Chapter Text
London, November 2005.
Harry Potter pulled his Auror cloak tighter around himself. The cold in Knockturn Alley wasn’t merely the work of the autumn wind; it was that clammy, unnatural chill that always seemed to linger wherever the Dark Arts had taken root.
He gave a faint, disdainful sniff. Hermione had given him quite the dressing-down in the Auror offices just yesterday. “Your behaviour is getting out of hand, Harry,” she’d said, her voice trembling with that particular blend of concern and irritation. “You skip galas, you date women—and men—who only want you for the scar stories, and you retreat into that… that mausoleum.”
Harry muttered into the collar of his cloak as he slipped past the fogged-up windows of Borgin and Burkes. “Out of hand.” If Hermione called an evening at Grimmauld Place Number Twelve—with a strong mug of Lapsang Souchong, the company of a still-grumbling Kreacher, and a dusty book on forgotten Celtic runes—“out of hand,” then he clearly had no idea what the phrase meant anymore. At least it was honest there. The books in the Black library might be dark, but they didn’t pretend to care about his status as the “Most Eligible Bachelor.”
That title had haunted him for the past five years like a particularly stubborn curse, after spending three years as a mere footnote in the top ten. It was a hollow honour. His relationship with Ginny had withered away after three years of dating. While she devoted her life to the Holyhead Harpies and the adrenaline of the pitch, Harry lost himself in the bureaucracy and danger of the Auror Office. They hadn’t lost each other in a row, but in silence. The few dates he’d had since all ended the same way: either in exaggerated fawning from fans, or in the hostile stares of Death Eater descendants who still had a score to settle with him.
A sharp, metallic sound ahead of him broke his thoughts.
Harry swore under his breath. Where was Proudfoot? He was supposed to have back-up, but the alarms they’d set on Silas Vane’s hideout had gone off too early. Vane had moved faster than their profilers had predicted. Waiting for his partner would mean losing him, and with a stolen object of this calibre, Harry couldn’t take that risk.
Brilliant, Potter. Absolutely brilliant, he thought, tightening his grip on his wand. He was old enough by now to know that heroism was often just another word for poor planning, but his instincts had already taken over.
There he was.
Ahead of him, the fugitive was running: Silas Vane. The former Unspeakable moved with a feverish speed Harry hadn’t expected from a man of his age. Vane was gaunt, his face a mask of paranoia, clutching a rune-covered casket to his chest as though it were his own beating heart. His knuckles stood out white against the metal in the dim, flickering light of the streetlamps.
“Vane! Stop!” Harry’s voice echoed off the damp walls of the alley.
The man barely spared him a glance, but Harry caught the sheer panic in his eyes. Vane knew he couldn’t outrun an Auror of Harry’s calibre.
Vane came to an abrupt halt at a dead-end wall where the alley’s shadows converged. He looked over his shoulder, eyes wild and bloodshot.
“They want to lock me in Azkaban for a discovery that makes death itself obsolete, Potter!” he shrieked, his voice cracking with madness. “If I’m not allowed to live in this present, I’ll find another!”
Harry stopped, his hands empty and visible to show he posed no immediate threat. He took a cautious step forward, his voice low and controlled—the tone he used in hostage situations.
“Silas, listen to me,” Harry said calmly. “Put the casket down. We can talk about your research, but not like this.”
Vane began to tremble, his knuckles white against the metal. “Talk? The Ministry doesn’t talk, Potter. They bury.”
“That Chronos Stone is unstable!” Harry took another step, his senses on edge. He could already feel the magic in the air crackling—a static charge that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. “You know what happens if the core is exposed to raw emotion—to energy. You won’t just tear yourself away, Silas. You’ll rip the whole district apart! Think of the people who live here.”
Vane glanced at the stone, then back at Harry. A chilling smile spread across his face. “Then let it burn.”
With a brutal motion, he tore the lid open and dragged a small, razor-sharp blade across his palm. Dark blood smeared the black obsidian.
“No!” Harry lunged forward.
He caught Vane’s wrist at the precise moment the stone began to scream. Something broke open.
Not in the stone—but in him.
The magic that burst free was no ordinary current; it had weight, like molten metal forced through his veins. His breath caught. For a fraction of a second, he felt… stretched. As though he stood in several places at once—or perhaps in none at all.
The cracks in the stone reached for him. Or he for them.
It didn’t matter.
The force surged through him and found an outlet, using his body as a channel without asking permission. He hadn’t wanted this—but something in him refused to let go.
The world responded.
The air collapsed with a dry crack. The cobbles beneath their feet began to ripple like water. Harry felt a tug at his navel, a thousand times stronger than Apparition, and somewhere far away, he thought he heard something breaking that had never been meant to move.
He watched the walls of Knockturn Alley warp at a maddening speed.
Colour drained from the stones. Fresh graffiti faded to ghosts and vanished as though it had never existed. The electric glow of the streetlamps flickered, shrank, and shifted into the warm, restless light of gas flames.
The air itself seemed to tilt—the damp, polluted stench of the city growing sharper, drier, steeped in smoke and coal.
Then came the impact.
Harry slammed hard against the cobbles. The blow drove the air from his lungs.
Silence.
No more rain.
Only mist—thick and low-hanging, as though it had gathered around him with intent.
He pushed himself upright, his head pounding. His fingers closed automatically around his wand.
The alley felt… wrong.
Too quiet. Too sharp. As though everything was just a shade too real.
His gaze fell on the hanging sign fixed to the wall.
He recognised it—but not like this.
The wood was dark and richly varnished, the letters deeply carved and inlaid with gold that gleamed in the flickering light. No cracks. No peeling paint. No years of neglect.
As though he were looking at a memory rather than reality.
A scream tore through the mist.
Harry scrambled to his feet, his senses snapping taut. The world around him was still shrouded in an unnatural grey veil.
“Vane?” he called hoarsely, but his voice died in the fog.
He drew his wand and cast a swift Hominum Revelio, followed by a more advanced Auror detection spell to pick up magical traces. The air trembled, but the signals were chaotic, as though time itself were still reverberating. Then, suddenly, a raw cry shattered the silence, followed by the sound of exploding masonry and panicked shouting.
Harry’s heart hammered in his throat. Was he too late? Had the Chronos Stone truly torn a hole in reality that was now beginning to devour Knockturn Alley?
He broke into a run, his cloak snapping behind him. As he rounded the corner by the White Exchange, he stopped short. It wasn’t a cosmic rupture. It was a fight.
Four men, clad in strikingly bright red cloaks, were bombarding a lone figure backed against a wall. Harry frowned. Red cloaks? Everyone in the Corps knew he’d switched them to muted grey with gold trim three years ago; red was far too conspicuous for field work. These men looked like poor imitations of Aurors—or like men hopelessly behind on protocol.
The man they were attacking was tall and pale, his face twisted into something sinister. His dark hair was matted with dust and blood. Despite his injuries, he fought like a cornered tiger: wild, desperate, and prepared to go down fighting.
“Enough!” Harry’s voice cracked through the alley, laced with the authority of a man accustomed to leading the most dangerous missions.
The four men ignored him and unleashed a volley of aggressive curses. The pale man deflected two, but the third struck his shoulder, slamming him hard against the wall.
Harry didn’t hesitate. He stepped into the fight with chilling control. With a short, sharp flick of his wand, he cast a Protego Totalum that shielded the injured man beneath a glass-like dome. One of the attackers swore and swung his wand towards Harry.
“Identify yourself! Stand down!” the man in the red cloak snapped.
“That’s my line,” Harry said coldly. With an almost bored flick of his wrist, he deflected a Stunning Spell and disarmed the second attacker with a non-verbal Expelliarmus so forceful it sent the man flying several yards backwards. “I’m Senior Auror Potter. Cease fire immediately!”
The attackers kept coming; their arsenal of spells was varied and dangerous, but to Harry their movements felt slow, unrefined. He stepped between the wounded man and the four attackers, his expression turning sharper, more severe.
“I said stop,” Harry repeated, his voice now dangerously low. He blocked a heavy curse with a simple motion and sent a shockwave across the cobbles that knocked the remaining men off balance. “You’re acting outside protocol. This man is injured and under my supervision. Who authorised this use of force?”
As the four men stagger from Harry’s shockwave, a sound cuts through him to the bone: the heavy, uneven thud of a wooden leg striking the cobbles. A rough, growling voice slices through the chaos:
“Senior Auror… who?”
Alastor Moody steps out of the shadows. Harry’s heart gives a violent lurch, but recognition is immediately drowned by a cold surge of distrust. His stomach twists. Not again, he thinks feverishly. He sees the fluid aggression, the full head of hair, and a face that bears not even half the scars Harry remembers.
This was too good to be true. The memory of Barty Crouch Jr. wearing Moody’s skin for a year flashes through his mind. This was a trap. A cruel imitation of a dead man, conjured by the Chronos Stone or a Death Eater who knew his history.
Only the magical blue eye remained a grotesque constant; it spun wildly in its socket before fixing on Harry’s forehead with chilling precision.
“Potter?” the figure barked, raising his wand. “I know every Potter in this country, and none of them have that look in their eyes. That look of someone who’s seen too many dead. James Potter is, at this very moment, safe with his wife. So who are you under that layer of Polyjuice, boy? A Death Eater hiding behind a dead name?”
Harry’s grip on his wand tightened. Anger began to simmer—this thing daring to use Moody’s voice to accuse him. “Shut up,” Harry ground out. “You’re not him. You’re a poor imitation.”
The man who looked like Moody gave him no chance to continue. “You call yourself an Auror while you protect that filth?” He pointed at the wounded man behind Harry. “The real Potter would sooner snap his own wand than throw up a shield for that kind! I don’t know what game you’re playing, intruder, but it ends here.”
Without further warning, a jet of green light burst from Moody’s wand. The deadly glow of Avada Kedavra illuminated the narrow alley.
Harry’s response was instinctive and violent. In a fraction of a second, he wrenched the cobbles from the ground before him with a brutal motion of his hand. The stones formed a solid wall that absorbed the curse; the explosion of green magic pulverised the rock into dust.
Heat flooded Harry’s veins; the attack was the ultimate insult. That an impostor would dare take on his mentor’s form to cast an Unforgivable Curse at him—something in him snapped. The years of war, the strain of the Chronos Stone, and the loneliness of the past years surged outward in a fury aimed not only at the attack, but at the desecration of Moody’s memory.
“Enough!” Harry roared.
He didn’t use his left hand to hold his wand, but to shape the environment itself. With a powerful sweep, he shattered the remnants of the stone wall into razor-sharp shards and sent them hurtling at the four enforcers with the speed of bullets, forcing them to scramble for cover.
His magic was no longer controlled; it was elemental. From his free hand, tongues of brilliant white fire lashed out, making the damp air of the alley hiss. He wielded his wand now as he had once seen Voldemort do in the Atrium: with a fluid, lethal grace that defied the laws of physics.
Moody was forced to retreat, his wooden leg clattering over the street as he threw up shields against the storm of debris and fire Harry unleashed.
“If you’re a Senior Auror,” Moody shouted over the chaos, dodging a curse that scorched his red cloak, “then tell me: what’s the current headquarters password?”
“The password?” Harry’s voice was raw, his breathing ragged in his chest. The flames dancing around his left hand flickered in time with his pulse. “Delta-Zero-Six-Green!” Harry bellowed, his voice breaking with sheer frustration. “For Merlin’s sake, what is wrong with you lot?!”
Silence. No recognition. No sign the code had broken the tension.
Only that look—hard, cold, calculating. Moody wasn’t looking at a colleague; he was looking at a target. Harry’s breath caught as the first icy thread of doubt crept through his veins like poison. Something was fundamentally wrong. His fury became a shield—a refusal to accept the lie standing before him. He struck harder, driven by the conviction that he was fighting a monster wearing the skin of a fallen hero.
But then the rhythm of the fight changes.
Moody—or the thing that looks like him—doesn’t merely evade Harry’s white fire; he parries it with a short, brutal twist of his wrist and a muttered incantation that cuts straight through Harry. It’s a very specific defensive technique, one Moody himself had developed to compensate for the limitations of his wooden leg. Harry had spent months practising that exact movement in the cellars of Grimmauld Place.
The world seems to slow. The white flames in Harry’s hand gutter out abruptly, as though an icy wind has drained the life from his magic. The hovering shards of stone clatter down onto the cobbles one by one—a death knell in stone.
“Wait…” Harry’s voice sounds thin, strange to his own ears.
He looks again. This time properly—past the anger. In the flickering light of the alley, he sees the man behind the legend. The nose is completely intact. No deep furrows of scars cutting across his face like cracks in a weathered statue. The face is too whole. Too… new.
The realisation hits like a hammer: this isn’t Polyjuice—or anything like it. This isn’t an impostor playing a role. The magic was too real, the posture too authentic. The man before him stands too straight, his shoulders not yet bowed beneath the decades of paranoia and pain Harry remembers. This Moody is faster. Stronger. Less… broken.
His stomach twists violently, almost making him retch. The “impostor” is gone; what remains is a man Harry loved more than he had ever dared admit—and that man is now aiming murderous focus straight at his heart.
“Alastor?”
The name breaks halfway in his throat. It’s a plea, a desperate attempt to force reality back into shape. Moody doesn’t respond, aside from a faint, distrustful frown.
“Who sent you, boy?” the voice snaps—the same voice that still haunted Harry’s dreams.
Harry shakes his head slowly, a reflex against the madness. He takes an unsteady step back, his heel slipping on the slick cobbles. The world suddenly feels too sharp. He doesn’t just see the man before him—he sees flashes of his end: an empty patch of earth, a magical eye lying lifeless in Umbridge’s hand, a grave that had never held a body.
“I buried you,” he says hoarsely, the words like ash in his mouth.
At that moment, his knees nearly give way. The foundation of his anger—the belief in an impostor—has crumbled, leaving only a raw, gaping wound behind. His wand lowers; its tip now points helplessly towards the muddy ground.
“I—I buried you…” He swallows hard against the lump in his throat. “We never had a body to say goodbye to. You fell… and there was nothing left.”
The silence that follows is suffocating. The enforcers behind Moody exchange uneasy glances. “He’s completely mad,” someone mutters, but there’s uncertainty in the voice at the sheer desperation in Harry’s eyes.
Moody, however, says nothing. His blue eye rotates slowly—slower now—and for the first time, there’s something in his gaze other than aggression. Not understanding—he is far too much Alastor Moody for that—but a flicker of deep, instinctive doubt. He no longer sees only an enemy; he sees a man mourning a loss that, for Moody himself, has yet to happen.
The reality of the time shift presses in on Harry like an icy weight. The Chronos Stone. The restored buildings.
“What’s the date?” Harry asks suddenly. His voice is cold, but there’s a tremor of pure dread beneath it. “No more games. What year is it, Alastor?”
Moody keeps his wand fixed unwaveringly on Harry’s heart. His blue eye spins once, uncertain, as though searching for the trap in such an absurd question. “Taken a Blasting Curse to the head, have you, boy? It’s the 31st of October, 1978. And if you don’t drop your wand immediately, you won’t live to see November.”
The year hits like a wrecking ball. Three years before he would be born. Three years before the man before him would gain the deep scars around his nose. Harry’s world tilts. The 31st of October… the day his parents died—only three years too early. He stands here, face to face with a dead man, on a date that for him has always meant the end, while for this world everything has yet to begin.
The tension in the alley reaches a breaking point. Harry’s shock is taken by Moody as an opening.
“Constant vigilance!” the Auror roars, and a barrage of Stunning Spells and powerful shockwaves hurtles towards Harry.
Harry reacts on instinct. He throws up a heavy Protego that shatters the spells with a deafening crack. Meanwhile, the wounded man has dragged himself upright with a pained groan. He presses his back firmly against Harry’s, his breathing heavy and ragged.
“Have you… got a plan to get out of here?” the man asks, his voice thick with a Russian accent.
Harry doesn’t answer immediately. With a powerful sweep of his wand, he unleashes a Depulso so heavily charged with magic that three of the enforcers are blasted backwards several yards into a stack of empty barrels. As they struggle to regain their footing, Moody shifts his focus to the wounded man.
Harry feels sweat bead on his forehead. “There are Anti-Apparition jinxes all over the alley,” he hisses over his shoulder.
The Russian nods shortly and fires a purple curse at Moody, which the seasoned fighter barely dodges with an impossible reflex. “Then we’re trapped,” the man growls darkly.
“Not yet,” Harry snaps. He scans his surroundings feverishly, searching for an anchor point in this strange, restored version of Knockturn Alley. His eyes land on the White Exchange. “The gap behind the dragon’s blood barrels—is it still open? It leads to the Daily Prophet.”
Harry has to conjure a strong, shimmering shield to deflect a renewed barrage of spells from the recovered enforcers. Meanwhile, the Russian hurls a dark, hissing curse at one of the attackers and shakes his head. “Crouch had that passage sealed. That rat has spies everywhere.”
Crouch? Harry doesn’t have time to dwell on the name. He keeps searching, his memory digging through the files on the Malfidus family he had studied as a Senior Auror. There had been a route discovered only in 2002… which meant that here, in this past, it had to still be open.
The Poisoner’s Crawl.
“Follow me!” Harry orders. He grabs the man’s arm to drag him along, but immediately lets go when he feels how wet and sticky it is. In the dim light, he sees that his entire palm is red; the man is bleeding heavily from a deep gash in his side.
Without hesitation, Harry slung the Russian’s arm over his own shoulders and took his full weight. “Stay with me!”
They staggered towards a barely visible side alley, a narrow slit between two overhanging buildings where the darkness was so dense it seemed to cling to the shadows themselves. Moody was closing in, his wooden leg striking the cobbles like an approaching sentence.
“You’re not getting away from here, whoever you are!” Moody roared.
“Watch me,” Harry muttered. He aimed his wand at the overflowing bins and loose debris scattered along the alley. “Piertotum Locomotor!”
The dustbins, old wooden crates, and even the heavy drainpipes creaked to life, forming a chaotic, shifting barricade between them and the enforcers. While Moody and his men were held back by the animated wreckage, Harry reached the blind wall at the end of the passage.
He searched with his fingers through the moss until he found the specific loose brick. He tapped it three times with his wand.
The wall did not open like a door; it simply seemed to fade, revealing a “space between spaces”—a flickering transit zone that lay outside normal wards.
“Quick!” Harry shoved the wounded man into the darkness of the Spiders’ Pass and cast one last glance over his shoulder at the stunned Moody before stepping through himself, the wall snapping back into reality behind them.
They were gone. But as they stumbled through the clammy tunnel towards the vaulting depths of Gringotts, Harry felt the man in his arms growing heavier.
“Hey—stay with me!” Harry’s snap was aimed more at steadying his own nerves than the man’s. He tightened his grip, his fingers slick with warm, thick blood seeping through the Auror cloak.
The Spiders’ Pass wasn’t a tunnel; it was a magical ulcer in reality. The walls were damp and seemed to pulse rhythmically, as though the passage itself were breathing. It was a narrow, suffocating corridor where time felt sluggish, almost viscous.
The man’s breathing rasped like sandpaper over metal. “You… should have run,” he forced out between waves of pain.
“Yes, well, that’s a recurring theme in my life,” Harry muttered grimly.
Behind them, an unnatural silence reigned. No shouts from Moody, no boots striking cobbles. Only the muffled sound of their stumbling footsteps and the drip of blood onto living stone. That silence was far more terrifying than any pursuit; it meant they were in a domain even the enforcers did not dare enter.
“Why?” the man asked suddenly. His head hung limp against Harry’s shoulder, but his eyes burned with feverish curiosity.
Harry frowned. “What?”
“Why help me? A stranger… filth.”
Harry’s thoughts flickered to the four red cloaks, to Moody’s green curse. Because the world I knew has just exploded in my face. Because I don’t know who the good ones are anymore.
“Because I didn’t fancy watching them execute you in an alley,” he said at last, his voice sharper than intended.
The man let out a hoarse, raw chuckle that dissolved into a blood-soaked coughing fit. “Foolish,” he whispered against Harry’s neck. “That blind courage of yours… It’s nothing but a weakness.”
The tunnel began to change. The walls pulled back, and the air turned icy, charged with a static electricity that made the hairs on Harry’s arms stand on end. The magic here was old, predatory, and alert.
Suddenly, the man stiffened. His grip on Harry’s arm turned vicious; his fingers dug in like iron hooks as he wrenched them both to a halt. “Far enough,” he rasped.
Before Harry could pull free, the man slammed him against the pulsing wall of the passage. While swaying on his feet, clutching his side, he did not aim his wand at Harry—instead, he pressed its tip with cruel precision against his own left forearm.
Harry’s eyes widened. Beneath the wand’s tip, he saw the ink of a tattoo writhe. The black lines seemed to come alive, like dark serpents burrowing hungrily into the man’s pale flesh. There was no incantation, no flash of light—only the sickening sight of living ink and the sharp intake of pain that escaped the man’s throat.
The world collapsed.
It wasn’t Apparition; it felt as though the space around them had been erased. Harry wasn’t pulled—he was simply forgotten by the place he had just occupied.
Then came the impact. Harry landed hard on his knees on damp, closely cut grass. The smell of soot and sewage was gone, replaced by the sharp scent of autumn leaves and expensive incense.
Before him, a manor rose from the darkness like a sleeping titan. It was stately, untouchable, with tall windows staring blindly at the stars. It radiated a malevolent elegance Harry knew all too well.
“Do not move.”
The warning didn’t come from one direction. It was a wall of voices, low and threatening.
Shadows detached themselves from the edges of the lawn. Figures in heavy, dark robes formed a semicircle, their faces hidden behind cold, silver masks that haunted Harry’s nightmares. Wands were trained on him from every angle, gleaming in the pale moonlight.
“Who is this?” one of the masked figures snapped at the wounded man.
The Russian had forced himself upright. He swayed, but his voice was forged steel as he looked at Harry. “Mine,” he said curtly. There was no room for argument. He claimed Harry not as a friend, but as property.
The Death Eaters did not lower their wands. The tension was so tangible that a single spark might have set the garden ablaze.
Then came footsteps.
Not the uneven thud of Moody, but a calm, measured rhythm along the gravel path. The circle of masked men parted with a reverence bordering on fear. Harry felt the temperature drop. The air grew thin and sharp, as though all oxygen were being claimed by the figure approaching.
“I do hope,” the voice murmured, melodic and terrifyingly calm, “that the story behind this intrusion proves every bit as intriguing as it looks.”
Harry looked up—and stared straight into the pale, aristocratic features of a man he knew only from stories and from a defiled diary. Before him stood not the monster he had killed, but the man he had once been. He still possessed that sharp, symmetrical beauty he had used to charm the world—long before he chose to tear it apart.