Certain Dark Things || Book Three

liv. a very long summer

By noon the next day, Harriet was ready to leave the infirmary.

Unfortunately, her definition of ready varied from Madam Pomfrey's, who didn't deign Harriet's rather persuasive argument in favor of freedom with so much as a blink of acknowledgment. Instead, she slapped a thick, chunky balm on Harriet's stinging hands and said, "One foot out of bed, Miss Potter, and you'll regret it."

After seeing the witch drug the Potions Master, Harriet didn't doubt she would.

Snape himself woke sometime before the dawn, before Harriet's own Dreamless Sleep wore off, as she'd blinked open her eyes to see his curtains across the aisle blasted and torn apart. She stared at the curtains for much of the morning as she sat and spoke with Professor Dumbledore, and she shivered thinking of how bloody furious the wizard must be. She had questions to ask him but didn't much like her chances of making it out of the encounter intact.

The Headmaster wanted Harriet to outline the previous night's events to the best of her ability, as she apparently had the best vantage on what had occurred. Elara and Hermione listened as well, until Pomfrey pronounced Hermione fit enough to leave and ordered Elara to rest. Dumbledore remained, and Harriet asked him why any of it had transpired, why they had been the ones needed to go into the forest at all, and he didn't have a better answer for her than Hermione had.

"Given what I know of your character, and of Miss Black and Miss Granger's, I can only assume something grave occurred in a timeline very much removed from our own," he said, leaning back into his chair, his attention centered on the window above Harriet's head. "Possibly in several timelines. There is much discussion among certain circles of academic society regarding time travel and its validity. There are also questions of morality that come into play, as dynamic shifts in history may possibly improve life in the present, but deny life to others in the future. That is to say, if not for Voldemort and his war, many of your classmates' parents might not have found each other—even Lily and James may have gone their separate ways, and I would not have the pleasure of sitting here in your lovely company, my dear."

Harriet frowned, picking at the blanket stretched over her knees, her mood souring as it always did at the mention of the Dark Lord. Would she forfeit being born to give life to all those who suffered because of Voldemort? Most likely, yes, but Harriet knew the theoretical question was a lot more complicated than it seemed. If someone could go back in time and stop everything terrible that had ever happened, it would erase all the good that followed, and it wouldn't stop bad things from ever happening again, either. It would simply change, and change, in and of itself, had no morality.

"But I digress. It is my belief Mr. Pettigrew must have grown impatient and, dare I say, reckless in his desire to retrieve you for his own amnesty. Perhaps Mr. Black got close to catching him on his next attempt. It doesn't take an advanced imagination to think students and staff might have been injured in such a confrontation. You and your friends would have sought to rectify the damage. Unfortunately, in attempting to do so, finding a professor—or myself—may have proven more disastrous than intended."

"So Hermione—or, or whoever started the time loop—sent me away from the castle. I guess werewolves are better than possible student causalities?"

"I cannot say what is better or worse, simply what is, Harriet. I can only be happy an innocent man's name will be cleared, and no one has suffered any lasting injuries."

"Except for Fenrir Greyback."

Dumbledore paused. "Yes, true. That is correct. The loss of life is always a regrettable outcome, but do not mourn the creature felled by the centaurs, Harriet; mourn the innocence he despoiled, mourn for Remus, whose life was ineludibly changed by the curse inflicted upon him, or mourn for the boy who Fenrir Greyback had to have been before he wandered a muddled path. The wizard who attempted to take your life in the Forbidden Forest is not worth your consideration."