Okay, this one's a threequel, everyone, so if you're just finding this story now, I'd encourage you to go read the rest of the iLily Academy/i series. Or don't. You might be able to follow this one without the context.

This one is going to most likely just be Harry's POV, as the last story got a little too out of hand with the POV jumping around. There will be no cuts to the future or anything. Just Harry in the past doing his thing.

Fair warning, this will feature James/Lily shipping and may or may not have an unfavorable view of Severus Snape. Also, this is NOT a Wolfstar fic, so if that's the dealbreaker, I encourage you to go read something else.

I think that should do it. Strap in, everyone. This is gonna be a doozy.

Chapter One: A Blast to the Past

Cold. A familiar sort of cold, with a wet chill in the air accompanied by the scent of pine and dirt. As his eyes cracked open, Harry felt a sudden and violent shiver wrack his body. He was dressed for a Texas winter, not… Wait… In the distance, there sat a rather very familiar tree, its long branches swaying slightly despite a lack of wind.

That was most definitely the Whomping Willow…

The discomforting cold momentarily forgotten, Harry sat up and took stock of his surroundings. He was on the edges of the forest (the not-so-forbidden parts), and in the distance were the snow-covered grounds of what was unmistakably Hogwarts. A trench had been gouged in the dirt, possibly from his…landing? Had he been flung here from the Ziggurat? Slowly, he got to his feet, feeling himself sway a bit as he reached out to steady himself against a tree. Well, he didn't seem to have broken anything, at least. Reaching into his pocket, he produced his wand (thankfully, it hadn't broken), whipping it at his jacket to transfigure it into something a bit heavier against the chill and also casting a small warming charm.

Hurried footsteps sounded nearby, and a gaggle of voices spoke into the still silence around him.

"It was somewhere over here!"

"Look, there's a trench!"

"Blimey. Reckon it was a meteorite?"

"A what?"

"Great big rock from the sky, like."

It sounded like a group of girls not much older than Mafalda or Tori, students that had seen his unceremonious landing, no doubt. Somehow, they sounded vaguely familiar, despite Harry having never been particularly close to any of the younger students aside from Mafalda while at school.

"Hey, it's a boy!" a girl's voice shouted as someone stepped into view from behind a cluster of trees. She had long black hair and a pale face with dark eyes that popped against her pallor. Harry recognized her after a moment, though with no small amount of confusion. Had he fallen into another memory? No, that didn't make sense; she was staring right at him, a polite but confused smile on her face.

But that was, without a doubt, Mary Macdonald, the girl from the pensieve Sirius had shown him weeks ago. She had been the best friend of –

"Lily! Marlene! It's a boy!" Mary shouted, taking a small step closer to Harry. She spoke in a quieter voice to him. "Are you alright? Where did you come from?"

"Is he handsome?" another girl's voice spoke up, and they were joined by a girl with short auburn hair and a smattering of freckles across her face. She caught sight of Harry, her eyebrows shooting up. When she spoke, her words bore a faint lilt of a Scottish accent. "Oh my goodness, he is. Lily! A handsome boy fell from the sky!"

"Goodness, and they said the weather would be nice today," a third voice said, one quite familiar to Harry. As he watched, a girl with long red hair and green eyes to match his own emerged from the trees as well, fixing him with a look of shock. "Oh. You weren't joking."

"He's a feather in the cap, isn't he?" Mary wondered aloud.

"Who's he look a bit like to you, Lils?" Marlene asked with a giggle, and Lily gave her friend a small shove. "Well, he does!"

"Whoever he looks like, we need to take him to the Hospital Wing, I should think," Lily said, fixing Harry with a searching look. "Did you fall off a wonky portkey or something?"

"Um…yeah," Harry said. "Uh…"

"Come along, then," Marlene said, hurrying forward and taking hold of Harry's arm while fixing him with a breathless sort of smile. "Off to Madame Pomfrey."

"You could have a concussion!" Mary fussed as she made sure to latch onto his other arm. "I have a cousin, fell off a wonky portkey once, he forgot how to eat!"

"That's not true!" Marlene insisted. "How could you just forget how to eat?"

"That does feel rather like something that just happens naturally," Lily pointed out, falling into step in front of them and leading the way. "Are you sure he wasn't having you on?"

"Well, this was the same cousin who said he had a pet thestral," Mary confessed while Harry simply watched the trio interact with amusement. "He never let me pet it, told me it was skittish."

The other two girls simply giggled at that, Lily occasionally shooting a thoughtful expression over her shoulder while Harry tried to come to terms with this entire situation. He'd definitely been in Ellis Locke's time machine during some sort of explosion, and the date had been set to February of 1973—given the chill in the air and the presence of childhood versions of his mum and her friends, well…

It was fairly cut-and-dry; he'd been sent back in time.

A conflicting snarl of emotions made themselves known with that conclusion. While Harry was of course a bit panicked over being quite far back in the past, he allowed himself the small comfort that, presumably, Ellis Locke's workshop was still floating about in the skies over Texas. And given that no one had found it before he and Hermione had –

Hermione!

"Oh! You alright?" Marlene asked as Harry stumbled and nearly fell into the cool moss underfoot. "Mind your step."

"You're pulling him too fast, Marlene," Mary chided her friend. "Look at him, he's white as a sheet! Poor thing…"

"Everything okay?" Mum—Lily asked. He wasn't Harry's mum, not yet, at least. In fact, she was younger than him, which contributed to those conflicting emotions as well. He'd always wanted to meet his parents, though preferably after they'd finished puberty.

"I just, um…" he trailed off. "Must've hit my head."

"Just hang in there, alright?" Lily asked him with a warm smile as they emerged from the forest and made for the path up to the castle. "If you fall, there's no way we can carry you, after all."

"Your concern is heartwarming," Harry said, and all three girls snickered at that. Harry was reminded a bit of Mafalda, though threefold and with a bit more teenage sass thrown in the mix.

Actually, this would certainly be a problem.

Trudging onward, Harry tried to keep his thoughts on the predicament at hand and not Hermione's new and profound absence. With all of this mess to distract him, he hadn't considered that…well, none of his friends—Hermione, Mafalda, Terry, Daphne, Astoria—they were…well, far away from a temporal standpoint. In fact, they hadn't even been born yet. Hermione's parents were likely still in secondary school or picking out a university to study dentistry.

He wasn't entirely sure how old they were.

In any case, he was effectively on his own. He supposed he could explain his situation to Dumbledore—while he was confident the headmaster would be able to help him, however, he wasn't so sure he'd be able to convince him to do so. He didn't really have any concrete proof that he was from the future, and his personal knowledge of Dumbledore's particulars was limited at best.

He was fairly certain he had a brother, at least…

His musings were brought short by their arrival into the Entrance Hall, and Harry found himself staring about as though there would be some massive and apparent difference between Hogwarts of 1994 and Hogwarts of 1973. Given the castle's prodigious age, however, it was merely very slightly less ancient now. He spotted one or two other students filing through the room featuring an outdated haircut or an overlarge pair of glasses, but that was about the extent of it.

"What's your name, anyway?" Mary asked as they walked.

"Oh, um…Harry," Harry said. "Harry Granger."

Given his resemblance to his father (which he was pretty sure had already been noted by Marlene), giving his real last name seemed ill-advised. Idly, he wondered where James Potter was. On the one hand, he was excited to see his father, but according to Sirius, all of the Marauder boys had been insufferable brats around this time.

Harry had gotten it honestly, after all.

"Granger?" Lily asked, peering up at him with a curious expression. "Are you related to Hector Dagworth-Granger? The potioneer?"

"Not that I'm aware of," Harry said.

"Where are you from?" Mary asked.

"How old are you?" Lily added.

"Do you have a girlfriend?" Marlene chimed in.

"Marlene!" Mary giggled.

"From Surrey, but I've recently moved to London, fourteen-and-a-half, and yes," Harry responded to each question in turn. The lattermost answer proved to be quite intriguing to the trio, as they gasped in unison.

"What's her name!?"

"What's she like?"

"Is she pretty?"

"She's beautiful," Harry said with a fond smile. "Her name is Hermione. She's probably the smartest person I know, and she's pulled my arse out of more trouble than it's had any business being in."

"Awww," Lily cooed. "Where is she now?"

"…Really far away," Harry said, feeling another stab of melancholy. "The, uh…portkey I dropped off of landed me here instead of with her."

All three of them gasped quite theatrically at that.

"We have to get you back to her!" Lily blurted.

"But first, you need your head checked!" Marlene said, continuing to drag him upstairs.

"If anyone 'round here needs their head checked, it's you, McKinnon," a boy's voice spoke, one familiar to Harry. As they reached the top of the stairs near the Hospital Wing, he saw two Gryffindor boys chuckling at the remark as they made their way along the same corridor.

Very familiar Gryffindor boys…

"Well, you'd know all about what it's like to need your head checked, wouldn't you, Black?" Marlene shot back, clutching fast to Harry's sleeve as she sneered at a quite young Sirius Black. Sirius only grinned right back, apparently amused at the interplay.

Sirius Black at the age of twelve(ish) looked much as he had in the pensieve his older self had shown Harry—haughty but good-looking in a way that promised a handsome young man in just a few years. His hair was a wavy mop of deep brown, probably modeled after some young actor he'd seen in a muggle magazine.

"James Potter, what have you done to your arm?" Lily's voice spoke, and she bustled toward the pair of boys. Behind Sirius, James Potter trudged along still wearing muddied Gryffindor quidditch robes and grinning in a sheepish way as he cradled his right arm to his chest. A vision of Harry himself in his second year, the only difference between the two was an absence of the glasses Harry had once worn and a lack of his mum's green eyes. James Potter's were instead hazel.

"Just a bludger, nothing to fret over," James said, obviously trying for a nonchalant sort of bravado but just as obviously unable to hide a tense edge of pain in his tone. Nodding toward Harry with a puzzled expression, he allowed Sirius to steer him toward the Hospital Wing while Lily held the door for both new arrivals. "Who's this?"

"Harry Granger," Mary said as she and Marlene directed Harry into the infirmary.

"He fell out of the sky!" Marlene added.

"Wonky portkey," Harry said.

"Hate those," James nodded. As they were escorted toward a pair of beds next to each other, James Potter stared Harry down, his brow furrowing. "Have we met before? You seem awfully familiar."

"Um…might've run across each other in Diagon Alley?" Harry shrugged. "You…play quidditch? What position?"

"Chaser," James said with a grin, distracted for the moment with a chance to brag in the presence of Lily Evans. "And, oi, Evans. McGonagall says I'm the best young talent he's ever seen. I'm loads better than I was at the start of the season. I'm a natural, you know."

"There is nothing natural about you," Lily said with a roll of her eyes while Marlene hurried to get Madame Pomfrey. "How did you manage to take a bludger to the arm during practice?"

"Well, like I said," James told her, "I'm a natural, aren't I?"

"You ever play quidditch, mate?" Sirius asked with a look at Harry. Seated in a chair next to the bed James was presently perched upon, he managed to make a full-body slouch look like a pose from the cover of a catalogue.

"Seeker," Harry said with a small smile. "Haven't played in a bit, though."

"Oooh, seekers are mysterious," Mary said, settling into a seat next to Harry's bed. "Off on their own, whole game riding on their shoulders."

"It's madness," Lily said. "If the snitch is worth so many points, why does anyone else even show up to the game? It should just be two seekers having a snitch-catching contest."

"Sometimes there's enough of a points difference that the seeker doesn't win the game," Harry pointed out, remembering Viktor Krum's performance at the Quidditch World Cup.

Which wouldn't take place for another twenty years…

"How often does that actually happen, though?" Lily asked him, and Harry shrugged.

"Statistically, not very often," he admitted. Lily gave him a triumphant little smirk, and he couldn't resist sticking his tongue out at her. She giggled, returning the gesture, and Harry felt an undeniable little glow in his chest at bonding with his mother. Sort of.

This was going to be strange.

Marlene arrived minutes later with Madame Pomfrey (Harry noted that the nurse looked virtually the same as she would in his time, though perhaps with slightly less gray hair and a few lines not yet formed in her face), who clicked her tongue at the sight of James Potter clutching his arm.

"I've seen far too much of you already this year," she chided him. "Are you sure you're ready for quidditch?"

"Gotta be bad at it before I get good, I reckon," James pointed out, and the nurse let a small laugh at that. Leaning in, she examined James's arm, running her wand along it as she muttered a few diagnostic spells.

"Broken in two places," she tutted.

"Told you," James muttered to Sirius, who rolled his eyes.

"Well done," he drawled.

The matron fixed James's arm up in a sling and tapped it with a muttered "Episky" before sending him on his way.

"Nothing strenuous for two days, mind you!" she called at his retreating back.

"Hear that, Sirius?" James's fading voice could be heard. "You'll have to write my essay for Sprout for me."

"Yeah, a roll of parchment about the mushrooms growing in your head," Sirius said flatly.

"Those boys," Lily muttered.

"I think you might be a little fixated on them," Mary said with a grin.

"Nah, just one," Marlene added, giggling at the murderous look Lily shot her.

"Alright, let's have a look at you," Madame Pomfrey said, now turning a critical gaze to Harry. Recognition showed on her face, her eyes darting toward the door James had left through. "Are you a cousin I haven't heard about?"

"Er, no, I'm Harry," he said. "Harry Granger."

"He fell off a wonky portkey," Mary said, and Madame Pomfrey fixed him with a curious look—no doubt she was used to an outlandish story to explain a trip to the Hospital Wing. Still, she was above all things a healer and set to work assessing any damage to Harry's person.

"A few minor scrapes," she said. "Bit of a bump. Nothing that won't sort itself out. If you'd like a wiggenweld potion – "

"That won't be necessary," Harry told her. "I've come back from worse."

"I can see that," the nurse muttered, still tracing her wand over him. "Multiple healed contusions, a number of concerning bites, and…regrown arm bones? What in the world have you been getting up to, boy?"

"This and that," Harry said evasively.

"Well, there's no immediate threat to your safety, other than what seems to be a penchant for disaster," Madame Pomfrey told him.

"I swear, I don't even go looking for it—most of the time," Harry said, and the three girls giggled at that.

"He's cute," Mary whispered.

"I like him," Lily agreed.

Oh, no.

Madame Pomfrey soon dismissed him, and Harry found himself a little surprised that she hadn't spotted him as some sort of time anomaly. Then again, she hardly knew every student in the school, and he was dressed fairly plainly in jeans and a thick jacket. All that aside, who really went about their life figuring today was the day some kid from twenty years in the future would get himself flung back in time and go landing in the forest?

Well…he would now, honestly. But that was more confirmation bias than anything, wasn't it?

Out in the corridor, Harry found himself at a loss as to what to do. Go to Dumbledore? It might do to at least try to explain the situation, and whatever his issues with the headmaster, he was the one most likely to be able to offer a solution or at least a theory. Still, Ellis Locke was by all rights a pioneer in his field; the likelihood that Dumbledore would be able to do much more than point him to the inventor's workshop was slim to none. And even then, Hermione had gone on at length about the Many-Worlds Theory of time-travel, that each jump through time had the potential to create a branching reality that was no longer the timeline the jumper had come from. There had been more, talk of the Observer Effect and the Housefly Effect, but it had made his head spin.

Still, one thing was for certain—if he did find Ellis Locke's time machine in this timeline, it might not take him to the future he'd come from.

"Where d'you suppose he's going?" Marlene's voice asked in a whisper.

"Dunno," Lily hissed back. "He looks quite thoughtful, doesn't he?"

Turning, Harry saw that had three tiny shadows in the form of the three girls that had found him, and all three were watching him with the same curious, earnest expression.

"Er…can I help you girls?" he asked, and they all giggled, Marlene and Mary shoving Lily forward a bit as though in some strange sacrifice.

"Well…we're just worried about you," Lily said. "You took quite a big fall, after all."

"I've fallen from higher," Harry said with a grin. "Madame Pomfrey says I'm sound; I'll be alright."

"Are you sure?" Mary asked him. "Maybe we should accompany you for a little while – "

"I'll be alright," Harry repeated, shooting for the same reassuring smile he often gave Mafalda—although all that did was have him profoundly missing his plucky little sidekick. Still, the effect was immediate and rather a bit profound; all three girls got the same wide-eyed look that Mafalda often got when Harry put on his Charming Older Brother hat, and leaving them a bit stunned, he hurried away.

He needed somewhere to think alone, and he knew just the place for it.

…

I need somewhere to think alone about everything that's happened.

I need somewhere where I can think by myself.

I need somewhere I can be by myself and think.

Glancing about the empty corridor, Harry was relieved to see no one watching as he made for the door that had appeared seemingly from nowhere in the wall. Idly, he found himself thinking what sort of Housefly Effect ripple would come of some random student seeing the Room of Requirement in the 1970s. Would an enterprising Ravenclaw finally find that perfect study spot and push toward his ambition of becoming an auror that rounded up a dozen Death Eaters? Or would some sneak with vile political aspirations discover a chamber in which to plot his rise to power?

Or, maybe some hungry first year would fine a roomful of candy. It was hard to say.

Equally hard to deal with was the whole situation unfolding around him. Now that the bizarre and mind-blowing novelty of meeting his parents as preteens had finally worn off, the stark and somewhat bleak reality of realizing he'd been stranded out of time was setting in its place.

Would he ever get back to his own timeline? Would he ever see Hermione again? Mafalda? Sirius and Remus? Well, his versions of them?

Inside, the Room of Requirement had apparently deemed his request worthy of a rather large study not dissimilar to the ones found in Grimmauld Place, albeit with the dark mahogany floors and deep red walls of the Gryffindor Common Room. Harry mused that it was as though the two places he'd felt most at home had melded into one in order to make him as comfortable as possible during his ordeal.

Making his way into the room, he settled onto a plush leather couch, taking in the low tables and what looked like a writing desk in the corner. Along the wall, high shelves were packed with books, though he simply didn't have the energy to muster being curious enough to check the titles of any of them. Perhaps they were just there as an aesthetic choice by the Room, for decorative purposes and nothing else.

It had seen fit to at least provide a few high windows to let in some afternoon sun, rather like it had the last time he'd visited. With Mafalda and Hermione.

And now he was quite sad again.

Stuffing his hands into his pockets, he tried to pull himself from a spiral of self-pity and –

What was this in his pocket?

Clasping his hand around a cold metal disk, he withdrew it to find—the Wayfinder. The mysterious multipurpose device that had led them along their little treasure hunt all across the United States. On one side, an ornate glowing emblem of an hourglass currently gave off a dull red light (that was a new color), while the other –

Had changed again.

"How may times is this thing going to be something else?" Harry muttered to himself. The face of the watch had gone, the compass arrow that had pointed them so steadfastly along on their journey now replaced by a series of what looked like small glass lenses, not unlike a bunch of tiny cameras. Harry could see reflected in the tiny orbs the flickering lights of the Room, the distant warm glow of the fireplace.

And strangely, a bright blue light…

"What the…?"

Quickly, he shot a look around the room, but the only sources of light were the high windows, the dancing glow of the lamps about the place, and the crackling fire—none of them were any sort of blue. Studying the watch again, he turned it over in his hands, noting that the top bit had popped up.

Well, nothing ventured…

He gave it a push, and it clicked in rather a satisfying way.

"Temporal entanglement detected."

"Oh," Harry spoke.

A voice had come from the watch, a metallic monotone like the gold robot from Star Wars. Just as Harry was beginning to inspect for the source of the voice, the glass diodes in the watch lit up a beaming blue, and some manner of projection issued forth. It looked like a hologram—also from Star Wars, Harry mused. Ellis Locked had really been ahead of his time.

"Please resolve all instances of temporal entanglement to prevent a Discontinuity Event."

The holographic display showed what looked like a thick strand of rope winding along, with various points labeled 1975, 1980, and 1985 and so on. A blinking red light was labeled Relative Present. Just after that point, a jagged break occurred, fraying the rope and leaving the two ends to sway ever so slightly.

"Temporal entanglement?" Harry muttered to himself. Well, he'd been listening to Hermione natter on about time-travel for weeks; he'd picked up enough of the jargon to understand that temporal entanglement was most likely a twist in time, and a Discontinuity Event sounded like a bit of the past not quite meeting up with the present. The rope was illustration enough of that, as well.

But then, what did that mean of what he knew of time-travel? Was it the Many Worlds Theory?

"The fact is, wizards don't yet really understand time-travel and how it works. Some say it's a linear flow and not to be messed with, others posit the Many-Worlds Theory as evidence that we could create stable branching timelines that run parallel with each other. There are a few that believe time exists outside of our capacity to even understand it, that it's a massive intertwining ball of four-dimensional…stuff, with rules that rewrite themselves the longer you look at it."

"And yet all three could be true at the same time."

"Exactly."

A conversation he'd had with Hermione echoed in his ears, and he pushed past the ache that even remembering her voice caused him to examine the conundrum before him. He was in an alternate timeline—that much had to be true. But temporal entanglement, along with the time-rope-thing on display before him implied that…

With a thoughtful frown, Harry reached for the projection, watching the white-blue light shift around his fingers as he attempted to pull at the rope. Sure enough, it dragged along, years whizzing by until he saw another rope passing through this one. At the intersection, there was a blinking red dot, which he stared at for a moment before tapping it.

"Good thing I've seen Star Wars, or I'd be proper lost," he muttered. The red dot blinked when he touched it, a little square popping up with words in it:

Temporal Intersection Point—TIP.713
Status: [PENDING]

Earth-085/Earth-125

Source: Time Vortex localized on Earth-125. For more information, see Document 713A.

That was…only slightly helpful… The exploding time machine sure seemed a likely candidate for a time vortex, whatever that was. Was his timeline Earth-125? This was veering away from time travel and crashing right into the multidimensional. An intersection of timelines…

Peter.

"That little sneak," Harry muttered as everything fell into place. This was the timeline Peter had come from. All that talk of causality and such hadn't been him somehow not comprehending the intricacies of time-travel; it had been him attempting to preserve his own past—which had been Harry's future and was now his present.

Oh, this was getting headache-inducing. He needed—some sort of primer, maybe a journal or a corkboard to track this thing.

Quite suddenly, there was; as he glanced up from the watch, he saw sitting before him on the low tabletop a spiral notebook, several pens, and a stack of books. The topmost one bore the title 'So, You've Found Yourself in a Stable Time Loop!'. Ahead and on the wall near the door, a massive corkboard had appeared, stuck with plenty of pins and string so he could put together a proper timeline.

"Right," he said, snagging the book toward him. Hermione had told him once (in this very room) that he needed to read more.

Perhaps it was time to start.