XXX
Story: [Past Present Future]
Summary: The Golden Trio is a trio, but they all belong to different trios, and to worlds that made war in very different manners.
Genre: Adventure, Friendship
XXX
He probably wasn't the best at math – never had been – but it was hard not to pick up some stuff over the years.
So he couldn't quite figure out the theory of relativity on a mathematical spectrum, but that didn't mean that he couldn't use the formulas from it for other things. Such as jury-rigging a time-turner.
They had him surrounded, but if he could just go back a day in time, he should be able to dodge them, and then he could set off the explosives just before he left, taking down perhaps a few thousand of them. It was a good plan, if a fair bit desperate – because time-turners didn't go back that far in time.
But necessity was the mother of all invention, and he very much needed to survive this. They still had a war to fight, and the others would never let him live it down if he managed to get himself killed like this. He hadn't even managed to do much more than blast down a dozen or so ships.
Though, to be fair, it'd been pretty damn impressive for a makeshift fortification and only a few hundred Guardians. Poorly equipped Guardians at that – and when he found the person who'd thought that would be funny, he'd personally hurl their arses into the sun.
Frowning at the complex mass of wires and sand, and other bits and pieces whose purpose he sincerely hoped that he'd managed to guess, Ron took a deep breath.
Turning to the messaging screen. "If this doesn't work, tell Hermione that I love her." He paused, grinning fiercely through gritted teeth. "Here's to hoping."
Then he pressed the button.
And the world fell apart.
XXX
Hermione carefully drew out the pattern in blood, knowing that it would be a very stupid idea to rush it, even if she was horribly pressed for time.
The shutters were still holding the storm at bay, but they wouldn't last for long, not with that many casters keeping it going.
And they'd told her she was paranoid when she'd lined the entire castle with enough magic to survive the moon itself dropping on top of it. Well, who was laughing now?
They'd been at it for hours, and they'd probably be at it for an hour or so still, before they'd finally be able to breach the defenses and actually begin tearing the place down like a house of cards.
In hindsight, she should've made sure to build a proper escape path, instead of relying on the violent responses of her defenses, and on them lasting long enough for reinforcement to be able to get there on time. Then again, that might've simply given them an easier path into her sanctum, and that would've been bad.
Either way, what was done was done, and Hermione didn't have time to think on things like that. She had much more important things to occupy her mind.
It'd been an idea of hers, a potential route for escape that was untried for a very good reason. The planet rotated and moved as time passed, so if she could simply truly stop herself in time separately from the rest of the universe, she should theoretically be able to move to a different location.
However, not even the inventor of time-turners had been crazy enough to actually separate the user from the proper flow of time, and Hermione really only had theory to go on at this point. Theory, magic, and a distinct unwillingness to admit defeat.
She'd always been a very competitive individual.
Stepping back from the complicated array of blood, she formed a messaging-Patronus. "The fortress has fallen, attempting escape-measures." She gulped. "Tell the boys that I love them."
Then she let it go, knowing that it would find them without issue, and focused all of her attention onto the experimental escape path in front of her.
"Here goes nothing."
She activated the array.
And the world fell apart.
XXX
Harry allowed himself to grin as he heard the traps down the corridor go off, and the quickly aborted scream of pain that came with it.
He'd probably abused the time-turner a bit too much lately, and he had the distinct impression that he wasn't going to be able to dodge around this by going back in time and escaping that way. Still, it would've felt weird to take it off, having long since grown used to its comforting weight around his neck.
Taking another deep breath as he carefully tried to stitch the wound back together, Harry briefly wondered how they'd managed to find him, before disregarding it as irrelevant. He'd likely been careless at some point, and they'd managed to pick up his trail. It wouldn't be the first time that that had happened.
There was cursing down the corridor, and he could hear the automated sprinkler-system as it activated from the smoke of the explosion. He grimaced, feeling suddenly a bit silly. He should've made the napalm-trap the first one, instead of the third, as it was everything would be so covered in water that it might not burn properly.
Making a mental note to do so – or at the very least deactivate the sprinklers – in the future, should he survive, Harry concentrated on tying off the surgical wire. Whoever had come up with the idea of numbing the area with magic, and then patching it up through muggle-means had been a saint.
Harry quickly redressed, knowing better than to face them without armor. Last stand or no, he sure as hell wasn't going to be making it easy for the bastards.
Grabbing the phone, he allowed himself to grin. They were trying to jam it, which was a sensible enough thing to do, but with the kind of magic he'd put into it, they really didn't stand a chance.
Snorting a laugh as he realized that he'd ended up getting the answering machine, Harry took a deep breath.
"I love you both. I'll be going on ahead. Don't do anything stupid."
Hanging up, Harry turned to wait.
The final door was blasted down, and the battle was on.
Considering how much blood had been on the front-runner's clothing, even before Harry splattered his brains across the wall with a well-aimed shot, he must've taken out at least half-a-dozen of them already.
Not bad for a rush job.
Harry flung another curse at them, even as bullets sliced through the air. Except, suddenly there was something he wouldn't be able to dodge, and well-engrained reflexes outvoted common sense. He flipped the time-turner, just as it was shot. Blood mixing with sand, Harry pressed the detonation button for the explosives that would take them all down with him.
And the world fell apart.
XXX
Mr and Mrs Granger weren't entirely sure what to make of their daughter.
Once upon a time, it was difficult to get her to do anything but read, so immersed in devouring knowledge to both with actually meeting other people. Not that either of them had really been surprised, considering their own childhoods. Introversion was hardly anything to be overly worried about, even if they did make an effort to get her to actually interact with others when possible.
But no, nothing could've ever been that simple.
There'd been incidents, things happening around their daughter that logically shouldn't have been possible. It hadn't been until Professor McGonagall arrived that summer to explain it to them that they'd finally understood that magic was real.
But again, that wasn't really what had them worried.
Hermione had been acting strange for several months by then, suddenly throwing herself into diligent exercise rather than studies, even as her grades remained steady. Well, actually, the grades remaining steady was probably up for debate, if her school teacher was to be believed.
Apparently they believed that their precious little girl knew more, and that she just refused to show it. Perhaps in an attempt to reach out to the other children her age, to lower her perceived academical 'perfection' to a level where others wouldn't hate her for it. Except... she didn't actually seem to be paying any attention to the other children at all.
In some ways, it was as if their daughter had been replaced by someone else, someone older, but somehow still clearly emotionally attached to themselves, even if she didn't seem to much care about anything other than exercise.
It was all very peculiar.
XXX
Ginny had been the one to notice first, with Fred and George a distant second. They might've been closer had they not been at Hogwarts at the time when it started. Their parents however, still didn't know.
There was something weird going on with Ron.
Not 'weird' in the sense of him beginning to eat like a sensible human being instead of a half-starved wolverine defending its meal from jackals, but rather in how his attention sometimes shifted really oddly.
He still played wizard-chess, trouncing all of his opponents with ease, but sometimes he would sit by himself with the chessboard moving the pieces around – sometimes not even following the rules on how they were allowed to move – and Ginny thought that he could see something beyond it. As if he was using the chessboard more as a place to think, a way to keep his own mind structured, even as he thought about something similar but very different.
Already suspicious, she'd – mostly out of boredom, there wasn't that much around the Burrow to do that didn't include some variation of chores – dug through his notebooks. And seen math.
She knew that he was older than her, and as such knew a few things that she didn't, but the math-stuff that he'd been scribbling at margins all over the place was so complicated that her brain hurt just looking at it.
Ginny thought that Ron might very well know that she knew about his math-thing, but despite how he pretended that he didn't understand when their parents were around, he didn't seem to mind much. Somehow perfectly willing to help her, rather than spend all of his time ignoring her to the fullest extent possible – as the siblings traditionally did.
If it weren't for his unchanging eating-habits, she would've suspected someone else disguising themselves as her big brother. Though why they would've even wanted to do that, was beyond her.
Fred and George figured it out because Ron messed with their projects somehow. And they couldn't figure out what he'd done, or how he'd done it. Only that when they'd tried one of their pranks at Ron, he'd simply given them a smug smile, as absolutely nothing happened.
After that, the twins had been mightily suspicious of their younger brother, and had spent an ungodly amount of effort in trying to figure out what had changed since they'd left for Hogwarts. The math hadn't made any more sense to them than to Ginny, but they insisted that some of it looked almost like the formulas for spell-creation.
Understandably, all three of them remained just as confused as before about just what in the world was going on with the youngest Weasley son.
XXX
Dudley hadn't been entirely sure what had happened.
One moment, it'd been just like every other day. And then it hadn't been.
He knew that it'd had something to do with the Freak, and stuff like that, but it'd happened too fast and too unexpectedly for him to have a solid grip about what had actually happened.
The Freak had had a nightmare or something, Dudley's dad had gone downstairs to make him stop screaming, and then he'd started screaming too. From pain.
Apparently, the Freak had been startled awake, and had hit his dad for waking him up.
That much of it actually kind of made sense to Dudley, since nightmares and sleep might make someone lash out at the one next to them – he'd seen as much on TV. Only, the 'hit' hadn't been the weak flailing of a ten-year-old.
The rather obvious proof of that was that his father was in the hospital, a wall had been busted through, something had caught on fire, and half the floor above the wall was sagging alarmingly.
Then some people in funny clothes arrived, and then Dudley's mom had started screaming at them. It'd been really chaotic, and then suddenly someone had pointed out that the Freak wasn't there anymore.
So now Dudley was sitting outside a hospital room where his dad was unconscious, and trying to think of how in the world his cousin had managed to simply disappear.
XXX
In hindsight, he really should've expected that nightmares and accidental magic didn't go very well together, but what was done was done and at least it got him away from the Dursleys.
He might not hate them or anything – they hadn't cared and somehow, years ago, he'd learned to simply stop caring too – but he certainly didn't like them. So, his accident had proven positive on at least that.
Not so positive was the loss of the blood wards, the knowledge that this might leave Dumbledore uncomfortably wary of all his actions, and the certainty that he had quite a bit more wizards on his tail than he was comfortable with. He might've grown used to being on the run during the war, but it hadn't exactly been something he'd enjoyed.
Still, hopefully his time away from anyone else might leave people more inclined to believe that his maturity was related to street-life rather than accidental time-travel.
And the moment he figured out how the hell he'd managed to pull that off, he was going to make damn sure that it never happened again.
'Second chance' or no, he'd been content with dying in that shabby little room, leaving behind a weakened enemy for the rest of them to deal with, and knowing that at least now he'd finally be able to rest.
He'd been fighting since as far back as he could remember, even if the official wars hadn't started until Voldemort had risen again at the end of his Fourth Year at Hogwarts. He'd been fighting Dudley, or the Dursleys, or Voldemort, or Death Eaters, or general Dark wizards, or Dark creatures, or a whole slew of other assorted people, long before the final war had broken out.
Though, admittedly, it was probably his own damn fault, considering his chosen occupation.
But that didn't mean that he wasn't allowed to whine about it, from time to time. And going to sleep and never waking up had seemed-... well, it hadn't been something he'd felt 'anticipation' for exactly, but he'd still been content dammit.
XXX
Ron wasn't entirely sure what he was supposed to do.
His attempt at modifying a time-turner had apparently not been nearly as effective as he'd been hoping, but had at the same time shown itself capable of things that were definitely impossible. Time that had happened had happened. That was an absolute fact. You couldn't make something un-happen.
Except he was suddenly a kid again, after messing around with a time-turner a bit too much.
He'd been running the calculations for it ever since. Trying to figure out where he'd messed up, or if he'd been using the wrong formula entirely, or if he'd screwed up the actual physical application of the math somehow. But even if he'd done any of those things, or all of them, that wouldn't change the fact that he'd managed to accomplish an absolute impossibility.
Or... had he?
There were some theories regarding alternate universes, and theoretically those universes might be more than a giant swirling pool of 'things that are' and actually follow more akin to that old well-loved fictional idea that alternate universes were 'choices that could've been'. And if that was true, then it was possible that he'd somehow slingshot himself into the body of a different 'Ron Weasley', rather than actually returning to the time when he himself had been that age.
Sometimes, he really really missed having Hermione around to properly crunch numbers with. He might've become good with it over the years, but Hermione had always been fantastically talented with anything that required proper logic.
Regardless of the specifics, he'd either managed to break causality into an unrecognizable mess by rewinding his own time, or he'd done something very different. The sensible conclusion was that he hadn't rewound time, simply because if he actually had then it wouldn't have stopped at something as simple as ending up in another body, but would've likely included the laws of physics collapsing in on themselves and the universe imploding.
Or something, Ron didn't understand it nearly well enough to say that for sure, but it sounded like something that would've been a likely risk cropping up from that kind of thing.
XXX
Hermione wasn't sure how she'd managed to bend the laws of magic enough that it'd launched her into the body of her younger self, but it'd happened, so in an act that would've left many people both awed and horrified, she'd kind of just shrugged and got on with her life.
Magic could do a lot of weird things, and over the years she'd learned that it was easier to simply roll with the punches than try to understand the details of it. It'd happened, now she needed to deal with it.
She'd always been a fairly practical person, even if she'd had a tendency to lean more towards the theoretical side of the spectrum.
However, having remembered just how badly prepared that theoretical know-how had left her for the wars and the things that had followed them, she'd decided to shake things up a bit this time around.
Exercising wasn't exactly difficult. There was always space to run in, and even if books weren't as useful for weightlifting as actual weights, they could make do in a pinch. Much more annoying was the lack of proper combat-honed reflexes in regards to movement and the like, forcing her to stumble around trying to remember how her stances were supposed to be, when her mind had long since passed the specifics of that onto her body.
And unfortunately there wasn't really a proper dojo or anything in the neighborhood to practice in.
Hermione sighed, shifting her stance from one awkward angle to another. Her balance was completely off, but this was what it was supposed to be like, if she remembered correctly.
She frowned at the badly-balanced stick in her hand. She really missed her sword.
XXX
He'd lived halfway on the street for the better part of the last three years, and sure he didn't have either funds or his wand this time around, but it wasn't exactly difficult to shoplift a spray-can and a lighter.
Limited in fuel, perhaps. But nobody would willingly tangle with a kid with a flame-thrower if they could avoid it, and he'd learned how to do notice-me-not charms wandlessly long before he'd been running from safe-house to safe-house in the middle of a guerrilla war.
Well, back then he could use it, but he hadn't exactly mastered it until the war had started to devolve into ambushes and gory explosions. It was surprisingly useful for assassinations.
And there'd been an awful lot of people who'd needed to die.
Shaking his head to dissolve the memories of those days, Harry focused instead on trying to pick the lock. He'd never needed to pick this lock before, but that was in no small part because – by the time he might've considered using it as a base once again – it'd been fairly well-known for the part it played in the war of Voldemort's second rise.
Fidelius or not, it wouldn't stop anyone from bombing the whole neighborhood, and even if the wards had managed to easily weather the German's bombardments during the second World War, Harry wasn't sure if he would've trusted it to remain as sturdy as it'd been back then.
Now though? Now it was perfect. Close enough to the Leaky Cauldron that he could sneak past it if he ever needed to, far enough away that he didn't have to worry about dealing with the wizarding world unless he chose to, warded heavily enough that nobody would worry about magic being used around muggles, and abandoned to the point where nobody would mind terribly if he rigged the whole place with traps in a fit of well-engrained paranoia. Perfect.
There was just a tiny little snag, Harry admitted to himself as the lock finally clicked open.
"Filthy thief!" A squeaky voice roared as the entrance hall behind the door was revealed.
Harry smiled at the elf, all sharp teeth. "I'm here to destroy something." He said simply. "A specific little something that was left to you, Kreacher."
XXX
Ron knew that there would be ripples. Chaos-theory stated that even extremely minor deviations from a set path could have impressive effects on what happened or didn't happen. However, he sincerely doubted that him revealing his ability with math would work to send anything into disarray before he'd end up on the train to Hogwarts.
If his parents knew of his ability, things might be different. His father worked at the Ministry after all, and it wasn't unlikely to imagine that he might brag to friends and coworkers about his youngest son's skill with numbers. Thus, if his parents knew of it, there was a certain probability of ripples truly distorting what he knew of the future.
Which was why he always very carefully made sure that they didn't know.
Ginny had always been pretty good at figuring things out, and trying to keep a secret from the twins was a bit like trying to avoid the attention of a starved werewolf on the full moon by draping yourself in meat.
Percy on the other hand didn't really pay attention to anything but his schoolwork, too desperate to cling to the impressive reputations of their two oldest brothers, too afraid of their parents being disappointed in him should he fail to live up to it.
Once upon a time, back when Ron had finally started to figure that out, he'd been left to wonder if he himself might not have fallen into that exact same pattern, if it weren't for the fact that he'd known that the twins would've tarnished the Weasley name too badly for his parents to much care what he himself decided to do – as long as it didn't include joining his twins in actively causing mayhem.
He might never get along with his rather uptight brother, but he felt more of an understanding pity for him, than any actual dislike.
Still, with the ripples contained for the moment – because Ginny had never been a tattletale, and the twins would likely be planning on ways to hold this over his head in the future – Ron was left with absolutely nothing to do until the first of September.
He still wasn't entirely sure what to do about Scabbers. On the one hand, he wanted to get Sirius out of Azkaban as quickly as possible, but there was no way to tell how he might avoid a repeat of the last time that the truth had been revealed, or if Wormtail might react violently to being exposed.
Either way, he should probably hold off on exposing him until he could do it in front of the entirety of Hogwarts, and preferably in a way that wouldn't make anyone think that Ron had known from the get-go that there'd been something wrong with the rat.
There was no need to get himself into trouble if he could avoid it.
XXX
Hermione knew her parents had some worries over their daughter acting strangely, but there were things that she needed to do, and trying too hard in keeping up the facade would've ruined her preparations for it.
She wasn't sure how to deal with Harry and Ron, or the friendship that they would end up developing in the original time-line. But she supposed that it would click into place somehow. After all, she wasn't the desperate-to-prove-herself know-it-all of her youth anymore, and she was honest enough with herself to admit that she could probably never be distant with the two boys.
They'd grown up together, their personalities slotting together like pieces of a puzzle, and even if they didn't know why her pieces were needed to complete them anymore, she knew why their pieces were needed to complete her own.
It was generally considered normal to react positively to a person who was nice to you, and Hermione didn't really think she had it in her to be mean to them.
Either way, she supposed that she'd figure it out once she was on the train.
XXX
Of course they'd met on the train. Having already lived that particular reunion once before: Harry knew that as long as he found an empty compartment to sit in, Ron would find him; Ron knew that as long he kept looking, he'd be able to find Harry sitting on his own; and Hermione knew that as long as she helped Neville with finding his toad, she'd be able to stumble into meeting the two boys without issue.
Unfortunately for their various attempts to follow the past events, it'd been a very long time since either Harry or Ron had first met each other, and most of that fateful day decades ago when they'd first talked had long since disappeared into the haze of time. Still, they did their best, even if the conversation came out as awkwardly stilted as both boys tried to figure out what they'd actually talked about. This wasn't helped by the very simple fact that one person's stumbling would trip the other one up as well, as they fretted uselessly over if they'd failed to deliver their 'remembered line' correctly whenever the other forgot what their own response should be.
It was a mixture of nerve-wrecking pressure of an unfounded friendship, and the frustrated knowledge that they'd already managed to pull it off once before.
This continued until Hermione opened the compartment door to ask about Neville's toad.
Which was where things got a bit chaotic.
See, much in the same way as Ron knew math, and Harry knew muggle explosives, Hermione knew divination. And even if she'd never been particularly skilled with it, it'd been obvious that something was wrong with the scene she walked in on when Ron's aura was steel and plastic and a galaxy in the palm of his hand, and Harry was blood and alleyways and gunpowder and more scars than there were stars in the sky.
She might not have been able to see auras back when she'd been elven years old the first time around, but she was willing to bet all of the gold in Gringotts that her two best friends hadn't been anywhere near to having those auras back then. So she made the perfectly sensible conclusion that the two boys were imposters, and reacted accordingly.
Considering Harry's experiences, he responded as well as could be expected by having someone aim a wand at him, and Ron was left a bit in the dust as curses started flying all over the compartment. Hermione's shouted demand of revealing who they really were, and where her friends were, certainly didn't help his mental equilibrium.
Harry was too deep into an instinctive fight for survival to do much but register that the girl wearing Hermione's face hadn't stopped slinging curses even when she opened her mouth to yell about something else. He took this to mean that she was clearly skilled, and decided to up the intensity of his own spells.
Somehow in the madness of it all, Ron threw up a silencing ward in order to keep them out of trouble. Mostly because this made absolutely no sense at all, and he wanted to sort it out properly before some prefect came rushing into the fray and got their heads splattered over a wall.
Hermione was fighting with a lot more power than he remembered and a lot less of her carefully weighted precision. At the same time, Harry was being downright nasty in his spell-selection, fighting more like a cornered animal than the charismatic leader that Ron had once known.
What actually stopped the fighting was Ron's second precaution.
"Stupefy." He aimed his wand at Wormtail, making sure that the Death Eater wouldn't figure out a way to use this situation to somehow get the whole lot of them into trouble later.
Harry glanced over and readied spells to deal with a second person entering the fight, Hermione turned glaring eyes towards him and aimed her wand, and then they both kind of froze.
The rat in his hands was definitely Wormtail, and rather than join in the fight on either side, he'd decided to attack the Death Eater in their midst.
Things kind of sputtered down into something resembling calm at that.
Though they had to spend the entirety of the rest of the trip trying to figure out what the bloody hell was going on.
Needless to say, Malfoy never bothered to look into the compartment that had been warded to high heaven to keep anyone from listening in. Three different time-lines with three very different combinations of warding, mixed together in a bizarre mishmash of impenetrable privacy measures.
Apparently, regardless of from which time-line they were from, the Golden Trio had always been a very private bunch of people.
XXX
Minerva had seen many children about to be Sorted in her years, and generally they fell into five different categories.
The ones who were terrified of whatever was going to Sort them, the ones who were terrified that they would end up in the 'wrong' House, the ones who were terrified because they weren't sure if this whole Hogwarts-thing wasn't a huge prank on them, the ones who were too excited to worry, and the ones who were actually calm for one bizarre reason or another.
Sometimes the calmness stemmed from having been told of the Sorting Hat, other times it came from a degree of confidence bordering on arrogance, and once or twice it'd been because the student had either been too distracted to be apprehensive or excited or too uncaring. During her time of escorting the First Years into the Great Hall, she'd only encountered the fifth category a few times.
She supposed that it was largely due to the easily excitable tendencies inherent amongst children.
Still, it happened every now and then that she'd encountered a child who honestly wasn't worried about their Sorting.
This wasn't one of those days.
Glancing out of the corner of her eye at three particular students huddling together in a way that reminded her an awful lot of the Weasley twins-... Oh yes, that red hair was unmistakable. So, this was the youngest Weasley child, and two friends he'd made on the train? Hopefully he wouldn't be as much of a handful as his older brothers.
Sharp green eyes darting around behind large glasses, the boy with black hair kept his back to the wall in a way that somehow manged to look perfectly natural, despite Minerva's niggling impression that it was deliberate. The girl with frizzy brown hair seemed apprehensive as well, but from the way her back had straightened out, she would've been willing to bet that the young girl was determined not to let it show.
As for the youngest Mr Weasley... he didn't seem very affected at all by the importance of the moment, more interested in keeping track of his two friends than on listening to her own words.
Considering that one of his friends looked a bit like a wild animal halfway from deciding whether or not it was being cornered, and the other one was trying to suppress her nervousness into a sage-like calm by shutting out the world, Minerva was willing to admit that the boy keeping an eye on them might not be a bad idea.
She'd seen accidental magic go off more than once from one of the First Years getting a bit too close to the breaking point, and whilst she didn't approve of the secrecy that was often responsible for it, it was tradition by now. Nobody was to know of the Sorting Hat until the last moment.
Still, the black-haired boy looked vaguely familiar...
After a brief moment of contemplation, Minerva dismissed the thought. Familiar or not, she had a job to do.
XXX
"Granger, Hermione."
Harry and Ron exchanged glances as Hermione untangled herself from the two of them and made her way to the front of the Hall. They didn't know what they were going to be facing, not really.
The Sorting Hat could read their minds, and they weren't exactly eleven years old anymore. Whether the Hat would take offense to their 'infiltration' of the school they'd all graduated from at one point or another, or welcome them back with a shrug, neither of them knew. And that wasn't even including the possibility of the Hat trying to split them up.
Harry had done a great deal of things he wasn't proud of, and somewhere amidst the wars, he knew that he'd done quite a few things which his eleven year old self would've been horrified to learn that he actually was proud of.
Ron had held the fate of entire armies in the palm of his hand, he'd seen moons break apart under spell-fire on his orders, he'd caused some horrific things to happen, and he'd made choices that still tasted bitter in his mouth all these years later.
Hermione had wrestled with gigantic storms and destroyed an awful lot more than she'd ever intended, she'd seen mountains shatter under the feet of her enemies, and she'd seen the devastation her actions had done on the opposite side of the world as she twisted weather patterns and tsunamis into following her will.
Neither of them knew if they belonged in Gryffindor anymore. Harry worried over Slytherin, Ron worried over Ravenclaw, Hermione wasn't quite sure which House she was worrying about.
In the end, at least partly, they could breath a sigh of relief.
"GRYFFINDOR!"
The Hat was willing to let the charade of their accidental return to childhood continue unopposed.
XXX
"Potter, Harry."
Every pair of eyes in the entire Hall immediately locked onto the small form that began to move from the line of First Years.
He was small, and kind of disappointing. He didn't march up with perfect confidence, or make a big scene. He just walked up, put on the Hat, and sat there.
They hadn't really expected anything beyond that. It was just-... he was the Boy-Who-Lived! Of course they were a bit disappointed.
Then, after a very long time of silence as everyone waited for the verdict.
"GRYFFINDOR!"
The Great Hall exploded into noise.
XXX
"Weasley, Ron."
A number of people made faces as they realized that there would be another Weasley walking around Hogwarts now. Most present were hoping that this one wouldn't be anything like the twins, but otherwise didn't really think much of it one way or the other.
Not until the Hat shouted. "GRYFFINDOR!" And the boy sat down next to the Boy-Who-Lived.
Sure, they were both First Years and they'd probably met on the train or something, but a friendship between the two of them was certainly worth noting. The girl with frizzy hair was there too, the three of them huddling up in a way that spoke of a surprising amount of familiarity.
But then Dumbledore told them to eat, and most other thoughts and curiosities fled from their minds. They were quite hungry, after all.
XXX
Hermione remembered Harry slowly growing obsessed with the Veil of Death after the war finally finished. She remembered him experimenting time and time again to discover how it worked, and then suddenly he'd found something. A plane of existence, slightly off from their own, a place that seemed to consist entirely of empty fields.
It'd taken them years to make it habitable, though outside of Harry, they'd mostly just done it to see if they could. It wasn't until Harry made a ridiculous statement in front of the entirety Wizengamot that they started to realize why he'd been so determined to succeed at it.
For the last four decades the muggles had been growing closer and closer to finding them. Satellites who couldn't quite account for the curvature of the Earth with their images. It was still considered a pointless anomaly, something not worth bothering looking into, but it was really only a matter of time until somebody more determined to unearth the secrets of it started digging too deep. The wizarding world was on a time-clock, and the muggles-... the muggles were just as bad as the wizards and witches whenever they encountered somebody that was 'different'.
There was a clock ticking away their time until discovery, and nobody could truly discard the idea that once that discovery happened, there'd be another war. A war in which they'd be outnumbered almost a thousand-to-one. Magic could do many great things, and Harry was perfectly willing to admit that the wizarding world might walk away victorious despite the numbers, but he also pointed out that by that time it was highly likely that their planet would be uninhabitable by humans.
And as everyone frowned down at him, Harry pointed towards the plane of existence that they'd finally made habitable. Even if muggles could somehow figure out a way to reach them within that place, they wouldn't have any reason to do so. He suggested something that could delay another war for millennia, and despite protests, despite arguments and even some bloodshed, the wizarding world evacuated.
Then Harry did something that was either brilliant or insane. Probably both.
He trapped them in there. No, he trapped magic in there with them. He found a way to twist the laws of the world until magic could only exist on their side. And Hermione wasn't sure if she was furious or awed at him, because he'd just forever eliminated muggleborns.
When she'd confronted him about it, his answer had been somewhere along the lines of 'oops'.
But still, it was the only way to truly keep their worlds separate. To make sure that they wouldn't leave countless of muggleborns to fumble their way into magic of their own. To not force that horrific potential war onto the shoulders of innocent children.
Some people tried to sanctify him for that, until he'd completely lost his temper and hurled a mountain at them.
That was the moment they started to realize that having magic compressed into a single plane of existence had... 'interesting' side-effects. Namely, spells had a tendency to be a bit too enthusiastic about obeying their desires.
They'd enjoyed almost an entire decade of peace, before someone had let the power go to their head, and had tried to take over the world. After that, they'd been bouncing from war into the next, every time their warfare changing drastically.
What had once been shadowy skirmishes where nobody ever truly knew for certain which side anyone was on, was suddenly two groups standing on opposite sides of fields and hurling curses at each other like rain.
Subtlety didn't really work right anymore, not with the way magic could twist and compress at the drop of a hat. But in return, there was no need to warily hold back. And so when the different sides crashed together, it became more and more... 'chivalrous', with the groups demonstrating their powers in huge clashes of magic, rather than in actual violence.
Weather became just another tool to play with, and even the always-logical Hermione had resorted to picking up on some of the more quirky aspects of magic.
Harry had kick-started an age of magic unlike anything that had ever been seen. And he'd done it by accident.
If she hadn't been quite so fascinated with some of the things she could do now, Hermione might've tried to hex him for that.
XXX
Ron remembered Hermione bent over a notebook, scribbles and papers plastered all over the room, interspersed with heavy-looking books.
It'd started as a whim, it'd devolved into something very similar to madness. And by the time they finally managed to drag Hermione out of that room, she was already halfway to her final discovery.
The way magic could be explained through science.
Everyone knew that the world didn't work like that. Except... she could prove it. Hermione actually proved that magic would do exactly the things she believed it would do, whenever she followed a specific set of rules.
She turned magic into science, and somewhere along the way, they'd all started to understand. That hadn't stopped people from trying to assassinate her for doing what was quite possibly the closest thing to heresy that existed in the magical world, but it meant that when she managed to survive time and time again, people listened.
Except, if magic was science, then why shouldn't the muggles be able to find them? And that made a lot of people uncomfortable, because they'd grown quite used to being self-governing, and they didn't like the thought of taxes, or whatever else somebody might decide to force them to do.
So when it was suggested that they simply 'leave Earth behind for the muggles', there'd been a lot of serious thought put into the idea, when before it would've been laughed at and ridiculed.
The stars were endless, their planet was small, and-... well, there was nothing holding them back from leaving, was there?
So they'd left. Oh, it'd been a long process, and a lot of people had decided to simply stay on Earth where they'd been born, but the younger generations had left. Too curious about what was out there, too adventurous to be held back by some traditionalists.
And that's when things got exciting.
Hundreds of ships, all taking to the air at once, filled with magical animals of all kinds.
Many had been happy to leave those same ships and were content with solid ground underneath their feet at the closest planet which they could find, but some of them enjoyed the freedom. And then some idiot had started to become a space-pirate, and so they'd had to conscript a space-navy to deal with them, and all of a sudden there were countries who were disapproving of each other.
Fifteen years after the first ship had left Earth, war broke out. Fifteen years of a golden age unlike anything anyone had ever seen, fifteen years of an explosive increase in population, fifteen years of amazing discoveries in automaton-technology.
By the time the war started, eight-out-of-ten participants were magically animated constructs. And their armies numbered in millions.
XXX
Harry remembered Ron fiddling with a muggle radio, trying to figure out what had actually been done to develop the wizarding radio all those years ago.
It'd been a few years after the war, and nobody had really paid it much mind at all. Until Ron jokingly used the mostly-working prototype to spy on some of the muggle world leaders, just to see if he could.
It'd taken them most of a week to get confirmation of what he'd heard. It'd taken them almost another week to gather enough people to actually figure out what to do about it.
The muggle world was apparently not quite content with leaving them alone to do as they wished. Not after Voldemort and his reckless hunting of their people. Not after their citizens had been turned into collateral by the actions of a single madman.
No, the muggle world wanted answers, they wanted confirmations, they wanted safety protocols, they wanted to make sure that the magical world could never hide from them ever again.
Sure, it was a perfectly reasonable thing to want for the muggles, but it went against everything the magical world believed in. The separation was supposed to keep the muggles ignorant of them, not keep the magical world from learning about muggles.
The tables were starting to turn, and Harry watched Ron throw himself into trying to discover things that muggles already knew.
It took nearly a decade before war finally broke out. It was a short one. A brutal and violent one. And it set the mood for when the second war started barely three years after the ceasefire had been called.
Bombs dropped, on enemies and allies. The muggles were fighting tooth and nail, and the magical population was responding in kind.
Hogsmeade was abandoned, as was any other place of congregation. They couldn't bomb everywhere, and after what had happened to Durmstrang, nobody wanted to tempt fate by giving them a good target.
Spells and curses cut unholy swaths through innocent bystanders, bombs and guns did much the same.
It was a guerrilla war, where both sides were too terrified to hold back. And of course, then the different sides started to splinter.
Harry had never been entirely sure what had been offered to the wizards and witches who'd decided to join forces in killing off their own people. But he suspected that it might be something much akin to what the magical world had been offering the muggles who joined them.
Harry had tried to keep out of it, mostly. He'd never had much of a stomach for it. Hermione had been terrifying when she decided to fight, Ron had mostly tried to drown himself in inventions that melded muggle-science and magic into an unholy mess, not wanting to see what the war was doing to their best friend.
In the end, nobody could escape unscathed, and even the three of them started to fight. But they made sure that every person they killed was a combatant. That every person they assassinated was someone who'd without hesitation order their deaths in return.
They weren't saints, not by a long shot. But, in a world that had been almost completely ripped apart in a civil war stretching across every inch of the planet, they were better than most.
XXX
Neville wasn't entirely sure how to explain it, but the social dynamic between the three friends was weird.
Always sticking close to each other, almost seeming to treat talking with other people as some kind of sacrifice, and acting as if they'd always known each other whilst at the same time seemingly being utterly blindsided by one of them doing something 'out of the norm'.
Hermione liked books, and had a tendency to be somewhat overbearing whenever trying to teach another person. That was treated as 'normal' by the two boys. But then sometimes she'd freely admit to not understanding a specific magical phenomena at all, and kind of just shrug it off without a care. That was treated as 'abnormal' by the same two boys.
Harry was a leader, not exactly good with socializing even if he could inspire those around him almost on a whim, and with a belief that there was much good in the world. That was treated as 'normal' by the others. But then sometimes he'd point out that the easiest way to solve a certain problem would be to throw someone off a building, and be perfectly convinced of that being a sensible and ethical course of action. That was treated as 'abnormal' by the others.
Ron was an easy-going person who enjoyed quidditch and chess, didn't see the point in doing homework, and could put his foot in his mouth with eery precision. This was considered perfectly 'normal' by the others. But then sometimes he'd fill entire sheets of parchment with complicated math, and go into depths about some of the things Hermione simply shrugged off. And that was treated as 'abnormal' by the others.
Neville didn't know entirely how the trio had managed to judge which things were considered to be 'normal' and 'abnormal', but it didn't seem to have been a thing they'd properly sorted out in between them beforehand. Just something that had clicked into place, and then clashed jarringly as reality contrasted their expectations.
The worst things were the way that they'd sometimes be halfway out of their seats to do something Harry had suggested, only to suddenly realize that it was one of those 'abnormal' moments, and they actually ought to scold him for having overly violent tendencies. It kind of freaked Neville out.
They seemed to be decent enough people, most of the time, if a bit weird. But there always seemed to be some kind of barrier between 'the trio' and 'everyone else'. Neville wasn't sure what it might be, and he wasn't entirely sure if he really wanted to know either.
The way they sometimes talked, he got the feeling that there was a lot of secrets shared in between them, and some of those secrets appeared to be quite heavy.
Neville had enough troubles just keeping up in classes, without dragging himself into some kind of secret conspiracies.
XXX
Hermione fought on open fields with magic that probably wouldn't work quite right, Ron fought with armies built with technology that he'd have to spend decades just trying to replicate, and Harry fought in alleyways with petrol bombs.
It was obvious to all of them which one of them would have the best chance to win the war against Voldemort.
Unfortunately, whilst Hermione had learned of duelist protocols, and Ron had grown used to gigantic nth-dimensional chess-games with rare casualties, Harry had learned that a good way to kill a man was to make sure that the bullets would kill his family members if he tried to dodge.
Basically, Harry was their best shot at beating Voldemort, but Harry had issues.
And though they'd both loved one time-line's version of him – and were perhaps maybe growing awkwardly fond even of this one – they weren't ready to let his moral compass lead them off a cliff.
Which resulted in much bickering, a lot of attempts to drag Harry's usually very solid ethical beliefs into something that could actually be accepted by society as 'pessimistic and practical, but not on the level of a homicidal maniac'.
Harry didn't approve of the specific wording of their set goal, but grudgingly relented to it after he'd lost sixteen attempts in a row of being 'nicer' about dealing with hypothetical situations than either of them.
Both Hermione and Ron agreed that it more than a bit creepy to see the person who'd in both their worlds been a sort of paragon for decent folk everywhere be so perfectly unabashed about oftentimes doing the complete opposite now.
XXX
A/n: No, I didn't really have a plan beyond tossing these three timelines together into canon-grounds. And yeah, Ron went space-race, Hermione went medieval, and Harry went guerrilla warfare. Mostly because it made the whole lot of them awkward again, rather than let them breeze through it all. They're not the Golden Trio if they're not awkward about something.