Chapter Text
“Avada Kedavra!” Severus Snape shouted. A jet of green light shot from the end of the Death Eater’s wand and hit Dumbledore squarely in the chest.
Harry, immobilized beneath the Invisibility Cloak, could only watch in horror as Dumbledore was blasted into the air. For a split second, he seemed to hang suspended beneath the shining skull, and then he fell slowly backward, like a great rag doll, over the battlements and out of sight.
Harry stood transfixed. It hadn’t happened. It could not have happened. Dumbledore couldn’t be dead.
“Out of here, quickly,” Snape was saying. He had seized Malfoy by the scruff of the neck and forced him through the door ahead of the rest; Greyback and the squat brother and sister followed, both of whom were panting excitedly.
As they vanished through the door, Harry found himself able to move once more. He threw the Invisibility Cloak aside as the final Death Eater, the brutal-faced man Snape had called Yaxley, was disappearing through the door.
“Petrificus Totalus!”
The Death Eater buckled and fell to the ground, rigid as a waxwork, and Harry leapt over him, running down the darkened staircase two steps at a time.
The dimly lit chamber beyond was full of dust. Half the ceiling seemed to have fallen in, and a battle was raging before him. Even as Harry tried to make out who was fighting whom, there was a flash of light and a body was blasted into the wall beside him before crumpling to the floor. Harry realized with a jolt that it was Tonks, her eyes frozen open, blood oozing from an injury on her brow.
Harry tore his gaze away from the limp Auror, his heart pounding. The smoke was beginning to clear, and Harry saw Ginny locked in combat with the lumpy Death Eater, Amycus, who was throwing hex after hex at her while she dodged them.
Across the room were Professor McGonagall and Lupin, each battling a separate Death Eater. Luna and Kingsley, meanwhile, were dodging around an enormous blond wizard who was sending curses flying in all directions, so that they ricocheted off the walls around them, cracking the stone and shattering the nearest windows. And at the far end of the hall, Harry saw a black cloak twist out of sight through an archway. Snape.
Harry launched himself after the Potions Master, but after only a few steps, his foot caught on something, and the next moment he was sprawled across someone’s legs.
Looking around, he saw Neville’s pale, round face visible from beneath a pile of rubble. “Neville, are you...?”
“M’all right,” Neville muttered, clutching his stomach. “Harry... Snape and Malfoy... ran past...”
“I know, I’m on it!” Harry said, aiming a hex from the floor at the blond Death Eater who was causing most of the chaos.
“Harry—” Neville mumbled. “It’s a massacre. There are so many of them.”
Harry scrambled up from the floor and sprinted after Snape, ignoring the bangs issuing from behind him, the yells of the others to come back, and the mute call of the figures on the ground whose fate he did not yet know. Harry skidded around the corner, his trainers slipping on the blood-slick stones, and had to throw out a hand to steady himself against the wall.
The corridor ahead had been half-destroyed. A great section of the outer wall had been blasted away, leaving the passage open to the night. Cold air rushed in through the gap, carrying smoke and the smell of burning wood. For a moment, Harry could only stare.
Below him, the grounds of Hogwarts had become a battlefield. Green and red spells streaked across the darkness like violent fireworks. The lawn was torn apart, trenches of scorched earth cutting through the grass. Giants moved at the edge of the forest, their shadows enormous against the moonlight, and Acromantulas spilled from the trees in black waves. Harry could hear screams, shouts, the crash of stone, and somewhere far below, the unmistakable roar of Hagrid’s voice. Death Eaters were pouring across the grounds from every direction, black-robed figures moving through the chaos like ink stains spreading across parchment.
A hand seized his arm so suddenly that Harry spun, his wand raised.
“Harry! It’s us!” Hermione stood there, pale and breathless, her hair half-fallen from its tie, dust streaked across her face. Ron was just behind her, limping slightly, his robes torn at the sleeve and blood running down from a cut near his temple.
“They’ve opened the gates,” Ron said at once. “There are loads more coming up from the grounds, and Snape’s disappeared with Malfoy and the others. We think he’s letting them in from the lower entrances.”
“Dumbledore—” Harry began. He had not meant to say it, but the name had simply forced its way out. For a second, the sounds of battle seemed to fall away. Dumbledore was the one person who was never supposed to fall. He had been there always, solid and certain, the answer to questions Harry had not even known how to ask. The idea of Hogwarts without Dumbledore seemed as impossible as imagining it without the castle itself.
A curse blasted into the wall beside them, sending chips of stone flying, forcing Harry back to reality.
“Move!” Ron shouted, and they ran.
The corridors of Hogwarts had become a maze of smoke and shouting. Portraits screamed from their frames, suits of armor lay smashed across the floor, and shattered glass crunched beneath the trio’s feet. Teachers were driving younger students back toward their common rooms while the rest of the staff and the older students fought to hold the main corridors.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione turned down a narrow staircase, then slipped behind a tapestry and into one of the hidden passages Harry knew only because of the Marauder’s Map. They climbed, descended, and then doubled back before finally emerging onto a seventh-floor corridor.
“Where are we going?” Harry managed.
“The Room of Requirement,” Hermione said, and Harry stopped short.
“But that’s how the Death Eaters got into the castle; we’ll be overrun.”
“I don’t think we will,” Hermione said, her tone confident. “And it’s the one place in this castle that might actually be able to hide us.”
Hermione and Ron took off again down the hall, and reluctantly, Harry followed.
Soon, the familiar blank stretch of wall stood ahead of them, bare and silent, lit only by flickering torchlight. A pair of Death Eaters patrolled the corridor, but a well-timed hex from Ron sent them both to the ground.
Somewhere far below, the castle shook with another explosion. Hermione was already pacing in front of the blank stretch of stone, fast and purposeful.
“We need a way out,” she said under her breath. “Not a tunnel they’ll know about, not somewhere obvious, somewhere safe. Somewhere they can’t follow.” Ron joined her, pacing too.
“A way to escape the Death Eaters,” he said, breathing hard. “A way to escape You-Know-Who. Somewhere they can’t find us.”
Harry stood still, staring at the wall.
Escape.
When he really thought about it, that was all they had done for years. Escape Voldemort. Escape death. Escape whatever terrible thing was waiting around the next corner. Harry had escaped Voldemort in Godric’s Hollow, then again in his first, second, fourth, and fifth years. And where had it brought them? Dumbledore was dead. Sirius was dead. Cedric was dead. His parents were dead. Escape hadn’t stopped any of it.
“We need more than that,” he said. Ron and Hermione both stopped pacing and looked at him. Harry’s voice was low, but steady now. “We need a way to stop him. Not just tonight.” He stared at the blank wall as though willing it to understand. “We need a way to stop him for good.”
For a moment, nothing happened, and then the castle trembled again. In the center of the blank wall, a door materialized. It was old, dark wood bound with iron, and heavier-looking than any door Harry had ever seen there before. The three of them stood staring at it. Ron swallowed nervously as Harry reached for the handle.
The moment his fingers touched it, a terrible cold shot up through his arm, like plunging his hand into ice water. Hermione gasped beside him, but he had already pulled the door open. Light spilled out from within, blindingly white and endless, and the floor vanished beneath them.
Harry felt Hermione grab at his sleeve, and he heard Ron shout his name, but the sound was snatched away at once. There was no up or down, no floor, no walls, only falling and light and the horrible sensation that he was being pulled apart into pieces too small to put back together. Images flashed around him, too fast to understand. A train platform. A phoenix in flight. Rain on black water. A dark-haired girl standing beneath flowering trees, looking up at Hogwarts for the first time. A woman speaking rapidly in a language Harry did not know. Dumbledore’s face. His mother’s eyes. And then? Pain.
Harry slammed forward into something hard, wood striking his ribs. There was a crash as the piece of furniture he’d collided with tipped over onto the floor, and parchment flew everywhere.
Harry looked around desperately, trying to get his bearings. Sunlight streamed through tall classroom windows, and particles of dust floated lazily in the warm air. Rows of students in black Hogwarts robes sat frozen at their desks, all staring at him.
At the front of the room stood Professor McGonagall, only she was younger. Much younger. Younger than Harry had ever seen her. Her face was less lined and her hair darker, though it was pulled back just as severely as ever, and she was holding a piece of chalk with the expression of someone whose patience had just been tested for the final time.
“Miss Chang,” she said sharply, “would you care to explain why you have just overturned your desk in the middle of my lesson?”
Harry stared at her. The room seemed to tilt, and he turned wildly, searching the classroom again. There was no sign of Ron and Hermione, only unfamiliar faces looking back at him with varying degrees of curiosity and alarm.
“No,” Harry said, then froze, because the voice that had spoken was not his voice. It was softer. Breathy. His hand flew to his throat.
Slowly, Harry looked down, past a rounded chest that stretched the fabric of his robes, to a slim, distinctly feminine body. His hands were smaller, and the nails at the end of each finger were better maintained than his had ever been. He was gripping the edge of the overturned desk so hard his knuckles were white. Long black hair had fallen forward over his shoulders, but this was not the stubbornly untidy mess that he was used to. This hair was straight, glossy black, and fell to the middle of his back.
“Miss Chang?” McGonagall asked, a note of concern present in her voice. Harry looked back up at her, panic rising so quickly that it made it hard to breathe. He had no idea where he was, and no idea what had happened to Ron and Hermione, but there was one person who might know what to do. One person who always seemed to know.
“I need,” Harry said, his voice trembling. “I need to see Professor Dumbledore immediately.”
Dumbledore’s office was both familiar and unfamiliar all at once. It was still the same room, and it still occupied the same amount of space, but as Harry had begun to work out, this was how the office looked a few decades earlier.
The strange silver instruments that clicked, whirred, and puffed quietly on their tables all seemed newer, and while the same portraits of former headmasters and headmistresses lined the walls in gilded frames, the room felt larger than the one Harry knew.
At first he thought it might simply be because it was less cluttered. The tables were not entirely occupied, and there was still space between the instruments for items and artifacts that Dumbledore had yet to claim. Dumbledore’s desk was relatively clear as well, and the bookcases around the room were filled rather than overflowing.
Then again, Harry thought grimly, perhaps the room only felt bigger because he was now several inches shorter.
He kept catching sight of himself reflected in the polished silver surfaces, and every glimpse made his stomach twist.
The long hair. The smaller frame. A stranger’s face with soft skin and frightened eyes. The girl had Asian features, fifth-year robes, and a Ravenclaw prefect’s badge pinned neatly to the front of her uniform.
At first, for several maddening minutes, Harry had thought he was in Cho Chang’s body. The prefect’s badge should have told him otherwise, since Cho had never been a prefect, but panic had not left much room for logic. McGonagall had quickly put an end to that theory. The Transfiguration professor had called him ‘Suzie’ on the walk over, with a tone that suggested genuine concern. Harry remembered the way she’d glanced at him whenever she thought he wasn’t looking, her lips pressed into a thin line.
“Professor?” he’d asked eventually.
“Yes, Miss Chang?”
“What year is it?”
McGonagall had stopped abruptly at that, and for a moment, she had simply stared at him.
“1977, dear,” she said at last, with none of her usual briskness. Then, after a brief hesitation, she’d added, “Would you like Madam Pomfrey to examine you before we see the Headmaster?”
Harry had shaken his head immediately.
Now, he sat in Dumbledore’s office. Just outside the door, he could hear voices: Professor McGonagall’s, clipped and firm, and Dumbledore’s, lower and calm. Harry could not make out the words, only the rhythm of them. McGonagall sounded concerned, while Dumbledore sounded, as always, like a man discussing the weather rather than a crisis.
Then the voices stopped.
The door opened, and Harry was already on his feet before it fully swung inward.
Professor Dumbledore entered briskly, wearing robes in a deep plum color. He, like McGonagall, was visibly younger. His beard was shorter, still silver rather than fully white, and his face, though unmistakably the same, seemed less marked by age. There was more energy in him, something sharper behind the calm.
He closed the door behind him and studied Harry for a long moment, not as a teacher looked at a distressed student, but with the same expression Dumbledore had worn when he’d sat at Harry’s bedside in the hospital wing at the end of his first year.
“Well,” he said, moving behind the great claw-footed desk, “Professor McGonagall tells me you were quite insistent in seeing me, Miss Chang.” He sat down, adjusting his half-moon spectacles. “How may I be of service?”
Harry stared at him, trying to reconcile what he was seeing.
Dumbledore was standing right there. Alive. Healthy, even. Compared to the man with the twisted hand and tired face, this Dumbledore looked so full of life. Like a man with a lifetime left to live.
For one wild second, Harry wanted to cross the room and embrace the old man, but instead he steadied himself.
“This is going to sound mad,” he said, “and you probably won’t believe me, at least not at first.”
Dumbledore inclined his head slightly. “In my experience,” he said, “these are often the most interesting conversations.”
Harry swallowed. “I watched you die earlier today.”
Dumbledore’s eyebrows rose.
“That wasn’t how I meant to start,” Harry stammered. “I watched you die. In my time.” He paused, trying to find the right words. “Look, I’m not Suzie Chang.”
Dumbledore was silent, and Harry rushed on before his courage failed him.
“I’m from 1997. Professor Snape killed you on the Astronomy Tower. Voldemort sent Draco Malfoy to do it first, but Draco couldn’t, and Snape used the Killing Curse and—and you fell and the Death Eaters attacked the castle. Ron Weasley and Hermione and I went to the Room of Requirement and asked it for a way to escape, and now I’m here.”
He stopped only because he had run out of breath.
The office remained very quiet, aside from Fawkes, who stirred softly on his perch.
Dumbledore’s expression had not changed, but Harry could see the mind behind it moving, fast and precise.
Finally, Dumbledore nodded. “That is certainly a great deal of information.”
“I know how it sounds,” Harry began, but Dumbledore raised a hand.
“It sounds either like the truth, or like an exceptionally ambitious lie,” Dumbledore said thoughtfully. He gave a small smile, and Harry saw that familiar twinkle in his eye. “And I confess that I should find either possibility rather interesting.”
“It’s the truth, Professor,” Harry said.
“Yes,” Dumbledore agreed, “I suspect it is. I suppose my first question, then, if you are not Miss Chang, is to ask the name of the student who has come to my office today.”
“I’m Harry Potter,” Harry blurted out.
Dumbledore did not react immediately, but nodded slowly, as though fitting the name carefully into place. “I take it you are James Potter’s child?” he asked conversationally.
Harry hesitated. “Yes,” he said at last, “and my mother is Lily Evans.”
Dumbledore leaned back slightly in his chair, his expression thoughtful rather than surprised. “I sense a certain reservation in your voice, Harry. Is your relationship with Mr. Potter in some way more complicated than one might assume?”
“I never really knew him, or my mother,” Harry said, his voice dropping. “They both died when I was little.”
That, at last, seemed to affect Dumbledore. “So James and Lily do not survive the war?”
Harry nodded. “Voldemort killed them when I was one year old. He came to our house in Godric’s Hollow because of a prophecy. He was trying to kill me too.”
Dumbledore’s voice was quieter now. “And yet you survived.”
“Yes.” Harry lifted a hand automatically toward his forehead, then stopped awkwardly as his fingers met smooth skin and not the familiar scar. “There’s usually a scar,” he muttered. “Lightning bolt. Very dramatic. Hard to miss.”
Dumbledore’s mouth twitched faintly. “I shall endeavor to imagine it.”
Harry managed the ghost of a smile, but it faded quickly. “Nobody really knows why I lived. My mother died protecting me, and somehow the curse rebounded. Voldemort lost his body.”
“And you were raised by your aunt and uncle?”
Harry frowned. “How did you know that?”
Dumbledore gave him a look that suggested this was a very simple question. “Because,” said Dumbledore, with a faint sigh, “if I were placing an orphaned magical child with blood protection in mind, that is precisely what I would do.”
Harry leaned forward. “I came to Hogwarts when I was eleven. Every year after that, Voldemort came back into my life somehow. First through a professor named Quirrell, then through a diary that turned out to be one of his Horcruxes, then through Peter Pettigrew helping him return, fully, in a graveyard during the Triwizard Tournament.”
Dumbledore’s expression sharpened. “Did you say Horcruxes? Plural?”
Harry nodded. “So you know what that is?”
“I know enough,” Dumbledore said quietly. “Please continue.”
Harry took a breath, tucking a loose strand of Suzie’s hair behind one ear. “We think he wanted to split his soul into seven pieces total, including the bit still in him. So six Horcruxes.” He started counting them off. “There was his diary from when he was a student, Marvolo Gaunt’s ring, Salazar Slytherin’s locket, Helga Hufflepuff’s cup, something belonging to Rowena Ravenclaw, though we hadn’t found it yet in my time, and Nagini, his snake.”
Dumbledore had risen from his chair and moved toward the window, hands clasped behind his back, but Harry pressed on.
“We know where some of them are. The ring. The locket. Professor Dumbledore, we can stop this before any of it happens. Before the first war gets worse. Before my parents die. Before you…” He stopped, swallowing. “Before all of it.”
Dumbledore stood in silence for several long moments, looking out over the grounds. When he finally spoke, it was as if each word was being chosen with great care. “If what you tell me is true, Harry, then time has offered us something both extraordinary and dangerous: the chance to change what has not yet happened.”
“Yes,” Harry said at once, jumping to his feet. “I don’t know where Ron and Hermione are, and I don’t know what happened to the real Suzie Chang. Maybe changing things makes everything worse, but I’m not just going to stand here and watch it all happen again. I can’t do nothing.”
Dumbledore turned to face him, and for the first time, there was no trace of amusement in him at all.
“No,” he agreed. “I do not believe that doing nothing is an option.”