worse off it would be.
The footsteps sounded on the stairs above her and prompted her to step out from her cupboard, knowing that staying in a small enclosed area would make it a lot harder to dodge if she needed to.
As she stepped out, she turned in time to see Dudley step off the stairs and stare at her and the remains of the lock in shock. A surge of relief flowed through her at seeing who it was.
"What the hell?" He asked, gaping at the scene before him.
She opened her mouth, thinking of something to say before giving it up as a bad job and closing it again.
"What the hell?" He insisted, refusing to take her silence as an answer.
In that moment, staring at her cousin in the middle of the night after bending reality to allow her to travel back in time, a thought occurred to her that was so completely and utterly ridiculous she could not help herself from speaking it.
"Hey Dudley, want to help me take over the world?"