I opened my eyes to white.

There was pain, hot fiery needles lashing all over my body, a sensation more acute than I've felt in some years. The Cruciatus does wonders to your pain tolerance, if you manage to survive it without proceeding to the drooling-at-the-mouth stage. But now, the sheer acuteness of the pain caught me off balance. I breathed deeply, closing my eyes, concentrating on the pain, isolating, ignoring it as I've done so many times before.

Something wasn't right.

I was lying on white sheets, in a room I knew well. Too well. The windows showed a view of the distant mountains in the north, and the cool breeze ruffled my hair. The unique smell of medicinal potions, strong and somewhat pungent, was very familiar - as was the bitter tang of Sleeping potion in my mouth. My hands and chest were swathed in bandages. I could fuzzily see my glasses on the bedside table, and hastily put them on to stop the dizziness that had accompanied my inspection of the room. My movements caught the attention of the mediwitch bustling the Potions cabinet at the other end of the room. Madame Pomfrey came over to me, smiling like she always had whenever I ended up in the Hospital Wing after another of those adventures involving magical beasts and insane wizards, which averaged to once a year at least. She was carrying a goblet in her hands, and her exasperated smile was like home.

My spine was cold, and sweat had sprung upon my forehead.

I remembered nothing of the last month. Nothing!

The last thing I remembered was attending her funeral.

I was suddenly more awake than I had been most of my life.

Pollyjuice. Illusion. Hallucinogens, air-borne or ingested with food or drink. Curses that influence the mind? But then the caster should've crippled my reason too, and my thoughts ran clear and unimpeded.

I looked down, my mind a whirl of speculation and anticipation, my senses alert for hints of danger or violence. Then I stopped thinking, had to, for as I looked on my body realization struck with hammering force -

My body wasn't mine, not as I remembered it.

Or it hadn't been mine, for decades.

All the wrinkles on my skin were gone. All my scars I had earned in my service had vanished.

It was as if all my years, my age, my whole life had been layered on me, and an artist's brush had carefully removed all the traces of what had been.

... Something was terribly wrong.

***

It was the robes that clinched it, of course. I could've accepted hallucinating about a person for whom I had immense respect, personal and professional. I could've accepted dreaming about the only place that would ever be home to me. I could've accepted that a mind such as mine, broken and lost, would try to heal itself by imagining the place it associated with youth, with love, with whispered dreams of innocence. But I couldn't, wouldn't accept the red and gold that was stifling me. This must be real, me lying abed in the Hospital wing, short and skinny as anything, all of fifteen years old with the gods-damned scars to prove it.

Besides, mad as I definitely was, I wasn't sadistic enough to dream up the thick foulness in that damned goblet. A definite Snape concoction.

Snape.

Take it...

Dumbledore.

You brave, brave man...

Hermione.

Books... and cleverness. Oh Harry, be careful!

Ron. James. Ginny.

I never gave up on you. Not really.

You should have, Ginevra. Should have. All it brought... all it always brought was death, wasn't it? A price to pay, for being a hero. For being arrogant enough to think myself a saviour. A price to pay, for living where none had before. You were wrong, Professor. Going into battle knowing you might die was nothing. Knowing you will die was nothing, when it meant safety for all who were in your heart. Watching them die, knowing it was your fault, always yours... I wasn't brave enough, tough enough to endure.

But now...

This time...

It could be different, this time.

Different, my mind whispered, but how?

Different, I told myself. Everything would be different. I could save them. I knew things... secrets. I could perform spells that'd give people nightmares. I could melt down Hogwarts with all its wards, the finest and most secure piece of magical architecture in the world, given a year to chain my rituals, provided no Dumbledore was there to counter them. I had looked into the abyss and it had shrunk away from me.

All your skills weren't enough to save them the last time. You are here again... would you watch them die? Bit by bit, rotting and withering, not even knowing who you were? Would you enjoy it? The voice again, the treacherous whisper grating in my ears. A muggle psychiatrist had once told me it was the voice of my conscience.

I'd told him my secret... that I had none left. Right before I killed him. Bled him to death, with the whispers urging me on.

It is surprisingly easy to bleed a man to death. You sever his jugular, then hold him upside down, the heart doing all the work... it's the most effective method, really. Easy and quick. Especially if you were a wizard.

Sectumsempra. Levicorpus.

I'd always known that the potions book would come in useful. At least Snape was good for something, the sonofabitch. Though to be fair, he performed his duties to Albus well.

Oh. He would be alive too, now... if this is the past. Along with... along with all whom I had lost.

I sighed, my occlumency reasserting itself and calming me. I didn't know what to do... what to do now that all my dreams seemed to have come true. The world for a moment seemed strangely skewed, and somehow wrong , and I felt as if I was somewhere I shouldn't have been and the universe, very pointedly, was letting me know.

I cared little. I needed to know what was going on. I needed to know where and when I was, needed to confirm that all this was real and not feverish dreams conjured by a decidedly demented psyche.

I don't respond well to threats. I never have.

If this was real, if all this was real - then I couldn't even begin to guess how this might have happened. My memory of the immediate past was blank, but I knew time-travel at this scale was impossible. There have been attempts to change the past, but even seeing the past through the Time Winds beyond scant weeks has always ended in failure - and not in a few cases, disaster. It was impossible.

So they say. So many things they say. So many rules, so many laws, restrictions. So many lies, half-truths, a web of deception that keeps them closeted within their own little society. They deserve this, for they do not dare to face what is real, fearing it might shatter their pretty little illusions. You do not…

I didn't answer, even in my mind.

But I had to admit, whatever the department had to say about long-range time-travel, I have always had my own suspicions…

In the deepest, darkest corners of the building that houses the Ministry of Magic, there is a path that leads to hell.

Hell, that was what we called it, we the ones entrusted with the blackest, bleakest magics the Ministry held secret from the public. We who dabbled in the arcane, the forbidden, the feared arts. The ways to crush a body, to fog the mind, to sear the soul - we knew them, we saw them, we lived with them all our waking moments. We were mad, yes, insane. We had to be, working with powers as unknowable as they were old, living where no day existed and the very air reeked of death despite all the purifying charms we installed. Yet we called it Hell.

Deathgate, some had named it. Time's Arch. I'd called it The Great Eye, a rather unsuccessful, not to mention lame attempt for humour given that my colleagues wouldn't have known Tolkien from a Talkana curse. We'd seen it, all of us, though nobody except me more than once. Nobody had wanted to. In a place where your usefulness in uncovering the deepest secrets of the universe was all that mattered, no one in five centuries had tried to research The Key Of Chronos. The name Χρόνος, of course, was that of the Greek mythic personification of time itself, forged in the beginning of all that was. That was all the clue we had about it, and nobody was quite suicidal enough to dig for more. Nobody except me.

I had little success in the first few years, but it had been like a bait, forever drawing me into deeper webs of power and shadows… offering bits and pieces of puzzles that hinted at something greater, some insight into the order of things in this cold and unjust world. I had followed the trail, for the need to know had burned in me then, a desire that had compelled me to seek out answers. Seek out why I had been punished so, why cast out of the content normality of all the ordinary people who eat and drink and fuck and sleep and don't have to ask why they live still, in a world that feels so pale and spent as ash.

If this was real, if all this was real… another chance, but why, why now - something, it had something to do with my research, maybe a ritual gone wrong, or gone right…

I didn't know anything. Yet.

I would. That's what I'm good at. I'd figure things out.

If all this is a lie… but I knew it wasn't, somehow. It wasn't. I knew it in my heart.

And if this is like a dream, then it must end as all dreams end…

So as I laid back on the hospital bed and gave back Madame Pomfrey the goblet with a smile as falsely bright as my existence, I couldn't help but think I really should enjoy this... this bit of stolen time...

 

Author's Note: I don't own any of the characters in the Potterverse, which happens to be the property of J.K. Rowling. Any character or setting you don't recognize is probably mine.