Prologue

He did it.

The war had been won. Harry had stood above the corpse of Tom, gripping his wand in one hand, and the Elder Wand in the other. His knuckles were bone-white. His blood was seeping into his snarl.

Bodies decorated the Hogwarts grounds. Professors that basically raised him. Students that were practically his kin. They watched him defeat Tom with glassy eyes. The ones that still had eyes, or a face, or a head, at least.

At some point, Harry had crumpled to his knees, and just knelt there.

A fog had settled over the grounds even with the sun burning bright in the sky. There was no life. No sound. Not even a ghost.

On the other side of Tom's body, a pale wraith of a man knelt, completely clean of blood and soot.

"This doesn't feel like a victory," said Draco Malfoy, and Harry wished he were dead.

His fists clenched over the wands.

"You're a coward."

Malfoy didn't flinch nor did he look stricken with this information. Perhaps he had known so for a long, long time.

He had shoved his hand into his pristine robes, and Harry had pointed two wands at him. Malfoy went still. For a few heartbeats, or seven years, they locked eyes, and a lifetime passed between them. Then, his rival pulled out a time-turner — trust Malfoy to have a time-turner when they're all supposed to be destroyed — and tossed it over Tom's corpse. Harry dropped the Elder Wand and caught it like it was a golden snitch. The wand thudded against the blood-soaked earth.

"Kill the bastard," said Malfoy, "Kill him before he even gets to Hogwarts. It's the one thing he always feared, you know. Sometimes when he was torturing me he would really let go, and I would get glimpses of his mind. His childhood. He was obsessed with death. You have to make him understand what's about to happen to him… For everyone…"

"Why do you care?" said Harry, eyes narrowed. The other man smiled.

"I may be a coward, but I'm not a monster." Then he got up and walked away, leaving Harry alone with Tom.

So he did it. He made it nearly seventy years back, he'd infiltrated Wool's Orphanage, and he'd found the room of Tom Marvalo Riddle.

Now all that was left was to kill the bastard.

The problem was, Harry had miscalculated in his haste, and he'd winded back the time-turner far more than he'd intended.

The boy was lying atop of the duvet of his blankets, despite the fact that it was freezing, and he was weeping softly, as if he didn't want anyone to hear. "Just you wait, Billy," he said to the cold stone wall, "I'll be a businessman. I'll be a scientist. I'll be Prime Minister. I will be somebody, and you will be nobody, just like everybody else."

It was 1930, and Voldemort was four years old. He had dark hair and chubby little legs and there was even a damn teddy bear watching over him against the pillow. In a way, it was like looking at a mirror into his past, where he was sobbing angrily on the bed in the cupboard under the stairs, because Dudley had gotten away with hurting him again. Harry slipped his wand into his pocket.

"You're a wizard, Tom," said Harry, grimly satisfied yet oddly sickened by frightening the boy into silence. Tom rolled over and stared at him with wide, glazed eyes. "You're a wizard, just like me. And I'm going to take you away from here."

And just like that, history was rewritten.