Categories > Books > Harry Potter > Let's Try That Again, Shall We?
The Harry Potter universe is the creation of J.K. Rowling. This is fanfiction. The standard disclaimers apply.
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Chapter 4: Tonks
Thursday, April 30th, 1998.
Nymphadora Tonks-Lupin sat in an old armchair, nursing her two-week old son. She was twitchy and restless, feelings which in turn she felt guilty about having.
"Yes, Teddy, I know I'm supposed to be thinking of nothing other than you right now. You look so secure and certain that I really will, too. No worrying about battles and evil wizards or crazy husbands who keep freaking out that their lives are going well for a change. If you're happy, you're just happy, right? I guess you think life is good so long as you have a nipple in your mouth. I guess that's fair enough."
She stared out the window of her parents' living room, watching a breeze ruffle the blossoms on the crabapple tree outside. It came through the open window every so often, bringing with it a faint sweet smell and an occasional pink petal. Tonks screwed up her face, and in a moment her hair matched the petals.
"There, now, you try!" she said, bring a lock of pink hair around to show Teddy. He ignored her.
"Spring's a good time to be born in. I wonder how long it will be until you are falling out of that tree like I did." She paused, deciding that anecdote of childhood nostalgia didn't work when she had climbed it, and once again fallen out, as recently as last summer. "Well, I was pretty good about not doing stuff like that while I was pregnant, at least. You're a tough little guy, lucky for you. Maybe you'll inherit your coordination from your father. Hm? I'll teach you all the best noses to make, and he'll teach you how to not trip over things and how to stay out of trouble! Avoiding getting caught is fine too, of course. Right, you don't care, you have a breast. I can make it bigger if you like . . ." She screwed up her face.
Teddy's eyes got wide as the breast expanded at him, and he was soon wailing in distress at the surprise.
"Oh, I'm so sorry, here, have it back the way it was! Please don't cry like that! You look so adorable when you're shocked, though—there's just that second before you start crying, when you're trying to figure out what just happened—it's priceless. I need to make sure Remus gets a photo of that before you get too old. I wonder where our old camera is . . ."
Teddy, who had stopped crying, and was now looking up at her as if he understood, made a final, further noise of indignation, and having made his point, returned to the nipple in front of him.
"You know, most boys didn't cried when I did that. They were all a little older, though."
After a while Teddy fell asleep. Tonks put him down in his crib in another room, and returned to pacing the floor. She had just turned to walk towards the window when through it came a whirring blur of gold and black. It stopped a few feet from her and hovered, giving her a chance to identify it as a snitch.
"Huh."
Someone had painted the body of the snitch black, leaving the wings their original gold. Tonks took a moment to second guess her impulse to make a grab for it, but decided if it were dangerous, it wouldn't have gotten through the wards. She had thrown every warding trick the aurors had taught her at the property after that last Death Eater attack; the yard would be a challenge for someone to find, and the house was virtually impenetrable to dark magic.
She waited too long to make up her mind, and the snitch darted out the window, where it resumed hovering, just out of reach.
"Okay, fine, you're a lost toy. You certainly don't look like a regulation snitch. I'll bite." With this, she apparated into the yard directly next to it. It wasn't so easy to take it by surprise, though, and it responded by zipping up a few feet, again just out of reach.
"Well, I suppose that's how it's played, right? I'll get my broom."
After checking on Teddy's monitoring charm, a few minutes later she was circling the house, trying to spot the snitch. She had played quidditch with friends when she was little, but hadn't really gotten to spend time flying for fun since she started at Hogwarts. It turned out that learning to dodge curses at high speed didn't contribute much to skill at snitch-hunting.
At last she caught a flash of gold from deep in the top branches of the crabapple tree.
"Oh, that is not fair. You don't get to do that in a real game."
She flew in close, trying to find a safe, or mostly safe, way through the branches. The snitch, acting like a nervous squirrel, stayed on the far side of the trunk from her, leaving only its wings visible to give away its hiding place.
"You know I can see you there, right? Cheeky little bastard."
She had managed to squeeze through and land on the highest branch that would support her weight, broom in one hand, the other using a smaller branch to keep her balance. Obviously, she'd have to catch the snitch with her third hand.
"Okay, so I didn't think this through."
She rested her broom in an almost stable tangle of horizontal branches, and inched her way the remaining few feet to the trunk.
"GOTCHA!" she proclaimed, snatching it at last from around the trunk. She had it a few inches from her face, examining the peculiar paint job, when it opened in a blinding flash of light and released a cloud of dust that surrounded her. A fraction of a second later, she was standing in her bedroom, holding half of the snitch by its still-struggling wing.
The cloud of dust settled, along with several pages of handwritten notes that fell to the floor next to the other half of the snitch. "Well, that's certainly mysterious. Let's see..."
--------
Dear Someone,
Assuming this worked, you are now a time traveler! Or at least, your consciousness is. As you are reading this, it's probably 1989, or a year or so thereafter. I'm afraid this method isn't terribly precise. So far I've only tested it on a lizard, and I don't think it was consenting. Sorry about that.
You were chosen by the charm on the snitch because you are well-placed to avert various catastrophes which have been foreseen in prophecy. Presumably you will know what those are and have a good idea what ought to be changed. Of course, if I knew what they were myself, I wouldn't have subjected you to this crazy scheme. You should go change them (although the charm is done at this point and I can't force you to do anything). This is a fresh timeline, so you don't have to worry about paradox. No, I don't think there's an easy way to get back to your old one.
The charm was also looking for people who would actually want to go back, but if I bungled that, you have my deepest apologies.
Naturally, even though you don't have to worry about paradox, you should still look out for all the ordinary things time travelers are supposed to look out for. I recommend Virgil Vella's _Tangled Timelines: A Treatise for Travelers_ chapters 3, 4, and 7, but not all the stuff about paradox or the Ministry-approved blather in the appendices. The charm was supposed to pick someone with at least a rudimentary grasp of occlumency, but if you don't feel confident, or that part of the spell didn't work, I recommend Gerta Griffith's _Manual of Occlumency, revised 3d Ed._ (unfortunately you can't risk hiring a tutor at this point, for obvious reasons). If you don't want to be seen buying them, there are copies of both of those books in the British Wizarding Library; ask a reference librarian if you can't find something.
I've enclosed a list of suggested readings for you. As I said, I can't force you to do anything, but they all seemed quite useful to me. Of course, the only time-traveling I've ever done is the ordinary kind that goes one second per second into the future, so I hope you'll forgive me if my advice doesn't turn out to be very practical.
I plan on making several of these, so there might be some other time-travelers out there. Hopefully you don't wind up working at cross-purposes, or all meeting each other awkwardly in the stacks of the British Library. Chapter 7 of the Vella book is a pretty good treatment of that kind of situation, I think.
Needless to say, you'll get the Ministry, the Death Eaters, and Dumbledore's folks after you if you get found out, so you should probably destroy the snitch this came in, hide the reading list well, and burn the rest of this note when you get a chance.
May you have the very best of luck in this quest I have thrust upon you. My hopes and good wishes go with you!
Anonymous
-------------
Tonks read the note with a painful knot growing in her stomach. If this were a joke, it was a remarkably elaborate one—her clothes had changed, and the decorations in her room had been changed back to how she had them as a teenager. The note itself could go either way; however improbable it was that she had gone back a decade, it was equally improbable that someone would accomplish it by luring her into the crabapple tree with an oddly-painted snitch, and then leave her with only a reading list to help her (alcohol would have been a far better choice, Tonks thought). True to his word, Anonymous had enclosed a reading list of about twenty books, most, but not all, about time travel.
There was, of course, a fast and simple way to tell if this was just a prank—there were any number of simple spells that would tell you the time. Auror training, in fact, had taught her to cast them whenever you thought you might have been unconscious or otherwise experiencing lost time. Her wand was right there in her pocket. Swish, zigzag, poke, and she would have her answer. The prospect filled her with dread.
'I don't think there's an easy way to get back to your old one.' She sat on her bed, weak in the knees, and reread the note. Remus, Teddy. She had a family! She was really, truly happy for once! Why on earth would the charm think she ought to have consented to this?
Her door was open. She got up and shut it, then lay down on the bed. "Crap." She realized using the time spell wasn't viable anyway, at least until she knew whether it was before or after her seventeenth birthday. 1989. She might very well be sixteen. Sixteen! She might have another year left at Hogwarts. Heck, she still had nightmares about being late to class. The knot in her stomach twisted further.
She realized part of her was still listening for Teddy, who now might never exist. That . . . was too hard to wrap her head around. She'd cry about it later, but it was far too unreal for now, and other thoughts were going through her head.
Why would someone have picked her? Okay, if the note was to be believed, no one did; it was a spell. The wizard who did this might have never met her.
Well, for one thing, she knew a lot. An auror, a member of the Order, and a good friend to several people who seemed to have history hinge around them whether they liked it or not. She would have some opinions on what to change, once she found out what day it was. And auror training was nothing to sneeze at—she might be clumsy, but she was one of the most competent individuals in Britain when it came to dealing with dark wizards and crisis situations. Oh yeah, and she could look like anybody she wanted.
"Fair enough, snitch, fair enough. So let's go see what day it is and start changing history, shall we?" She tucked the pile of papers and the two halves of the snitch into a desk drawer and headed out into the hallway. Maybe she could find a Daily Prophet before having to talk to anyone.
"Good morning, Dora—or should I say afternoon?"
That was her dad. In the armchair facing away from her. It had a high back, and she couldn't see him, but that was her dad, who had been killed by Death Eaters. Would be. No damnit, that's the whole point, isn't it? There was the first item on her list of things to change.
"Dora?"
"Hi Dad." She briefly thought of making a joke about how long she had slept, and asking what day it was, but then realized her dad would just play along and make things up. There was the shuffling noise of a newspaper page being turned. The knot in her stomach untwisted slightly.
She looked over the edge of the chair, trying not to look at her dad, trying not to do anything that would trigger tears. Okay. June 17, 1990. Sunday. Her birthday was two weeks ago, she was free of the underage magic restrictions, and she had a whole summer ahead of her before starting her last year at Hogwarts. That, she could definitely work with.
"Dad, do you know if I had anything planned today?"
"Ha! If you have anything planned at all for the rest of the summer, it's news to me. If you are looking for something to do, you could always start your homework early." He stifled a laugh at that last thought.
"Oh sure, of course, because I want to spend all summer writing stuff for Severus Snape. You know I'll do it eventually, like, say, in the last week."
"I know, Dora, I was just teasing."
"Where's mum?"
"Out shopping."
"Okay. I think I'm going to go for a walk."
She went outside and looked up at the crabapple, which was a bit smaller than it had been a few minutes ago from her perspective. There were small green fruits on it by now. She patted it on the trunk, and headed off down the street.
The Tonkses didn't live in a wizarding village—their house, though heavily warded, was on an ordinary suburban street in a muggle neighborhood. Dad found it more familiar, being muggleborn, and it seemed to satisfy her mother's sense of order. Tonks had to admit that their street tended to have fewer explosions or monster attacks than were normally found in purely wizarding neighborhoods, so it was at least quieter.
As she wandered, she made a mental list of priorities. She could leap into action easily enough, but impulse control probably mattered here. Darn. Her list looked something like this:
- Contact Remus? Argh. Where was he in 1990, anyway? Oh yeah, and I'm just barely above the age of consent. That's going to be weird. I'll come back to that.
- How did Voldemort come back? Uh, first he tried growing on Quirrell's head -- how did that work? I can deal with that. Then there was that business in the graveyard? Yes, all preventable. Except, do we need him alive when we destroy the horcruxes?
- Okay, those are a nice definite quest. The ring was under the floorboards at the gaunt shack; I could go get that right now and stop Dumbledore from, well, dying? Assuming I can avoid the curse myself. Diary—Malfoy has that, but seemed all to eager too part with it. We can work with that. The locket's still at 12 Grimmauld, and only Sirius can get in (side note—Sirius, right). The diadem is in the Room of Requirement, if I can find it in all that mess. Okay, straightforward enough. I'll go after it once I get to Hogwarts. Harry said he got the cup out of the LeStranges' vault, but the way they did it was crazy and even I couldn't pull it off. We'll make that Dumbledore's problem and just tell him not to touch it. Uh, everyone was sure Nagini was a horcrux, but we don't know if that's true, or where she is. That's six. Dumbledore said there were seven. Damnit. Did he ever tell us? I'll come back to that later—this is plenty for now.
- Right. Harry. He's stuck with his relatives because of those bloody blood wards, but we could do quite a bit to help him now. Heck, he'd be, what, nine right now?
She really wanted to go check on Harry right away, but reined herself in and kept thinking.
- So, Sirius. And Percy has Wormtail right now. Hm. He can stay right there until I have a solid plan for what to do about him, but I can't go doing anything that might get in the papers without dealing with him first, in case he sees it and panics.
- Oh. Death Eaters. I do know quite a bit, don't I? I can pick them off at my leisure. And maybe Bella will stay in Azkaban this time. The dementors aren't loyal, though . . . no idea what to do about that. I don't think anyone else would know either.
"That seems like a decent start. Let's see what I can get done before mum and dad wonder where I am!" A quieting charm silenced the subsequent "pop!" of her apparating away.
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Author's notes, added 1/22/2011:
This is a good point to clarify some things that seem to be confusing reviewers.
There might not be explicit canon support for Tonks knowing about horcuxes. For the purposes of this story right here, in the original timeline Dumbledore discussed horcruxes at Order meetings Harry was not present for, although he might have lied to Harry about that. He did not tell anyone about Harry being a horcrux. He also did not talk to the Order about the Hallows, so Tonks doesn't know they are real. I'm assuming also that Tonks and Harry talked a great deal so long as they were in the same building, and that she knows much of what he did at those points in time.
When a character talks as if the Order is or is not active at a certain point, that is evidence of their opinion. It's not exactly a corporate entity, so there's no true answer.
As to the effect of the snitches, it is more or less to drag the subject sideways through time, not precisely back. It is not neat and tidy like a time-turner -- it is designed to shred timelines, not create stable time loops.
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Chapter 4: Tonks
Thursday, April 30th, 1998.
Nymphadora Tonks-Lupin sat in an old armchair, nursing her two-week old son. She was twitchy and restless, feelings which in turn she felt guilty about having.
"Yes, Teddy, I know I'm supposed to be thinking of nothing other than you right now. You look so secure and certain that I really will, too. No worrying about battles and evil wizards or crazy husbands who keep freaking out that their lives are going well for a change. If you're happy, you're just happy, right? I guess you think life is good so long as you have a nipple in your mouth. I guess that's fair enough."
She stared out the window of her parents' living room, watching a breeze ruffle the blossoms on the crabapple tree outside. It came through the open window every so often, bringing with it a faint sweet smell and an occasional pink petal. Tonks screwed up her face, and in a moment her hair matched the petals.
"There, now, you try!" she said, bring a lock of pink hair around to show Teddy. He ignored her.
"Spring's a good time to be born in. I wonder how long it will be until you are falling out of that tree like I did." She paused, deciding that anecdote of childhood nostalgia didn't work when she had climbed it, and once again fallen out, as recently as last summer. "Well, I was pretty good about not doing stuff like that while I was pregnant, at least. You're a tough little guy, lucky for you. Maybe you'll inherit your coordination from your father. Hm? I'll teach you all the best noses to make, and he'll teach you how to not trip over things and how to stay out of trouble! Avoiding getting caught is fine too, of course. Right, you don't care, you have a breast. I can make it bigger if you like . . ." She screwed up her face.
Teddy's eyes got wide as the breast expanded at him, and he was soon wailing in distress at the surprise.
"Oh, I'm so sorry, here, have it back the way it was! Please don't cry like that! You look so adorable when you're shocked, though—there's just that second before you start crying, when you're trying to figure out what just happened—it's priceless. I need to make sure Remus gets a photo of that before you get too old. I wonder where our old camera is . . ."
Teddy, who had stopped crying, and was now looking up at her as if he understood, made a final, further noise of indignation, and having made his point, returned to the nipple in front of him.
"You know, most boys didn't cried when I did that. They were all a little older, though."
After a while Teddy fell asleep. Tonks put him down in his crib in another room, and returned to pacing the floor. She had just turned to walk towards the window when through it came a whirring blur of gold and black. It stopped a few feet from her and hovered, giving her a chance to identify it as a snitch.
"Huh."
Someone had painted the body of the snitch black, leaving the wings their original gold. Tonks took a moment to second guess her impulse to make a grab for it, but decided if it were dangerous, it wouldn't have gotten through the wards. She had thrown every warding trick the aurors had taught her at the property after that last Death Eater attack; the yard would be a challenge for someone to find, and the house was virtually impenetrable to dark magic.
She waited too long to make up her mind, and the snitch darted out the window, where it resumed hovering, just out of reach.
"Okay, fine, you're a lost toy. You certainly don't look like a regulation snitch. I'll bite." With this, she apparated into the yard directly next to it. It wasn't so easy to take it by surprise, though, and it responded by zipping up a few feet, again just out of reach.
"Well, I suppose that's how it's played, right? I'll get my broom."
After checking on Teddy's monitoring charm, a few minutes later she was circling the house, trying to spot the snitch. She had played quidditch with friends when she was little, but hadn't really gotten to spend time flying for fun since she started at Hogwarts. It turned out that learning to dodge curses at high speed didn't contribute much to skill at snitch-hunting.
At last she caught a flash of gold from deep in the top branches of the crabapple tree.
"Oh, that is not fair. You don't get to do that in a real game."
She flew in close, trying to find a safe, or mostly safe, way through the branches. The snitch, acting like a nervous squirrel, stayed on the far side of the trunk from her, leaving only its wings visible to give away its hiding place.
"You know I can see you there, right? Cheeky little bastard."
She had managed to squeeze through and land on the highest branch that would support her weight, broom in one hand, the other using a smaller branch to keep her balance. Obviously, she'd have to catch the snitch with her third hand.
"Okay, so I didn't think this through."
She rested her broom in an almost stable tangle of horizontal branches, and inched her way the remaining few feet to the trunk.
"GOTCHA!" she proclaimed, snatching it at last from around the trunk. She had it a few inches from her face, examining the peculiar paint job, when it opened in a blinding flash of light and released a cloud of dust that surrounded her. A fraction of a second later, she was standing in her bedroom, holding half of the snitch by its still-struggling wing.
The cloud of dust settled, along with several pages of handwritten notes that fell to the floor next to the other half of the snitch. "Well, that's certainly mysterious. Let's see..."
--------
Dear Someone,
Assuming this worked, you are now a time traveler! Or at least, your consciousness is. As you are reading this, it's probably 1989, or a year or so thereafter. I'm afraid this method isn't terribly precise. So far I've only tested it on a lizard, and I don't think it was consenting. Sorry about that.
You were chosen by the charm on the snitch because you are well-placed to avert various catastrophes which have been foreseen in prophecy. Presumably you will know what those are and have a good idea what ought to be changed. Of course, if I knew what they were myself, I wouldn't have subjected you to this crazy scheme. You should go change them (although the charm is done at this point and I can't force you to do anything). This is a fresh timeline, so you don't have to worry about paradox. No, I don't think there's an easy way to get back to your old one.
The charm was also looking for people who would actually want to go back, but if I bungled that, you have my deepest apologies.
Naturally, even though you don't have to worry about paradox, you should still look out for all the ordinary things time travelers are supposed to look out for. I recommend Virgil Vella's _Tangled Timelines: A Treatise for Travelers_ chapters 3, 4, and 7, but not all the stuff about paradox or the Ministry-approved blather in the appendices. The charm was supposed to pick someone with at least a rudimentary grasp of occlumency, but if you don't feel confident, or that part of the spell didn't work, I recommend Gerta Griffith's _Manual of Occlumency, revised 3d Ed._ (unfortunately you can't risk hiring a tutor at this point, for obvious reasons). If you don't want to be seen buying them, there are copies of both of those books in the British Wizarding Library; ask a reference librarian if you can't find something.
I've enclosed a list of suggested readings for you. As I said, I can't force you to do anything, but they all seemed quite useful to me. Of course, the only time-traveling I've ever done is the ordinary kind that goes one second per second into the future, so I hope you'll forgive me if my advice doesn't turn out to be very practical.
I plan on making several of these, so there might be some other time-travelers out there. Hopefully you don't wind up working at cross-purposes, or all meeting each other awkwardly in the stacks of the British Library. Chapter 7 of the Vella book is a pretty good treatment of that kind of situation, I think.
Needless to say, you'll get the Ministry, the Death Eaters, and Dumbledore's folks after you if you get found out, so you should probably destroy the snitch this came in, hide the reading list well, and burn the rest of this note when you get a chance.
May you have the very best of luck in this quest I have thrust upon you. My hopes and good wishes go with you!
Anonymous
-------------
Tonks read the note with a painful knot growing in her stomach. If this were a joke, it was a remarkably elaborate one—her clothes had changed, and the decorations in her room had been changed back to how she had them as a teenager. The note itself could go either way; however improbable it was that she had gone back a decade, it was equally improbable that someone would accomplish it by luring her into the crabapple tree with an oddly-painted snitch, and then leave her with only a reading list to help her (alcohol would have been a far better choice, Tonks thought). True to his word, Anonymous had enclosed a reading list of about twenty books, most, but not all, about time travel.
There was, of course, a fast and simple way to tell if this was just a prank—there were any number of simple spells that would tell you the time. Auror training, in fact, had taught her to cast them whenever you thought you might have been unconscious or otherwise experiencing lost time. Her wand was right there in her pocket. Swish, zigzag, poke, and she would have her answer. The prospect filled her with dread.
'I don't think there's an easy way to get back to your old one.' She sat on her bed, weak in the knees, and reread the note. Remus, Teddy. She had a family! She was really, truly happy for once! Why on earth would the charm think she ought to have consented to this?
Her door was open. She got up and shut it, then lay down on the bed. "Crap." She realized using the time spell wasn't viable anyway, at least until she knew whether it was before or after her seventeenth birthday. 1989. She might very well be sixteen. Sixteen! She might have another year left at Hogwarts. Heck, she still had nightmares about being late to class. The knot in her stomach twisted further.
She realized part of her was still listening for Teddy, who now might never exist. That . . . was too hard to wrap her head around. She'd cry about it later, but it was far too unreal for now, and other thoughts were going through her head.
Why would someone have picked her? Okay, if the note was to be believed, no one did; it was a spell. The wizard who did this might have never met her.
Well, for one thing, she knew a lot. An auror, a member of the Order, and a good friend to several people who seemed to have history hinge around them whether they liked it or not. She would have some opinions on what to change, once she found out what day it was. And auror training was nothing to sneeze at—she might be clumsy, but she was one of the most competent individuals in Britain when it came to dealing with dark wizards and crisis situations. Oh yeah, and she could look like anybody she wanted.
"Fair enough, snitch, fair enough. So let's go see what day it is and start changing history, shall we?" She tucked the pile of papers and the two halves of the snitch into a desk drawer and headed out into the hallway. Maybe she could find a Daily Prophet before having to talk to anyone.
"Good morning, Dora—or should I say afternoon?"
That was her dad. In the armchair facing away from her. It had a high back, and she couldn't see him, but that was her dad, who had been killed by Death Eaters. Would be. No damnit, that's the whole point, isn't it? There was the first item on her list of things to change.
"Dora?"
"Hi Dad." She briefly thought of making a joke about how long she had slept, and asking what day it was, but then realized her dad would just play along and make things up. There was the shuffling noise of a newspaper page being turned. The knot in her stomach untwisted slightly.
She looked over the edge of the chair, trying not to look at her dad, trying not to do anything that would trigger tears. Okay. June 17, 1990. Sunday. Her birthday was two weeks ago, she was free of the underage magic restrictions, and she had a whole summer ahead of her before starting her last year at Hogwarts. That, she could definitely work with.
"Dad, do you know if I had anything planned today?"
"Ha! If you have anything planned at all for the rest of the summer, it's news to me. If you are looking for something to do, you could always start your homework early." He stifled a laugh at that last thought.
"Oh sure, of course, because I want to spend all summer writing stuff for Severus Snape. You know I'll do it eventually, like, say, in the last week."
"I know, Dora, I was just teasing."
"Where's mum?"
"Out shopping."
"Okay. I think I'm going to go for a walk."
She went outside and looked up at the crabapple, which was a bit smaller than it had been a few minutes ago from her perspective. There were small green fruits on it by now. She patted it on the trunk, and headed off down the street.
The Tonkses didn't live in a wizarding village—their house, though heavily warded, was on an ordinary suburban street in a muggle neighborhood. Dad found it more familiar, being muggleborn, and it seemed to satisfy her mother's sense of order. Tonks had to admit that their street tended to have fewer explosions or monster attacks than were normally found in purely wizarding neighborhoods, so it was at least quieter.
As she wandered, she made a mental list of priorities. She could leap into action easily enough, but impulse control probably mattered here. Darn. Her list looked something like this:
- Contact Remus? Argh. Where was he in 1990, anyway? Oh yeah, and I'm just barely above the age of consent. That's going to be weird. I'll come back to that.
- How did Voldemort come back? Uh, first he tried growing on Quirrell's head -- how did that work? I can deal with that. Then there was that business in the graveyard? Yes, all preventable. Except, do we need him alive when we destroy the horcruxes?
- Okay, those are a nice definite quest. The ring was under the floorboards at the gaunt shack; I could go get that right now and stop Dumbledore from, well, dying? Assuming I can avoid the curse myself. Diary—Malfoy has that, but seemed all to eager too part with it. We can work with that. The locket's still at 12 Grimmauld, and only Sirius can get in (side note—Sirius, right). The diadem is in the Room of Requirement, if I can find it in all that mess. Okay, straightforward enough. I'll go after it once I get to Hogwarts. Harry said he got the cup out of the LeStranges' vault, but the way they did it was crazy and even I couldn't pull it off. We'll make that Dumbledore's problem and just tell him not to touch it. Uh, everyone was sure Nagini was a horcrux, but we don't know if that's true, or where she is. That's six. Dumbledore said there were seven. Damnit. Did he ever tell us? I'll come back to that later—this is plenty for now.
- Right. Harry. He's stuck with his relatives because of those bloody blood wards, but we could do quite a bit to help him now. Heck, he'd be, what, nine right now?
She really wanted to go check on Harry right away, but reined herself in and kept thinking.
- So, Sirius. And Percy has Wormtail right now. Hm. He can stay right there until I have a solid plan for what to do about him, but I can't go doing anything that might get in the papers without dealing with him first, in case he sees it and panics.
- Oh. Death Eaters. I do know quite a bit, don't I? I can pick them off at my leisure. And maybe Bella will stay in Azkaban this time. The dementors aren't loyal, though . . . no idea what to do about that. I don't think anyone else would know either.
"That seems like a decent start. Let's see what I can get done before mum and dad wonder where I am!" A quieting charm silenced the subsequent "pop!" of her apparating away.
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Author's notes, added 1/22/2011:
This is a good point to clarify some things that seem to be confusing reviewers.
There might not be explicit canon support for Tonks knowing about horcuxes. For the purposes of this story right here, in the original timeline Dumbledore discussed horcruxes at Order meetings Harry was not present for, although he might have lied to Harry about that. He did not tell anyone about Harry being a horcrux. He also did not talk to the Order about the Hallows, so Tonks doesn't know they are real. I'm assuming also that Tonks and Harry talked a great deal so long as they were in the same building, and that she knows much of what he did at those points in time.
When a character talks as if the Order is or is not active at a certain point, that is evidence of their opinion. It's not exactly a corporate entity, so there's no true answer.
As to the effect of the snitches, it is more or less to drag the subject sideways through time, not precisely back. It is not neat and tidy like a time-turner -- it is designed to shred timelines, not create stable time loops.
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