Chapter Text
My life was supposed to go back to normal after the war. I killed Voldemort, and I destroyed his Horcruxes. I ended the war. I thought that gave me the right to a normal life.
How naïve I was.
My name is Harry James Potter, I am the Chosen One, and I was never going to be allowed to live happily ever after. However, I tried my best to fool myself into thinking that I would.
Once the war was over, and the bodies were buried, I let the charade begin. I got back together with Ginny, and we were happy. I joined the Aurors, and I was happy. We were all happy, George signed over Fred’s half of the shop to Ron, and he set about opening a new branch in Hogsmeade. He thought it would help keep morale up when the school re-opened, and he was right. I don’t think the Thestrals had ever gotten as much attention as they did that year when the school re-opened after the battle.
Ron and Hermione got together too, of course. That was no big surprise, not to any of us. Hermione joined the Ministry despite ranting about the immorality of it. She was determined to turn it around, to bring about real change. Kingsley was too, and that was why he was elected as our post-war Minister for Magic.
We felt the losses, and we didn’t pretend not to. But we pushed on, and we tried to pave the way for the next generation. We tried to fix the damage the war had done. We were all determined, and we were all motivated. It was beautiful to watch and even more beautiful to be a part of.
I was part of it for a very brief time, unfortunately. Joining the Aurors was tough, but it was all that I wanted to do. With Kingsley’s help, I brought about real change in the DMLE. I made the Auror Force a strong one, a force that could be trusted. I helped oust the corrupt Aurors that had slipped through the cracks during the war. It was satisfying, and it kept me busy while Ginny was back at school. I missed her that year, but I was naïve to think that I couldn’t ever miss her more because, as I was about to learn, I could.
When Ginny graduated, she was selected as the reserve seeker for the Holyhead Harpies, and I can’t remember ever being more proud of her. I went to every game, even if she was just on the bench, and my heart swelled with pride the first time I saw her fly in those green robes. We were married shortly after that game. People gossiped and said that we were too young. Maybe we were, but after everything I had seen and done, I certainly didn’t feel 21, and I knew Ginny felt far older than her 20 years too.
I thought that life was short. My parents had been 21 years old when they died, and that was my age upon being married. Ginny and I ignored the criticism anyway. We had never really cared about what people said. The people we loved didn’t disapprove, and that was enough for us. That was the year that Ron proposed to Hermione too. It was a good year. I will never forget how Ginny looked like an angel as she glided down the aisle in that wedding dress. I will never be able to forget the snow falling around that little church in Godric’s Hollow. The whole night was filled with dancing, laughter and love. Ginny was glowing with happiness, and I felt the same.
It felt like my life was beginning, but I was still naïve back then. I never expected my life to take the turn that it did. I thought that Ginny and I would be starting a family in a few years. I thought we would grow old together.
As it turned out, we were only married for a few months when the accident happened. It was March, Ginny and I were still in the honeymoon period of our marriage. I was called out to an incident at a big old house in the country. I didn’t realise until I got to the place that it was none other than the Riddle House itself. By that point, I knew that something was going on, but I could hardly turn back and leave my partner to enter the house alone. I still don’t entirely understand what happened inside that house, but I’m trying to make sense of it all.
I should have died when the masked men hiding out in there captured me. A spell was fired that I had never heard of. I knew that it was dark magic from how the words were uttered and the blood-red beam of magic that shot from the masked man’s wand. I closed my eyes, expecting the curse to kill me instantly.
My life never did flash before my eyes; it all just happened too quickly. Instead, before the spell could hit me, there was a flash of bright light before my eyes. I opened them to see a shimmering white shield around myself. I hadn’t conjured it, and I had no idea about how it came to be. The dark curse bounced off of the shield and engulfed the entire room in a hideous red smoke. I was protected beneath the shield that I had no control over, but as the smoke dissipated, I saw that I was the only one to survive the ordeal. The masked men had been killed by their own curse, and my partner lay dead on the floor.
The guilt had already begun to set in when the impenetrable shield disappeared. I got to my feet shakily and called in the death of my partner with a Patronus. I was willing to call it a strange mystery that had saved my life, but something was not sitting right with me. I felt uneasy, I had cheated death, and I had no idea how I had managed it.
My mind was so busy trying to comprehend what had happened to me that I did not notice the masked men that remained in the decaying entrance hall. They all shot spells at me, and I was not prepared to defend myself in my state of distraction.
A cutting curse sliced my hand off, and a blasting curse blew a hole in my chest. I fell to the ground in pain, and the masked men laughed. I knew something was not right. I could feel my hand tingling, so I forced my head to turn towards it. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that it was growing back, just like the hole in my chest was slowly healing itself. The masked men had not noticed, allowing me to grab my wand, kill them, and flee from the house.
I did not dare go back to the flat that I shared with Ginny. I was terrified about what was happening to me, and there was only one person who could understand it. There was only one person who could comprehend what was going on. I apparated to Grimmauld Place, I had always said that I would do it up one day, but I had never gotten around to it. Instead, I used it to store things of value to me, hence why I had returned to retrieve my invisibility cloak.
Once I had my cloak, I apparated to Hogwarts and snuck into the school. I knew the new security wards like the back of my hand. I had helped design them. Getting around the wards was the easy part. I snuck through the school, which was bustling. It was term time, after all, and it was the middle of the day. When I reached the Headmistress’s Office, I whispered the password (“Loch Ness”) and climbed to the office that had once belonged to Albus Dumbledore.
I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that Minerva was not in her office. I took my cloak off and stood before the portrait. Dumbledore smiled, and his blue eyes sparkled as he asked what he could do for me.
I suppose my fear was evident on my face. I had been sweating, I was pale, and I was terrified. I managed to choke out that I needed to know what was happening to me.
Dumbledore was patient while I explained. He looked at me over his glasses and nodded in all of the right places. When I had finished, I waited for him to tell me how I could put an end to whatever was happening to me.
However, that did not happen. Instead, Dumbledore looked at me solemnly and told me that I was the Master of Death.
He explained that because I had kept the Elder Wand after the war, still had the cloak, and had retrieved the stone from the forest, I was the Master of Death. At first, I didn’t understand because I had hidden them. I didn’t carry them anywhere with me.
But alas, Dumbledore had shaken his head. I still owned all three hallows. I was the Master of Death. I am the Master of Death. The shield that had saved my life had been conjured because the Master of Death cannot die.
Of course, that didn’t explain why the shield hadn’t appeared the second time – when my hand had been cut off, and a hole blasted into my chest. Dumbledore panicked for the first time when I said those words to him. He told me that he suspected a dark curse had been combined with the magic of Death.
The words he uttered, the sparkle in his eyes gone, they still haunt me to this very day.
“That should never happen, Harry. The result is...unnatural.”
The way he had spoken the word “unnatural”, I knew he meant supernatural, immortal, invincible. Whatever word was attached to it, the meaning was the same. I would live forever. I could not die.
It didn’t matter what I did with the Hallows, it was too late, and that chilled me to the bone. I ran from the room, pulled the invisibility cloak back on and made my way out of the castle in a daze.
When I returned to Grimmauld Place, I destroyed the resurrection stone. I left the cloak in Diagon Alley to be discovered. I could not bring myself to get rid of the Elder Wand, but having broken up the Hallows, I tried everything that I could to kill myself.
I stabbed myself, and I even used Avada Kedavra on myself. It knocked me out, but when I woke up, I was perfectly fine.
Physically at least.
I had decisions to make, and I had to make them quickly. I could not die. Dumbledore had been right about that, as much as I hated him for it. I was going to live forever. I was going to watch everyone that I loved die. And I had worked something else out too. The dark curse that had been used on me had been designed to freeze my heart. It had been combined with Death's strong, powerful magic, which meant that I was frozen as I was. I would not die, and I would not age.
I could not remain here. How could I carry on with my life? I would only get away with it for a few years before Ginny realised that I wasn’t ageing at all. I would never grow old, get grey hairs, or get laugh lines. The world regarded me as a hero and saviour. I was always in the press. I was always forced to go to Ministry balls and charity events. People would notice, and when they did, I would be brought into the Department of Mysteries. I would be examined and dissected. I could not live a normal life among people who knew me.
However, I was known all over the wizarding world. As I paced the drawing-room of Grimmauld Place, I found myself wishing that I could go far into the past where nobody had ever heard of Harry Potter. The thought sparked an idea, and the idea sparked a plan. I raked through a box of things I had kept from my time at Hogwarts. In that box was the time-turner that Hermione and I had used to save Buckbeak and Sirius.
Hermione said that it had stopped working after that year. She thought that it was broken, but the Ministry had just decommissioned it. To those who did not know about Ministry protocols or Ministry security magic, it would be useless. However, I did know about these things, and I managed to hack the security charms on the time-turner in a few hours.
I still had a lot of work to do before going anywhere significant with the time-turner. In its basic state, the most it could do was go back or forward 24 hours. I had waited too long even to be able to go back to the Riddle House and stop myself from entering it. However, I knew what I had to do, so I allowed the Aurors to report me as KIA (Killed in Action) alongside my Auror partner. I faked an explosion at Grimmauld Place so that nobody would think to go there, and I threw myself into my work.
I studied the time-turner and every book that I could find on Time Magic. The days became weeks, and the weeks became months. I ignored the newspapers, and I ignored the outside world. I did not want to see reports about my grieving wife. I did not want to see people mourning their ‘great’ hero. I did not want to see the people I loved moving on without me. So I shut it all out, and I worked. After months of research, I realised that I would get nowhere with the time-turner alone. Even if I supercharged it, I could only go back in time by about a month. I needed more time than that.
The only solution that I could see was cheesy and old fashioned. It was incredibly muggle, but for that reason, I thought that it might just work. In the old library, I had found a stack of muggle books belonging to Sirius. Amongst them was a novel by H.G. Wells entitled “The Time Machine.” I read it avidly and studied the sketch of the time machine discussed in the book. I knew it was a muggle concept, but I realised that I needed to build something like this to travel the distance that I wished. I needed a way of setting the time and date of my destination. I sketched out hundreds of ideas before I was struck by one. I had an old Auror Box in the basement of the house. I had stolen it a few years before from the deep storage vaults in the DMLE. I thought it might have a use one day, and I had just found the perfect one.
I spent months working on the Auror Box. I used an enlargement charm on the inside of it. I ripped out the old fireplace that had once connected the box directly to the fireplaces in the Auror Department. Once I had ample space to deal with, I began to construct my time machine. Using H.G. Wells as a guide, I focused on combining clockwork and magic to make all of the connections. This required more reading, and five years had passed before I had even begun the actual work on the machine.
The time passed very quickly when I had all of it in the world. I had mostly avoided the outside world, but at that point, I was desperate. My machine was not working, and I needed outside help. I could not supercharge the time-turner no matter how hard I tried, and I knew that I would get nowhere without it. To be successful, the time-turner had to become the heart of my time machine.
I ventured out to find the man that I needed. Perseus Ollivander, the great-grandson of the Ollivander who had sold me my first wand, was the man to ask. The Ollivanders were an ancient wizarding family, and to master the magic of wandlore, they learned about a vast range of magical topics. On route to find Perseus in France, I made a stop. I could not help myself. I had to see how everybody was. I had no concept of time, and I barely realised that it was Christmas.
I stood outside the living room window of the Burrow underneath my invisibility cloak. The snow was blowing a gale all around me. I felt like an orphan in a Dickens novel as I stared in from the cold to the happy scene inside. I was consumed with so many emotions. Ron and Hermione were laughing as they bounced a small redheaded girl on their laps. Molly was surrounded by her grandchildren, and Ginny was wearing a wedding ring.
I swallowed hard as I stared at that ring on her hand. I found it difficult to accept that she had remarried so quickly. She was smiling and talking to the baby that was currently being bounced on Ron’s lap. But behind the smile, there was a sadness in her eyes. I only looked away from the wedding ring when a hand clasped Ginny’s shoulder. Ginny looked up with a smile and then kissed the man.
I did not know whether I should feel angry at her for moving on or happy that she was not miserable without me. She had married Dean Thomas, her former flame. I knew that Dean was a good man, but the roaring dragon I had suffered with in my sixth year had returned to my chest.
I pushed it down and apparated away from the house with a crack that nobody heard. Watching her was too painful. Seeing them all but being unable to communicate with them was too horrible.
I went to France, and I found Perseus Ollivander. I had used glamour charms to change how I looked and gave him a false name. He said he knew nothing of clockwork magic. But he did know a fair amount about time magic, so he agreed to help me with my project.
I had not had much interaction with the outside world, so I did not have an awful lot to go on. Still, I thought that Perseus might be the most handsome man I had ever laid eyes on. He was in his mid 20’s and was half-French. He had pale skin, blond, almost silver hair and the most mesmerising dark blue eyes.
Perseus practically moved into the house to help with the project, and I quickly found my friendship with the man becoming something more. He was kind, he was patient, and he was determined. I enjoyed his companionship, and I admired him. We could spend evenings talking about time magic, dissecting an old time-turner to discover its secrets. We could discuss a muggle book and not realise that four hours had passed. We could sip firewhiskey and laugh about the sorry state of the world. We could comment on how nothing had really changed even though Voldemort was dead, another dark lord would be along soon enough.
When I told Perseus my secret, he smiled and said to me that he knew. After all, I was Harry Potter, but I had not aged a day since the accident, and we had been researching time magic for the past year. Perseus never judged me. He simply loved me and kept me sane. He did not allow the project to consume me, I stopped just existing, and I truly lived again.
As the years passed, we made progress on the time-turner. It became the heart of the time machine, and we wired it in with powerful magical connections. When Perseus got sick, the time machine had the power to go back and forward in time. But it could only go back or forward 48 hours.
48 hours was not long enough to save Perseus.
We had tried, we had spent years trying, but we had never been able to supercharge the time-turner. I had gotten sloppy, and my work had taken longer because I had fallen in love. I had been happy, so my obsession had taken a backseat until Perseus got sick, and I cursed myself until I was blue in the face for that.
It was a new influenza attacking the wizarding population. They called it bird flu amongst muggles, but it seemed to target something in the genes of witches and wizards. The incubation period was 72 hours, and every person infected died regardless of how early it was detected. So, in the end, I had to concede that there was no way I could save him.
Perseus had been as graceful and elegant in his death as he was in life. He had been strong, just as he had been in life. He was paler than ever and very weak, and I had not left his side. I held his hand, and I am not ashamed to say that I cried as I saw his life being ripped away from him.
“I lived a good life, Harry,” Perseus had whispered as the end neared.
“No,” I had told him, my voice raw with emotion, “You lived a lonely life because you chose me.”
Perseus had smiled weakly, “I would have chosen that life over and over again for you.”
I had shaken my head, “This is my fault. You are going to die, and I can’t do anything to save you! I have a time machine, and I can’t do anything.”
Perseus had only shaken his head back at me, “I lived a good life, Harry. These 20 years I have spent with you have been perfect, and I could not ask for more.”
I hated myself for letting him fall in love with me. He was 48 years old when he died that night, and I had not aged a day since 2002. Perseus should never have wasted 20 years of his life on me.
That was the day when I closed my heart off and vowed not to let anyone else in. Of course, there would be lovers because otherwise, eternity would be a lonely existence, but there could not be love. Not ever again.
I had barely made progress on my project, and 25 years had passed. I had the basics of a time machine but no way to supercharge the time-turner. I had no way to control the machine. I needed to be able to send it forwards and backwards in time. I needed to be able to control the date. I was so far away from where I needed to be. I poured over the notes that Perseus and myself had made over the past 20 years. Still, they shed no further light on the situation, and they just made me mourn the man who had been my companion for so long.
I decided to focus on the clockwork aspect of the machine. I read, and I read, and I read until I knew what to do. I created the date and time setter out of scrap metal I had found around the house and garden. I used clockwork cogs and imbued them with magic to control the machine. It had taken me two years, and it was barely even a step forward.
It did mean that I could test the machine for the first time. I could still only go back or forward 48 hours, but my test proved that the date and time setter worked. The machine itself needed several charms placed on it to make the journey more comfortable. I had been thrown around the machine as it spun around, and the outside had begun to crack under pressure.
Ignoring the fact that the heart of the machine was virtually useless, I fixed these errors. I installed extensive security charms around the machine so that it could not be entered by anyone other than myself. I used perception charms on the machine so that nobody would notice it unless I wanted them to. I put a strong, permanent shield charm around the outside so that the external walls would not crack when it travelled in time. The biggest challenge was making the journey smoother. I studied the concept of inertial dampeners in Muggle Science-Fiction, and I applied that theory to the inside of my time machine. It worked perfectly, and my next test flight was perfectly smooth.
I had spent another three years of my life making these changes; however, once I was finished, I had to come to terms with the fact that I needed outside help once more. It had been five years since Perseus’s death, and the wound still felt as fresh as it had the night he had breathed his last breath.
I did not want to let another person in, but I needed help.
I needed to supercharge a time-turner, and there was no way I could do that on my own. So I ventured out into the world once more and saw that not much had changed. The fashion trends had changed, and new houses had cropped up where there had once been fields. I tried to avoid looking into the lives of my friends and family, but once more, I could not resist.
After losing Perseus, I had to check that the people I had once loved were still okay. Influenza had killed a third of the population, I knew there was a chance it had affected my friends, but I had tried not to think about it. The fact it had taken Perseus from me was bad enough.
The first place I visited was the Weasley family graveyard. There were two new plots, one that looked very freshly dug. I stood in the warm summer sun and stared at those graves. Arthur Weasley had been 79 years old when he died three years ago. I suspected that it had been influenza because they had only found the cure two years before then. The newest plot belonged to Charlie Weasley, only 60 years old when he had died four months ago. I couldn’t bear to look any longer, so I decided to check on the others.
I stood outside and looked into the living room of the Burrow once more. The scene was different this time though. Molly did not live here anymore. Instead, it seemed to be the family home of Bill and Fleur. Their three children were adults now and no longer lived at home. I stood there for a long time and watched their eldest child arrive with her husband. I had to smile when I realised that Victoire’s husband was my very own Godson Teddy Lupin. My smile widened when I saw a tiny baby in Victoire’s arms. I listened closely and heard Fleur call her Grandson Remus. My heart swelled in a way it hadn’t done in a long time. From listening to the conversation, I heard that Molly was in St. Mungo’s and had been since her husband's death three years ago.
I had heard enough when I left at nightfall to see Ron and Hermione. I followed Hermione home from work and found it difficult to comprehend how old she had gotten. All of my friends were in their early 50’s now, and I was eternally 21. Hermione and Ron lived in a beautiful cottage in Godric’s Hollow, and much to my surprise, I realised that Ginny and Dean lived next door. Part of me cursed them all because I wished for the life that they led. But I was mostly happy to see them all flourishing. Ginny had two grown-up children, a boy named Arthur and a girl named Lily. When I heard Ginny utter that name to her daughter, I felt a great thanks towards her and wished that I could express it. I found tears welling up in my eyes. She had named her daughter Lily. She had never truly forgotten me. In some form, she still loved me as I still loved her.
I sat outside well into the evening, finding it hard to let go of the people I loved for the third time. I knew I should not visit like this, but sometimes I couldn’t help myself. I eventually took my eyes away from Ginny’s family. She and Dean were playing games with Arthur and Lily on this warm Saturday evening. They had been catching up outside the house in the unseasonably warm climate when Ron and Hermione had come over with their two children. I had never seen Hugo Weasley, and little Rose had been a tiny baby the last time I had seen her. With Rose was a tall blonde man who Ginny and Dean greeted with a hug. I moved closer and listened to him speak. He sounded and looked familiar somehow.
I wondered what relation he was to Rose, but I saw a wedding ring glittering there when I looked at her hand. On the blonde man’s hand, a golden wedding band shone in the evening moonlight. I was just coming to terms with the fact that Rose was married when I heard someone ask the man, Scorpius, how his father was. As Scorpius spoke of how a lesser form of influenza that came back every year (despite a cure being found for the deadlier form of the disease) had weakened his father so severely that he was virtually bound to his bed, I realised that he was talking about my former rival Draco Malfoy.
Rose Weasley had married Scorpius Malfoy, and Ron was sitting here conversing with him and sharing firewhiskey with him. I smiled slightly at how much the world had changed since I had left it. I was about to leave when I heard Rose speaking about her job in the Department of Mysteries. I heard her joke about how much bad luck she had earned herself when she had knocked over a case of time-turners she had been working on just yesterday.
A lightbulb went off in my head. I knew who I needed to help me. But how would I do it without raising suspicion? I went home and formulated my plan. I changed my appearance drastically and made sure to bump into Rose at a café the next day while she was on her lunch break. I was fiddling with my time-turner when I did so, and she noticed. She asked me what I was doing, so I told her about my project, and as I had predicted, it piqued her interest.
Rose came to the house at the weekend, and we worked together on the time-turner. It took weeks, and I made her promise not to tell anyone what we were doing. She kept her word, and I made it clear that I was very grateful. After months of work, we had found a way to give the time-turner extra power. I thanked Rose, and she smiled at me. She opened the door to leave the house and asked me – “Did you really think I didn’t know who you were? I would recognise you through a hundred glamour charms.”
I was alarmed and told her I didn’t know what she meant. But Rose had only smiled more widely and spoken softly.
“Good luck Harry. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
I thanked her after that. And I watched Rose leave with genuine fondness in my heart for her. My two best friends had many flaws, and they had bickered like hell throughout the time I had known them, but they had raised that girl to perfection, and I wished I was able to congratulate them on that.
With my time machine seemingly functional, I focused on the more comfortable aspects. I spent the next ten years perfecting the machine's interior, which included learning extensive charms and spells. I learned about areas of time magic that were so complex they took months to master. I turned the time machine into a home that I could travel through time in. I was determined to use it to make a difference somewhere. I could not make a difference here, and I could not change my own fate. Studying time magic for so many years had taught me one important rule. I could never interfere with my own time stream. If I did, there could be consequences too cataclysmic even to imagine.
The year was 2042 when I thought that my time machine was ready. I had not looked upon the outside world since my last visit. I could not bear to see any more death. Through the odd newspaper I had picked up, I had heard that Molly had died in St Mungos. They supposed that she had died of grief, and I could understand that conclusion. I tested my machine for what I hoped to be the final time that year. The supercharger on the time-turner should have given me free rein to go as far into the past and the future as I liked. However, it malfunctioned on my maiden voyage and instead threw me ten years into the future. I stepped out expecting to be in medieval England, but instead, I was in Grimmauld Place, and the newspapers told me that the year was 2052
I cursed in frustration because I could not understand what had gone wrong with the time-turner. It seemed to have burned out, and I was stranded in 2052 with no power source for my time machine. I was forced to venture out for the first time in 20 years, and my search would show me things that I knew I did not want to see. I had to find Rose again. She was the only one who could help me get a functional power source for the machine—but finding her meant facing those who I had left behind so many years ago. My friends were now in their early 70’s, and they were old. They were grandparents. Yet here I was, still eternally 21. Seeing Ginny old, grey and widowed was the hardest thing I had ever done. The only solace that I did have was that her family surrounded her. She had children and grandchildren, just like I had always wished for her.
I found Rose. She was a mother herself now. She and Scorpius had two beautiful children. I watched them walking through a park close to their house. I was not under the cloak, but I hoped that I was far enough away to go unnoticed. Rose turned her head to the side, laughing about Scorpius's words, and her eyes caught mine. I was preparing to apparate out of sight when she smiled and waved. She moved her head in the direction of the rose garden that I was standing next to. I took her hint and stepped inside.
I waited for her on a bench amongst the roses. They were in full bloom, and the scent filled the air. Finally, she stepped into the garden and sat next to me amongst the fragrant pink flowers.
“So, did you take the slow path or the fast path?” Rose asked me with a smile.
I sighed and told her, “The fast path, but the machine malfunctioned. It threw me ten years into the future, and the time-turner burned out.”
Rose had looked at me thoughtfully then, “The time-turner wasn’t powerful enough to handle time travel on that scale... So I think we will need to create a new one.”
“Create one?” I had asked.
“From scratch,” Rose had agreed, “It will have to be huge to handle the amount of magic that you need. It will take years to build.”
“How many years?” I asked, looking at her desperately.
Rose had understood me perfectly. She had taken my hand and spoken to me gently, just as Hermione used to, “You don’t mean how many years Harry. You mean how many more people will you have to see die before you can escape, don’t you?”
I could only nod. My throat felt tight and constricted as the weight of her words hit me like a ton of bricks.
Rose had squeezed my hand then and fixed her kind blue eyes on mine, Ron’s eyes, “If we’re lucky ten years. If not...I don’t know how long.”
I had accepted my fate then. Rose came to the house whenever she could. She stole essential parts of a time-turner from the Department of Mysteries. We slowly worked on building a time turner around six times the size of an average one. As we worked, Rose kept me updated with the day to day affairs of the family.
As the years passed my friendship with Rose strengthened because I gradually began to lose everyone that I loved and she was my only friend. First Bill, then Percy, then Fleur, then George, then Luna and the latest one had been Angelina. I never attended the funerals because I could never bring myself to do so. I heard from Rose that nice things had been said and many people had come to say goodbye. Still, I could never bring myself to visit that Weasley graveyard and see the plots increasing year on year. Ginny seemed to outlive them all. She seemed strong and resilient. Rose spoke of her fondly, and she told me that every time she saw her, she seemed as young as ever.
Eventually, however, time caught up with my closest friends. Rose had missed one of our meetings, and my worst fears began to materialise. She missed the next one too, and when she did show up on the third day, she had been through hell. She threw herself into my arms and sobbed as she told me that her father had died and that the funeral was in two days. It was the first funeral that I forced myself to attend. I stood a long distance away and watched Hermione sob into her daughter’s arms. I watched Scorpius comfort his wife. I watched Ron’s body being lowered into the ground, and that was the day when my heart truly began to harden.
I threw myself into my work on the time machine and distanced myself ever further from Rose. She knew what I was doing and tried to stop me from doing it, but I had no choice. I felt the pain of losing someone I loved far too often. Another ten years had passed since I had been stranded in 2052. My only remaining friends were Hermione and Ginny, who were in their early 80’s now. I knew Hermione’s health had been declining since Ron’s death, but her death still shook me to the core. She died five years after Ron, at the ripe old age of 88. Rose grieved her terribly, and I told her that she would be foolish to continue helping me with my work. We went our separate ways at Hermione’s funeral. I cried as I watched her body being lowered into that plot in the Weasley graveyard. That graveyard was far too full these days, and that hurt too.
I bade Rose the best in life, and she bade me good luck with my project. Parting with her felt like losing another great friend. We had created something fantastic together.
We had worked together for 15 years, and the super time-turner was practically finished. All of the pieces had been slotted into place, but the time turner had to be imbued with powerful magic. It had to sit for at least five years after being imbued with that magic to stabilise. If I tried to use it too soon, it would combust and not only would I lose all of our hard work, I would lose my time machine.
Five years seemed like a minute to me. I had spent 65 years working on the machine. I had lived for 87 years and had not aged a day since the accident. I had spent 65 years being 21, and I was overdue my escape.
The days passed very slowly when I did not have my obsession to lose myself in. So I quickly learned that I needed a pastime of some sort to help pass the time. That was when I took up history. I learned as much as I could. I studied the history of both the wizarding and the muggle world, and I decided that I needed to be knowledgeable about the past if I was going to travel in it. As I exhausted the library at Grimmauld Place, the years began to pass faster and faster. I began to count the months when I reached the final year.
The time-turner only had three more months to soak up the magic when I received an unexpected visitor in the form of Rose. She had been crying, and her beautiful face was stained with tears and lines. She hugged me and told me that Ginny had died that morning.
My heart broke into a thousand pieces when I heard that news. Ginny had seemed strong and tough. Rose had once joked that she thought she would live forever, and I had gotten that impression too. I thought that she would be the one to live to over 100, like Dumbledore. I thought she would be the exceptional one. I thought I would be able to escape her death.
I had been wrong. Ginny had been 91 years old when she died. It was a funeral that I could not avoid, but it was also the one funeral that changed me forever. Ginny had children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They all sobbed and grieved for her on the cold, winter’s day that they laid her in the ground. She was not buried in the Weasley graveyard as I had expected her to be. I had expected her to be laid to rest with her family because they had always meant so much to her.
That was what I had expected, but the truth was so much more heartbreaking than my expectations. Ginny was laid to rest in the graveyard in Godric’s Hollow. The graveyard behind the little church where we had gotten married so many years ago. Walking past the church in the snow brought back memories that I had repressed for a very long time. I shut my eyes as images of her in her wedding dress flashed through my mind. The images rushed in quickly, every memory that I had spent years repressing. I remembered her laughing as I spun her around at the wedding. I remembered being lifted by all of the brothers as Ginny grinned. I remembered Ron and me dancing together for a joke after his best man speech.
When I opened my eyes, tears that I could not control poured down my cheeks. They were all gone—the subject of every happy memory within my heart. Every single one of them was gone. I kept my distance at the funeral as Ginny was lowered into a plot next to mine. There was no body in the ground beneath my gravestone, but the stone stood there all the same. I could barely see for the tears that burned my eyes. Between my mother and myself was Ginny.
Four cold gravestones were all that was left of my family. Of the mother who had sacrificed herself for me and the father who had died to create a better world for me. Of the girl who had captured my heart and held it for so long.
I chanced a glance at Rose as I slipped out of the graveyard through the kissing gate. She looked at me with sympathy in her eyes that I detested. I fled to Grimmauld Place, where I would hide out until I could operate the time machine in a few months. That image of Rose looking at me across the graveyard through the snow that was falling would haunt me forever. I would see Rose many times throughout the rest of my long life. I would see her as a child and as a woman. I would see her as Rose Weasley and Rose Malfoy. But as I left that graveyard and she looked at me so solemnly, I knew that was the last time that Rose would ever see me. Knowing that broke my heart. She had, after all, become such a close friend and confidant of mine.
When the day finally came, I fitted the time-turner into the time machine, and it whirred to life happily. I should have been filled with hope at the promising start, but my anger consumed me. I was bitter, and I was sick of the world. I was already sick of living, and I would have to live for many more years yet. I would find something capable of killing me one day, but I had no idea how long that would take.
I keyed in a date. The 1st of September 990AD. The time machine whirred happily, and the time-turner at the heart of it began to spin exceedingly fast. I pulled down a lever, and the machine started to turn around as it transported me through time. I held on tightly. Even with inertial dampeners, it could get a bit bumpy in here. When the machine came to a shuddering halt, I allowed a smile to grace my face because I was going to step out of this time machine and witness the first-ever sorting ceremony at Hogwarts.
I had a fully functional time machine, but I hadn’t escaped. I knew that I would carry the guilt of my past for years to come. I wondered if I would ever really be able to let go of those who I had loved so much. It was something I was not sure of, but I was convinced that this machine had given me a new lease of life.
I opened the doors and let the bright sun shine in. I marvelled that the sun was in a different position. I marvelled at the difference in the landscape and the sparkling new castle below me.
I stood on the side of the cliff and looked at the world, and I finally had a purpose again.
I could not help those in my past, but how many others could I help? The opportunities were endless, and the entire world lay before me.
I had done that which so many before me had failed to do.
I had mastered time travel.
Harry shut his journal and smiled, looking around the time machine that he loved so much. He was just beginning to wonder where he ought to go next when the machine whirred to life, and a message flashed up in hologram form in front of him.
Harry frowned; it was a date. He swiped his hand to erase the message, but he got to his feet and keyed in the date, “Why do you want to take us to future London?” he mused.
The machine just whirred in response.
“Alright,” Harry said, pulling down the lever, “I’ll trust you.”
- TBC -