The Grangers of 62 Saint Mark’s Road, #3A, Notting Hill, London were a perfectly normal couple. They would probably not take well to a ten-year-old hooligan knocking on their door, which was why Harry was climbing through their daughter’s window in the dead of night.
A quick wandless spell and no one would notice anything odd. Harry sat down in the desk chair and threw one of Hermione’s stuffed animals at her face.
“Wha—? Hey! MUM! DADDY!”
“They can’t hear you.”
Hermione shut her mouth. Stared at him. “Who are you and how are you in my bedroom?”
“Name’s Harry Potter, and magic.”
“Magic isn’t real.”
“Your favorite book is Matilda and you can make things move with your mind.”
Hermione paled. “I d-don’t know—”
Harry held up a hand and the stuffed animal he’d thrown floated back into it. “I’m a wizard. You’re a witch. You had a visit from Professor McGonagall with Hogwarts School. Your parents hate their daughter being so unusual but they agreed to let you go to school when you begged them not to have your magic bound. Right so far?"
"Who are you?" she whispered.
"I told you, I'm Harry Potter, but I think you're asking how I know all this, and to answer that I've got to tell you some stuff that's gonna sound crazy, so I'm gonna drink this, which forces people to tell the truth. You'll have some too so you know it works."
"I'm not drinking anything some strange boy who broke into my room gives me," she said flatly.
Harry grinned. "I'll drink some first so you know it's not poison, how's that?"
Hermione looked at the door. Looked back at him. The only light came from streetlamps outside. It cast her face in harsh angles below her bushy hair. Merlin and Morgana, she was young.
“We don’t have a lot of time.”
“Drink it,” Hermione said.
Harry tilted up the vial of Veritaserum and let seven drops hit his tongue. The woozy feeling washed over him immediately. “Enough for half an hour. Just do one drop, it’ll wear off in a minute or so.”
Hermione took the potion. Blinked very fast. “Oh, goodness, this…”
“What’s your greatest fear?”
“Not leaving a mark,” she said, and then flinched.
“Mine too.” Harry winked, took a breath, and told her everything.
The troll. The war. The horcruxes.
And then what came after. Betrayal. Loss. Agony.
“A love potion? But that violates the whole idea of consent.”
Harry smiled through his tears. “You know they called you the brightest witch of the age?”
“Did they really?” Hermione shook her head. “That doesn’t matter. I—love potions?”
“He was our best friend, and Ginny was… but they’d been potioning me for years.” Harry took another seven drops of Veritaserum: the half hour was almost up. “By then everything had gone to hell. All the oldest families lost everything. Money concentrated in the hands of bureaucrats who’d never taken a magical oath to govern in the best interest of the governed. Ancient enclaves fined and stripped of their independent authority. Magical creatures treated like pets. Rituals and rites practiced for millennia banned. There was unrest, poverty. Corruption worse than anything that came before. People arrested for studying ancient, venerable magics… books burned, property confiscated… and then magic itself started to die.”
Hermione gasped.
“At first it was a rise in squib births—nonmagical children born to magical parents. Then a drop in muggleborn magical children. Then people started noticing how wizarding fertility rates had been falling precipitously ever since the war. And then the Muggles found us, on a CCTV camera some American Auror missed. Have you studied the Holocaust in school yet?”
“Of course I have.” Hermione’s eyes shone with tears. “Are you saying…”
“There were camps. Experiments. Muggleborn children like you had it worst--most of the world has no reliable way to identify Muggleborns before they're old enough for accidental magic, and at that point many parents turned in their kids. They thought it was unnatural, you see, and when the Muggle leaders dangled the promise of their child becoming "normal", well.
"Most wixen didn't know the spells that could shield against high-velocity attacks of a physical nature. They fell to bullets and bombs. Only the most ancient and powerful war wards could stand up to muggle attacks and as magic weakened so did the wards. Creatures had it worse--unicorns were hunted nearly to extinction within a few years. Dragons lasted longer, but not by much."
"That's awful," Hermione whispered. "Oh, I can't imagine… but I don't understand how you're here. I've read some of the theory Muggles have around time travel, of course, but still…"
Harry grimaced. "I used ritual magic. It was only possible if I… well, killed someone."
Hermione's eyes got very wide. "...who?"
"Really? That's your question? Merlin, this potion. Ronald Weasley, the traitor."
"Oh. Okay."
"That's not at all how I expected you to react."
Hermione huffed and it was so like her older self Harry felt like he was seeing double--the girl she was and the witch she had been. Would be again. "He helped his own sister rape you for years and told all your secrets to the newspaper so they would arrest you for being--well, Dark isn't a crime, that actually sounds awfully racist--"
"Never change," Harry told her with a smile he couldn't hold in. She wasn't his Hermione but she was still herself. "Still, I didn't expect you to accept ritual human sacrifice." At least not this quickly.
"You gave up the life of a traitor and, from what you've said, a murderer and corrupt policeman as well, since he worked for the government that was so messed up, in exchange for coming back to a time when he is still alive--I sincerely hope you've done so to fix things and not just to break into my bedroom and tell all your secrets to a schoolgirl." Hermione paused for a much needed breath and went on. "Which reminds me, what was I to you? You say we worked together to help people being persecuted by the magical and normal--sorry, Muggle--governments. But it seems like we were… close."
Even in the bad lighting, he could see her blush.
"The oaths I swore to Ginny were binding," Harry said. "But you were someone I loved--very dearly."
Hermione looked very closely at him. "Right. And now you're a grown up man in the body of a ten year old boy. That's a bit disturbing, isn't it? You don't expect me to be your girlfriend, do you?"
Harry burst out laughing. "Nothing of the sort. Merlin, I'm not some kind of pervert. You were my best friend. I'd have died a hundred times over without you, Hermione. You're brilliant and pragmatic and compassionate in a way I never was and… maybe it's unfair, but I couldn't not ask for your help, and I didn't want to lie to you. Maybe someday when you're grown… but it would be between you and me, not because of what I felt for a version of you who doesn't exist anymore. And the memories of that time are fading already. It's the price of the ritual. I won't lose them all, but it will come to feel like something that happened to someone else, like a dream, or a story. It's already begun. I hadn't intended to do this until we were older, and only if we'd become friends again, but within a day or two of coming back I started feeling… like a child again. And I couldn't do this alone."
She nodded. "I understand. The mind and the body are not separate. Descartes was entirely wrong about that."
There was a long pause.
"You've already read Descartes?"
Hermione bit her lip. It was a tic her older self had shared, and one the Harry of before had found adorable and sexy. He couldn't see it as either now. Mostly it was just… endearing.
"An abridged version. Mummy wouldn't let me read the original."
"Like I said. Brilliant."
"I'll help you," she said suddenly. "Of course I will, goodness, there's no way I could not… I do wonder why… why I didn't come back with you."
For the first time, and though he knew it was futile, Harry fought the potion. "You… were dead," he finally ground out.
She exhaled sharply. "I… how?"
"Weasley," he whispered. No words could convey the horror, the grief, the rage he'd felt when he learned Hermione had been killed while resisting arrest. The warrants for both of them had never been formally rescinded even when evidence came to light exonerating Harry of the crimes Weasley and others had said he committed. Tensions had been rising with the Muggles already and he and Hermione had returned to England to help. In the chaos, Minister Shacklebolt had forgotten to issue pardons… or had neglected to do so on purpose. Harry would never know for sure. Either way, it had given Ron the legal option, as an Auror, to arrest Hermione—and then he’d cursed her in the back when she tried to run.
It had been the last straw. Hermione had held on to her optimism, made him promise never to use the ritual unless it was their absolute last resort.
“Oh.” Hermione’s tiny body was perfectly still. “I’m sorry.”
“What? What for?”
“That you had to go through that. You obviously cared about her… me… very much. And… I suppose I can… see why we were friends.”
Her smile felt like absolution.
Harry smiled back.
“So… do you have a plan? I’m assuming there is one. I’m happy to look at it and help, of course, but I don’t know… what exactly you want from me.”
“Just to… know that someone knows the truth, is enough,” Harry said. “There are ways to share memories. I don’t have one with me, but in July on my birthday, I’ll be able to retrieve a Pensieve from my family’s vault at Gringotts. If you want, I’ll show you… as much as I can. It wouldn’t be fair for me to remember so much of you when you know nothing of me.”
“I’d like that,” Hermione said softly. “This is… strange. I do feel like I know you already, even though… well, frankly, everything about this is disturbing and insane.”
Harry barked out a laugh. “It really is, isn’t it?”
“I’m glad to be your friend.” She turned, then, and sat on the edge of the bed, cautiously reaching out a hand. Harry took it and ignored the way his fingers trembled. “Although I think we should tell my parents we met at the library.”
“Yeah.” Harry grinned. “Yeah, no kidding.” He took a deep breath. “Right, well, here’s the plan.”
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