Chapter Text
January 25, 1928 — Little Hangleton, England
The world returned to Harry in pieces.
The first sensation was weight — something small and warm in his arms, rising and falling with shallow, fragile breaths. The second was cold — winter air biting at his face and hands, the sharp sting of frost along his spine.
He was standing. Somehow.
A country road stretched behind him, pale and empty beneath a leaden sky. Before him, not far now, loomed a grand manor. It was all stone and symmetry, its windows glowing faintly gold in the late afternoon light. Something about it tugged at him — familiar, haunting. He knew it like one knows a place from a long-forgotten dream.
A gust of wind caught his coat and his knees buckled for a moment. The infant in his arms let out a soft, mewling cry.
No. He can’t collapse here. Not with the child in his arms.
Harry gritted his teeth, adjusted his grip around the swaddled bundle, and forced one foot in front of the other. He couldn’t fall. Not while holding something so impossibly small. So unbearably fragile.
By the time he reached the stone steps of the manor, his vision had begun to swim.
He raised one shaking hand and knocked hard — once, twice — before the darkness reached up and dragged him under.
He awoke to warmth.
The sheets beneath him were soft. The room around him smelled faintly of lavender, dust, and something sharper—antiseptic? He turned his head—slowly, painfully—and was met with the tearful face of a middle-aged woman bending over him.
It was strange—he had no memories of this woman, this face. And yet, warmth bloomed in Harry’s chest in her presence. He felt safe. Loved.
“Tom,” she gasped. “Oh, thank the Lord Almighty—you’re awake!”
A cool hand pressed to his forehead, trembling with relief. Her face was lined with worry and a kind of fierce affection, her eyes red-rimmed and glistening.
“You collapsed on the steps with an infant in your arms!” she said, almost scolding. “Do you have any idea what you’ve put us through? I thought you were—oh, Tom, I thought I’d lost you!”
Harry blinked at her. The words meant little at first. His head was thick with cotton and static. “I…” His throat was raw. He tried again. “The… baby?”
“In the sitting room,” she said, still breathless, her hand not leaving his. “She’s fine. Healthy lungs, that’s for certain. But where—? Tom, where did she come from? Whose child is that?”
Harry didn’t know. The question echoed inside him, strange and hollow.
Where had the child come from?
And then he remembered the weight in his arms. The too-sharp wind. The road. The way he had known —deep in his soul, before his thoughts caught up—that the infant mattered more than anything else in the world to him.
His heart squeezed painfully in his chest.
“I… don’t know,” he murmured.
The woman looked at him like he’d gone mad. “You brought her here yourself! Carried her in your arms with a death grip before falling unconscious with fever on the front stoop. And you don’t even know whose child she is?”
“I…” He closed his eyes. “It’s all fuzzy. I can’t remember.”
She hovered a moment longer, uncertain, then gave a small huff of disbelief and moved to the door.
“I’ll bring her to you. Maybe that will shake something loose.”
He said nothing. He didn’t need to.
Because even before she returned with the infant, even before she gently placed the wriggling bundle back in his arms and left the room again, Harry knew. Not with logic or memory—not yet—but with instinct, as deep as blood.
And the moment he saw those chocolate-brown eyes staring up at him, the memories began to trickle in.
June 10, 2002 - A Tent in the Forest of Dean
The only constant in Harry Potter’s life was Hermione Granger.
Brilliant, unstoppable Hermione.
She had changed during the war—grown into something larger than life. She had this wild-eyed intensity, a desperation that could have passed for madness if Harry hadn’t known her so well. She was bloody terrifying in those last days. Terrifying and beautiful and full of fire.
She called it The Triune Ritual.
“I’ve calculated everything,” she told him, parchment after parchment spread across their wobbly kitchen table. “The third conjunction of Jupiter, Uranus, and Earth, Harry. January 25th, 1928. It’s the third instance of a triple alignment within a three-year cycle! It’s incredibly rare, and this alignment in particular… it’s like a scar in time itself. A chance—maybe the only one left.”
He blinked at the diagrams, trying to follow her explanation, but it was all Arithmancy and astronomical projections and magical theory beyond anything he’d ever managed to wrap his head around.
“A chance for… what exactly?” he asked.
She looked at him then, fierce and unblinking. “To send us back.”
“Back?” Harry repeated, brows raised. “Back where?”
“To 1928, Harry—before it all began,” she said impatiently. “Before Riddle became Voldemort.”
Harry laughed. He remembered that distinctly—he actually laughed in Hermione’s face. “That’s madness.”
“You think I don’t know that?” she snapped. “You think I haven’t run every variable a hundred times? It’s madness, but it’s possible. And it’s the only way.”
“I still don’t understand…”
Hermione looked at him with exasperation. She had lost her aptitude for patience ages ago. “The ritual burns our magic, Harry. All of it. You won’t be a wizard when we arrive, and I won’t be a witch.”
He had gone cold at the thought. “You’re saying we’ll be Muggles?”
“I’m saying that our magic is one of the ritual’s costs,” she said, her eyes suddenly avoidant. “To break our bonds to our current time and bodies, we must release what anchors us: Magic. You can think of it like… like burning magic as fuel to travel.” She bit her lip, looking uncharacteristically uncertain. “It should come back with time, I think.”
“You think?”
Hermione crossed her arms with a huff. “If Galpott’s Theory of Soul-Borne Magic is correct, then yes, Harry, it ought to return with time. It’s highly theoretical, of course, but if you’d like to debate the Arithmancy with me then be my guest!” she said waspishly.
Sensing a lost cause, Harry changed topics. “What’s the other cost of the ritual?”
“Identity.”
Harry blinked. “Meaning…?”
“In this case, either loss of body or mind,” Hermione said blithely. “I think our best strategy would be for one of us to sacrifice their body and the other their mind.”
Harry stared at her. “So… what, one of us arrives as a ghost and the other shows up completely insane?”
Hermione pinched the bridge of her nose. “No, Harry, not— oh, for Merlin’s sake.” She inhaled deeply before continuing, “Sacrificing the body means your soul is placed in someone else’s form—DNA, voice, face, fingerprints, the whole package. You’re still you, just… in a different container.”
“And sacrificing the mind?”
“Means you keep your current body, DNA, etcetera,” she said with a shrug, “but with your memories wiped. It’s like performing an Obliviate so deep it burns everything away. As blank a slate as when you were first born.”
Harry rolled his eyes at her. “Right. So obviously you’re keeping your brain. Can’t imagine trying to save the world without Hermione Granger in working order. I, on the other hand, am already a few spells short of a wand, so I guess I’ll be the tragic amnesiac in this plan.”
Hermione looked amused. “Actually, no.”
He blinked. “No?”
“I’ve only been able to find a suitable match for the ‘body snatching’ strategy for you. The criteria are highly restrictive.”
Harry crossed his arms. “You’re not seriously saying we’re going to wipe your mind.”
“Well—”
“The mind of the Brightest Witch of Our Age?” Harry practically shouted, disbelieving.
Hermione scoffed at the moniker. “It will be temporary, Harry! We can put it all back.”
Eyes narrowed, Harry prompted, “Explain.”
She shifted slightly on her rickety wooden chair, folding her legs beneath her and looking both excited and entirely too calm for someone discussing memory-erasure.
“I’ll offload a portion of my memories into your mind before we go,” she said. “Think of it like storing data on a floppy—your brain, in this case. Once we arrive you’ll give them back.”
Harry stared at her.
“You’re going to... upload your brain into me.”
“Well, not all of it,” Hermione said briskly. “There are limitations to how much one mind can hold without compromising its own integrity. I’ll distill it down—give you the essentials. Personality markers, critical knowledge, strategic goals. The framework of who I am.”
Harry ran a hand down his face. “That’s utter madness.”
“It’s controlled madness,” she said with a shrug, sounding very pleased with herself.
For a while neither of them spoke, and there was only the sound of wind against the tent walls and crackling wood in the fireplace.
“So whose body am I snatching?” Harry finally asked.
Hermione blinked. “Oh—did I not say?”
“No.”
“Oh. Right. Well.” She cleared her throat. “Tom Riddle Senior.”
Harry stared at her.
She launched immediately into a justification. “He meets the critical parameters. We have access to his bones; he was alive during the conjunction; he’s biologically compatible with you; he’s empty enough for you to slip into...”
Harry physically recoiled at the last statement. “That’s a horrifying way to describe a person.”
She smiled grimly. “In this case, it’s simply accurate. After that kind of trauma…”
He sighed, acknowledging her point. Tom Riddle Senior had been dosed with love potions at the hands of Merope Gaunt for well over a year. Especially as a muggle, that would have left him as a shell of his former self.
“Tom Sr. is a perfect candidate, Harry. We need a Muggle of similar age who shares your physical characteristics.”
Harry quirked a brow at the latter point. “I’m hardly the spitting image of Riddle, Hermione.”
She merely rolled her eyes at him. “He’s a tall caucasian male with black hair—I’d say that’s a pretty good match.” After a beat, she added, “And he has the best claim to guardianship of Tom Jr. that we could possibly hope for.”
Realization dawned on Harry like an icy wind. “Are you telling me,” Harry breathed, “that your brilliant plan is for us to time-travel into the past, give up our magic, hijack Voldemort’s dad’s body, and then raise him?”
Hermione tilted her head, a look of fond exasperation on her face. “What on Earth did you think the plan was, Harry?”
“Oh, I don’t know… maybe kill him in his crib and call it a bloody day?”
Hermione gave him a long, flat look.
Harry shrugged, ignoring the guilt roiling in his gut, and deadpanned, “Poetic symmetry, don’t you think? He tried to kill me as a baby—seems only fair I return the favor.”
“That’s not who we are!” Hermione said sharply. She looked at him with something fierce and furious behind her eyes. “We’re not killers, Harry. And we don’t need to be. That boy—Tom—wasn’t born a monster. He became one because no one ever loved him.”
Harry sank farther into his seat, looking chagrined.
Hermione softened. “You and I both know what love can do. We’ve seen it. We’ve lived it. And if someone—if we —had been there for him… maybe none of this would have ever happened.”
He rubbed his forehead. “This plan is completely insane.”
“It’s also our best shot,” Hermione said, lifting her chin.
And she was right.
And that was the worst part of all.
January 25, 1928 — Little Hangleton, England
Back in the quiet bedroom, Harry let out a long, shaky breath.
It had worked.
He was here.
Which meant he hadn’t died.
Which meant…
He looked down at the newborn in his arms. Small. Warm. Alive. She blinked up at him with intelligent eyes—chocolate-brown and uncannily familiar. They were eyes that had once outpaced him in every classroom, rolled at him in every argument, and wept beside him through every loss.
Harry knew those eyes.
Hermione.
Something had gone wrong. Or... not wrong, exactly. Just not quite right. She’d been meant to return in her same adult form—sans memories. Harry was supposed to give those memories back and then she was going to help him raise Lord-bloody-Voldemort.
Instead, she’d come back as this: a newborn babe.
“As blank a slate as when you were first born,” she had said, so matter-of-fact. Well. That description had been spot-on, Harry thought bitterly.
Now, in addition to raising a would-be-Dark-Lord, he also had to raise his best friend.
His best friend. Who had sacrificed everything—including herself—for this mad, impossible plan.
Harry closed his eyes and pressed a kiss to her tiny forehead.
“Hermione Granger,” he muttered with a rueful smile. “The Brightest Witch of Her Age.” He settled her more securely in the crook of one arm. “You’re grounded indefinitely for landing me in this mess.”
He could almost hear her indignation in his head.
Almost.