Harry blinked and shook his head to clear it. How could he be daydreaming on a day like this? In just a few hours, he would be setting foot in Hogwarts for the first time...
A knock sounded at the compartment door and Harry jumped. Colors seemed to swirl in the back of his mind, and he shook his head again. "Yes?" he answered politely.
The round-faced boy who had been looking for his toad on the train platform peeked his head in. "Is it all right if I sit in here? Everywhere else is full."
"Sure!" Harry said, moving Hedwig's cage to the side to make room. The boy flopped down onto a seat in relief. A shape paused outside the compartment, then continued on.
"Thanks." He looked down at his hands, which were full of a very large toad, and hastily put the toad down on the seat next to him before sticking out a hand. "I'm Neville Longbottom."
"Harry Potter," Harry said, somewhat gingerly taking Neville's hand. Neville's jaw dropped.
"Really?" he asked keenly. His eyes flicked upward to Harry's forehead, an expression Harry was sure he was going to have to get used to. He nodded, smiling as Neville's eyes grew wide. "Wow. I knew you were my age but I never...I mean, I didn't think..." Neville seemed to be thinking of too many words to sort out which ones he wanted to say, and so fell silent.
The toad croaked, then jumped from the seat to the floor.
"Trevor, no!" Neville grasped for the toad, which leaped deftly to avoid the boy's hands. Harry shot a hand out and managed to pin one of the toad's legs to the floor. It croaked reproachfully at him as Neville gathered it up. "Thanks," he said, tucking the toad into the front of his jumper. "He's forever trying to get away from me, I don't know why..."
"He's big," Harry said, more for something to say than anything else. Neville beamed.
"My Great Uncle Algie got him for me, first time I did magic," he said proudly, puffing out his chest (although that could have just been Trevor shifting position). "My Gran was worried I didn't have any magic at all, see, and so Algie kept trying to scare it out of me."
"Did you grow up in a family of wizards?" Harry asked, his interest piqued. Neville nodded.
"It was mostly just me and Gran, but other family'd come around rather often. I'm the youngest in the family, people were always stopping by to see how I was coming along...I heard you grew up with Muggles, what was that like?"
"Awful," Harry responded, a little more honestly than he might have. "First time I did magic I got shut in the cupboard under the stairs and didn't get fed for two days."
"No way," Neville said.
"I mean, not all Muggles are like that," Harry amended quickly. "My aunt, though, apparently she hated my mum and dad for being magic...she and my uncle tried to keep me coming to school."
"They tried to keep Harry Potter from learning magic?" Neville asked, his eyes round as saucers.
"Well, it's not like I'm...like I'm famous or whatever, in the Muggle world," Harry pointed out. "I reckon Muggles don't know anything about Voldemort or - what?" For Neville's eyes had just bulged and the color had drained from his plump cheeks.
"You say his name?" Neville asked in a half whisper. Harry recalled Hagrid's extreme reluctance to say the name, and determined that perhaps it wasn't one of the giant man's idiosyncrasies after all.
"I never knew I shouldn't," he said somewhat glumly. "I don't know anything about the magic world, my aunt and uncle tried hard as they could to keep me from it. I bet I'll be rubbish at school."
"No, that'll be me," Neville said in a matching tone of despondence. "Gran didn't even really want to give me dad's wand, but decided that was what he'd want..." he trailed off as though realizing what he was saying.
"Are your parents dead too, then?" Harry asked sympathetically. Neville squirmed.
"Well..."
A knock on the door of the compartment made them both jump, and an expression that looked very much like relief washed over Neville's face.
The red-haired boy from the train station looked in. "All right if I join you? My brothers are driving me mad."
Harry glanced at Neville, who shrugged. "Sure," he said.
"Thanks." The boy came the rest of the way in and sat next to Harry. "I'm Ron. Ron Weasley."
"Neville Longbottom," Neville supplied.
"Harry Potter," Harry said. Ron's face split into a grin.
"So they weren't pulling my leg! I thought it might have been one of Fred and George's jokes, you see...you're really Harry Potter!"
"That's going to get old very fast," Harry observed to no one. Ron immediately reddened.
"Sorry," he mumbled.
"No!" Harry said hurriedly. "It's no problem, really, I'm just...not used to it. I guess I'll need to get that way."
Hedwig hooted loudly, easing the tension slightly. Ron looked impressed.
"That's a gorgeous owl," he said with a tinge of jealousy. "He yours?"
"She. Her name's Hedwig. She was a birthday present from Hagrid," Harry responded.
"Isn't he the gamekeeper at school?" Neville asked. Harry nodded.
"He was the one who finally told me about Hogwarts and that I'm a wizard and all that," he explained. "I had no idea until he told me, about anything. And when he saw how my aunt and uncle were treating me, and found out I didn't know anything about magic or any of it, he took me to Diagon Alley and got me Hedwig."
"Lucky," Ron said. "All I've got is Scabbers." From his pocket he drew a very worn-looking rat, which didn't wake up from its nap and continued to hang limply from Ron's hand.
Harry felt a sudden unnatural urge to grab the rat and throw it out the window of the moving train. Colors danced behind Harry's eyes and he blinked them away. As defenestrating a stranger's pet rodent is not the best way to kindle a friendship, Harry ignored the impulse and settled in to the somewhat stilted but congenial conversation of people who are rapidly becoming friends.
The rest of the day passed in a blur; Harry only clearly remembered a bushy-haired girl named Hermione bursting into their compartment to chastise them after Draco Malfoy, the pale blond boy he had met in Diagon Alley, had nearly spurred them all into a fistfight. Snatches of memory wafted through his mind as he settled into his four-poster bed in his dormitory to sleep; he had been pleased when Neville and Ron were both sorted into Gryffindor with him, though a niggling worm of doubt still reminded him that the Sorting Hat had wanted to place him in Slytherin, and images of the inside of the castle kept forming and disappearing as his mind tried to process all the events of the day.
He could hear the other four boys in the first-year dormitory settling themselves into sleep; Ron snored softly in the bed on the right, and Neville turned over, rustling his sheets in the bed on the left. Harry smiled, snugged his head a little deeper into his pillow, and was about to drift off...
Could he have attributed a sound to the sensation he felt, it would have been the slamming of a very large steel door. The colors that had been whirling through his head the entire day firmly attached themselves, shocking him awake and disorienting him completely.
His brain stopped gibbering and Harry looked down at himself. Oh. Right. He was eleven years old now. He found it hard to believe he had ever been quite this small, even with evidence before him.
"Harry?" came Neville's whisper. "Did you -"
"Yes," Harry whispered back. "Common room." He didn't want to talk where Dean, Seamus, and Ron could overhear should they wake up.
In pajamas (Harry was amused to once again see Neville in his teddy bear flannels), Harry and Neville quietly stole down to the common room, pausing to make sure it was empty before taking a seat by the fire, which flared up again once it knew there was someone nearby. Harry pulled his wand from his sleeve and muttered "Muffliato" to ensure they would not be overheard.
"That was a bit intense, no?" Neville asked. Harry chuckled.
"A bit like a stiff Sobering Draft after a long night of it," he agreed. "So...think we're done here? I mean, we've met on the train first now, and..." he wrinkled his brow. "That's...odd."
"The memories?" Neville asked. "Yeah. It's almost like deja vu. I remember everything that happened in my first year the first time...and now I remember everything that happened in this first year, and it seems almost...truer. Like it's the proper memory, which I suppose it is now." He shook his head. "It's going to take some getting used to." He considered for a moment. "Still can't believe I let Hermione use fire on that Devil's Snare."
"It was either that or be strangled to death," Harry pointed out. "Still can't believe you caught the key. That's a real bruise to a Seeker's pride, you know."
"Maybe you shouldn't have taught me to fly."
"I'll take your point into consideration," Harry said wryly. "At any rate, if we're done here...why are we still here? Why not just poof back to where we came from?"
"I...don't actually think we're done," Neville said slowly. "I can't really remember anything beyond summer hols between first and second year, aside from what happened in our own timeline, and the two timelines do not jive and it's actually giving me a bit of a headache." Neville kneaded his temples and Harry had to agree; trying to remember his second year at school and reconcile it with this new first year made him want to go cross-eyed. Neville opened one eye suddenly. "Do you still have that flask?"
Harry stared at Neville. "I have no idea. I put it in my school bag when Dumbledore gave it to me, but I don't own that bag yet. Where would it be? For that matter, why would I even have it at all? I didn't get to keep my socks or my wedding band."
"I just get the feeling that if Dumbledore was really supposed to be our guide, he'd have taken the whole bodily transport thing into account, and made that flask stick to us like glue," Neville said. "Your trunk, maybe?"
"I'll go check," Harry said dubiously, "But I already unpacked it, and it wasn't there."
He tiptoed up to the dormitory and probably shouldn't have been surprised to see white light shining from between the cracks of the trunk at the foot of his bed. Quietly as he could, he opened the trunk, removed the flask, shut the lid, and stole back downstairs.
"It wasn't in there before," he insisted as he handed it to Neville. Neville, rather wisely, said nothing as he wrenched out the stopper.
The now-familiar white and green lines flew out of the flask, but not all of them - only a small cross-section, large enough to span the couch but not enough to fill the room as they had done in Dumbledore's office. Harry wasn't sure how he recognized his own line, as it was identical to the several dozen others that had emerged, but he knew which one was his. Frustratingly enough, however, that was the only thing he knew as he looked at the lines; the rest of it made as much sense as a day-old spiderweb.
"Here," Neville said, pointing. "This was where things were different. The white line changed, you and I met first...and that changed the whole school year, I stuck to you like glue, even through to the end of the year..." he trailed his finger along the lines, then stopped. "Here's another diversion. Looks like..." his eyes scanned the other lines as Harry studied the point beneath Neville's finger, trying to comprehend the mass of whorls and intersections that Neville seemed to be able to navigate with ease. "Just before second year, we meet up at Diagon Alley - that's new, or at least it was new, looks like it actually happened already - will happen already - damn tenses, you know what I mean." He moved his finger forward just slightly. "Middle of second year...what did we do second year again?"
"Basilisk," Harry said. "Saved my future wife from certain doom. Killed a horcrux while we were at it. You know, the usual."
"Right," Neville said, nodding. "Well, this go round I'm in on the plans with the Polyjuice Potion but I stay clear of the actual brewing, as I'm sure that even being near it will cause it spontaneously combust..."
"How can you tell all this just by these lines?" Harry interrupted.
"Hm?" Neville asked, cocking his head to one side. "Oh. You've got to touch them - here -" he reached out to grab Harry's hand and placed his fingers on his green timeline.
Harry blinked in surprise, more at the familiarity of Neville touching him than the vague impressions of something that was almost like memory from the line. But then it made sense, didn't it? Even after changing just one event, he felt more...companionable toward the round-faced boy holding his hand over the wispy lines, as though he'd known him for much longer than he had.
Neville suddenly seemed to realize what he was doing and let go, though not hurriedly. As he did, the impressions of memory fled.
"Hey - it went away," Harry said. "Do that again."
Neville raised an eyebrow, but grabbed Harry's hand again. Harry nodded.
"Apparently you literally have to hold my hand to get me to understand them," he said. He studied the pattern for a bit, then sat down on the couch. "I think I'll just leave you to it, if it's all the same to you."
"Right. Anyway." Neville turned back to the timelines, one hand tracing the white and one the green. "It looks like we're actually going to have to shepherd events into going the way they need to go. We don't have to go and change every single little thing, but these big revisions...like here, where I go down into the Chamber of Secrets with you and Ron...it seems like every big revision we make is going to make the white timeline more like the green one."
"But how do we know when we're done?" Harry asked. "We can only see a couple months at a time."
Neville shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe we'll just show back up in our time again."
The conversation lapsed. Neville made to put the stopper back in the flask and the lines obediently retreated into it.
"To bed, then?" Harry asked. Neville nodded.
"No telling where we'll end up tomorrow. Or when. May as well get some rest while we can."