Chapter Text
With a thoughtful hum, Luna peers at the wreckage over her rose-shaped sunglasses. Bedside her, Harry scratches at the edge of his beard sheepishly. For a long moment, neither of them say anything.
In front of them their old but cheerful Volkswagen bus stands tipped on its side, listing heavy against the columns of the henge.
"And this," Luna says very serenely, "is why you shouldn't be driving."
"What - no, this isn't my fault," Harry objects and waves his gloved hand accusingly at the henge. "This thing came out of nowhere!"
She looks at him, her expression mildly pitying. "Neolithic ritual sites don't appear out of nowhere when I'm driving."
"Well, it did! The hill was clear one minute and the next - stones!" Harry says defensively and folds his arms. "I don't know what happened, but I definitely wouldn't have missed up a giant ring of stones out in the middle of a big open field, now would I?"
Luna gives that some consideration, pushing her sunglasses back up her nose. In front of them, the bus lets out a little whine of metal scraping against stone as it shifts a little lower and settles against the column. "So we got ambushed by the Neolithic ritual site."
"Er," Harry hesitates. "I guess so?"
"Neolithic ritual sites are ambush predators," Luna muses. "How exciting."
Harry thinks about it. "Mental if true, yes," he agrees. "Though maybe it... apparated. Or we did. Or - I don't know."
"Spontaneous translocation through spacetime?" Luna suggests.
Harry grins. Gotta love Hermione, introducing muggle terms to wizarding spaces. "Something like that, yeah," he agrees. "Anyway, I didn't drive into the henge. It drove - er, appeared into… us? Apparated. You know what I mean."
"Mmh," Luna hums agreeably, tilting her head at the Volkswagen. Then she looks up at the sky above them. "The weather's changed too."
It had - from beautiful, sweltering summer day into... overcast dreariness. It looks like it's not just going to rain - but like there's going to be a storm. "Huh," Harry says, frowning a little. "Well, that's alarming. Think we passed out for a bit, missed like… a day or two or something?"
"I don't, no," Luna says.
"So, weather distortion by sudden unexplained teleportation magic - or actual temporal dislocation?" Harry asks warily.
"Well," Luna says thoughtfully and looks around. "That depends on whether the season too changed."
It hadn't, it turns out, but things are still, clearly… different. It's hard to tell by only looking around, the area isn't exactly familiar to either of them, but they both feel it. Something is just a bit off, and it's not just that they crashed into a henge that wasn't there before.
"So, the usual weirdness," Harry says. "Something is wrong, and now we have to figure out what, does that sound about right?"
Luna hums non-committally, which is answer enough. "Which is why you shouldn't be driving," she concludes calmly, looking at him. "These things only happen when you're driving."
Harry opens his mouth to object and then closes it. He… can't really argue against it. "Counter argument," he tries anyway. "You love it when these things happen."
"True," Luna agrees and smiles before looking at the bus. "Think we can right up Fairybell? She looks a bit sad."
She does. Thankfully, the charms Mr. Weasley helped them put on her had kept her from turning into an outright scrap. Harry loosens his wand from the wrist holster. "One of these days we really need to steal the Knight Bus user manual or something, stop stuff like this from happening," he says, lamenting all that led him here. "Come on, let's get the old girl's wheels back on solid ground."
Harry's after-Hogwarts plans sort of… meandered into nothing. Auror Academy turned out to be a bad fit, as did most of the other jobs offered to him by the Ministry for Magic. Harry's various issues with authority just clashed with everything and everyone. There were arguments, a few duels and a couple of fistfights, and in the end Harry decided it was better for everyone if he sought employment elsewhere.
Meantime Ginny got really invested in her Quidditch career and got very busy and stressed while Harry got the opposite, and things got tense. Eventually it sort of wound into an awkward ending somewhere in their second year of dating. Their parting was more or less amiable - in the end, they were both just glad they hadn't gotten married or pregnant before then, regardless of many people's insistence on it. Like Molly Weasley's. Who was and still is very disappointed.
Thankfully, Harry's relationship with the family held on during and after the breakup. He even worked for a while at Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes, but that was more charity on George's part than anything else. They didn't really need an extra employee at the store - though he did bring them a lot of new customers.
Mostly he was at loose ends, still trying to figure out what he wanted to do when he grew up. At the same time, Hermione had decided to pursue a double degree of Arithmancy and Applied Mathematics with fervent ambition of forwarding wizarding sciences, while Ron finished up at Auror Academy and graduated, so both of them were busy and getting busier. He saw them once or twice a month, if he was lucky.
It kind of made him feel like a bum. Here they were, advancing their careers, and he was just… sitting around. And sure, he had enough money that he didn't really need to work a day in his life, but still… It really made him feel like he'd just become a layabout, living off of his multiple family fortunes. Just like the person Dursleys accused him of being.
He really should be doing more with the time given to him - it had been so hard won - but… what?
When Luna told him about her plan to travel and see the world and find creatures no one ever had before, he'd kind of longingly thought he would like to try something similar. Travel, see the world, explore, maybe even go to a beach.
"Never gone to a beach before," he admitted to her. "Aside from Shell Cottage, and that doesn't really count, does it? I've never gone swimming just for the sake of swimming. Never tanned. I wonder what that's like."
Luna looked at him curiously. "Why not find out?"
Harry's immediate reaction was to shake his head and sigh. "No, I can't. I need to find a job," again, "and do something with my life."
"Why?"
Such a simple question. It turned out Harry didn't really have an answer, other than, "Well, it's what I should do, it's what people do, right?" Which honestly wasn't much of an answer.
Then Luna said, easy as anything, "You should come with me."
And it really was that easy.
… okay, it wasn't - but it makes for a snappier story, to say it was.
Once the bus is back on her wheels - and they've repaired the big dent in her side - Harry and Luna set up camp beside the henge, Harry pitching up the canopy and the lanterns and setting up a table and pair of chairs, while Luna investigates the Neolithic ritual ambush predator.
"It doesn't exist," she concludes as she ducks out of the rain and under the canopy, while Harry sets up the folding table for some grilling.
Harry gives the henge a cursory glance. "Looks pretty real to me," he comments. "How many sausages do you want?"
"One is fine," Luna says and shows him a map book. "We are here," she points and her many necklaces clatter against the table as she sits down across from him. Her hair is dripping water on the pages. "There is not supposed to be a henge here, not that anyone knows anyway. It shouldn't exist."
"Maybe it was magically hidden until now, maybe?" Harry suggests, considering her wet hair before drying her with a flick of his wand. "Or it really apparated here from somewhere."
He knows better by now than to question her on the location. For a person who gets lost a lot, and who loses a lot of things, Luna always tends to know where she is. It's usually exactly where she means to be.
Luna pushes her rose sunglasses up to her hair, pinning her now dry blond curls back. "Or we aren't where we're supposed to be."
… Right, never mind that then.
"Okay, you're going to have to elaborate," Harry says, firing up the grill before putting his wand away. "Because it doesn't really feel to me like we moved much. Aside from, you know, crashing into a henge."
"We are in the same geographical location," Luna agrees, flicking her wand for a compass spell. "But the place might be different. Also, the date is different."
Harry grabs the tongs and gives them a couple of clicks in thought. "Different," he says with a steadying inhale. Then he starts loading meat, mushrooms and veggies on the grill. "Different how?"
Luna looks past the edge of the canopy, where the rain is coming down hard enough to form a sort of curtain around their camping setup. "Not as it was before or how we assume it to be?" she offers. "It's currently the 13th of August…"
"... yeah?" Harry agrees. "It is. You told me this morning. Friday the 13th."
Luna glances at him. "... in the year 1982."
Harry considers, briefly, of being shocked. There was a time when he used to be shocked about these things. He'd flail and exclaim and say things like,"That's impossible," and, "How is that possible," and, "Why is this happening to me," and so on. Teenage him was very dramatic about events and situations.
He's not a teenager anymore, though. He and Luna have been travelling for about four years now, and after what happened in Egypt… well.
"Huh," Harry says and prods the mushrooms with the tongs to make room for the corn.
"It's also a Friday," Luna adds helpfully.
"Of course it is," Harry says and clears his throat. "So we went from Friday the 13th to… Friday the 13th, but 22 years back in time?"
"That's what Tempus tells me," Luna agrees.
"Well. That's new." They're quiet for a moment, Luna flipping through her book of maps while Harry flips peppers and corn and sausages on the grill. Then Harry says, "So, nothing wrong with my driving. My driving didn't do this."
"Well," Luna says thoughtfully. "Not your driving, no. It was more it being you who was doing the driving that did this, I think. These things only happen to you, Harry."
Harry sighs in agreement - can't really argue with that. "The plates, please?" he says and then, as she hands him some, divides the food between them before turning off the heat with a gentle tap of his wand before sitting down. "So, we should probably make sure we know what's going on before we jump to conclusions. Confirm the date at least, before we, you know, panic."
"That seems reasonable." Luna hums in agreement, conjuring herself a garish yellow plastic spork. "How do we do that?"
Harry considers it for a moment and then lifts up his wand again, doing the summoning charm for a Daily Prophet delivery. "Give it half an hour, and we should know for sure," he says.
"Good call," Luna says with an agreement, flicking her wand in the air as well. "I'm summoning a Quibbler owl."
Harry thinks about it and casts another summoning charm. "Witch Weekly," he announces.
"Spellbound," Luna adds.
"Tempus."
"What Wizard."
In the end, they end up summoning the deliveries for about a dozen different wizarding newspapers and magazines. The first of them arrive before they finish their dinner - a Daily Prophet owl, looking mighty peeved about being summoned so late in the day.
"There must be an aviary nearby," Luna comments while offering a bit of sausage to the bird while Harry gets out the Knuts to pay for the paper.
Headline is about the passing of a prominent member of Wizengamot and how yet another hereditary seat would be going empty in the future due to the lack of a viable - and non-incarcerated - heir. Looks like a big part of the issue is dedicated to the growing concern about the state of Wizengamot and its many permanently empty seats - and how many seat holders are now, unfortunately, locked away in Azkaban.
The date, though…
"Friday the 13th, August, 1982," Harry says ruefully.
"That seems conclusive," Luna comments, holding the sausage for the Daily Prophet owl to tear into. "What do the articles say?"
They're more or less what one expects from the Prophet. The Wizengamot article takes all the important pages with snippets of interviews and rumours and slight hints about how there might've been political motivations behind certain arrests around the end of the war. Apparently, the fact that so many purebloods ended up in Azkaban was the reason behind certain changes in the council - and its leadership.
Aside from that, there are some interviews, think pieces, an article about the recently published study on the Wolfsbane potion by Damocles Belby and so on. The sports section is mostly about the recent Harpies victory, which makes Harry's heart clench a little.
"Say this is correct," Harry says, tapping the date. "And we're twenty two years back in time… Well. I guess we got two questions, to start with. How did this happen, and can we undo it?"
"Three questions," Luna corrects, wiping her fingers now that the sausage is gone. "Do we want to undo it? Thank you," she says to the owl on the folding table between them. "That's all."
The owl gives them a look and then flaps his wings before taking off, gliding into the ever darkening sky.
Harry looks up at her and she looks back calmly, picking up a bit of grilled pepper with her spork. "You mean…?"
"This henge shouldn't be here," Luna says, biting into the pepper. "But it is, and it looks like it has been for a long time. Which means it's different here than it was where we came from. Which means this isn't the past."
Harry sets down his fork and leans back on his plastic camping chair. "So it's… another world? Alternate reality?"
"So evidence seems to suggest," Luna says and turns her attention to her food. "Though of course, we should confirm that, too, before jumping to conclusions."
Running a hand over his beard, Harry clears his throat. His heart is suddenly picking up speed. "That's, ah. I mean. Is it possible?" he asks, trying to affect a casual, calm air.
Luna shrugs. "I don't see why not," she says and picks up the last of her food with her spork. "Time travel is. Teleportation is. And we know other dimensions exist. So. why not time travel teleportation to other dimensions?"
"Yeah, but - other worlds?" Harry asks feebly.
Again, Luna shrugs, giving him a look, adjusting her big bangles idly. "Why not?"
Why not, why not indeed. "We should, um," Harry clears his throat again. 1982 - would that make him 2 years old? Or rather, his this-world-version. And it's August, so, his baby self has spent less than a year at Dursleys. If his baby self even is at the Dursleys. Maybe his baby self is at Godric's Hollow, living his best life with loving mum and dad? Maybe he isn't the Boy Who Lived, maybe -
Harry clears his throat. "We should. Confirm. Right? Wait," he says and gives her a look. "You wouldn't mind staying? What about your dad?"
Luna tilts her head a little, her eyes straying as she thinks about it. "Well," she says. "It would be sad. I would miss him. And he would miss me. But I know if he knew, he would want us to take this opportunity. If it was him, I would want him to take the opportunity."
"What opportunity? Opportunity to do what?" Harry asks, even though he knows.
Luna shrugs, looking at the rain. "Change history. Save people. Make things better."
They're quiet for a moment, just listening to the rain pouring all around them, on the bus' roof, on the canopy. It's getting dark, and the only light is the lanterns hanging from the poles, the warm glow spilling out of the bus. It feels oddly private, even secret, like they're in an enclosed space.
And… yeah. She's right. "Okay," Harry says and draws another breath. "So, we should see what else is different. Check how close this world is to ours - if, if this is a different world. Maybe there's something in Diagon Alley we could…?"
"We should," Luna agrees and looks at him. "Do you want to finish your food first? I can feed it to the other owls if not."
"Owls?" Harry asks, and looks up just as the Witch Weekly comes swooping in, trying to land on his head. "Whoa!"
Luna calmly watches him flail and reaches to pick out another pepper from his plate. "I can examine the henge while you visit London," she muses while he struggles with the owl. "See if there's something that tells us how we got here. We'll consolidate our findings in the morning."
"That sounds - good - ack," Harry says, and manages to manoeuvre the wildly flapping and somewhat affronted owl onto his arm. "Yes, good, thank you - here, your payment…"
The owl pecks at him as he gets the issue of Witch Weekly from her, then she accepts the payment in her little satchel and takes off in a huff.
"Would you pick up some pudding while you're in London, Harry?" Luna says, chewing on Harry's peppers. "We're almost out."
"Yes, of course - I'll grab the shopping list before I head out," Harry says, opening the rolled up magazine. "Should check out what's in here first, though."
The cover features a potion master who'd recently released a revolutionary line of hair products - with smaller lines advertising articles about housekeeping tricks, about how to spice up things in the bedroom with spells and an interview of some author who'd written a self-help spell book.
"Oh, I remember that," Luna comments, looking at the last one. "Dad has the article in a scrapbook - my mum contributed to the book. She was the inventor of the Self-Arranging Drawer charm. Or maybe is," she says, thoughtfully. "She might be alive here. If she exists."
Harry looks at her for a moment. Then he stands up. "Think you can handle the papers? I'm heading to London," he says. "The sooner we know what's up the better. Is there anything else I should keep an eye out for?"
Luna considers that for a moment, pulling the Witch Weekly issue closer to her. "You should put on a disguise," she says. "Just in case."
Harry runs a hand over his chin. "I don't know. Who would recognize me, really? If it is 1982, my this-world-version would be just a toddler, Luna. And I don't look that much like my dad anymore," he says and then hesitates. "Do I?"
"No," Luna agrees easily enough and opens the magazine. "But knowing our track record, we will end up breaking the law and making enemies quickly, regardless if it's regular old time travel or dimensional time travel. We already are breaking the law, technically, by time travelling this far," she points out. "So, you might as well make sure not to leave an easily followed trail for people to trace."
"... yeah, good point," Harry says ruefully. "I don't suppose we have any polyjuice left?"
"No, and I think we might be out of some of the ingredients to brew it. You should check the potion stores."
"I guess I'm dyeing my hair then," Harry mutters, running a hand through it. It's gotten a bit long, and being as scruffy as it is, he knows it can be a bit… memorable. He would need to tie it back too, maybe slick it down… "Red or blond?"
Luna looks up and squints at him. "How about a nice strawberry blond? With the dark brown robes. And change your glasses."
"Right," Harry nods, turning to enter Fairybell.
"And remember to dye your beard too this time!" Luna calls after him. "And eyebrows!"
Harry pauses at the side doors to give her a look. "Do you want to do my disguise?" he asks pointedly.
Luna thinks about it. "Yes," she says and stands up. "Go get the brown robes - the ones with the collar and shoulders. I'll get the colour swatches."
Harry rolls his eyes, good natured, and goes to get the robes.