Chapter One

"What is that?"

Her skull pounds.

"Not sure. Found it in Dad's study. I reckon he took it off one of the baddies he was tailing last month."

Somewhere to her left, she can hear someone screaming.

"Al, you really shouldn't be taking things out of peoples' studies. What if it's jinxed?"

Hugo is swimming in front of her eyes, all terrified eyes and stark-red hair. How did he get here?

"Oh, come off it. Like you didn't jinx yourself just last week with that experimental thingama whatsit that you got from the back shelves in Wheezes."

Hugo is asking her name, but she can't speak through the blinding pain in her skull. Besides, he knows her name. Why ask such a thing?

"Exactly. Some of us learn from our mistakes, cousin."

There are two Scorpiuses. She wonders briefly if she has a concussion as she looks from the first Scorpius, laying prone next to her looking no better than her, to the second, standing across the room looking shocked.

"Coward. Come on, I'm going to Scorpius' place. He'll be interested, I bet."

She doesn't find Albus before she passes out.


She wakes up at Shell Cottage. How had she gotten here? Her head still aches something fierce.

She looks around slowly, blinking rapidly against the bright sunshine coming in through the window. She doesn't dare sit up, but it doesn't matter. Within thirty seconds of waking up, the door to the room she's in (not the one she usually stays in here, she notices vaguely) opens with a loud creak and she winces as her aunt comes in, looking stern but every bit as ethereally beautiful as ever.

"Aunt Fleur," she says quickly, "It was all Albus' idea, I swear! I told him not to press the button, but of course he never listens, and-"

The blonde woman in the doorway had gone still the second Rose's mouth had opened, but the tray of crackers she'd been holding hits the door with a loud thud that makes the younger girl jump, hands flying to her ears as the noise reverberates through the room.

"Vhat did you call me?"

Aunt Fleur looks shocked, for some reason, and Rose wracks her brain for whatever she's said wrong and can't think of anything. "Aunt… Fleur?"

The older woman, looking more confused and off kilter than Rose has ever seen her (including that one time that James and Fred had accidentally beat a bludger through her bedroom window and directly into her wall), nods once, quickly, and then comes in, shutting the door behind her.

"Mon cher, I know zis vill be confusing, but could you tell me your name?"

Rose frowns. What was she playing at? "It's Rose," she says. "Your goddaughter, Rose. Did you hit your head too? Did we somehow end up teleporting here? Is that what that artifact did?"

"No, Rose," Aunt Victoire says, still looking confused. "I didn't 'it my 'ead. Could you tell me, please, what year it is?"

Now Rose knows that she's lost her mind. "It's twenty-twenty-four." She half expects her mother to come flying into the room, demanding to know why she's using such a disrespectful tone with her aunt, but what the hell is happening?

"Oh Merlin." Aunt Victoire stands up quickly, backing toward the door. "I'll be back, mon cher. Just, erm, un moment." She wrenches the door open and rushes through, nearly slamming it and almost tripping over the tray that still lays on the floor in her haste.

The thrumming in Rose's head doesn't stop. She wonders when or if she'll be able to take a potion. She wonders if Al and Scorpius are as confused as she is. She makes a mental note to kill her cousin next time she sees him.

She doesn't know how long she's in the room, door closed, waiting for her aunt to come back. She assumes at some point that her mother must not be here yet, because if she was she'd have already come to the room to yell at her for her stupidity. Bored, she begins to inspect her surroundings.

Obviously she can't be sure, but for some reason it looks like the room she woke up in is Louis' room. Only, instead of his Quidditch-themed decor, there were seashells on every wall and a clean, white quilted bedspread. She wonders for a moment how long she's been asleep; he wasn't meant to move out for another month, and she knows he's not one to have packed up and converted his room this early. Besides, Aunt Fleur was quite insistent that each of her childrens' childhood bedrooms be kept the same so that they could always come visit. Just one more reason to be confused, she supposes.

Eventually, the waiting becomes too much. The late morning sun that she'd woken up to has moved, signaling the mid-afternoon, and technically, Aunt Fleur had never told her she couldn't leave the room, so she decides that she'll go find Albus and Scorpius. Best to get their stories straight before the rest of the adults come to interrogate them.

Rose slips from the room, leaving the door slightly cracked so as to avoid noise. While Aunt Fleur hadn't been specific, she had definitely implied that she wanted Rose to stay put, and the girl wasn't eager for a tongue-lashing. Logic dictates that if the boys had also been hurt, as Rose assumed they had been, they would have been put in rooms near Rose's, so she tries the door directly next door – Victoire's room – first.

The door opens easily, but just as noisily as her own had. She hardly has it open before she winces at the noise. She pushes it open the rest of the way and, almost at the same moment as she feels someone grab her arm from behind, she feels all of the air leave her lungs. There, laying in a room that should've been Victoire's but looked as bare of personality as Louis' had, under a plain pink quilt, lay her mother. Or, someone who looked very like her.

"Mum!"

The volume of her voice is painful even for her own ears, but she can't help it. Her mother, who for a reason she can't quite place looks different, is laying on her back, perfectly still, her arm – covered in blood-soaked bandaging – laying on her stomach. She looks as gray as the quilt that's draped over her.

Most notably, she doesn't even stir as Rose calls her.

Whoever it is that still has hold of Rose's arm yanks her back, shutting the door behind her. She turns around, heart in her throat and tears in her eyes, to see a man that she doesn't know but who looks vaguely familiar. The man has sandy blonde hair and looks easily as old as her father, with grotesque-looking scars marring his face. She jumps back from him, accidentally hitting her head against the door behind her. White light flashes across her vision as she puts her hand to her head, groaning.

"Please Rose," the man says, "You have to calm down." He tries to grab her arm again, gently this time, but she recoils.

"Who the hell are you?" Her tone is scathing, but by this point she has had it. "And what the fuck is going on here?"

The man steps back, shocked by her outburst, but stays close. He reminds her of someone trying to shush a feral kitten. "My name is Remus," he says slowly, "And I hear you've had quite a trip. If you don't mind, there's quite a few people here who would like to talk to you."

Rose doesn't allow herself to loosen her tensed muscles, instead leaning further into the door behind her. "I don't care who wants to talk to me," she says, ice in her tone. "I want to know why the bloody hell my mum is laying in a room looking– looking–" She sobs. Dead.

"We can tell you everything you want to know," Remus – where have I heard that name before? – says, "But I think it best if you come sit down first. We can go back to your room, or we can go to the sitting room. Whatever you prefer."

Rose is hesitant to follow this strange man anywhere. Nothing was making sense. "Where is my dad?" she asks, ignoring his request. "I'm not following you anywhere. I don't know you. I want my dad. If Mum's here, he is too."

Remus frowns a bit, but before he can open his mouth, a door from down the hall opens and Aunt Fleur, mercifully, comes toward them. "Rose," she says, that same coaxing voice that Remus is using floating through the hall, "You can trust 'im, love. Come, let us get you sitting down."

Rose looks between the two for a moment, her heart racing. She might not know the man, but she knows Fleur. And something tells her that none of her questions will be answered until she does as she's bid. Slowly, feeling every bit like the scared kitten they're treating her as, she follows them into the Cottage's sitting room.

She stills again as she enters the room and her eyes zero in on the others already convened there.

Uncle Bill is sitting on the couch, face angled toward the doorway where she stands. Her dad, his expression one of pure bewilderment, stands with his arms crossed protectively across his chest and his back against a wall. Finally, Uncle Harry stands in a corner looking just as confused as everyone else seems to be. And it's in this moment, looking at her family members all in one room, all staring at her, that she understands what it is about her mother that looked strange. Because all of them share the same strangeness.

They all look younger. Much younger.

Suddenly, Rose feels very much like a little girl again. Tears come to her eyes as she tries to reason through the pain making her brain foggy, as she tries to understand what's going on. Then, just like the child she feels like, she breaks down into tears, nearly throwing herself across the room at her father.

"Daddy," she sobs, her arms wrapping around her dad, who stiffens immediately, "I don't understand. I'm sorry Dad, we didn't mean to, I don't know what happened, I–" Her sobs overcome her, and she can feel herself hyperventilating. Slowly, so slowly, she feels her dad wrap his arms around her too, awkwardly patting her back the way he always does when she's crying. The familiar action in the face of everything else being so strange and unfamiliar just makes her cry harder.

She feels a hand slowly wrap around one of her wrists, disentangling her from her dad, and she can't even muster the energy to fight them off. She turns, and it's Aunt Fleur again, looking the same as she always has. As her tears finally start to dissipate – which she surmises has more to do with dehydration than her emotions leveling out – she notices that her godmother is the only one in the room that doesn't look any different.

"Rose," Aunt Fleur says, softly, "Come sit down, cherie. We 'ave so much to discuss."

Rose allows her aunt to pull her gently to the armchair opposite the couch and she sits, suddenly exhausted.

"Unfortunately," the sandy-haired man, Remus, starts, "We have just as many questions as you. If you'll permit, Rose, we'd love for you to tell us what you know first so that we can help too."

Rose takes a deep breath, trying to channel her mom, who always seemed to meet stressful situations with an admirable levelheadedness, and then launches into the story. She starts with Albus – "Sorry, Albus Dumbledore?" "No, Albus Potter. Why the hell would a dead headmaster be there?" – bringing that damned device to her house, tells how she'd warned the git not to mess with it, and then explains how they'd ended up at Scorpius' house. Every adult in the room turns more and more ashen-faced as her story goes on, until finally she has told everything she knows.

"So to be clear," Uncle Bill says after a pregnant pause, "You, Ron's daughter, and Albus, Harry's son, took a dark artifact out of Harry's home office, and then brought it to Malfoy Manor to show it to your friend, who is Draco Malfoy's son?"

She furrows her brows. "Why are you talking like that?"

The room is quiet. Eerily quiet. It's almost a full minute before a voice breaks the silence, and that voice comes from behind her.

"Because," the halting voice of her mother, clearly out of breath, says, "It's 1998, you don't exist, and your friends – one of which is apparently Harry's son, but both of which are in more danger than they know what to do with, are currently still in Malfoy Manor with You-Know-Who."

Rose stands quickly, too quickly, to meet her mother's gaze, which she barely has time to register before a blinding pain hits her head and she collapses for the second time.