Disclaimer: I don't own anything...blah...blah...blah.
I'm soooooooooooooo sorry for the lon wait! I know it's been more than a month, but it wasn't completely my fault, bit I don't want to blame all of it on other people, let's just say, that there was a little beta "confusion" which is solved now.
I would like to deciate this chapter to my beta, x-Xanti-x who betad this for me in less than a day! Thank you so much!
Now, on with the story!
An encounter with the ood badguy
Time went by quickly, most of the student almost have totally forgotten about the time travellers and the first shock of them being there slowly disappeared, mostly because the older Harry and Hermione decided to stay in their quarters for most of the time, not even going down for the meals.
It was soon time for the first Hogsmeade weekend and the younger Harry was not happy at all. Of course he pretended to be, but he failed miserably. Hermione and Ron even offered to stay with him in the castle. Harry wanted desperately to accept their suggestion, but he couldn't, so he continued to pretend that he was all right and let his friends go, smiling until they disappeared form his sight.
As he wandered the hallways of Hogwarts, he was thinking about Hogsmeade and his friends, wishing he could be with them. He was completely oblivious to the outside world as he was walking, he only snapped out of his thoughts when he heard Professor Lupin call after him.
He turned around and found his professor in the corridor, before an opened door, which, Harry assumed, was his office.
"I was just about to make a tea. Would you care to join me?" asked the professor smiling at him. He could only nod as he followed his professor into his room.
While they were waiting for the tea to be ready they talked about a lot of things and Harry was relieved to find out that the professor did not think of him as a weak person at all when the not-so-old man told Harry his reasoning for stopping the young one fight against the boggart.
As they were slowly drinking the hot tea, the topic slowly got to the feast at the beginning of the year and the mysterious arrival of the most unexpected people.
"It seems they don't like talking that much. Or showing themselves in public, for that matter." said Lupin, taking a sip from his cup. Harry laughed out at this point and told the professor about his encounter with the two.
"Hermione is all right. I mean the older one, but that man…not Harry, 'cause he's nothing like me. He is not completely sane." said Harry.
"Don't judge from so little," lectured Remus, "you don't know what he went through and believe it or not, he is just like you in many ways. I watch him carefully when they decide to show themselves. Even though he tries to hide it, he has his moments when he is just like you, like teasing Hermione, or smiling at her. These are little things, but they show that he is still a human being with feelings. And his Hermione constantly tries to make that Harry come out. The one who is so much like you." Said the elder one.
"You know, sometimes you are so much like your father. In more then one way." said Lupin, taking the student by surprise.
"You knew my parents?" whispered the younger one.
"Yeah, I did. Once." answered the professor, obviously slipping into some old memories. Harry seeing this, and the sad look on his teacher's face, decided to let the matter slip.
'For now, at least', he thought.
Harry was about to ask another question about the opinion of his professor on the two time travellers when Snape came out of the fireplace with a cup in his hand. Harry saw it more convenient to leave, so he thanked the tea and left the two professors on their own, thinking about his conversation with Lupin and the more then suspicious potion in Snape's hand, but decided to leave that piece of information for later, when he could discuss it with his friends.
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Harry Potter was not a happy man. Ever since he had arrived in the past he had been trying to find his godfather, having no success at all.
"I can't believe it!" He shouted in frustration, circling the room, trying to find out what was wrong with him, but he couldn't find a thing. Hermione had been watching him for the last hour and was getting tired of doing nothing.
She was surprised too, as they had no problem with tracking anyone, except for Voldemort in the last few years. She tried to find a reason for their lack of success, too, but had no more luck than her husband.
"It makes no sense at all. One time he is somewhere and in the next at someplace completely different. As far as we know he should be somewhere around here." said Hermione after a while. "Maybe it's some kind of a spell neither of us know? Is it possible for him to use the same spell you and Voldemort use?"
It was a complicate spell Harry picked up sometime around his training. He hadn't talked about it much, but from the little information Hermione was able to get out of him, the spell basically hid one's magical signature, preventing others to find him or her. The only problem with it was that you had to be very powerful to be able to maintain it, as it took a lot of energy and concentration to keep it up every time, even while sleeping.
"Nope. Even though Sirius was a very powerful man, he hadn't had enough power to maintain it. And even if he did, it wouldn't be possible for him, or anyone for that matter, to send his signal to different parts of the world." said Harry, taking the role of Hermione as the know-it-all for a minute.
"You know, it's Halloween." started Hermione, deciding to change the subject for the moment.
"Yeah, and…?" asked Harry not sounding interested at all.
"And!? It's Halloween for God's sake! You know, big feast and all. Ring a bell?"
"Yeah, big feasts, happy people, parents dying, the Triwizard Tournament and the list goes on. Nothing happy has ever happened to me at Halloween. This year won't be an exception." said Harry bitterly.
"Nothing good!? You remember first year, right? A big troll in the girls' bathroom, saving a bushy hared girl and becoming friends with her. This is an unpleasant memory for you?"
"No. Of course no…" started the man, but his wife interrupted him.
"Or the church, the same bushy hared girl in a white dress? I can't believe you forgot about it!" shouted Hermione, completely losing it.
Of course she loved her husband more than anything in the world, but sometimes she simply had enough. Deep down she knew that he did not forget about their anniversary at all. She was angry with herself for being so selfish, when people out there, in their own time, were dying, angry with Harry for playing the part of the martyr, but most of all angry with the world for expecting Harry to be the one, for making his childhood a living hell and for transforming him into the man he was now, barely showing any emotions, withdrawn and thinking he didn't deserve happiness.
"I'm sorry." Started Harry but Hermione cut him off.
"No, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have shouted at you like that. It's just so maddening sometimes. You having the burden of saving the world on your shoulders and I'm just too selfish. I want all of you just for myself and I'm afraid of losing you, too." said the young woman, sitting down on the couch and letting her tears escape.
She felt the familiar arms of her husband snake around her as he sat down next to her, whispering calming words into her ear. He slowly turned her face towards is own and gently kissed the still sobbing girl.
After a few minutes of kissing, when oxygen started to be a need they pulled away, but stayed close to each other, foreheads touching.
"And I'm sorry for being an arse to you and for ignoring you most of the time. I know that you're just trying to help me and you've helped me more than you know since I came back, but it's just so hard sometimes after…after everything." Finished the man who had no time to be a child.
"Tell me about it. It would be so much easier if you told someone about it. The things that happened to you there. Wherever you were." said Hermione.
"I…." started Harry when they heard a knock from the entrance of their common room. As Harry stood up to open the door Hermione rearranged herself, quickly wiping her tears away from her face.
When Harry opened the door he came face to face with none other than his old head of house, Professor Minerva McGonagall.
"What do you want?" asked Harry quickly going back into his don't-mess-with-me mode.
"I just wanted to ask if we should expect you at the Great Hall for the feast tonight." Answered the old lady, obviously not happy with her old student's attitude towards her.
At the exact moment Harry said 'no', Hermione replied with a 'yes'. The old professor looked back and forth between the two, wondering which one of them to believe.
"We'll be there, Minerva, don't worry." said Hermione at last, receiving a death glare from her husband, to which she only replied with a sweet smile.
"Then see you at the feast" said McGonagall, obviously in hurry to leave the two alone.
When the older professor left, Harry turned back to his wife angrily. He waited a few minutes and calmed himself down before asking:
"Why did you say yes? I thought we agreed on keeping a low profile and on staying as far away from the students and teachers of the school as humanly possible."
"No. You were the one agreeing on it. You left me no place to argue. It's our anniversary today and I'm not planning on spending it with you not even paying attention to me. Every single year we failed to celebrate it because Voldemort always decided to do something right on Halloween. I refuse, you hear me? Refuse to spend this evening looking for his bloody soul pieces. Here we have the opportunity to rest a little, away from the war and everything and I'm planning on making this time, as short as it may be, useful. You do whatever you want, but I'll be there." And with that, she left for her own living quarters, leaving a stunned Harry behind her.
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It was almost 7 o'clock, the feast was bound to start in just a few minutes, but Harry still sat on his bed, eyeing his dress robe. Or rather the best robe of his. The truth was that he only had two dark green robes to wear. All the others were black. After his training, he preferred his black jeans and T-shirt. Rather dark and scared the shit out of people. When he told these reasons behind the black to Hermione she said he acted childish and she would have been right if those had been the real reasons. But they weren't.
He just couldn't bring himself to tell the truth to Hermione. He never lied to her. Only left out some things. Like the time when he was sent to kill some or another muggle. It was part of his training. To kill, to take another's life without hesitation or regret. He told her about his training with weapons and in wandless magic and some other, not really important things. But he left out a great deal of that torture.
The endless hours of torture with muggle and wizard weapons too. Or his weeks closed in a dark room with two Dementors, no less. No. She didn't need to know about it. Not yet, not ever.
Now he was debating whatever to go or not to go to the feast. When Hogwarts was a school, he always loved those feasts, but so much changed ever since.
In the end he decided that Hermione wanted him to go, so he would go, it was their anniversary after all.
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The feast was about to start and Hermione sat alone at Gryffindor table. Even though Prof. Dumbledore offered her a place at the staff table she didn't feel like chatting with her old professors. After their argument she was hoping that Harry would show up, but after 4 hours of waiting she gave up hope.
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"What do you think? Why is she sitting there all alone?" asked Hermione to Ron and Harry, looking in the direction of the future herself. "She seems sad. Shouldn't we go over there and…I don't know…Just talk to her?"
"Well, if you want, we can…" started Harry but couldn't finish his sentence as the doors of the hall opened and a 24-year-old Harry strode into it, looking for something, or rather, someone.
After a minute his eyes rested on a lone figure at the end of the Gryffindor table. When he spotted the figure and their eyes locked the older Harry did something that only 4 people had seen him do since they arrived: smiled, and Hermione smiled back.
He went towards the woman, sat down next to her, and leaned in to give her a kiss. Or so it seemed, as he, in the last moment missed her lips and cheeks completely and whispered something into her ear.
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When the doors of the hall burst open and Hermione looked up she was surprised to see Harry standing there, and in his green robes, no less. For a minute she was terrified that maybe Harry has forgotten where they were, as he was about to kiss her, but in the last moment he seemed to come to his senses and pretended to whisper something into her ears.
After the initial shock of the appearance of the time travellers the feast started and continued with the usual chatting and laughing of the students and staff, up until there was a sudden shout from the Gryffindor table, which seemed to come from the general direction of the two 24-year-old people. Every single eye in the hall turned towards them, but they seemed oblivious to anyone other than each other.
"I can't believe we have forgotten about it!" said Hermione a little too loudly. "It's Halloween, of course!" continued the girl.
"It's high time she noticed," came a whisper from the Slytherin table, but the older Hermione didn't even bother to look up to find who had said it; she suddenly got up from her chair along with her husband. Without another word they left the hall in hurry, leaving the whole school confused.
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The two hastily went up the stairs and ran all the way to the portrait of the Fat Lady, arriving right on time to see a black dog disappear around the corner of the hallway. They quickly followed the dog, not even looking at the shredded portrait of the Fat Lady.
After a good ten minutes, they reached the Entrance Hall and both were relieved to find the doors of the great Hall closed, so no one noticed them leaving the castle. They knew that Sirius would leave the castle in another and longer way because he wouldn't want to risk the possibility of being seen.
They decided to wait for the animagus at the Shrieking Sack, as they were very well aware of him hiding there.
They disappeared right on time to avoid being seen by the big, grim-looking dog. They ran all the way to the Shrieking Sack, not daring to utter a word in fear of being heard.
Not long after they arrived, they heard the footsteps of someone, or rather something. The moment the dog came into view from the trap door, Harry got him from behind and held him steadily.
"Well, well, well. Aren't you a cute grim?" said Hermione with an evil grin evident on her face, looking right into the fearful eyes of the dog.
"Look, what we have here, Hermione. Sirius Black, the one and only Padfoot afraid of his own godson." at this the dog stopped his struggle to free himself and turned his head around just to come face-to-face with the exact replica of James Potter, his best friend, only with the eyes of none other than Lily Potter. At this moment the dog did something neither Harry nor Hermione had ever seen a dog do: fainted.
Thank you for reading this chapter and don't forget to review!
My beta has the next chapter, so I hope I'll be able to update soon.
I never planned to ask questions abut the direct story here, but after asking at least 5 people and still don't having the answer I decided to do otherwise. So here is my question:
Should or shouldn't Hermion get pregnant? Please answer me in you reviews!