Everything Everywhere One Thing at a Time - Chapter 13 (Patreon)

Ran a couple days over my imaginary deadline because of how long it ended up being.

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Chapter 13: Council of Temporal Pre-Location

“-. April, 1995 .-“

Corporealizing the incorporeal proved a frustrating topic to research. On the one hand, it theoretically shouldn’t be any more difficult to master than other magical disciplines. On the other hand, spells like that had fallen out of use so very long ago, and rituals even further back, that precise methods weren’t written down anywhere anymore. Harry was already way ahead of most people thanks to the ghost-affecting spells he’d been using since the first Walk.

Even those spells should have been much harder and dangerous, the only reason they weren’t was Magic – it did the legwork for them as it did for every other mystical discipline now. Since no one knew for sure if Magic even reached past low orbit, it was almost a guarantee that it wouldn’t be there for Harry if he ever wound up in that diner again, in a different reality. Or timeline, if there even was a distinction.

No, if they wanted to get anywhere, they had to find out how their antideluvian ancestors did it. Calling it a ‘slog’ was not inaccurate, since they’d been left with just old fairy tales and half-recorded poems and inscriptions to extrapolate from. 

As his research with Nicolas became a long-term affair, Harry thought of Peeves more than once. The poltergeist was such a menace that more than one Hogwarts professor or headmaster should have gotten fed up with him over the centuries. Since they hadn’t eliminated him, that meant they couldn’t.

They still contacted Dumbledore with a request to find whatever books he could on the subject, but even this didn’t turn out anything new.

Then, too, was the issue of the Astral Diner, and its obviously confected and transient nature. It was a sort of conjuration, but closer to an illusion than solid. Or the other way around, and it was a shared delusion instead. In either case, it was completely made up of the power of those entities. Parts of their own energy bodies, maybe, or at least shaped and projected by them.

In short, Harry couldn’t expect to draw a ritual circle in make-believe chalk and expect the floor to cooperate with him. Same for anyone else that came with him. Somehow. Or went there without him, if it was at all possible.

Harry was too ashamed to admit it, but he shied away from the thought of confronting those people again. Or doing anything to make them come after him. A big part of him wanted to just… let it all go. Set aside all the divination and whatever else, to live a normal life. Whatever passed for normal for him. The Goa’uld didn’t return during any of his other lives as Harry Potter.

It wasn’t like being a diviner was even Harry’s idea, he was just doing it because he thought he’d finally found something he could do well. At least, something that wasn’t just an inferior copy of what his parents were good at.

What am I even thinking? Harry felt suddenly angry at himself. Following in my mom and dad’s footsteps, why would that be bad?

His first thought was leftover stuff from living with the Dursleys, they always made his mum and dad sound like losers he should be ashamed of. But he was over that, wasn’t he?

Harry was not too ashamed – barely – to admit to this confusion to Nicolas and Pernelle at dinner one night.

“Perhaps resentment over inherited expectations?” Perenelle wondered. “The idea that teenagers always rebel is a modern lie, but still. Not a few people rebelled throughout history against expectations imposed upon them, even heirs.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Harry said dubiously. “It’s not like the teachers at Hogwarts ever pressured me to be more like my parents or anything, or made me feel ashamed when I wasn’t as good as them in class. Except Snape, kind of, he just hated me for being James’ son.”

“And possibly for not being his own son,” Nicolas mused. “If he fancied your mother, it stands to reason he’d resent her children not being his.”

Harry pictured himself with Snape’s hooked nose and oily hair and grimaced in disgust. He’d never be rid of that image now. He wondered if maybe his life wouldn’t be better if he had aphantasia.

Unfortunately, the research didn’t advance much after that point. The one thing they hadn’t done was seek access to the vaults of the Department of Mysteries, but Harry doubted even they could help without miraculously being in possession of a pre-flood collection of ritual instruction materials. Even then, they’d be in an impossible situation – they needed to recreate ancient spiritual magic, possibly necromancy, but Magic would either substitute or syphon off whatever power they collected in whatever ritual they put together. This meant they couldn’t even test if they had a solution that would work if Magic didn’t exist.

In any case, whatever they came up with would have to be completely fuelled by the caster’s personal spiritual power, which Magic’s very existence here meant Harry was never going to be able to build up anywhere near the necessary point.

Charlie made assenting noises when they brought up the idea of pushing Magic itself away from an area – but not the power – but he was still busy with his model.

“Perhaps we can use Gryffindor’s sword as a battery,” Nicolas wondered one day, because even he was reduced to just speculation. “But changing one spell energy type to another has its own problems.”

“What do you think, Godric?” Harry spun the sword-pen around his fingers. “You think you have enough energy?”

‘Not for two things at once,’ said the sword spirit. ‘I do have an upper capacity, and it took much of it just to harm that one careless man. Avada Kedavra works by fatally wounding the spirit, but it doesn’t destroy it outright despite what the incantation means. Clearly, those people won’t die from one glancing hit. In either case, warding them away and powering some manner of ritual at the same time is beyond me, especially such a powerful one.’

“Well, we’ve done all we can for now,” Nicolas finally decided after Harry relayed all that. “We will have to live and see what other opportunities emerge.”

Harry both resented and envied his pragmatism, but he really wished they’d gotten somewhere. He didn’t want to think he’d have to rely on just the spells from his mum’s ghost, seeing as they were just to trap and restrict. Only temporarily too. If they’ll even work on whatever Ascended were.

He especially didn’t want to think what it could mean that he just ‘happened’ to learn about the Cauldron of Nodens just before all this happened, but the questions came on their own anyway.

Was it just chance, or some grander design? Was that bartender man lying, or was Harry’s life really at the whim of some unseen ‘master’? Did that ‘master’ mean for Harry to use it? On what? Who? Did the unseen master mean for Harry to become the sort of person who’d sacrifice other people to build up his own personal power? Harry already resented that he even had to think about such a thing, did anyone expect him to go through with something like that?

Why wouldn’t they? Harry thought morosely. I already know at least one person I wouldn’t mind using it on.

Voldemort. He deserved that and worse, didn’t he? He’d already done worse to himself even. Since Tom was even undead, having his spirit drained so his soul could pass on would be a mercy, wouldn’t it? For him, and especially everyone else who would be better off with him gone.

If Harry was right about how the cauldron – the goblet worked, he should get even more than just a base boost to spiritual power. Voldemort had almost certainly done a bunch of rituals too, and Harry was… fairly sure they’d all come back when he was revived in that first life in the graveyard. He always dominated Harry in speed, strength and reaction time, and was better than Dumbledore when the Headmaster still had the Elder Wand. So, some physical enhancements were probably spirit-deep too, at least.

Harry didn’t share any of this with Nicolas. He didn’t want to know what he’d say. How he’d even look at Harry for what was going through his head right now.

He was just 14.

Harry Potter was just 14 years old and he was already premeditating murder.

Even Voldemort hadn’t done that until he was two whole years older.

“-. May, 1995 .-“

To Harry’s growing shame, he couldn’t bring himself to share his dark thoughts even with Ron or Hermione.

To his even bigger embarrassment, he did end up sharing them with Neville instead. The boy in question visited the Pottery alone one Saturday morning to badger Harry into coming to Raptor Mountain with him for the weekend, and show off his all-new firearm skills.

That was how, in-between marvelling at Harry loading, aiming, shooting, disassembling and reassembling his guns blind-folded, Neville got Harry to tell him about some of his more exciting missions.

It was somewhere amidst all that that Harry went and slipped about what was on his mind.

Instead of being disturbed at Harry’s evil thoughts, Neville looked almost relieved, if anything.

“It’s just – you seem a lot less waffly now,” Neville ‘explained’ when Harry stared weirdly at his reaction for a bit too long, and it made absolutely no sense because Harry was more afraid than ever and those dark thoughts were– “About giving as good as you get, I mean. I was getting kinda worried, honestly.”

“Worried?” Harry asked bewilderedly. “Why? About what?”

“You know,” Neville waved vaguely. “Never getting around to being a hero. You, I mean.”

“What?”

Neville became frustrated, like he wasn’t sure how to explain, but he tried anyway. “Everyone keeps saying my mum and dad are heroes, but they’re not.”

Harry suddenly wondered if everything since he woke up wasn’t just another alternate life.

“Heroes aren’t… they’re not losers.” His own mean words seemed to make Neville ashamed, but he bulled through. “Least they don’t lose on anyone’s terms but theirs. Whatever happens in a hero’s life that’s most important – it happens because of something they decide to do. My parents, even your parents, they didn’t do that. They did what other people told them to do. What my parents did, how they ended up – maybe it was the right thing for me, maybe it wasn’t, I won’t just judge my parents like that, but it wasn’t the heroic thing. The heroic thing would’ve been – I don’t know, something. Something that wasn’t that.”

Harry disassembled and reassembled his weapons while his thoughts wrapped around all that.

“Heroes – they aren’t minions,” Neville finally managed to properly articulate, how long had he been wrestling with this problem? His own problems? “I know some like Cu Chulainn and Heracles were technically slaves, but that didn’t matter. The world turned on their actions, not the other way around. The rules don’t matter when it comes to doing the right thing. Or the least wrong thing, even the worst thing as long as the arsehole earned it. I’m a scaredy cat, but if I weren’t, I know I’d not hesitate at all if I had the chance to kill Bellatrix Lestrange.”

… Huh.

“Hermione punched Malfoy for making up bad rumours about you while you were under, did you know that?”

No he hadn’t.

“She felt really good about it afterwards, but then she became all ashamed for feeling good about it. Said that if you hurt someone and don’t immediately feel bad afterwards, even if they’re the worst people ever, there’s something wrong with you,” Neville made a face. “She doesn’t understand. She’ll never understand unless real stuff starts happening to her too.”

“Poetic justice, huh?”

“Revenge,” Neville snarled. The light of the magical sun seemed to skirt off his face, too fake to touch him for that moment. “When justice and vengeance are the same thing, regardless of what some popinjay in purple robes has to say, that’s when you’ve got a hero. That’s what I think, at least.”

Did Neville Longbottom just preach sedition? Against the Wizengamot?

Holy crap.

After his amazement passed, though, Harry wasn’t sure he completely agreed. By Neville’s understanding, Sirius Black did the heroic thing when he set Harry aside in favour of going to pursue justice and vengeance on Peter Pettigrew.

But that’s not really true, is it? Harry aimed his sniper rifle and shot a dinosaur all the way on the other side of the valley. Sirius went along with Dumbledore’s orders to give me up, as relayed by Hagrid.

“Great shot, Harry! Do your own spotting for a bit while I go and collect the kill, any other beasties should’ve run away but it never hurts to be careful.”

Harry watched Neville leave, but his thoughts were elsewhere.

Sirius chose to be a minion, and he took the fall for it. Also like a minion. And then his master washed his hands of him, like one does when a minion becomes more trouble than he’s worth.

Now it was Harry’s turn to be ashamed of his uncharitable thoughts, but even so…

He didn’t feel like he was wrong.

Harry thought about that night in first year, when they were all set to follow ‘Snape’ into the third floor corridor, before Harry changed his mind at the last second. His memory of his life that he got the Patronus from were still vague and spotty, but he was very sure he hadn’t had cause to change his mind at the last second then. He, Ron and Hermione followed ‘Snape (actually Quirrel) through the traps, and…

And what?

“Freedom,” Harry muttered to himself, that was what changed the course of his life, wasn’t it? Why he himself was able to change it in first year, to stop being the same as that first Harry Potter. “Bravery. Boldness.” He looked at the guns he’d been able to conjure wholesale because Evan Lorne – because he just knew firearms that well. “Self-determination.” Commitment to self-determination, maybe, but even combined those words didn’t seem enough.

Guocaun, King Herla’s long buried memory supplied, as if through distant fog. Wulthuz, Farr, kleos, Ollerus, Ullr the Renowned,

“… Glory,” Harry barely managed to murmur, irrationally shy of the word even when no one else was around to hear. “The trait of kingship.”

Harry waited until Neville got back, and after scanning the area for any leftover game, they went together to field dress the kill and carry the proceeds to his secret jungle home. It took two trips, but they made it back before dark.

That night, as he went to sleep, Harry used psychometry on himself. Followed his history all the way back to birth, and then further back until he rewound that entire life too. He may or may not have skipped over a bunch of other Harry Potter lives until he found that first one – and it was the first one as Harry Potter – but he didn’t look too closely. He was still too scared to commit to past life regression fully.

But if he couldn’t cope with recalling a single night, he may as well resign himself to being a coward forever.

Harry stopped at the moment when Hermione immobilized poor Neville with Petrificus Totalus, and relived that night.

Except he wasn’t ready for what all happened, and had to morbidly indulge snapshots and highlights of the next couple of weeks just to confirm if what he saw was true.

When he woke up just fifteen minutes after falling asleep, Harry Potter stared at the ceiling and felt torn between horror and incredulous disbelief.

I killed a man, Harry thought as the disbelief won. I killed a man when I was eleven. And nobody acted like it was a big deal! Even Dumbledore!

Harry wanted to be furious on behalf of his former self, he’d killed someone in self-defense at age 11 and nobody ever even asked if it had completely messed him up?

But it didn’t, Harry also recalled, and he didn’t feel the same disbelief even though he thought he should. He really thought he should. I wasn’t messed up. I wasn’t torn up over it at all. I didn’t buy it when the headmaster told me Quirrel was ‘already dead’ or doomed, or whatever malarkey he spun. I’d killed a man and I knew it. But I… didn’t feel bad about it?

Didn’t feel good about it either. It was just something that happened. He did feel a great relief that the mystery and danger were over, and a bit sad that a man he’d never met had lost his eternal life because Harry wasn’t good enough to stop Quirrel without putting the Philosopher’s Stone in danger. But for having survived when his mortal enemy didn’t…

Harry didn’t feel guilty about it at all.

The mixture of incredulity and indignance enabled Harry to beat back the persistent fear that the bartender had put in him. He went back to sleep, and after achieving the lucid state, he went and finally lived out his first life as Harry Potter properly.

A lot of it was still spotty, a bunch of years he didn’t relive at all because of his lack of frame of reference for those experiences in this life. He literally didn’t remember anything after the Battle of Hogwarts to the day his youngest kid started Hogwarts, except for a few holidays. Like the one that taught him the patronus charm. But he remembered everything up to the final battle fine.

Except kissing Cho Chang. Or Ginny Weasley. He hadn’t kissed a girl yet, in this life. Which was good because if he had, he might’ve gotten to remember more of –

Well, that.

Waking up the next morning, Harry thought blankly that his conclusions of the prior day had been true.

He’d never felt guilty for taking down his enemies, mortally or not. Not over Quirrel, or any Death Eater later, and certainly not when Voldemort finally died. No, it didn’t count as suicide for him either. Just because Harry was too weak to defeat his enemy properly and had to resort to killing him through a trap, one he didn’t even set up himself, didn’t make it any less killing. Harry had known what was going on the whole time. Even indulged an awkward victor’s monologue at the end about it.

The duels, fights, taking down his enemies… it only ever felt good. Euphoric, even. If he ever felt bad about something, it was losing people. His sadness and grief seemed to extend across the whole normal human spectrum there. The only emotion he ever felt even more intensely than that, was…

Fury. Whenever he was deprived of autonomy and freedom, he felt everything between indignation and depression-induced apathy… But when he was denied the chance to fight his own battles, he seethed with apoplectic rage until he burst.

Even then, though, it took being overloaded with Voldemort’s own anger during fifth year, for that first Harry to finally start losing his temper openly. And he still didn’t lose control of all of himself, just his mouth.

The Harry of now didn’t feel any more guilty or ashamed over any of that either, except maybe not going through all the way – if he was man enough to defy Dolores Umbridge in class, he should’ve been man enough to refuse to attend her detentions, no matter what that harridan or McGonagall or Dumbledore had to say.

If anything, with the way things turned out by the time his children were old enough for Hogwarts, Harry felt like that him hadn’t gone far enough.

No, that’s not right either.

The Malfoys may have been pardoned, along with a few others, but that was just a handful of exceptions in payment for Narcissa’s silence when she checked on Harry after Voldemort hit him with Avada Kedavra. She lied about him being dead, and didn’t even make any demands in return, it was enough that Harry had told her Draco was alive.

This way, there was no blanket amnesty for all the Death Eaters – the Malfoys sold out all the others, who were killed or put away. It was a complete reversal of how the First War ended, when the ones who got convicted were the exception. Because of this, their world didn’t see a repeat of the same mess as the first time. It allowed them to reform the government properly that time around. Hermione never would’ve become Minister for Magic if they hadn’t.

Harry parted with Neville feeling a lot lighter, and a lot less squeamish about all the things he wasn’t squeamish about.

Enough so that he was finally willing to broach the topic with his foster family.

It did not go the way he expected.

“Oh, is that all?” Nicolas Flamel, it turned out, had very different standards of behaviour versus the modern world. “Harry, I don’t keep to myself because I hate other people. Maybe you missed it but I come from a time when outlawry was still practiced.”

Hey, that’s right! Outlaws weren’t just those gunslingers from western films, the original legal meaning was person declared as outside the protection of the law. With people like that, you were allowed to do anything to them, taunt, hurt, torture, even kill, anyone and everyone was legally allowed to persecute or kill them. 

“Honestly Harry, the fact that outlawry isn’t still practiced is a damned shame,” Nicolas shook his head. “A shame exceeded only by the gall of modern government busybodies who presume to dictate even what you’re allowed to do on your own property. Laws today are more interested with protecting criminals than the innocents. Not only will the courts send a man to prison for killing the deviant that raped his barely teen daughter to death, entire charities and advocacy organisations will spring up in the aftermath to exalt the perpetrator as the ultimate martyr.”

No way, Nicolas had to be exaggerating for emphasis, right? But it wasn’t like he ever lied to Harry… that kind of thing actually happened?

“It’s not just Tom Riddle either, many of his followers committed enough crimes foul enough to have earned the same label several times over. If right to get even and outlawry were to make a return, it would be a much fairer world.”

Voldemort. And the Death Eaters. Outlaws.

Harry Potter’s cognitive dissonance evaporated so fast that he felt abruptly light-headed.

He thought this might be a good time and place to laugh madly, but no such impulse came. Instead, he just felt as if the Erlking was looking at himself from the other end of history with an unmistakable air of ‘no shit, kid.’

“I think I owe Sirius an apology.”

To others, Harry’s comment might have come out of nowhere, but Nicolas Flamel was a diviner. He was well used to sudden ideas and epiphanies that made no sense when seen from the outside.

In hindsight, while Sirius Black had failed to be a hero, it wasn’t for lack of trying. If he’d managed to hunt down Pettigrew and kill him successfully, he’d have definitely been hailed as a hero after the dust settled. Even the whole ‘taking the law in your own hands’ thing wouldn’t have been a problem, aurors and hit wizards had a license to kill Death Eaters at that point.

Sirius probably would’ve still spent some time in lockup, but just a few days while they investigated, not in Azkaban. He’d have then become the guardian of the Boy-Who-Lived on top of being the great avenger of said baby’s parents.

Pettigrew also wouldn’t get to spend the next twelve years sleeping with children, never mind still be around fourteen years later to bring Voldemort back to life with Harry’s unwilling cooperation. And blood.

“Expecto Patronum. Sirius, I’m coming over, you don’t mind, right? See you in ten.”

Harry’s godfather was very bemused by Harry going for a visit just to apologize for thinking bad of him out of nowhere. Sirius reassured him as best he could, which wasn’t bad at all once it occurred to the man to point out that thoughtcrime was hogwash. Alas, he soon had to leave for a meeting with Dumbledore at the ministry, in the hopes of getting some extended access to certain Department of Mysteries areas.

It was, all in all, supremely ironic that Harry himself ended up making more progress than anyone else again, in their research.

He hadn’t even been trying for it. He’d just been a mixture of bored and antsy after Sirius left him with a promise of being back in a couple of hours tops, so he set about walking up and down Grimmauld Place. He hadn’t tested the endurance of his ‘see in all directions’ power in a while, he figured two hours would be nice enough exercise.

That was how he found out, by complete accident, that there were things he couldn’t see with that ability, even though his normal eyes could. Worse, there were things that cast huge blind areas in his second sight’s range, or at least spells that could have that effect. It still alerted Harry that something was wrong, but it wasn’t quite like noticing that you suddenly had a blind spot in your vision. It was more like the edges of that blind spot tried to squeeze together so you didn’t notice that you couldn’t notice them, and didn’t quite manage it.

Harry used a duster – with a very long wooden handle, Black Family curses were no joke – to wipe the dust off the display case. There was a pendant inside it, the sort made of two parts on a hinge that hid something inside, hanging from the neck a headless bust.

“Half-Blood Master must not touch Master’s locket!”

What the bloody hell?

“-. 24 June, 1995 .-“

This is the sad story of Sirius Black’ younger brother. A marked Death Eater, Regulus Black betrayed Voldemort at the very last moment. He thus ended up dying in order to steal one of the soul anchors that the Dark Lord had made in order to become immortal.

A decade and a half later, the discovery of this story’s grim end led to the third most shocking day of Sirius Black’s life, and the darkest irony in Harry Potter’s life too: the first major breakthrough that he, Nicolas, and the rest of their little conspiracy had in corporealizing the incorporeal were Voldemort’s horcruxes.

Even this was just a fluke, and barely a consolation prize at that.

Horcruxes were rare and obscure dark magic, as was the method of undeath they were based on (phylacteries). Complex and demanding too, the spirit was easy enough to harm but the soul was a much tougher nut to crack, nearly irreducible. It made sense, in a way, that you needed to do something against all reason to fracture it – if the soul was your identity, then cracking it meant to crack your own identity.

Calling Voldemort insane would be giving him an excuse, but there was a large spectrum of bad psychological traits that sanity still allowed for. Narcissism, obsessive behaviour, paranoia, those were just the three most obvious flaws possessed by the Dark Lord. It was everyone’s bad luck that his sheer competence offset all of those flaws and then some.

Voldemort had loaded his horcruxes up with incredibly powerful protection spells and curses. It wasn’t just that the locket was impervious to all harm until Harry used parseltongue to open it – what they were comfortable trying at least, without extreme hazardous protection. The thing also had a nasty legilimency-based attack built in.

Also, it was protected from divination, as well as passive forms of extrasensory perception if Harry’s inability to perceive them directly with his omnidirectional sight was any indication. It wasn’t perfect, but that just made it all the more impressive since that camouflage seemed to be entirely coincidental.

The locket wasn’t protected against psychometry though. Not Harry’s, at least, when he evoked himself from when he still had the scar. He got to learn more than he ever wanted about that form of immortality, and it was immortality instead of just unlife.

The magic Voldemort used to actually affect the soul directly was their greatest breakthrough yet, if only because it was Tom’s own power and will that did it, rather than Magic picking up any slack as was the case for the subsequent enchantments.

As if they didn’t already know that Voldemort was the most powerful Dark Lord ever, now they knew he’d managed to build up personal power enough to defy the constant drain of Magic, in spite of said Magic.

At least now we know for sure that it’s possible?

It was darkly impressive that Tom Riddle had the power and the will to do that while literally committing the ultimate self-harm.

Harry didn’t know what it said about Tom Riddle, or even Herpo the Foul who originally invented horcruxes, that premeditated murder was enough to split their soul. Repeatedly, in the former’s case. Tom had done a lot of torture and other acts of malice aforethought from when he was a young child. He never cared about who suffered or how, intentionally or otherwise. Actually, he seemed to enjoy it. Or if not enjoy it, take vindication from it.

More likely murder was the unnatural act, which spoke a lot better of mankind than most anything else. Some people liked to claim that murder was just another part of human nature, because nature itself is cruel by nature. But it wasn’t like all animals of the same race habitually murdered each other, especially herbivores and omnivores. Actually, it was rare even for territorial predators – usually two of the same species just fought over rights to an area and the loser submitted or ran away.

The old myths say humans were originally much grander and nobler.

Harry’s personal experience wearing the skull of Brann the Blessed proved that the former, at least, was completely true. In that context, not much was more denobling than murdering another human being.

It’s not enough to murder just anybody though, Harry thought darkly. To make a horcrux, the one you murder has to be an innocent, or at least someone who doesn’t ‘deserve’ it somehow. Someone whose murder is ‘wrong.’ Unearned, maybe, from your own perspective. Your own soul’s perspective.

It was quite gruesome that the evil didn’t stop there. After you split the soul, there came the spells to bind that fragment to an object. The way this was done was yet more self-harm – after ripping out part of your very self, you needed to twist the sense of identity of that microcosm of your very self through the identity of the object. This was achieved through what Harry could best liken to, essentially self-inflicted, brainwashing via torturous mutilation.

Incidentally, this meant that the receiving object needed to have its own solid identity, or something Magic recognized as identity, to twist it through. This meant it needed to be either another living being – which would eventually die as all mortal things did, thus defeating the purpose – or a highly magical object with a very long and famous history. That was why Voldemort used famous old artefacts for his horcruxes, instead of just shoving his soul fragments into random grains of sand. It wasn’t just megalomania.

Unfortunately, the difficulty of making horcruxes even if he let Magic do all the heavy lifting didn’t say anything good about the possibility of imposing any sort of effect without it. Especially on much bigger spectres, never mind literal gods. Or near enough that the difference might not matter.

Like Voldemort, Harry would have to do it all by himself, with his own power.

He had nowhere near that amount of power.

Probably.

It was these thoughts that percolated through Harry Potter’s mind all day on June 24, 1995, such that he didn’t even register when Cedric Diggory won the Triwizard Tournament until everyone in the stands was getting up to cheer.

Harry got up too and did some cheering of his own, if only because he was determined to take every possible excuse to go on with life instead of hiding under a rock like those glowing creeps wanted. It wasn’t the same without hanging out with his friends, that was why he was on a different row instead of with them, but he could wait until they got somewhere else to make up for that lost time.

He’d come to Hogwarts for the Third Task incognito, having used contacts and a wig to change his eye and hair color to brown, and muggle face putty to make his nose look a bit different. Charles Gordon was a man of many skills. Also, magical disguises wouldn’t have worked because of the dispelling waterfalls set up over the access ways to the stands.

After the complete failure of security on not just the part of Hogwarts but the Ministry itself, as seen in the Crouches, nobody was taking any chances. If figuring out that enchantment gave Dumbledore an additional reason to talk to the DoM and conceal what they really most wanted, Harry wasn’t going to complain.

The Gringotts goblins still hadn’t finished having a fit about it, as Harry understood it, but he was fine with that. Those swindlers were overdue a reminder anyway, of why they lost every one of their ‘rebellions’ – enough mind and effort let a wizard achieve or duplicate any magical feat, especially if they already knew it was possible. It was just the goblins’ bad luck that Dumbledore needed distracting from his worry over Harry’s coma, and generally being depressed.

Harry might still be annoyed at the actions of Griphook and the bank from that first life, now that he remembered them.

The security on site still had spells and checks to check for regular stuff too, or rather highlight the real appearance of the person through whatever disguise they had, like interposing outlines. Not cast on the person but the air around them, thus bypassing personal glamour items and spells. Fortunately, Dumbledore was quite accommodating of Harry these days. They had arranged ahead of time for Harry to go through the security point manned by Dumbledore’s own handpicked security expert, namely the real Alastor Moody. It stuck in the old auror’s craw, but Moody owed Harry for saving him from Barty Crouch Junior.

The only hitch in the ‘support Cedric Diggory without stealing his thunder’ plan was that Harry’s hair turned from black to red and back a few times when he passed through the waterfall. Nobody else saw it thanks to the whig, but Harry had other ways to see and feel besides eyes. It was as if his body couldn’t decide which was his ‘real’ hair color. It was strange, it wasn’t like he ever had red hair until the prank by his dad’s ghost, and Herla – Arth – had been a blue-eyed blond.

Prematurely aged from stress though, Harry reconsidered as a vague echo of memory bubbled up. Red hair turns blond as you age, and eventually snow white.

If he’d been any good at metamorphing, Harry might have been able to force or suppress the shift, even though the waterfall, but he was pants at that. He had tried to practice, but he could never make changes happen.

They had better luck when Nicolas or Sirius used transfiguration on him, but not how they hoped. The idea was to get him used to feeling the changes in the hopes of reproducing shifts without external magic, but the opposite happened. When something about him was changed by anything not him, whether or not he was conscious of the spell or not, Harry immediately felt the difference along with a profound unease. His metamorph magic activated extremely easily then, almost automatically, reverting him to his natural state.

Whether a holdover from being petrified or just a mental block, it seemed that Harry would have to settle for just having a physical reset function, at least for the foreseeable future. Hopefully Nicolas was right that it would also work to keep him in perfect health, but they didn’t exactly have a way to test or practice that while Harry was still enjoying the lingering benefits of the Elixir. 

Well, unless he used psychometry on his biology, maybe?

Harry suddenly had the very clear premonition that trying that for the first time in the middle of a roaring stadium was a bad idea.

Right. Best leave it for later.

Harry had arranged to meet with his friends inside the Hogwarts corridor leading to the greenhouse. Well, more like Hermione had arranged it, there was something going on with her but Harry had been too busy to more than notice, and it didn’t feel like anything too bad.

He ran late because he got caught up in the crowd headed down to – futilely – try and get a piece of Cedric while he was already being crowded by the judges and press, and the aurors hired precisely to stop that very thing. Harry managed to break away before the mob forced him to be part of the stampede – weren’t people with first-class seats supposed to have more class? – but he lingered because he saw something interesting happening with his second sight.

If not for his own dealings with the Goblet of Fire, Harry wouldn’t have understood what was happening. It was quite the thing to see a magical contract unravel because its terms had been fulfilled. It went quite thoroughly against the purpose of Nodens’ actual enchantment, since that one had been intentionally designed to exploit the harsh and indiscriminate nature of geas penalties. It did give him the clearest view yet, though, of where the Goblet’s own enchantments ended and the original cauldron’s began.

Harry didn’t know how he’d make use of this, or when or if, but he wasn’t ruling anything out.

I’m turning into a bigger research nut than Hermione.

Since he wanted Cedric to know Harry had been there to support him, Harry went to hang out with his friends until Cedric finally got away from the mob. That got mixed results. Ron was waiting at the right spot, but Neville was elsewhere being monopolized by his grandmother, and Hermione was absent. When pressed, Ron said she said she had a ‘surprise’ for Harry, one she’d been working on for weeks apparently, so much so she’d been MIA outside classes, but which both Ron and Neville had been sworn to secrecy.

Fair enough.

Harry and Ron were enjoying treats in the kitchens when the Marauder’s map finally showed Cedric alone. Well, alone with just his father and girlfriend.

“Expecto Patronum: Hey, good job. Wish I could say I saw the whole thing, but the organisers sadly don’t know what a jumbotron is. I was in the stands the whole time though. Good luck with your eternal fame, maybe you’ll actually enjoy it.” Harry would’ve left it at that, but he hesitated. Maybe it was marauder mischievousness, maybe it was his old life as a king that weighed all opportunities, maybe it was not being kidnapped and used in a foul resurrection ritual this time around. Whatever it was, the spiritual malaise from what the Others did to him was temporarily lifted. “I might have an employment opportunity for you in a year or ten. Think about it.”

He watched Prongs disappear through the wall, then focused to see how long he could share his sight with the stag, like he had while petrified. Pretty well now, it turned out. He experienced the stag’s lightspeed dash to the receiver – it wasn’t teleportation, was that its highest limit? – and even got to watch the gobsmacked reactions of Cedric and those with him before Prongs dispersed.

The patronus didn’t so much rejoin Harry as it reformed in his spirit, not crossing the intervening distances this time. What a good mystery to distract Hermione with, next time she went all frizzy.

Unfortunately, the Marauder’s Map also showed a bunch of people gathering outside the kitchen doors by then, most of them unfamiliar. When they asked the elves, they found out it was press people. Someone had brain enough to wonder if the unknown fourteen year-old young wizard Ron Weasley left with might be more than he seemed.

Harry grabbed Ron and apparated to the seventh-floor corridor, right outside the suite Nicolas and him used on and off when they visited. Dumbledore was accommodating in more ways than one, these days. Harry probably could’ve bypassed the block on apparition anyway, by asking Hogwarts itself for the special permission, but he didn’t want to mess up the castle’s sleep just for that.

Didn’t want to walk back any second chance he gave either, until and unless it was thrown in his face. That was no way to live, Nicolas always said. Or run society.

They didn’t find anyone in the suite, but there was a note in Hermione’s writing and co-signed by Nicolas, saying to go to the Room of Requirement. So that’s what they did.

When he and Ron reached the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy, Harry found out why he hadn’t been able to divine anything about Cedric Diggory today. Well, he already knew most likely why – if you can’t divine anything about someone’s future, it most likely meant they’ll be directly and meaningfully involved with your own around that point in time.

Now, Harry finally knew how Cedric would be involved – he was right there, in front of the tapestry. And so was Cho Chang.

“Alright there, Potter?” Cedric greeted him as they arrived, then nodded at Ron. “Weasley.”

“Diggory.”

“Diggory,” Harry shook the older boy’s hand. Or man, now. Not just of age, but proven in all three tests of skill, might, and character. “When I said a year or three, I did mean a year or three. I’m not employing anyone yet.”

“Anyone else, you mean?” Cedric said shrewdly.

“No comment.” Did he mean Charlie, or someone else? Doctor Strauss? Dumbledore, even? Yeah, pull the other one. “Was there something you wanted, or is you being here just coincidence?”

“In this one spot where the Golden Four keep vanishing and reappearing mysteriously? Obviously not.”

“So?”

“I was wondering if your mysterious job offer might not be preceded by, let’s say, anything at all resembling internship.”

“You’ll have to explain that one.”

“Look, Potter-“

“You can call me Harry. And Miss Chang may well.”

“Then you should call me Cho.”

“And you should call me Cedric. Could we talk somewhere a bit more private?”

Harry and Ron exchanged a look, then they led the way into the nearest classroom, where everyone did all they could think of to maximise security.

“Harry, people talk,” Cho said after the last spells settled. “A lot.”

“Which makes it really obvious when they aren’t talking about something,” Cedric picked up. “There’s been a lot of not talking about you this year, from Weasley, Granger, Longbottom, the teachers, the headmaster, even the press. After what you did last year, it should’ve been a media circus but it wasn’t. Even now they’re only doing the bare minimum of mentioning you.”

“Your influence is impossible to notice,” Cho continued. “Don’t even try to deny it. The intellectual high society through Nicolas Flamel, the Wizengamot through your godfather, the Ministry through Dumbledore, maybe even the ICW. The headmaster has never played second fiddle to anyone, but he did for you that night, and he’s been extremely careful to avoid the implication that he might any influence on you. And then there’s Hogwarts – the wards, the ghosts, even the castle grounds do practically whatever you say. Cedric’s already mentioned the press.”

“Yeah, my family knows all about what it means to control the press, we had our own man as Minister for Magic once, you know?”

“… Alright?” Harry said. “Yeah, that’s all true. So what?”

“You won’t deny it?” Cho asked, surprised.

Harry shrugged. “I’m a private person, not a liar.”

“Huh,” Cedric muttered. “I thought we’d have to do a lot more proving ourselves, guess I filled my bag with all those notes and charts for nothing.”

“You’ve got charts?” What? “When did you have time to make charts?”

“I don’t know, the whole year?” said Cedric.

“It’s been obvious for a while that you’re building up to something too big for just four people,” Cho waved vaguely. “You were bound to start recruiting at some point.”

“We want in.” Cedric twined his fingers with Cho’s, but he didn’t look away from Harry. “Both of us. We’ve been discussing it for months, we already cleared it with our parents. They said they’ll do the plausible deniability thing, but we can do whatever we decide for ourselves. We figure the chance doesn’t come twice, to be part of the thing what will shape the world for at least the next generation.”

Harry crossed an elbow over his fist and wiped his mouth several times. “Just… what do you I’m up to, you two?”

“That’s the point, isn’t it? We don’t know.”

“Right fine job there,” Cedric huffed. “But you took the mask off to warn me of danger back then. That’s enough for me.”

It was just a coincidence that you were on the way out of the Great Hall. Harry decided not to say that though. “What’s your best guess?”

“Something to do with the Dark Lord,” Cho said hesitantly. “I know, right obvious, but as I said, the whole not talking about you deal has worked really well.”

“Annoyingly well.” Cedric’s amusement took any sting out of it though.

“Right.” Harry looked between the two. “That’s not it.”

“Pardon?”

“Whatever you think ‘this’ is, it’s not about the Dark Lord. Well, we’ll probably have to deal with him at some point, but he’s not it. But fine, come on. Since you’re here anyway, there’s no need to wait.”

“Wait what? Not about – what do you mean you’ll have to deal with him, is he back? Even without – you know?”

“Not yet, don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t worry?!”

“Harry-“

“No more questions right now, please. Nothing you’ll see today will make any sense either, probably.” Harry took down the locking spells and led the way out. “We’ll need to have a long sit-down at some point to get you up to speed. Later though, after we’ve come up with some manner of security process. And maybe when we’ve put something together that won’t immediately make you think we’re all insane. No guarantees on the last one, I don’t know what Hermione’s been cooking for today, but it’ll almost certainly seem completely barmy.”

Cedric Diggory and Cho Chang were clearly not satisfied with just that, but the revelation of the Room of Requirement more than appeased them. When inside, though, the sight of not only Harry’s friends, but also Sirius, Nicolas, Charlie, and Dumbledore there, was enough to vindicate all their beliefs.

“Well hello there, sir,” Charlie welcomed Harry more formally than usual, eyeing the two newcomers with intense, cool eyes. “Are we recruiting already?”

“Looks like. They haven’t figured out anything important, but they still want in on pure faith that I’m not a bad guy. Is there anything particularly actionable that might slip out if they decide not to swear secrecy after whatever this meeting is about?”

Hermione cradled her forehead and began to shake hear head in exasperation. Charlie eyed her with amusement, and looked back to Harry. “Nothing anyone will believe out of context.”

“Alright. Then unless anyone objects? No? Come on you two, let’s sit over there out of the way.”

Seeing that Harry made the final call, seeing it not be Dumbledore that took the lead on that confrontation – it banished whatever lingering hesitation the two had.

“So Hermione, or Charlie? Both? What did you call us all for?”

The answer, it turned out, was Hermione wanting to play with legos. Or, rather, to make a presentation using legos. This was what Hermione had been so secretive and constantly absent over, since Harry woke up from his parallel reality coma. She’d been working with Charlie on something.

Hermione took the small, purple, beaded handbag she always seemed to carry with her these days, and upended it in the middle of the room. A sheer deluge of legos poured out, and it was some time and creative floor shifting on the Room’s part before the things stopped piling.

With wand in hand, Hermione made a bunch of the lego blocks fly and form into a fence that enclosed most of the Room’s floorspace.

“Picture this,” she said in what was clearly a thoroughly practiced speech, how nice of Charlie to let her have this. “There are twin brothers living in one house. They have all the power, water, gas and food they could ever need, and sufficient space to live forever comfortably. But they also have a horrible neighbour who wants their property, and will stop at nothing to get it. Harassment, sabotage, throwing trash over the fence and roadkill through their windows, he’ll do whatever it takes to run them out, or even kill them, and soon even develops a taste for the suffering he inflicts.”

While Hermione practiced her transfiguration and animation charms to bring Charlie’s speech to life, Charlie himself tuned to a whiteboard he’d set up and wrote:

Twins = Alterans

Bad neighbour = Ori

“The brothers agree that violence won’t work because the bad neighbour has too many sycophants that will gang up on them. They don’t agree on the next best thing. One twin wants to go all-in on defense, while the other wants to do something else. Maybe train, maybe build weapons instead of just walls, maybe he wants to go out and gather his own support base, to eventually give the bad neighbour a taste of his own medicine.”

Charlie wrote on the whiteboard:

Brother = Ascended

Twin = Gods (?)

“Unable to resolve their differences, the siblings divide their legos - resources equally, and build a thick wall right through the middle of their house so neither can interfere with the other, while they each focus on their approach of choice.”

In a grand, whooshing display worthy of a musical, Hermione made a new bunch of legos build themselves into a long, thick wall that split the room in perfect halves. From where Harry stood, he saw both sides equally, the wall’s edge being right in front of where he sat.

Charlie, meanwhile wrote on the whiteboard again:

Right half = Wormhole X-Treme reality

Left half = Harry Potter reality

Don’t name it after me if it’s just to lump me in the same box as that silly show.

“So,” Hermione continued while trying to hide how proud she was, of pulling off such a sprawling NEWT-level animation spell modification. “What happens when time passes, the bad neighbour refuses to give up, and the first twin runs out of his half of the legos, because an eternity of defensive warfare costs endlessly more than going on offense just the once? Especially when no defense is perfect and he constantly has to rebuild it? Even after he’s perfected it as much as he could?”

“You keep trying,” Cho said, surprisingly, though she didn’t seem entirely sure. “After a point, you’ve gone too far to give up.”

Charlie solemnly wrote on the whiteboard:

Sunk Cost Fallacy.

“What’s the other twin doing?” Ron asked. “While the first one’s doing all this?”

“That’s the thing, we don’t know for sure,” Hermione replied. “Maybe he trains, maybe he builds traps and home-made bombs and cannons for when the neighbour decides to change which side of the house he attacks. Maybe he isn’t even home, and instead is out running a campaign of hearts and minds in the hopes of overwhelming the bad neighbour with his own gang in the future.”

“Maybe the first twin does some of that himself,” Charlie idly threw in. “Perhaps they even work together on it, if only to relive some of the brotherly love and loyalty they used to have before.”

“What we do know,” Hermione continued. “I think, is how far the first twin was willing to stretch himself before it came to that.”

Harry didn’t get it until Hermion cast a new spell, which thinned the dividing wall between the brothers to a single thin stack of blocks, with outright holes in places. The majority of the blocks, now removed, then flew to become additions and reinforcements to the outer fence, which had long since become a wall under Hermione’s repeated spellcasting, during her explanations.

“The wall between realities,” Harry snapped his fingers on finally getting it. “The sound of staff weapons and Al’kesh I heard during the first Walk, the jaffa warrior and his goa-uld snake. You think this is why things from their side slip into ours on all Hallow’s Eve? By now it’s thin and full of holes – the first twin used it all up to reinforce the outer defenses, didn’t he?”

“That’s how this model would explain it,” Hermione nodded after looking at Charlie for confirmation. After a hesitant glance at Cedric and Cho, she continued. “It stands to reason that this is also why you were able to punch through to that side at all, never mind so easily or without realising what you were doing.”

So that’s why I was able to reincarnate sideways, when I couldn’t find a past life that fit? That answered some of Harry’s questions, but it also came with some nasty implications for the near future. “If that’s true, then twin one is out of options. Or soon will be.”

“That’s what my model would suggest.” Charlie said this time, and underlined ‘Sunk Cost Fallacy’ twice. “So. In this situation, what recourse is left? You’ve used up all the lego blocks on your side of the house. You’ve also filled out all your space. What happens?

“You stop,” Cedric risked saying, though his heart wasn’t really in it because he could guess it wasn’t the right answer.

“You can’t afford to, you still haven’t solved the problem of the asshole neighbour next door.”

The right answer came not from Harry, or Ron or the entirely confused Cho and Cedric.

“You take your brother’s legos.” The answer came from Neville. “And when he objects, you take them by force.”

Charlie nodded and wrote on the whiteboard:

In-fighting.

“I still have no idea what you lot are talking about,” Cedric cautiously said. “But I’m assuming that laws, aurors, or even just a neighbour’s association aren’t notions that apply to – whatever this thought exercise is?”

Charlie shook his head. “My original analogy was for three princes, where one of them inherits the parents’ realm, and the other two flee their older brother’s tyranny to build their own realm around a lake on an island on far side of the neighbouring sea. The first brother eventually comes looking for the other two and does his thing because he’s just that kind of prick.”

“Oooh,” Cadric and Cho said, even though they still didn’t understand anything because they lacked all the context.

“Still doesn’t need to end like that,” Ron scowled. “The twin could just back down.”

And then we’d all-

“He can’t anymore,” Neville pointed out. “It’s not the same as before, they know now that the arsehole neighbour isn’t giving up, and the first twin’s idea failed, even if he won’t accept it. It’s not just a matter of sibling rivalry now, it’s survival.”

“Yeah,” Ron said glumly. “Survival can be used to justify just about everything.”

“And the twin has other reasons of his own to resent the first one by now.”

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Harry murmured. “All of which would be soured if his brother betrayed him like that.”

“Not just soured,” Hermione said. “Lost, unless I misunderstood something Mister Gordon?”

Charlie moved to the other half of the whiteboard and wrote: Load-bearing wall.

Belatedly, harry realized that almost all of the other load-bearing walls on the first brother’s side had been taken apart to reinforce the outer bulwark.

“Naturally, to get the Twin’s legos the dividing wall has to come down.” Charlie underlined ‘Twin’s half’ three times before he turned around. “We don’t know how honorable either side is, so we can’t be sure which brother will break first. But it’s possible that this issue has already been rendered moot.”

Harry didn’t need Charlie’s pointed stare to figure it out. “I breached into the brother’s half of the house first, from the twin’s side,” he groaned, rubbing his face. “Or at least I’m the first one who did it anywhere near that level. They – the first brother can twist it as the twin being the first to violate their agreement.”

“If they’re as petty as that,” Hermione tried to be the voice of optimism.

Harry certainly hoped they weren’t, the bartender guy’s surprise at Harry being there had seemed genuine in the moment. But now Harry was wondering if successfully kicking him out of his head hadn’t been a bad thing, since it meant he might not know that Harry was there by complete accident. And completely ignorant of everything too.

“You keep saying defenses.” Sirius said from somewhere behind, where he and the other adults had moved to be out of the way.

From the starts of everyone else, Harry wasn’t the only one who’d forgotten they were there. Was his situational awareness really that bad, without the eye at the back of his head?

“I’m guessing you don’t mean actual walls.”

“No indeed.” Two new lines were written on the whiteboard.

Defense strategy = stacking time loops

Twin’s legos = needed for more loops

At a glance from Charlie, Hermione made an ‘o’ sound and hastily arranged everything other than the fence in the the first brother’s side of the room into the closest thing to a giant ball of yarn that legos allowed.

When that last touch-up was finished, Charlie added one more line to the whiteboard.

Twin’s half of the house = space / span to put more loops

Shit. “The time loop machine,” Harry blurted as the memory of that ridiculous mission report resurfaced. “P4X-639.” Harry stood up and walked to the center of the room, the lego structure vanishing in bits and pieces ahead of him to make space for a table and pensieve. “Lorne wasn’t one to memorise planet designations, but he made an exception for this one.”

Thankfully, the Room still made it possible to view mmories without diving into the pensieve itself. He only had memories of reading SG-1’s reports about it, but that still meant he could conjure geminio copies of the pages as they came up in the memory space.

Cho and Cedric were beyond bewildered by this point, but Harry was too preoccupied to care. “When the plague broke out, the Ancients attempted to make a time travel device to go back and prevent the galactic pandemic from happening. They didn’t succeed – not then – but they did manage to make a localized machine of time reversal. When the man – Malakai – found it, he tried to finish what the Ancients started because his wife died and he wanted to see her again. The resulting time loop lasted for months on the outside, but it only kept repeating the last ten hours, and not only affected that planet but thirteen others relatively close, including Earth.”

“Yes, your summary about that was sparse, but it’s what gave me the starting point,” Charlie admitted. “The Lanteans and the Pegasus Galaxy as a whole raise some questions about just how far the range of that looped spacetime is, especially since it pretty much would have to include the much more distant Othala Galaxy.” Where the Asgard were. “Perhaps it’s not an issue of space at all, and the ultimate refinement of that device consists of different, higher-dimensional mechanics the Ancients only accessed after ascension.”

It made sense if that was the level when the main Ancient-Ori opposition took place, but...

It didn’t change the basic realities of conflict. To win a conflict, you needed the will, the resources, and the space to maneuver.

If Charlie was right, the Ancients in the no-magic side were running out of the last two, so they might want to move into this one.

What will happen to us then?

Would realities merge? Would time be undone to – whatever the point was when the two branches split? To make way for a second ball of wibbly wobbly, timey whimey stuff? Or make the other one bigger?

Who was the ‘Master’ the bartender guy was talking about? Harry wondered not for the first time. What does he have to do about this? Does he know about this? Does he care? Is he why there are time loops on this side too? Is he doing anything? Should he? Why?

Harry didn’t know. But he did know what he experienced on the other side, and his conclusions remained the same: time did not work that way naturally. Now, if Charlie’s model was correct, it meant they’d thinned the ‘wall’ between the branches of reality. Or the ‘master’ on this side had.

Harry didn’t know anything about the latter to make any judgments. But if it was the ‘Others’ that did it, it meant they must be running out of whatever resources or space it took to twist time on itself, for lack of any better terms. Localized area or not.

Harry wondered how much less he’d understand, if he asked Charlie to show him the undoubtedly massive stack of notes and papers and charts he used to draw up his – whatever actual theoretical model he’d recruited Hermione to dumb down for the rest of them.

The meeting turned into a long, drawn-out speculation session after that, which challenged, avoided, skirted, denied and confirmed Harry’s dreadful conclusions over and over.

It only wound down when Dumbeldore, finally, said something. “I understand that ‘wall’ is not used literally here, but I assume you chose that word because it fits the context best?”

Charlie regarded the old wizard. “I did.”

“Does that mean that when we think of ground, or floor and roof, they are also only loosely accurate? In both nature and function?”

“Yes. What are you asking?”

“Because then it is not only the separating part that is important. From what you say, the ‘wall’ is the only thing the two ‘rooms’ have in common. And since galaxies don’t rest on a solid surface, never mind time, then the floor of this room cannot be more than a visual reference for this demonstration. I am sure that many explanations could occur, but I will hazard a guess and say that the wall between the rooms is the only part that matters, other than the fence. It is not just a separator, but also the only thing keeping the two realities connected, as well as consistent relative to each other.”

“The sympathetic principle,” Harry sat up in his chair. “You have to work with it and against it to make – what? The opposite of a protean charm? On an intergalactic scale? Bigger? Hermione, is the ball of yarn analogy random? Charlie?”

“It’s not,” they both said.

“All the loops in a ball of yarn could, in theory, run through the same hollow object, right? Like if it’s knotted through a ring?”

“What, like Earth’s magnetic field goes through the poles?”

“Exactly, Hermione! If time works like that…”

“… Yes?”

“I think I might know what the ‘ring’ would be.” Harry leaned back and frowned, wondering if he was really following any sort of logic or if it was just some… weird divination thing he was going through right now. Skipping all the steps to the conclusion. “The Quantum Mirror,” the murmured. “SG-1 ran into a weird mirror-like device early on, that let people go to and back from alternate timelines, near identical but more and more distinct the farther you changed the settings.”

It was strange that it existed, and doubly strange that it was never used again after… conveniently being found and utilized once, to save the Ascended Others’ preferred timeline. No way would the US government resist using and abusing it for the rest of time, never mind the NID. If it was destroyed at any point, none of the reports Harry read had mentioned it.

But if it had another purpose than being a door to the realms of ‘what if,’ then the Others would definitely meddle to secure it, non-interference be damned.

“I’m sure they used something to force the timeline split,” Hermione agreed with something completely different than what Harry’s mind was winding towards. “But I doubt it would it be the same thing they used to reset their side, especially so many times.”

I’m wondering if maybe there might not be a split at all.

How would you split a hair length-wise? Why would you? Even if you could, it sabotaged the structural integrity. What if instead you just looped and looped and looped until you ran out of room and had to let the hair continue on for a while until you had more room? Was there a whole string of timey whimey balls between now and… whatever moment in the past the timeline ‘split’ happened?

Harry had had to reincarnate forward, which meant this reality was the one that was going to end. The dread from that realisation was only dampened by the memory of his other lives where he lived long enough to die of old age. And, he supposed, there was no guarantee that their reality wouldn’t loop again anyway, for whatever reason. Since it did loop at least a few times, were they really the Twin’s half, instead of the other one? Were both brothers doing the loop thing? Or was it that the Twin only did it a few times, to fix mistakes, instead of a dedicated defense system that had to constantly happen, like Borther 1?

Ugh, he was thinking in circles.

What actually mattered? If there was a single string, a single timeline, it only mattered which one was the more recent loop. So far, signs pointed to that being ‘not this one.’ It didn’t bear thinking about. Was this the first loop of the new ball, or the last of the old one?

On look, another reason for me to lose all will to live, how lovely.

If time was like an ever-growing tree, then split branches made more sense, especially since it left ‘room to grow’ as the only concern. But then the issue of subsuming the neighbouring branch didn’t apply, and how would you ‘reset’ a branch? Cut and graft? Let the severed branch fall and become fertilizer while the tree grew another branch in its place? Or from near the cut knot?

Right, I’m not getting anywhere, Harry scowled internally. Or I’m missing something.

Dumbledore was right, analogies were more confusing than helpful after you’ve had time to think past the surface.

Then again, maybe Harry shouldn’t expect to understand time in a single afternoon, never mind how one messes with it.

There was something he did understand, though. Maybe. “The Sympathetic principle,” Harry muttered after a while. “The best way to create it would be if you didn’t need to put the work in at all, right?”

“So you see it too.” Charlie remarked, with that rare approval that meant the world to you when you knew it came from the smartest man in the world. “I’m impressed. I’m not saying my model is incontrovertible, but it’s nice when someone reaches the same conclusion, especially without my advantages.”

“Yeah, no, we’re not doing the whole talking in circles for another hour thing,” Sirius scoffed. “Harry, please explain because this guy sure won’t.”

“The wall between the rooms,” Harri waved at it. “Dumbledore was right, it’s not just a wall. It’s also the thing keeping the two realities glued to each other. The common part that keeps them consistent relative to each other. If we look at it like some ritual or big spell, then there has to be the equivalent of a ritual array somewhere. It would be big, way big, galactic-big or more, maybe, but… more or less identical in both realities because it was already there when they still were the same reality. Way back.”

As usual, Hermione got what he was talking about first. “The stargate network.”

“The stargate network.” And Atlantis, the Antarctica facility, the knowledge databases, the ships, space stations, any other dedicated facilities, Proclarush, Taonas, the planet Agnos that may or may not exist, the quantum mirror itself. Any one or all of those things could serve. Maybe even the ruins all over space. Those things never degraded despite no material being eternal, no matter what substance or alloy, and most of them certainly were never subjected to energy state locking technologies, or whatever Samantha Carter might ramble about. “Hey Cedric.”

“Yeah?”

“You reckon your dad will be looking for you by now?”

“Well, you did send him that message-“

“He means yes,” Cho was less shy about wanting to escape this insane situation, which had gone on way too long for all of them as it was. “We should probably be checking out. Maybe get back to this later? When we’re more up to speed on – whatever this is…”  

“Yeah, I figured. How would you two like to visit Antarctica with us?”

“Wait, what?”

“-. July 8, 1995 .-“

It wasn’t until the first weekend of July that they went to Antarctica, since not everyone could just drop everything and travel to the south pole on a whim. They also needed to prepare portkeys, extra portkeys, emergency portkeys, the hardiest wizard tent ever enchanted, arctic weather clothes, and protection spells for each of them. Also, food and water, but wizard tents came with five star amenities so that went without saying.

When they did go to Antarctica, Cedric and Cho managed to come along, though only Cedric had the benefit of a father that deliberately didn’t ask for details. Cho had to sell it to her parents as a weekend stay-over at Sirius Black’s house. Which was where the trip started and would complete, but it was a bit too much truth stretching for Harry’s tastes. Hopefully, Dumbledore would make good on his promise soon, to help Sirius develop some way to read people in safely.

They two additions had spent much of the intervening time being some manner of frazzled, as Hermione, Neville and Ron filled them in on what they knew. Which wasn’t anywhere close to what the adults knew, or even everything Harry knew. But it was still a lot.

As far as field trips went, it was actually really good. The adults freely taught the younger ones whatever struck their fancy, something Harry and his friends gleefully took advantage of. It wasn’t every day you could cut loose with magic outside of school, after all. Even Cedric shared in the sentiment, he hadn’t been of age long enough for the wonder of that freedom to fade yet. Besides, one-on-one tutoring from Nicolas Flamel and Albus Dumbledore? Who wouldn’t be over the moon?

Since they needed to not only find the right spot but also dig to it, the last stretch of the journey made for some very intense spell practice indeed. Harry thought he acquitted himself well, even compared to the two senior students.

When they finally found the stargate, there was much boggling and amazement. Even the adults weren’t immune to it, including Nicolas with all his six hundred years of life. Harry himself, who’d travelled through the stargate many times during his life as Evan Lorne, still felt tight in the chest from awe and excitement, however muddled by anxiety.

They dug a good cove inside the ice, set up the tent, and lights, and even a barbecue. Finally Harry had no more excuses to waffle about dialling out.

It didn’t work.

Harry dialled over two dozen addresses he knew should have worked on the dial-home device, or clavis as the Ancients called it. Not only did the stargate not connect, it didn’t react at all. It was like it didn’t have power, despite Harry’s inherited experience from Lorne letting him determine that the clavis and its connections to the gate were all fine. Energy reading spells further confirmed it. The stargate was certainly receiving power, and it was perfectly intact too.

“It could be Magic,” Dumbledore guessed, which was fair because not much else made sense. “Perhaps it is draining the power from it like it does most other electronics. Like it used to do with the pyramids.”

Harry agreed.

Up until he walked up to the gate and used psychometry on – on-

Infinite unmoderated mutations isn’t evolution, it’s cancer.

- o-on the stargate, and-

When a man's heart overshadows a god's, what will the gods punish? What will they forgive?

-and – a-nd-

~ Oh, the torment bred in the race, the grinding scream of death, and the stroke that hits the vein, the haemorrhage none can staunch, the grief, the curse no man can bear. But there is a cure in the house, and not outside it, no. Not from others but from us, our bloody strife. I sing to you, true gods on time’s far side. Now hear, you blissful powers departed – answer the call, send help. Bless we children, give us triumph now. ~

When Neville and Ron wrenched him away from the ancient ring, Harry Potter was left dizzy and shaken.

What was that? A rite? An incantation? Prophecy?

Whatever it was… it had been his voice. His own voice. From the past. And the future.

The stargate wasn’t defective. It was already in use, just not to travel space. It was being used in a magical ritual. Would be used in a magical ritual.

In the past.

And the future.

Halloween, Harry thought woozily as Ron and Neville helped him into the tent, and from there to a chair because he was too scatter-minded to even stand anymore. Even when it’s not Halloween everything still goes to hell on Halloween.