Chapter Text
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HOSPITAL BEDS ARE are universally recognisable even if you’ve never been in a hospital before. The pressure of the over-tucked bedspread pressing in on you, the stiffness of sheets, the slight roughness of them, the unfamiliar pillows... she knew she was in hospital before she even opened her eyes.
Someone was sitting her up, helping her drink something acrid and slightly fizzy. It tasted like the antiseptic mouthwash she’d had to have after getting a tooth removed but thicker and stronger, the sickly bubbles racing down her throat and filling her stomach with nausea. She groaned and turned away, and very distantly, over the dizzy queasiness she could hear voices, but the sickness was getting worse and she knew she had to fall asleep as soon as possible to escape the horrible limbo of conscious nausea so she let her whole body go limp, and thankfully, let sleep come.
It was dark when she could finally open her eyes, the high, stone-vaulted ceiling stretching up above her.
She frowned at it.
No hospital where she lived looked like this. The strangeness shook all the lingering sleepiness from her head and she sat up with effort. The room around her looked like the photos of old hospitals she’d seen in her medical history course; metal-framed single beds tightly wrapped in white sheets all lined up in the stone chamber. A warm orange light shone from the far end of the room through a peaked stone doorway – the orderly’s office perhaps.
She tried to call out to whoever was on duty but her voice caught in a horrible thickness in her throat and she choked. Clearing her throat she tried again, her voice coming out thin and creaky like she always sounded after a bad cold.
“Hello?” she called. Her weak voice did not get very far at all. She propped herself up further and cleared her throat again. “Hello?”
A face appeared in the window, someone peaking up from their desk. They immediately stood and pushed through the door, bustling over with echoing footsteps.
“You should not be straining yourself,” the woman admonished, busily wringing her hands before she even came close. She wore a long white apron and an old-fashioned headdress, and there was something eerily familiar about her, like seeing a childhood friend’s parents for the first time in years.
“Sorry,” she croaked in reply.
The matron pushed her gently (but very definitively) back against the pillows and with the same firm hand took her chin and peered down into her eyes. “Hmm,” said the matron, sounding dissatisfied. “Perhaps time for another dose.”
Without waiting for a response the matron pulled a flask of elegant purple glass with a huge rounded base and thin reaching neck from the bedside table next to the bed. “This is essence of valerian,” said the matron, seeing the concerned expression she was shooting the bottle. “It’s used to treat severe cases of time sickness.”
“Time sickness,” she echoed disbelievingly, but allowed the matron to give her a glass half-filled with the silvery green liquid. There were tiny purple bubbles forming even lines up the sides of the glass and fizzing on the surface.
“Go on,” said the matron, nodding at her.
She tentatively sipped – the same unpleasant taste hit her and she grimaced.
“Trust me, drinking it isn’t as bad as what’ll happen if you don’t drink it,” said the matron very grimly, straightening the sheets on her bed around her as she forced down the acrid liquid. As soon as the last drop was gone, the matron took the glass from her and placed it back with the bottle.
“Thanks,” she told the matron, “could I ask –”
But she stopped. Before she could finish her question, the matron had produced a long thin stick from her apron and tapped the glass curtly. It gave a little rattle and the liquid residue vanished.
Seeing the wide-eyed expression on her face, the matron raised an eyebrow. “Is it so surprising to sterilise equipment? You have a paltry view of my establishment indeed.” She stowed away her wand in the folds of the white apron again.
Her wand.
“No, I –” but the nausea swam in her stomach again, and she shut her eyes against the feeling. “Sorry, I just –”
“Rest,” said the matron sternly. “I will attend you in the morning. You have a visitor who is eager to speak with you.”
She didn’t even reply, letting blissful sleep wash away the confusion and nausea bubbling away in her stomach.
•❅──────✧❅✦❅✧──────❅•
The bright morning sun woke her as curtains around the room sprang apart seemingly without assistance.
“Good morning,” said the matron from last night briskly, already bustling around the room wand in hand. “I’ve prepared your morning dose,” she nodded at the half-filled glass and bulbous bottle beside the bed.
Feeling increasingly confused at the surreal circumstances, she dutifully downed at the horrible medicine, this time successfully managing to suppress a grimace. “Thanks,” she rasped, voice still weak.
“My name is Madam Pomfrey,” the matron said as she waved the wand again and both the bottle and glass vanished into thin air. “And you are?”
There was a beat of silence, and then she burst out laughing, the thick feeling in her throat mangled it into a horrible hoarse sound which she only stopped at ‘Madam Pomfrey’s growingly sour look at her outburst. “Sorry,” she croaked with a half-grin, “just – you know, it’s kind of funny…”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand the joke,” Madam Pomfrey said coolly.
If this was a prank, the matron was committing to pulling it off hard. There was not a hint of breaking script on her face which was even more impressive when she brandished the wand again and the crumpled blanket obediently straightened itself.
She couldn’t help it – maybe this was a prank, maybe an extensive role play experience, she didn’t know, but the magic tricks were pushing her over the edge. “How are you doing that?” she exclaimed incredulously.
Madam Pomfrey froze. “I beg your pardon?”
“The tricks,” she prompted enthusiastically. “I get the set and the act, but –” she craned her head to look for strings on the blanket, or the curtains, “– I can’t figure out how you’re pulling that stuff off!”
Madam Pomfrey’s expression had turned into one of alarm, and before either of them could speak again, the stone-peaked door opened behind her.
If there had been any doubt in her mind as to the depth of the sheer commitment to their pretence, that doubt was extinguished when she saw the figure walking towards the two of them with a pleasant expression on his wizened face. The beard, the hair, the garish gold-and-purple robes – even the half-moon glasses on his long nose –
“Good morning, Poppy,” said the man dressed as Dumbledore conversationally, apparently impervious Madam Pomfrey's stricken expression. He turned to her bed and surveyed her carefully. “It is good to see you’re awake, but what on earth have you done to poor Madam Pomfrey?”
“Albus,” Madam Pomfrey said in a quiet but urgent tone. She led him away until they were just out of earshot and began a serious looking conversation with heads bowed. Madam Pomfrey shot a few anxious looks back over to where she lay in the bed.
Watching them, she couldn’t help but admire the man’s ability to nail Dumbledore’s mannerisms. She looked around the room for cameras, expecting to see a little blinking light or tell-tale lens giving away the schtick.
“Pardon me,” said Dumbledore, and she looked back down to find him standing beside the bed with hands clasped gently in front of him. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced; my name is Albus Dumbledore, I am the headmaster of this school.”
“Yeah,” she winked, “Hogwarts, I’m very impressed.”
He and Madam Pomfrey shared a glance. “Poppy has told me that you wanted an explanation for her, ah, magic tricks?”
“Yeah!” she said again, having to clear her throat before continuing. “Don’t get me wrong, I love what you’re doing. All this?” She gestured to them. “Very impressive, but I am genuinely curious. How are you pulling that off?”
A long pregnant pause followed her speech. “Poppy, might you fix us some tea?” Dumbledore asked politely.
Madam Pomfrey immediately hurried away as Dumbledore retrieved his own wand from his robes and gave it a small flick. A standard classroom chair appeared next to the bed and he sat.
“See, that’s what I’m talking about!” she exclaimed. “It’s so convincing!”
But...
She frowned at the chair. There really was no way she could think to fake that. The curtains could have had electronic pulleys to open them, the sheets could have invisible strings pulled by out of sight stagehands, even the self-cleaning cup she thought she could come up with some sort of movie-magic method by which that could be achieved.
But the chair… It really did come out of nowhere.
She thought about the bottle and glass disappearing before, and the complete seriousness of their acts, and her gaze drifted to the huge, diamond-leaded glass windows next to her, the expansive grounds she could see from them, the edge of a vast lake visible in the distance, and leading away from the room they were in, the sliver of a giant stone castle–
“What is your name, my dear?” Dumbledore said calmly, folding his hands on his knees.
She stared at him, a horrible sinking feeling creeping up inside her. “Is this real?” she asked in her weak, hoarse voice. She felt stupid to ask, ridiculous, gullible, but something didn’t feel right. If it was a prank, she was starting to fall for it.
“Yes,” he replied simply. “It’s real.”
They sat in silence for a moment whilst she stared out at the bit of castle visible from the window. It stretched away from the Hospital Wing, tall towers with long ribbony flags snaking in the breeze far above.
“This can’t be happening,” she breathed.
“I’m afraid so,” said Dumbledore, forlorn. “The specifics of your circumstance elude me, but I can offer you what information I have.”
She fixed him with a serious eye. “What the hell is going on?”
“You were found by our groundskeeper, Hagrid,” Dumbledore began. “He was on a patrol in the Dark Forest, the woods that border our grounds.” He inclined his head towards the window and sure enough, a fringe of dark swaying trees was just visible in the far distance. “It is a dangerous place for student and teacher alike, a stroke of true luck that he found you before any of its occupants could.”
She shivered involuntarily but if Dumbledore noticed, he chose not to comment.
“You were in very poor condition when he brought you to the school. Madam Pomfrey was convinced you only had moments to live, she insisted on treating you on right on the steps of the Great Hall. Only after you were, forgive me, off death’s doorstep did she allow us to move you to the Hospital Wing. I must say, you are quite lucky we are not in school term, I suspect you would have drawn quite the crowd and your recovery would not be so tranquil,” he looked around the empty wing with a genial expression.
“I nearly died?” she croaked.
“Yes,” he replied gravely, “But worry not, you are in the very capable hands of Madam Pomfrey now. You are in no danger.”
“But how did I get here? I don’t live in England.”
Dumbledore surveyed her again. “That I do not know. I first suspected Apparation gone afoul, but not only did you have no wand, it has come to light that you are unfamiliar with…”
“Magic,” she finished lamely. “You’re doing real magic.”
He nodded, still watching her closely. “You have some knowledge of magic?”
She sighed, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her palms. “I read about it, growing up.”
“You have magical relatives?”
“No,” she muttered, pressing into her eyes to make strange patterns and colours appear. “It’s a children’s story, a book series about Harry Potter. Everyone grew up reading it.”
After a moment of silence, she took her hands away from her eyes, blinking the blurriness away and looked over at him. Dumbledore’s gaze was intense, affixed on her face.
“About his life?” he asked, leaning forward.
“Yeah,” she said, slightly freaked out at his reaction. “His years at Hogwarts, all the stuff he got up to, you know –” she gestured vaguely with her hands, “Philosopher’s Stone, Chamber of Secrets, all that stuff.”
He did not reply, he only looked on. The fresh silence was only broken by Madam Pomfrey’s approach, holding a laden silver tray which she placed gingerly on the table next to her bed.
“Thank you, Poppy,” Dumbledore said, sharing a significant glance with her.
Madam Pomfrey nodded once and swiftly left without a word.
Dumbledore waved his wand and two teacups filled themselves in mid-air. She watched, enraptured.
“Milk? Sugar?” Dumbledore said.
“Uh, yes thanks, both.”
The milk jug sprang to life and two sugar cubes plopped daintily into the tea before the cup flew towards her, only just managing to contain the tea in its gold-trimmed rim. “Thanks,” she said lamely.
“I’m afraid I still don’t know how to address you,” Dumbledore sipped his own tea.
Her moment of pause was perfectly hidden by her sip of tea, but she knew she had only a few seconds to decide what to say. If this was real, she didn’t know if it was wise to use her name. She always gave fake names in weird situations, and perhaps this wasn't a creepy guy following her down the street trying to pry her number from her, but it was fucking weird. How obvious would it be if she lied? What would she say? The moment was being drawn out to its absolute maximum as she swallowed the tea and–
“Marina,” she said as she lowered the teacup.
What the fuck.
How on earth did ‘Marina’ even come out of her mouth, what even was Marina–
“And your surname?” Dumbledore’s tone was indecipherable.
Panic surged. “Diamond.”
Ah.
There it was.
She mentally facepalmed in incredulous disbelief at her own mind. Why the fuck had Marina and the Diamonds been at the forefront of her thoughts?
“Diamond?” Dumbledore repeated.
“Er –” she swirled the tea around her cup, trying to think of a convincing recovery. “No, actually its Diamant, with the ‘a-n-t’ at the end, but people usually just say it like diamond though. It’s… French.”
For fuck’s sake, ‘convincing recovery’ does not mean, ‘ramble about the way French people pronounce suffixes.’
“I see,” Dumbledore said placidly. She was about one thousand percent sure she did not pull that off. “Well, I am very pleased to meet you, Miss Diamant.” He pronounced it somewhere in the middle between French and English.
How could she have picked such an awkward sounding last name? 'Surely there’s a restart button,' she thought cynically, 'and I get another pass at this.'
“Don’t worry about that, just call me Marina,” she said sheepishly. “No one really goes by surname where I’m from anyway, it would feel weird to start now.”
“I see,” he said evenly, sipping his tea. “Now, Marina, tell me more about these books.”
She shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not sure what you want to know, they were just stories I read growing up, no one thought that they were secretly true if that’s what you mean –”
“Forgive me, you mentioned the Philosopher’s Stone?”
“Yeah, that’s the first one,” she replied, a bit confused.
He assessed her a moment, as if weighing his options. “The Philosopher’s Stone is currently hidden, are you able to tell me where that is?”
“You don’t know where it is?” she asked incredulously.
“Forgive me,” he repeated, looking almost embarrassed. “This is perhaps a rather crude test… these are tense times. If you know where it is hidden, I feel I may proceed with a certain degree of trust…”
For the first time, Marina really thought about who she was talking to. Dumbledore. Alive. That very much necessitated that she was before a critical point in the Harry Potter world’s timeline. Things hadn’t all happened yet, she was somewhere in the middle of it.
“Well,” she said slowly, “I really think it could be one of three places, depending on when this is. Like, the date.”
“It is Friday the 17th of May, 1991,” Dumbledore supplied cheerfully. He assessed a complicated clockface that sat on his wrist. “And it is 9:41 in the morning.”
Marina blanched. 1991. Harry hadn’t even started his first year. Before she let her thoughts run away with all the implications of the date, she focused on the question she had been asked. She was here before Harry arrived at Hogwarts, but only just, and that meant –
“It’s at Gringott’s then. Vault 713.”
Dumbledore’s eyes sparkled. “Indeed.” He placed the cup of tea he was holding on the bedside table. “Marina, I feel I must be honest,” he began gravely. “I confess, while the magic responsible for how you came to be here remains a mystery, I do believe there is a reason for your presence.”
“A reason? Like, a job?” Marina asked apprehensively.
“Precisely,” he said. “I believe that there is something in your knowledge of this world, some matter in the perspective you hold that is crucial somehow. You know of things that will come to pass, or rather, may come to pass…” Dumbledore trailed off, looking deep in thought.
Marina’s head was swimming. “What do you mean? Are you saying you want me to help you change the future? I thought that wasn’t really possible in time travel?”
“Normally, yes, time travel resolves itself as a closed loop, but in these circumstances… I suspect more powerful forces are at play than time turners.”
She thought about what he was saying, that, having read the books and knowing the way things play out, there must be something significant she could bring this world.
“Sir,” Marina said slowly, the ease of adopting Harry’s way of addressing Dumbledore not lost on her. “There has to be something else you can tell me... If you’re looking for helpful things I could tell you now, before anything has even begun, the list is endless. I could just tell you how everything happens, what goes wrong, how to stop it… I wouldn’t know where to begin –”
“Forgive me,” Dumbledore repeated as he held up his hand, “I did not make myself clear. I am sure there are any number of things you could tell me to be helpful, but magic this powerful is rarely intended to merely be… helpful.” He leaned forward, his gaze intense again. “I want you to think beyond helpful. What do you bring to this world that no one else could?”
The words rang in her ears. The pressure of his statement was unbearable. Ideas flitted through her mind like swarming birds – telling him about Quirrell having Voldemort stuck on the back of his head, stopping him from putting on the Gaunt ring, how to kill the basilisk, who Scabbers really was, that the Triwizard cup was really a portkey, that Harry had a piece of Voldemort’s soul in him, that Sirius was innocent, that Mad-Eye Moody would be replaced by Barty Crouch Jnr in disguise, that the locket was a fake–
Just like that, her mind clicked. It was 1991. Dumbledore didn't even know about Voldemort’s Horcruxes. Surely... surely that was it.
Thoughts racing, she tried to think of anything that would change the game more than that, something more significant, more important than knowing the truth about Voldemort’s soul.
“You have something,” Dumbledore said. It wasn’t a question – his eyes had never left her face.
“I think so,” she said tentatively.
He picked up the cup of tea and gave it a demure sip, eyes sparking. “Tell me what you know.”
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