Note:

Third year should be finished next chapter. I wanted to do it in one but it got unwieldy

Chapter 18:

The following Friday, after Harry and Hermione left the Hospital Wing, they met in the common room after dinner for their first attempt.

It was a normal night, almost painfully so. The room was packed to the gills, almost every available seat and table taken up by relaxing Gryffindors looking forward to the weekend. The round room was a sea of loud conversations and laughter, along with the frantic scratching of quills by those who had unfortunately left their homework to the last minute.

It was homey, exactly like any other Friday night from the last three years. It was a perfect testing ground.

Hermione was in her usual spot in the corner when Harry entered, taking up three tables with her mountains of books and papers, her quill zooming over her parchment like a demented pixie. Ron, who had somehow convinced Seamus (for the ninth time this year) that playing a game of chess would be different this time, waved frantically at him to grab his attention. "Hey Harry, wanna play a round? You can play whoever wins."

Seamus, who by this point had realized he was a dead man walking after Ron had taken his second Bishop, muttered under his breath "Whoever wins? Like it's going to be any different this time."

He felt guilty that he had shared the Time Stone with Hermione and not Ron, but he had a good reason. Ron, for all of his admirable qualities, could not keep a secret to save his life. He also had a tendency to blurt whatever was on his mind when stressed or angered. It was never malicious; he just spoke without thinking as a retort. This was doubled whenever it was the Twins bothering him, which they did almost every day. It was an open secret to the boys in the dorm that Ron couldn't be told certain secrets, such as the location of Dean's Firewhiskey bottle, or it would soon be known to every student and professor in the school.

Harry had a nightmare vision of the Twins bothering Ron about his robes or something, and Ron responding with "Oh yeah? Well Harry has an ancient rock that lets him time travel and he's using it to get me better robes!"

No it was better to sort out all of the powers of the Time Stone, and then let Ron know. Surely a demonstration of its powers would impress upon him the seriousness of keeping it a secret. Plus it would be easier to test it if there were only two people. It's just common sense.

Harry was about to respond when a loud voice echoed across the common room. "Oi Weasley, we need to have a talk!" It was Daphne Greengrass, who was pushing her way through the portrait hole past several stunned Gryffindors and stalked her way over to Ron. The green trim on her robes stuck out like a sore thumb amidst the crowd of red and gold. One extremely brave prefect tried to block her path but was cut down by a particularly nasty glare.

Seamus practically dove out of his seat, as Daphne planted herself across from Ron.

The redhead in question looked as though he had been hit in the head by a particularly large anvil. Harry didn't blame him. Daphne may have been the first Slytherin to ever set foot in the Gryffindor common. "Wha-what are you doing here Greengrass? This is the Gryffindor common room."

"You think I don't know that? I'm here because we lost two weeks working on our project when you were in the hospital wing. We are behind." She put emphases on the word like she was talking to a small child. "I'm not going to do the entire thing. And since you can't be bothered to come out of here and study, I needed to come to you. I will not let you bring down down my perfect grade in DADA, even if I have to drag you over the finish line."

Somebody wolf-whistled in the silence, probably one of the twins, and Ron flushed a brilliant shade of red. He pulled a book over to him, and began to study.

Deciding that the offer of chess was no longer on the table, Harry made his way over to Hermione. Harry dumped his books onto the only free space on Hermione's table, startling her out of whatever trance she had been in. She raised her head, poised to bite the head off of whoever had dared to interrupt her, but when she saw it was Harry, she let out a sigh of relief.

"Is it time? Finally?"

For the first time in a while, Harry really looked at Hermione. She looked exhausted, her shoulder slumped and defeated looking. Her eyes, which were bloodshot with angry looking bags under them, had tears gathering at the edges. Her clothes, which she normally took such pride in being neat, were rumpled and wrinkled. The hand that clutched the table shook slightly and was stained with ink up to the wrist. Frankly, she looked a second away from snapping, falling to the ground and hysterically sobbing.

Harry nodded, and pulled out his Stone, clutched tightly in his hand to trap the soft green glow from escaping. "I'm ready."

"And you're sure this is going to work?"

"I mean… no? But what's the worst that could happen?"

Hermione looked aghast. "You mean you don't know for sure?"

In lieu of responding, Harry grabbed her hand and slowed time.

It turns out that stopping time was a lot like damming a raging river. The timestream was vast, fast, and did not like to be interrupted under any circumstances. Using the Time Stone was like dropping a wall of concrete into the middle of the river: It did the trick of stopping the current, but it was unnatural, and the river did not like it one bit. It was constantly trying to flow up and through any cracks in his wall, which meant he had to focus on stopping any leaks. It was like playing whack a mole, except this time Dudley wasn't trying to use his head as the target.

Hermione looked around in amazement as the people in the common room began to slowly come to a halt, like windup toys that had reached the end of their spring. All around them, quill scratching came to a halt, spells were paused halfway done, Daphne was frozen in mid hand motion as she empathized something to Ron. Outside, birds froze and hung in the air like they were hung in place from string. Even the wind had stopped.

For the first time in her life, Hermione heard true quiet. No wind, no birds, no other students breathing or talking. If she closed her eyes, she could be the only person in the world. She thought she could faintly hear her own heartbeat.

After taking a moment to gather himself, Harry opened his eyes and Hermione gasped. Harry didn't have pupils or whites in his eyes, they were a uniform glowing green. The exact shade as the Time Stone. It was like he had replaced his eyes with the stone.

"Harry!" her voice echoed strangely in her ears, like it was being absorbed by the air. "Are you alright? How do you feel?"

Harry for his part didn't know how he felt. It strange, and not pleasant, but not bad? His entire body felt electric, literally, as if he had a mild current running through him. Nothing awful, but not something he wanted permanently either. But most of all he felt…

"Pressure. It feel like pressure on my whole body. Like being underwater. I can feel time trying to start again, pressing against the inside of my head"

"Do you need to stop?"

"No not right now, but I don't know how long I can keep this up."

"Can I let go?" She gestured to their still joined hands. Harry shrugged, the movement harder than it normally would be, as if he were wearing a weight. "If you freeze, we can just try again."

She let go and remained moving. "Oh that's fascinating."

They were both silent for a moment, although that moment could have lasted decades.

"What do we do now?" He finally asked.

She let out a grin, the first true smile he had seen on her face in a while. "I don't know about you, but I'm going to take a nap."

After that night, the next few months seemed to fly by for Harry.

That first time he had frozen time, he had only lasted for about five hours on his internal clock before he felt his control slip and time reassert itself. Hermione was understandably upset about being woken up from her nap, but she understood.

Every Tuesday and Friday after that, Harry and Hermione would meet in the Common Room after dinner, and he would stop time for as long as he could. Slowly over the course of weeks, like training a muscle, it got so that he could stop it for longer each time. He was now up to an entire 31-hour period before the pressure got to be too much and he had to let it go. He didn't want to know what would happen if he held the timestream longer than he safely could, and he didn't want to find out. He had researched horrifying stories of magical core death, and full body apoptosis and he wanted no part of that. As it was, the hunger, tiredness, and deep muscle pain he felt when coming out of a session was bad enough.

On the academic front, Harry's grades improved to an absurd degree when he rose to be second in the entire year behind Hermione. His grades improved so much that several professors had grown deeply suspicious that he was cheating and staged an intervention.

The night before his mid-January potions exam he had been summoned to the hospital wing and given a purging potion by an extremely hateful Professor Snape. As he was handed the vial, Snape pulled him in close and whispered, "I don't know what memory potion you took, but this will get rid of it. When you fail tomorrow, I will see you expelled."

Harry, unable and unwilling to tell Snape that he had read the Fourth, Fifth- and Sixth-year potion textbooks cover to cover out of sheer boredom due to frozen time, wisely stayed quiet and took the rancid brew.

After a truly awful night with unspeakable things coming out of both ends, Harry was placed in a warded room and forced to take his test under supervision.

All the suffering from the purging potion was worth it when Harry got a perfect score and got to watch Snape's face turn a truly alarming shade of purple when he was summoned to his office during his break the next day.

The unhinged rant that Snape unleashed that day would live on in Hogwarts lore for decades, and caused an entire class of second years, and Snape himself, to have to have their hair regrown after the greasy professor had angrily banished a cauldron full of hair removal potion at the back wall of his classroom where it exploded in spectacular fashion.

However, the biggest change, and the one that would inspire the most gossip from professors and students alike, was Hermione.

Seemingly overnight, she had gone from being overworked to the point of mental collapse to being relaxed and carefree. She had found time to pick up Gobstones as a hobby. It wasn't as if her workload had gotten any easier, in fact the professors had increased her workload, almost offended that she thought it was too easy. However, her work was even more flawless than it had been before.

She even found time to write a rebuttal article to a recent paper written in Charms monthly, for which Professor Flitwick was noticeably colder to her for several days. Mostly because she was right, Hermione had told him with glee.

Like Harry, she had been abducted into the Hospital wing and tested for every kind of cheating potion and spell that could be cast but they found nothing. After 24 hours, the professors simply had to conclude that she was maybe the single most gifted student they had ever seen and let her go about her business. But every few weeks, she was given a quick scan with an anti-cheating spell, just in case.

Rumors followed her in the hallway, everything from that she was on memory potions, to she was sleeping with a professor to get her grades up, but she ignored all of them.

It was amazing how regularly freezing time seemed to make it go faster. The days blended into weeks, and the weeks into months. Suddenly, Harry and Hermione looked up one day realized that it was late March.

On this day Harry was hidden out in the library, angrily flipping through yet another book on dueling magic. Time was frozen around him, which wasn't unusual at this point, however what was unusual was that it was the middle of the day.

A few hours ago, Harry had overheard the unthinkable in Hogsmeade. The inconvincible.

Sirus Black was his godfather.

Sirus Black, the man who had sold out his parents to Voldemort. The man who had condemned him to a decade plus of hell with the Durlseys. The man who had broken out of the most secure prison in the world with one goal in mind: to finish the job his master had failed to do and kill Harry Potter.

Harry hurled the book to the floor with a howl of grief and buried his face in his arms.

His godfather! Not even just his godfather, but his fathers supposed best friend. The man who should have taken care of him, shown him love, kindness.

Then and there, Harry made himself a promise. He would hold Sirus Black responsible for each and every one his scars that his uncle and cousin had given him. If he had to hunt him down himself, he would make him pay. Slowly, and painfully.

The only issue? Sirus Black could be anywhere in the county, maybe even all of Europe. It would have been insane of the man to stay anywhere close to Hogwarts after Halloween. Harry needed not only a way to find him, but a way to get to him. He couldn't apparate or have the money to fly, but he did have a way around that.

He needed the Space Stone.

Harry wiped his eyes on his sleeve and pulled out his notes.

Over his past few months, Harry had had a lot of free time. Of course he studied more than he ever had before, his grades reflected that, but unlike Hermione he couldn't just study and study for eternity. Eventually, the words would start to blur together, and he had to stop.

So, he spent his time looking for the other stones. Or rather starting the process of looking for them.

Harry had taken advantage of his freedom and checked the entire castle from top to bottom. Every room, every cabinet, every hidden passage that he knew of, he checked them all. Even a few he stumbled across while searching. After the castle he checked the grounds, the forest, Hagrid's hut, even Slytherin's hidden library and the Chamber of Secrets. He had taken to freezing time without Hermione, so he could check more often. When he was in class, Harry had recruited the trio of ghostly rangers on the sixth floor to search without him. They had even checked Hogsmeade. He had promised them a good word with the house ghosts if they could find one.

Nothing. Less than nothing.

It was only after almost a month of searching that Harry had to conclude that the stones were not anywhere near Hogwarts. Which meant he had to find five very smalls needles in a planet sized haystack.

He knew they were out there. He could feel them. Ever since he had picked up this stone, he had felt a slight pull whenever he used it. Like a gentle hand tugging on his arm. The stones wanted to be reunited, wanted to be used together. He had tried to follow his gut, but the feeling was too faint. Every time he turned; the feeling faded only to come back later. The feeling was too faint to be used on its own. Wherever the other stones were, they were either shielded or dormant.

Harry had read Slytherin's journal cover to cover more than a dozen times. He had memorized the whole thing at this point; however he kept running into a problem: The missing pages. Almost half of the book was missing, the pages torn out.

He had a feeling that whatever information he was looking for was on those pages. Why else would someone have gone to the trouble of removing them? They could have listed the exact locations of each stone, but he would never know.

Harry was in the midst of, yet another read through of the journal, when a hand on his shoulder scared him out of his skin. Hermione was standing over him, a look of wordless sympathy of her face.

Harry stared "How did you unfreeze?"

She shrugged "I saw the look in your eyes and grabbed the back of your shirt. You know it's not healthy for your first instinct in the face of trauma to isolate yourself from the rest of the world. Especially the way you do it." She shrugged off her bag and took the seat across from him. "I figured you needed a minute alone, so I took a long walk around the lake and grabbed my bag before I came up here."

"But how did you know I would be here?"

She gave him a deeply unimpressed look. "You think I don't know my best friend? Deep down, underneath that layer of jock, you're just as big of a bookworm as I am. Bookworms always flee to the library in times of crisis." She saw the journal on the table between them. "Still no luck with the missing pages? Did the last spell not help?"

After she had gotten done devouring the journal, Hermione had agreed to help him look for the missing pages. Last week she had given him a spell that was supposed to recreate missing pages in any book. He had tried it and had recreated a bunch of pages covered in actual hieroglyphs and then a page full on insults. He hadn't tried it a third time.

"No, and now I'm back to square one."

"That too bad. Who would steal pages out of someone personal journal?"

"Probably someone like me. Someone who wanted the stones."

"But you said nobody had been in that library for a thousand years. All of the traps were undisturbed. Who could have possibly stolen them?"

"Well there were about a million magical teenagers here over the millennia. Maybe one of them got it. Or a professor. Or Voldemort."

The worked in frustrated silence for a few minutes, Harry sulking and Hermione pointedly ignoring him.

It hit him like one of the castles Gargoyles had fallen on his head.

"Someone like me…" he mused out loud.

"What did you say Harry?"

"Not someone like me Hermione! Me! I stole the pages! A thousand years ago! Who else would have been interested and known about them? I tore them out of the book myself."

"Don't be ridiculous Harry. You couldn't possibly have stolen them. To do that you would have had to been there a thousand years ago, and it's not possible to…"

Harry gave her a pointed stare and then gestured at the frozen room around them.

Hermione blushed deeply. "Oh right."

Harry began to gather his books, shoving them into his bag. "Come on Hermione, we have places to be"

She was confused but let herself be dragged down the hallway after hurriedly grabbing her bag. "Where are we going again?"

"We are going to the other library; we have a book to deface."

The sun was frozen at eternal noon as they hurried across the grounds. The pair of them plunged into the tree line, following the path that Harry still remembered vividly. In seemingly no time at all, they found themselves in the clearing with the trapdoor.

They stared at the dark opening in the ground.

"Hermione, you know you don't have to come. You could stay up here and keep watch…"

"Keep watch from what? We are literally the only people in the world right now? Besides it's the hidden private library of Salazar Slytherin. You could not pay me to keep me up here." She brushed past him and disappeared from view. He followed.

Down below, the study was in worse shape than he remembered. The floor had been eaten away in places due to the rain of potions and Harry could see straight down to the void below the floor. The remains of the couch appeared to have fallen through one of these holes. The chains still dangled from within the now empty fireplace.

"Oh wow" Hermione breathed.

"Careful the floor-" She took a step before he could finish, and the floor gave out beneath her left foot. She shrieked and Harry gave an almighty heave to pull her out of the floor.

"-is weak" he finished unnecessarily.

She nodded; her eyes blown wide in terror. "Weak, got it."

"Good news, we don't actually have to go any further. As long as we are inside the door." He pulled out the stone and gave her a smile. "Back in a minute."

It was almost anti-climatically easy.

He traveled backwards, seeing the odd sight of himself the first few times he had been here. He saw the explosions that had started when the trapdoor had ripped through the room, then himself being beaten by the flying books. A few minutes past before he saw himself again smaller, pale, and bloody after fighting the Basilisk finding the room for the first time. Then it was dark and silent, the room undisturbed as the centuries washed over him.

After a long time in the dark and dankness, suddenly there was light. A very old looking Salazar Slytherin was there, placing his journal on the desk. Harry waited until the old man had left the room, strode over to the book, and tore out the pages he needed.

He didn't even disturb the dust.

Ten minutes later he was back with Hermione, brandishing the pages. "Got them."

"Give them here." She pulled out the journal and went to work reattaching the pages as they walked back to the castle.

Later than night, after he had restarted time so they could finish the day, they met at their table in the common room.

They had invited Ron to sit with them, but he was otherwise occupied with Daphne, who had once again cornered him. There had been some (read: overwhelming) hostility to a Slytherin using their common room to study, but she had ignored the very loud protests and semi dangerous spells sent her way. Out of desperation, some of the older students had gone to McGonagall, who had pulled Daphne into a closed-door meeting. Nobody quite knew what was said but the girl had emerged with a shit-eating grin on her face, and an official degree from the Gryffindor head of house that she was to be allowed to work in the common room before curfew. Neither side liked it, but she wasn't going to stop coming and they weren't going to accept her. So the outright hostility from the first few days had faded into a kind of cold war between the two sides.

Harry felt for Ron, he really did. He would probably be in the same position. The project, a series of essays, presentations, and practical magic about a particular creature, spread out over an entire year was exactly the kind of thing he would struggle at. As it was, he had finished all of his essays back in January, had most of the presentations memorized and could do the magic blindfolded. He just had to show up with his part, and Susan was trusting enough to let him work on his own.

A noise from Hermione had brought his attention back to the table. She had turned the page and found an elaborate rune diagram taking up two full pages. "It's beautiful" she murmured.

Harry, who knew nothing of runes, had to disagree. "It's squiggles"

"It's not squiggles!" she said sharply, "This is a rune sequence diagram written by Salazar Slytherin himself! This is invaluable!"

"What's a rune sequence diagram?"

"Its instructions for a ritual spell." Seeing his confused look, she sighed and went on. "A ritual spell is how you work more complicated magic. Most spells only have one effect from a single field of magic, right? To unlock something, or to set it on fire? A ritual spell can work multiple fields of magic at the same time to do many things at once. Let's say for instance, you wanted to turn a living tree into toothpicks for some reason-"

Harry nodded, not really following but willing to listen.

"- To do it by regular magic you would need to cast a cutting curse to take down the tree, levitate the thing, take off the bark, cut it into individual toothpicks, conjure boxes, it would be a long process right? A lot of magic used."

Harry nodded again.

"But with a ritual spell, you could input all of those commands into the rune sequence beforehand, so all you have to do is active the sequence and it does it for you. You can even add a repeating rune so it keeps doing it."

"So it's the difference between making something by hand or building an assembly line to build something?"

"Exactly."

Harry was getting excited now. "So what does this one do?"

"I have no idea."

He deflated a bit "You don't?"

"Harry these are incredibly advanced runes. I have only learned the basics. Advanced basics maybe, but only basics." Seeing his expression, she bit her lip and offered. "I'm sure I could take a look though. See if there is anything I do recognize."

She quickly copied the runes onto a spare piece of parchment and got to work. While she was doing this, Harry pulled the journal over to him and started flipping through the other pages. As he feared, most of it was indiscernible nonsense or intensely technical jargon. There was a section on research for each of the five missing stones, but four of them were blank. The only one that had anything was the section on the space stone and that only had one word: Yagua. And try as he might, he couldn't make heads or tales of that.

Giving it up as a bad job, he turned back to Hermione, who had just put her quill down.

"Okay Harry, good news or bad news first?"

"Bad news."

"I only got three parts."

She pushed the parchment towards him. "Ok see this part means compass, this one means parts of a larger whole, and this one means you need ingredients beforehand."

It wasn't much to go on. "Ok what's the good news."

"It's not as complicated as I thought it would be. It's like he dumbed it down to as simple as he could make it. I could probably translate this, if given enough time and focus."

"How much time would you need?"

"Two months with the extra time. Maybe 3?"

"Which would put us right at the end of June? The time when someone has tried to kill me the past two years?"

She winced "True. Something is going to go wrong. Do you still want to go through with it?"

"Let's get started."