Disclaimer: I am not JK Rowling and nobody has ever mistaken me for her. I am merely playing with the world and the people that she has created.
Thank you so much to everyone for your lovely comments, alert requests etc. I hope you enjoy this new chapter, too!
3. The Greenhouse
Hermione was a bit of an expert on Time Turners. She had relied on one for a year and of course she had studied them for fun while she was doing that. Ron tried to listen to every snippet of information with which she regaled him, but the bits he was really interested in were how to get to February 1978 and how to get back again.
The Marauders, the ones who'd made the Map, they would have been at school then. His own parents would have been long gone and raising babies. He tried to work out whether his heroic dead uncles, Gideon and Fabian, might be where (or was it when?) he was going. He thought they'd be too old.
Hermione had finally worked out that he wasn't listening anymore. She made him repeat back to her the most important of her instructions. They had got to the cupboard and through the open door he saw all the big egg-timer things on their shelves.
"Looks like I'm off."
"Yes, you'd better hurry," Hermione said.
"Not really, whatever time I leave here I'll get there at the same time, and we already know what time I get back here 'cos we've seen me." Ron looked at the empty staircase and it looked ideal to him, so he asked, "What about a kiss for luck?"
"Honestly! Is that all you think about? You don't know what you're going to walk into. It wouldn't be a good idea for you to arrive in 1978 feeling, um, distracted."
"Why don't you ever spend any time thinking about it?" Ron grumbled. "Don't you think I'm sexy at all?"
"Not now, Ronald. Get on with it." She pushed him into the cupboard.
l8l
Neville had worked it out by now. He had turned time in the wrong direction. He was a fool, just as Snape had always told him he was. He would have to go back and start again. He should probably have a bath before he set off to meet his parents, too, judging by the reactions he was getting from the students of the future.
He hurried away from them all and out of the castle. When he was confident that nobody could see him, he pulled out the Time Turner and prepared to spin it back. His fingers met resistance. It was stuck. He pushed at it a little harder. He tried moving it in the opposite direction. Nothing.
He'd broken it. He was stuck here. He was an idiot.
He sat down on the hard, cracked ground. It had clearly been a pretty dry spring this year. His tired mind wandered. Someone had planted flower beds which hadn't been there in his time. They were lovely: just what he would have planted himself. He wandered over to inspect them. There wasn't anything useful he could do after all, he might as well sniff Kelpie-Roses. Someone had altered their scent. He had always thought that Kelpie-Roses were beautiful but they smelled too mild. One of his daydreams had been to work out a charm to enhance it, and clearly that was exactly what somebody had done.
Without thinking, he let his legs move of their own accord around the grounds until he found himself at the place where he always went when anything at school depressed him.
He opened the greenhouse door and stepped in. There was a man standing where Professor Sprout should have been. He was repotting dwarf foxgloves. Neville tried to remember where he'd seen him before.
The man turned round at the sound of the door closing.
"Ah," he said. "So, it's today. I wondered when I'd get here."