Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Harry already knew how to get to Platform 9 ¾, because the Weasley family had shown him in the previous timeline, and he’d been there many times since. So when he heard Molly talking to the twins, and memories of his horrible last encounter at the Burrow flooded his brain, he’d opted to hide behind a man wearing a tall hat rather than approach them. Until he’d actually seen them, he had still been planning to pretend it was his first time and ask for help just like before.
He decided there would be plenty of other chances for an encounter of the Weasley kind. He just needed some more time to process things. As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t quite shake the fact that the ten-year-old girl clinging to her mother’s hand was the same woman who had murdered him only a month ago.
-X-
On the train, Malfoy was in a compartment already wearing his robes. He was sipping something from a silver flask with a big snake on it when Harry found him. He raised the flask in greeting.
“Yikes,” Harry said, “you’re starting early.”
“Never stopped,” Draco replied, offering Harry the flask.
Harry, feeling strangely hungover from last night’s antics, accepted. He paused right before the flask reached his lips.
“It’s Firewhiskey, right? Not something that’ll make my dick fall off?”
Malfoy rolled his eyes.
“You watched me drink it,” the blonde sneered as he snatched the flask from Harry’s hands and took an impressive swig. “And what does it matter anyhow? Isn’t Ginny Weasley still wearing that around her neck?”
“That happened in the other timeline,” Harry said defensively. “St. Mungo’s gave me a new one. It was bigger. And, for your information, I haven’t even spoken to a Weasley yet.”
“Maybe don’t this time. I told you they were the wrong sort.”
“Don’t start with that garbage, Malfoy. You know how I feel about it,” Harry took a swig from the flask.
“I do,” Malfoy confirmed. “I’ll try to behave around Granger and the Evil Ginger’s because I know you like them.”
Harry punched his friend in the arm. “Ass.”
“I know you are, but what am I?” Malfoy sneered. Harry gave him the finger. “Seriously though, how are we going to do this? Should we pretend to be enemies and try to fix the mistakes we made last time?”
“I was thinking the same,” Harry confessed. He paused to release Crookshanks from his carrier. The cat began to explore the train compartment. “Except, being enemies was one of our mistakes. I completely wrote off all of Slytherin because you were such a steaming pile of dragon dung, and maybe if I hadn’t, some of your classmates might have made other choices during the war. The-Boy-Who-Lived has a certain amount of influence, after all, even if he might not want it.”
“Don’t be a steaming pile of dragon dung,” Malfoy narrated slowly as he pretended to write that down. “Got it. It’s a place to start, I suppose. So, we’ll keep our heads down and see what happens for a while?”
“Works for me,” Harry agreed, taking a sip from the flask Malfoy had passed him. “So, how was living with your parents again after all this time?”
“I keep forgetting I’m supposed to be eleven and getting frustrated because my parents are big believers in children being seen and not heard,” Draco replied darkly, reaching for the flask. Crookshanks rubbed against his ankles and Draco reached down to pet the cat. “Tell me about the muggles.”
“Not much has changed there,” Harry replied, “but I may have convinced them to hate me less.”
“A miracle,” Draco snorted.
“Right?” Harry laughed, “What about your tattoo? Is it still there?”
“Kind of?” Draco shrugged. Harry looked at him hard.
“What do you mean, ‘kind of’?”
The blonde sighed and slid off his outer robe and began unbuttoning his shirt.
“What, now it’s a tramp stamp?” Harry guessed. Draco snorted and slid his white button-down off his shoulder so Harry could see the snake, which had once resided in a skull tattooed above Draco’s wrist, seemed to have turned purple and slithered up to encircle his upper arm.
“It looks kind of cool,” Harry commented. “I’ll deny saying that.”
“Thankssss,” Hissed the snake.
“It talks too,” Draco added.
“What does it say?” Harry asked. Draco shrugged.
“Baking instructions, mostly. Turns out, Tom 27 likes baking. I’ve been losing time for the last month and waking up in the kitchen. Last night I apparently baked a few dozen biscuits.”
Harry raised an eyebrow, and Draco pulled a large tin from his bag. Harry cast several spells to find out if the biscuits had been enchanted. When the spells came back negative, he selected one and took a bite and made a noise of approval.
“You can still speak snake in this timeline, right?” Draco said, shoving his arm into Harry’s space. “Talk to it. Find out what it wants.”
When Voldemort had tried to kill Harry when he had been a baby, he had unintentionally shoved a chunk of his soul into Harry; giving him a scar shaped like a lightning-bolt, the ability to speak to snakes, and creating a weird psychic connection between the two of them. Harry had lost the psychic connection and his ability to talk to snakes after Voldemort had killed him in the first timeline. It had been almost seventeen years since Harry had tried. It appeared that Draco could now speak to snakes as well.
The snake tattoo on Draco’s arm was realistic and resembled the purple snake they had met in Limbo with Tom 27.
“Hello?” Harry hissed tentatively. Crookshanks, who had been curled up in the seat next to Harry stood up, arched his back and hissed.
“You speak too?” the snake hissed, flicking it’s forked tongue and slithering twice around Draco’s arm. Harry waited. “It’s me, Tom from the twenty seventh timeline?”
“Hey Tom,” Harry said, “I remember. Love the biscuits.”
“Thanksss,” hissed the snake. “It isss a new recipe I came up with.”
“You’ve got mad skills bro,” Harry replied. The snake tried to look humble.
Suddenly the compartment door slid open. Draco pulled his shirt back on just in time to prevent an eleven-year-old Hermione Granger from getting an eye-full.
“Has anyone seen Neville’s toad?” she asked.
“He should really keep that in his pants,” Draco muttered. Harry elbowed him in the ribs.
“No, but we’ll help you search for it,” Harry said kindly. “What does it look like?”
“It’s a toad,” Hermione replied, rolling her eyes at him.
“That isn’t helpful,” Draco pointed out. “Wizarding toads can have all sorts of modifications. Color. Shape. The expensive ones can make themselves look like other animals. My father has a toad that can talk.”
To a listener who didn’t know Draco, it might have sounded like he was bragging. He was actually trying to share important information about wizarding toads that a muggleborn witch might not be aware of.
Harry had encountered Lucius Malfoy’s talking toad. He and Draco had been working a case involving a secret society, a vampire, a goblin and three virgins that they had been planning to throw into a volcano to prevent an ancient evil from starting an apocalypse. The Aurors and their allies had been forced to go into hiding while they waited for Harry’s eyes to grow back and had gone to Malfoy manor because Harry’s apartment building had exploded and there was a homicidal lamp terrorizing Grimmauld Place. The toad had spent the entire weekend insulting them.
Hermione sighed.
“It’s brown,” she said, speaking slowly. She made a shape with her hands. “And this big.”
“His name is Trevor,” Neville added.
The description did sound like an ordinary toad. Harry tried to recall what Trevor the toad had looked like the first time around. The toad had never done anything particularly interesting, and he remembered Neville had always had trouble keeping up with it.
“Accio Trevor the Toad!” Harry shouted, wand in the air.
“Really, Potter?” Draco sighed as the brown blur came flying down the train corridor.
“Saves time,” Harry shrugged, catching the airborne toad with his hat.
“Could you teach me that?” Neville asked when Harry passed him the toad.
-X-
Inevitably, Harry’s thoughts wandered. Eleven-year-olds, even ones as intelligent as Hermione Granger, just weren’t the best conversationalists. Harry found himself thinking again about what he hoped to accomplish with his re-do. Exposing Peter Pettigrew and getting his Godfather out of Azkaban came to mind. The rat was somewhere on the train right now.
Harry had an idea. It was impulsive, and a little stupid- but when had that ever stopped him?
Without giving any warning, Harry fell to the floor of the compartment and pretended to go into convulsions. Hermione, bless her, moved everything away from him so he wouldn’t hit his head and Malfoy called for help.
Three prefects appeared quickly.
“He’s having a seizure!” Hermione explained. She was speaking loudly.
The Prefects were useless. The Prefect from Slytherin wanted to stun him. The one from Hufflepuff suggested a full-body bind. Percy Weasley thought ignoring it and hoping it went away was a valid option.
The act caused a huge commotion and drew a crowd.
It was all going exactly as Harry had planned. He stopped twitching and lay still for a moment, listening to the murmurs around him as everyone began to notice he had gone still.
Then, above all the other voices he heard Ron Weasley asking if he was dead. Harry bolted upright, found the youngest red head easily with eyes that had spotted a thousand snitches and pointed.
“You!” Harry shrieked, shaking his pointed finger at the youngest male Weasley.
“Me?” Ron asked stupidly, pointing back at himself.
“Your rat murdered my family!”
-X-
Harry had just accused Ron’s rat of murdering his family, which would have been absurd under any circumstances. The fact they were eleven and had never met before only made it more perplexing. Rumblings of confusion could be heard throughout the growing crowd.
“You’re mental!” Ron swore, holding his rat protectively. “Scabbers could never hurt anyone.”
“Utter nonsense,” Percy declared, staring at the boy on the floor and shaking his head. “He must have hit his head when he fell.”
“I’m psychic,” Harry declared, pointing his wand at the rat. He imagined his blustering sounded a lot like Professor Lockhart’s had in second year before the man had made every bone in Harry’s arm disappear following a quidditch accident.
“More like, ‘psychotic’,” murmured the Slytherin Prefect.
Scabbers bit Ron’s hand, causing the boy to drop him. Crookshanks immediately pounced. The cat currently had both of his paws resting on Scabbers, and was watching Harry as though waiting for instructions.
“I’ll prove it,” Harry’s wand emitted a flash of blue light and suddenly there were two men crouched in the spot where the cat had had the rat pinned. One was Peter Pettigrew, and the other was dressed in old-fashioned clothing. This was one more imposter than Harry had been expecting.
“Fuck,” Harry cursed.
“Fuck!” The man on top echoed Harry’s sentiment in a strained voice before he leapt gracefully to his feet, grabbed the wand from the Hufflepuff Prefect and started stunning people. “Now we have to Obliviate them all.”
Harry had wanted to cause a scene and have an audience when he revealed Pettigrew’s secret, and he had succeeded. The second reveal had been a surprise. Having spent the last month telling his cat all of his secrets, he felt a little betrayed. For now, at least, their goals seemed to be in alignment. There were too many witnesses who might talk, and having to answer questions would make their position more difficult. So, he picked up Neville’s discarded wand and helped the man who had been his cat obliviate people. If nobody remembered the event, there could be no questions.
Draco stunned the man who had been Scabbers, cast a body-bind, and conjured some ropes for good measure. “Should I Obliviate him too?”
“No!” Harry shouted as he stunned Marcus Flint. “He needs to know who he is and what he’s done when the Ministry gets their hands on him.”
“He saw us, Harry!” Draco argued, wand pointed at the unconscious Pettigrew.
“If everyone else on the train forgets what happened, there’ll be no way to verify his story. Nobody in their right mind would take him seriously. It’ll be a grown man who is supposed to be dead making ridiculous claims against two little boys who don’t remember their names and a cat.”
Draco swore. Then he too leapt into action, using Hermione’s wand to help Harry and his cat modify memories.
Stunning and Obliviating everybody on the train took all afternoon, and bodies lay everywhere by the time they were finished. Harry did the conductor last, causing the train to nearly derail before finally coming to a stop.
-X-
After moving themselves and their hostage to a new compartment, exhausted, they finally sat down to talk.
“I thought we agreed to follow the last timeline and to not draw attention to ourselves, Potter. What the hell was that?” Draco demanded once they were alone.
“Seemed like a good idea,” Harry shrugged, “And who’s going to know? My cat just Obliviated everybody.”
“We should deal with that too,” Draco said.
Harry and Draco both turned their wands on the other man in the compartment with them.
“I got cursed by some hags three hundred years ago,” the man who had been Crookshanks explained, hands above his head. “They murdered my family and trapped me in my animagus form.”
“Why should we believe you?” Draco demanded. Harry pulled out a vial of potion.
“I’ve got this,” Harry told Draco. To the man who had been Crookshanks he said, “Feel like repeating everything under Veritaserum?”
“Sure,” the man agreed, seeming to realize it wasn’t a question. “Just give me a minute.”
First, he cast an assortment of spells with the borrowed wand in his hand, finishing with a series of stunning spells. Next, he returned the wand to the Hufflepuff Prefect he’d borrowed it from. Finally, he took the potion from Harry and threw it back, making a face.
“Ask away,” the man declared.
“Who are you?” Draco demanded.
“My name is Soren Fowler. I was a hitwizard back in the 1690’s”
“That would make you older than Dumbledore,” Harry commented.
“Who?” Soren asked, blankly.
The man went on to tell them everything he had just told them under the truth potion. Once they had determined Soren wasn’t a dark wizard or a pedophile, Harry and Draco lowered their wands and listened as he told them his life story.
The man had been alive for more than three hundred years and was the same age Harry and Draco had been in the past timeline. Before the hags had murdered his family and turned him into a cat, he’d had a wife and six kids.
As a cat, he’d lived among both wizards and muggles. Sometimes in a family home and sometimes on the streets. Once on a pirate ship. He’d lived through several ruling monarchs, between 1660 and the present. He had survived several wars, including the American Revolution, two World Wars, Grindelwald’s uprising and Voldemort’s first reign of terror. Soren had also been part of an elite squad of Auror’s who dealt exclusively with the worst of the worst the wizarding world had to offer.
“What are you going to do now?” Harry asked, “I don’t see any reason to detain you.”
“I’ve thought a lot over the years about what I might do if I were to ever gain my freedom. Everybody from my time is dead. Could I stay with you guys?” Soren asked, “You said you were from the future, we can all be displaced together. I don’t know how to live in this time yet. I’d need a new identity. I’ve been a cat for a long time and I’d like to say I’m a pretty good one. Nobody ever suspects the cat. I can follow people and listen to conversations without being seen. I could be an asset to you.”
“We’re expecting this to go to hell fast,” Draco warned, “with Potter involved, it always does.”
Harry snorted.
“Last time a teacher with Voldemort living on the back of his head let a troll into the castle on Halloween so he could try and get past a three-headed dog to get a stone that could make him immortal.”
“Shit,” Soren said, looking a little dazed.
“Wait…what?” demanded Draco. “The teachers never said anything about what happened with the troll, just gave Gryffindor house points. They sure as hell never said anything about a three-headed dog! All they told us at the end of the year was that Professor Quirrell had a tragic accident.”
“I haven’t told you this one?” Harry asked. Draco shook his head. “He was possessed by Voldemort.”
Draco shuddered.
“You guys make it sound like this sort of thing happens often,” Soren commented.
“Possession?” Harry asked, “Sure. People get possessed at Hogwarts all the time. Ginny got possessed during second year. I got possessed in fifth.”
“I’m possessed right now,” Draco added. “If you don’t get possessed at Hogwarts, what are you even doing?”
“Exactly!” agreed Harry. “Second year a giant snake petrified several of our classmates. Third year there were werewolves, Dementors, and another homicidal crazy supposedly trying to kill me. Fourth year it was dragons, merpeople, and the return of Voldemort. Fifth year everyone and his brother was trying to fuck with my head. Sixth year Dumbledore finally decided to teach me something important, but then he died, and I dropped out my seventh.”
“First year I wanted Potter to be my friend. Second year I wanted to win the house quidditch cup. Third year I got attacked by a Hippogriff. Fourth year I wanted Victor Krum’s autograph. Fifth year somebody finally gave me authority, and that’s when everything went horribly wrong. Sixth year I was supposed to kill the headmaster, but I couldn’t do it and the Dark Lord got mad and conquered our manor.”
“I was tortured in that manor,” added Harry.
“Don’t flatter yourself. Almost everyone I know got tortured in the manor at one time or another,” Draco replied.
-X-
Having obliviated the train conductor, nobody knew how to drive the train or how to get to Hogwarts, so there was nothing left to do but wait for Hogwarts to become concerned when the train didn’t arrive on time and send somebody to see what the problem was.
Harry, Draco and Soren snacked on Tom 27’s biscuits and discussed what the game plan would be when they arrived at the school.
“We have to act like we don’t remember anything,” Draco said. “It would be suspicious otherwise. We should also practice some first-year spells.”
“I already know all of the first-year spells,” Harry said.
“Obviously,” Draco replied, “but if we’re the only ones conscious when whoever Hogwarts sends to check on us gets here, there will be questions. They’ll probably check to see what our last spells were. Better they find a bunch of hovering charms than a few hundred Memory Modifications.”
“Good thing we didn’t use our own wands,” Harry reminded his friend.
“Neville and Hermione might be in trouble though,” Draco replied.
“No, they won’t,” Harry replied. “They’re first years, and Hermione was raised by muggles. Nobody would expect a first year, let alone a muggleborn, to be able to cast a viable Obliviate. We just need to stun ourselves and pretend like we don’t remember anything. They’ll search the train, find Pettigrew and assume he stole a wand and attacked a bunch of students.”
“That’s actually brilliant,” said Draco.