Title: Godric's Hollow
Genre: Romance / Angst / Tragedy
Rating: T
Pairing: off-scene James x Lily
Spoilers: N/A
Summary: Would we have done anything differently? Could it have been stopped? Or was the die long ago cast? And if we could go back, alter its course, stop it from happening… would we?
Word Count: 2,333
Warnings: 3rd Year AU

Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to the great J.K. Rowling. Summary is from Heroes.

A/N: I have to stop sitting on ideas for years and years. I had this one as soon as I heard the Heroes line (literally years ago), and now with the release of Cursed Child, this has kind of been done. Ugh. But, that being said, the plot bunnies don't let me sleep until I write things down. So now instead of being an AR, it's an AU. And, to be fair, I think if any of us had murdered parents and our teacher opted to save a big magical bird with time magic, we've be sufficiently irritated and pissed off.

Harry knows, he knows, that this is a stupid, impulsive idea. He doesn't need Hermione to tell him that. Though she does, loudly and ardently.

"I can't even begin to explain to you why that wouldn't work, Harry."

"It's a hypothetical question, just humor me." He makes his eyes wide and innocent. Poor Harry Potter who grew up without magic, who doesn't intake the information in books like a drowning woman takes in air. How could he possibly know any different?

She sighs, eying him askance as if she didn't believe him. "Well the Time Turner simply isn't designed to deal with that many possibilities. The farther one travels back in time, the more lives are altered. For example, when we traveled back a few hours to save Buckbeak, there are only a few lives altered. His, Hagrid's, Sirius. Maybe one or two unforeseen others. But to go back in time 12 years… there's simply too many strings to unravel. Not only is your life, and the lives of your parents altered, but the entire wizarding world could be changed by that outcome." When she sees him frowning, she makes an exasperated noise. "If your parents never die, then Sirius never goes to Azkaban. Maybe Peter Pettigrew is caught. But those are small, brief good things… you could never know what kind of problems you could cause to achieve those." Her eyes bore into his. "Do you understand, Harry? You could ruin so many more lives."

He nods, agrees with her wholeheartedly on the outside. But on the inside, honestly? He is seething.

At no point in his life, did Harry ask to be The Boy Who Lived, to be the savior of the wizarding world. He didn't ask to be orphaned and sent to live in exile from the only world he'd ever felt at home, to be bullied and picked on and treated so unfairly by the only family he had ever known. All he wanted, all he ever wanted, was a family who loved him, which he could love in return.

Who was the Order to tell him it was better this way? How could they possibly know that? They never told him anything of importance. He'd never even know about them if it wasn't for Sirius, who Dumbledore had also chosen to keep a secret from him. So did Ron's family. Was all he good for was the death of his parents?

Somehow that didn't seem fair.

He reached into his pocket after Hermione had left the common room and pulled out the Time Turner that somehow no one had noticed was missing yet. It glinted in the firelight of the empty room, reflecting golden shadows across the stone walls. His eyes were far away as he came to his decision and, with a calculated number of turns, rotated the hourglass.

A feeling of triumph suffused him as the room faded from his view.

Hogwarts 12 years ago looked almost the same. The bags the students had were dated, the haircuts archaic. But the same uniforms, the same textbooks, pretty much the same teachers wandering the halls. It was, thankfully, between classes, so all Harry had to do was sneak out the front door, down to the village the fifth years all kept talking about, and make his way to Godric's Hollow. Wherever that was.

No big deal, right? Just that nobody ever thought to take him to visit his parent's graves or the house where he was born or anything. Why would he ever want the chance to say goodbye to their tombstones? That would be crazy.

The journey took him over a month. He couldn't Apparate. He had only the money in his pocket (since it wasn't like he could go to his family's vault now). But he was pretty good off of living off of nothing, thanks to the Dursleys, so he made his money last, scrounging for food, making his way on foot, sleeping wherever he could. Making sure no one saw James Potter's doppelganger wandering the streets like a homeless man.

When he first saw the sign for Godric's Hollow, he almost didn't believe he was finally there. It was another few weeks, by his count, until the night Voldemort came for his parents and changed his life forever. All he could do was sit tight… and wait.

All things considered, it was very anticlimactic, his altering of the future and his saving of his parent's life. When he woke on the night he'd dreamt about since he was a child, he knew it was coming. And when Voldemort slid from the shadows like the snake that he was, Harry crouched down and, with a whispered "Expecto Patronum" into this wand, let Prongs burst through into the night like moonlight made tangible.

He saw Voldemort straighten with a start, and, as expected, assume that the patronus was James Potter. He shouted out a Killing Curse and the stag faded from view. When Voldemort realized what had happened, it was already too late.

Lights in the house flickered on, voices carried through the door, a blast of sparks shot up like a beacon into the dark, night sky. Voldemort stared at it for a long moment, before the sound of Apparating Order members started to fill the quiet. Then, with a hiss, his vanished.

Harry waited several long moments, until the grounds were flooded with witches and wizards of the light, until Dumbledore himself popped into view. Only, then, when he knew it was safe, did he flip his Time Turner to travel forward and flip it over… and over… and over…

The world he materialized in, was not like the world he had left.

There were so many people at Hogwarts. Harry had always thought of the school as crowded, but really each House year only had less than twenty people. That was barely 80 people per year. Not that many, when you think about the size of most Muggle schools. But now… now it was a theme park. There were students all over the place, more than he could count. When he glanced around, the school was even bigger than he remembered.

He grinned as he began looking around for his friends. With a glance around the grounds, he spotted Ron's vibrant red hair with a group of Gryffindors. Harry called out to him with a wave, but stopped at the flabbergasted look on Ron's face.

"What's up, Ron?"

He glanced askance at a gaggle of Gryffindors, some of whom Harry recognized, and some of whom he didn't. "Uh… nothing?"

"Where's 'Mione at?"

Ron blinked at him. "How should I know?" Before Harry could answer, he continued. "Why are you even talking to me?" It was Harry's turn to blink in confusion. "And what Gryffindor did you steal that tie off of?"

He frowned. "What kind of tie should I be wearing?"

Not all the time traveling in the world prepared for Ron to answer with, "Slytherin."

It took Harry three solid hours in ensconced in the library to figure out what went wrong.

Here's what Harry had thought was going to happen:

He would go back in time, stop Voldemort from murdering his parents. So he wouldn't be the victim of an attempted Killing Curse, he'd never be the Chosen One. He would get to live a normal, magical life with his parents, Sirius (who would be exonerated of his crimes by his parents), and Remus (who would be fine as long as Sirius wasn't imprisoned). The Order or Dumbledore or someone else would deal with Voldemort when he lift Godric's Hollow after his parents set off an alarm.

Here's what actually happened:

James and Lily had sounded an alarm and the cavalry had arrived. But instead of Voldemort being killed right there, or captured. He'd let lose a huge blast of power and vanished. All the adults had thrown up shields, but young Harry was caught in the blast, giving him his iconic scar in this timeline, too. But since that plan didn't work, Voldemort took it to mean that Harry wasn't who the prophecy was referring to so he went searching for a more viable possibility. He found Neville Longbottom and basically repeated the events of Harry's original childhood with Neville.

Neville grew up as the Chosen One, living with people who he wasn't even related to in the Muggle world, with dead parents and a grandmother who wasn't allowed to know where he was. Harry grew up with two loving parents, and a godfather who adored him. But apparently that spell blasting over him as a child left a remnant of the Dark Lord in him, and he was sorted into Slytherin, gleefully thinking about telling his godfather about how he'd been sorted into his family's House. Maybe it was that sliver of Salazar Slytherin. Or maybe the hat knew Harry had altered the past all for his own gain. Neville and Ron remained in Gryffindor where they'd always been. Hermione was a Ravenclaw, where Harry always suspected she should have been, if not for the Sorting Hat's forewarning sense that she needed to look after one Harry Potter.

Judging from what he'd gleaned, Neville got into a lot less trouble than Harry did as The Chosen One, whatever that meant. Maybe it was meant to be like this all along. Harry seemed as at home in Slytherin as he'd once been in Gryffindor. Instead of being the hated child of James Potter, he was the Potions prodigy son of Lily Evans. Snape even seemed to like him. Malfoy seemed to no longer hate him, they were even teammates on the Quidditch team. Malfoy playing at admirable Chaser position.

But Neville, with his calm disposition and sweet demeanor was not one to fight back as ardently as Harry had been, it seemed. He got into far less trouble, because he didn't go looking for trouble. The Sorcerer's Stone was stolen by Voldemort his first year because Neville felt no need to stick his nose where it was not expressly invited. Harry wasn't even sure he would have made it through the tasks without Ron and Hermione. Dumbledore and a hoard of witches and wizards (Harry's parents and godfather among them) retrieved the Stone, but there was no telling how much of the Elixir Voldemort had stockpiled for himself. He could, theoretically, be immortal for the foreseeable future. Without Malfoy's need to pry into Harry's life, Tom Riddle's diary never found its way to Hogwarts. So still no one knew about the Chamber of Secrets and, to Harry's knowledge, a giant basilisk was still living underneath the school, only one cursed object away from waking and wreaking havoc on the students. Sirius never had to escape Azkaban, so Ron still had a pet rat that was actually an Animagus.

Harry sat in the library for a long, long time, until he was kicked out. He luckily arrived at the Slytherin dorm at the same time as another student and memorized the password. Luckily, James had still bequeathed his invisibility cloak to his son, so Harry sprinted out to the Great Lake to brood.

The way he saw it, he had two choices: The-Boy-Who-Lived choice, and the selfish choice. He fiddled with the Time Turner as he thought.

The-Boy-Who-Lived choice, the choice that was the unselfish, the heroic choice, meant that he went back again, and changed everything back the way it was before. He would have no parents, only know his godfather for a brief time. But Neville would have his life back, his grandmother. Hermione would have her friends, Ron and Harry, back. Voldemort wouldn't have the Sorcerer's Stone, and no basilisk would be waiting to strike.

But the selfish choice… the selfish choice meant Harry grew up surrounded by magic and love. He could fly a broom before he could walk. His holidays were full of laughter and love. His parents, Remus, Tonks, Sirius. He had a family that loved him no matter the House he was sorted into, he had a home to go back to that he loved over the summer. He was even friends with some of his Slytherin year mates and, judging from the photos stuck above his bed, the Quidditch team had spent last winter holiday at the Malfoy Manor. He looked happy in the photos. Carefree.

He knew what choice he should make. He knew what Hermione would tell him. He could probably assume his parents and Sirius and Dumbledore would all say the same. But they'd never lived with the Dursely's, never dreamed of their parents being murdered, never faced death year after year.

So, while he knew what choice he should make…

… he stopped twirling the Time Turner in his hands abruptly, cocked his arm back, and hurled it into the lake…

… he also knew what choice he was going to make.