Chapter Thirteen of 'Anularius'- Leaping Through Time
Chapter Twelve.
Title: Anularius (12/16)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Snape
Warnings: Angst, time travel
Rating: R
Summary: Traveling back in time is safe. All you have to do is keep away from people who affect time, who are pretty rare. It's just Horcrux-collecting Harry Potter's luck that Severus Snape is one of them.
Author's Notes: A late Advent fic for thebookivore, who gave me this prompt: Harry/Snape. Time travelling Harry. As an unspeakable explains to Harry, time travel is actually very safe, because most people cannot affect the time stream except a rare few. You can tell who can affect time because they can see time travelers, otherwise "it's similar to how most Muggles cannot see magic, their minds naturally shy away from it and come up with the most incredible explanations for what they have seen". Harry knows to hide out from himself but doesn't realize that Snape can see him ...
I meant to complete this fic on time for Advent, but it got too long for me to finish on time, so I’m posting it as a chaptered story. The title is Latin for “maker of rings.”
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirteen-Leaping Through Time
Harry stepped out of the whirl of color and looked around. For a moment, he thought the jewel had failed to take him where it should have. Maybe the younger Snape didn’t have one of the jewels after all. This plain, empty room didn’t look like the ones in the dungeons were he had spent so much of his time.
But then he realized that that was because all the candles were dimmed, and the flickering shadows and occasional bright spots had become thick, brooding dimness. There was no fire on the hearth at all. There was no blanket draped on the couch, as there had been when Harry was sleeping there. The door to the lab was shut.
Harry looked around uncertainly. He hadn’t seen Snape’s actual bedroom. Would he be there? Or perhaps outside? The jewel might have brought him to the place but not the person.
Then a wand touched the back of his neck. “You are to declare your name,” said Snape’s light, dry voice. “And I might not kill you if you’re good.”
Harry swallowed, hoped that doing so wouldn’t look too cowardly, and said, “Harry Potter. I tried to go back to my own time, and instead I traveled to two different points in the past. Both were places I was with you, but I don’t-I don’t understand why the jewel would have taken me there instead of back to my own future in the Department of Mysteries.”
Snape was silent for long moments. The wand at the back of his neck didn’t move, though. Then he said, “You will show me the jewel with the traveling enchantment.”
Harry hated to do it, because he knew he might not get it back, but on the other hand, Snape was probably also angry enough to really curse him with that wand. He had to worry about being alive before he worried about getting back to his own time.
If that’s even possible at this point, with all the ways that I must have changed the timeline, Harry thought wearily, and moved his hand into his pocket slowly and obviously, the way he had been trained to tell criminals he was holding at wandpoint to do it. He dug out the jewel and offered it backwards on his flat palm.
He felt Snape’s wand press hard enough that it seemed as if he was leaning all his weight on it. Then he took the jewel and examined it. He must have turned it back and forth; Harry thought he could make out faint reflections playing off the walls. A second later, Snape muttered an irritated spell, and flames sprang back onto the candles and torches. Harry blinked in surprise, and tried not to twitch. That might also get him cursed.
“It does seem to be one of the heartsblood jewels from the cross.” Snape’s voice was neutral in a way that told Harry how much it must have cost him to keep it neutral. “Where did you get it?”
“Where do you think I got it?” Harry snapped, unable to ignore the provocation of a stupid question even though he also thought Snape probably had his reasons for asking it. “I pried it out of the cross before I destroyed it.”
“And the cross is gone?” Snape was whispering to himself, as if he thought that Harry’s answers were less important than the jewel. Harry wanted to turn around and see Snape’s expression, and insist that he was more important than a bloody jewel.
But doing that would only anger Snape further, so Harry instead stood there, and then went with it when Snape abruptly grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. Harry raised his hands and tried to look as innocent as he could.
“You knew I had taken a heartsblood jewel,” said Snape. He took a step back and swept his head around as though he was checking for shadows behind Harry that might produce more things he considered impossible.
He looks tired, Harry thought. Stressed.
But since he had really been one of the factors to contribute to that, he knew better than to say anything about it. He nodded instead. “Because of one of the times I went back to.”
Snape cocked his head. “Accio heartsblood jewel.”
The one that he already held trembled. The jewel that had been hiding in Harry’s pocket, the one that he had found on the dying Snape’s body, leaped out of his pocket and flew over to Snape. He took it and stared at it. Then he looked around.
Harry didn’t know what he was searching for until he spun to face Harry and growled, “Where is the one I took? What did you do to it?”
Harry gaped at him. “How could I do anything when I didn’t even know you had it? Until I went to the future, I mean. I mean, your future. My past.”
Snape exhaled hard. Then he turned and cast a spell Harry didn’t recognize on the heartsblood jewel that Harry had taken from his-his future self’s-dying body. The jewel trembled and vibrated for a moment, making an odd thrumming noise. Then it relaxed into stillness against Snape’s palm.
Snape closed his eyes.
“What did the spell tell you?” Harry asked, when he thought he had waited long enough for Snape to make up his damn mind.
Snape spun around again, and this time, his wand ended up jammed right against Harry’s jugular. Harry arched his neck a little, tears of reaction starting from his eyes. But he fought them down, furiously, and stared at Snape, waiting.
Snape shook his head and whispered, “Do you understand that I do not have the jewel I removed from the cross? And that the one you brought back with you is that same one?” He moved a step closer, but at least he moved his wand up so it was more vertical instead of horizontal, and Harry could breathe. “Do you understand that that means the timeline can be changed? And things will still exist?”
“The past can affect the future,” said Harry, and shifted uncomfortably as he tried to get back from the wand. Snape touched his shoulder, and that was enough to hold him still. He was still trying to watch the end of the wand and Snape’s eyes simultaneously, though. He told himself that wasn’t stupid, that was just good sense. “I already knew that, or they wouldn’t have sent me back to destroy the Horcrux. They hoped that destroying it in the past would remove the threat of Voldemort in the future.”
Snape, watching him so steadily, seemed to have forgotten to flinch at the name. “And the future can affect the past,” he said.
Harry closed his eyes. He had a headache. “They still should have sent someone else. I don’t know much about time travel.”
“I am glad they didn’t,” Snape said, in a voice so low that Harry couldn’t really distinguish the emotion in it. “Because then otherwise, I would never have met you.”
Harry blinked and looked at him again. Snape stood closer to him than Harry thought was really necessary, gaze locked on Harry’s face. Harry shifted. “Yeah,” he said, “but you know that this means-”
“That what I envisioned cannot be?” Snape interrupted. “I know that. That vision vanished when you left.”
Harry winced but didn’t make excuses. “I want to know what this means. I want to know how to help you. Come to terms with fate and the fact that I have to leave,” he added, while Snape was still opening his mouth.
“You came to put the timeline back into place?” Snape’s voice quivered a little with laughter. “You thought bringing the heartsblood jewel back to the past would help resolve that?”
“I didn’t expect it to make your jewel disappear.” Harry stared again at the sparkling one in Snape’s hand. He supposed logically, that more than two couldn’t exist since the cross had been destroyed, but on the other hand, he didn’t know that logic actually applied to time travel.
“I did some more research after you left.” Snape’s voice sounded odd. Harry turned towards him and saw Snape’s eyes fastened on him expectantly, as though he thought Harry would lunge at him any second. “Things about time travel that might explain some of our experiences. Do you wish to see them? Or do you have to get back to your friends?”
Harry was just opening his mouth to reply when he realized how mock-serious Snape was acting. He narrowed his eyes. “You don’t need to be a prick about it.”
“On the contrary,” said Snape, “I think it wisest to protect myself, since even if I convince you of what I have discovered, I may not be able to prevent you from charging off to a future that you think exists without me.”
Harry winced all over. “I’m sorry.”
Snape listened for a moment, then nodded judiciously. “That was a fair beginning,” he said. “It didn’t have the word ‘but’ after it.”
Harry clenched his teeth a little. Even when he was trying to listen honestly to Snape and do all he could to make up for some of the things that had happened between them, he felt judged and pushed aside.
But the mess they had made, or he had made, wasn’t cleared up yet. “Do you think that the future is changed now, completely?” he asked. “If I were to go back now, I would find some other version of myself, or I would never have been born, or-”
“Rather than asking wild questions and making equally wild speculations,” said Snape smoothly, “perhaps you should look at this tome I discovered. It clarified some things rather spectacularly for me.”
He reached behind him and picked up a large red book that he held out to Harry with a slight, mocking bow. Harry glared at him a little, but Snape didn’t appear at all repentant, so Harry sighed and accepted the book.
The pages were thick and creamy, strangely hard to turn, as if the parchment they were made of liked to stick together. Harry turned them over anyway, and made his way to the page that had a thick red bookmark stuck into it.
The words on the top of the page, where the bookmark was magically placed to point, jumped out at him the minute he turned to it.
The theorists of the nature of time once spoke of time as a stream, flowing only one direction, and liable to swallow any changes that tried to take place in it. Then, after the invention of Time-Turners, it was thought that the stream could be dammed and diverted, making it necessary to take extreme caution when traveling in time. But recently a new theory has emerged, after time-travelers claimed that they did make changes to the timeline, and that nothing bad resulted.
This theory sees time as a great, organic beast, one that some have likened to a dragon or a tree. A tree can be cut down, but not with one blow, and this would be a tree enormously bigger and more impervious to even magical damage than any living tree could reasonably be said to be. A dragon will not notice the bite of a mosquito, even if one could pierce through its thick scales.
Harry paused and glanced at Snape. “These are recent theories?” he ventured.
Snape nodded. “Irma keeps more careful track of books on time travel than I had thought. It must be a pet project of hers. This one was published last year.”
“But that still means 1982,” Harry pointed out, feeling a renewed surge of anxiety. “It means that by the time I come from, they could have changed their minds again and come up with another theory on the sensitive nature of time.”
In silence, Snape held up the heartsblood jewel.
“You don’t think that proves a lot by itself?” Harry raised his eyebrows at Snape. “The man I knew wouldn’t think that proves anything.”
“Not by itself,” said Snape calmly, although Harry saw his jaw clench and felt a small surge of glee that he had succeeded in irritating him. “What proves something is that I had it here, and you found it in the future, and now it is here again.” He lowered his hand and stared at Harry. “The moment you came back in time to change the Horcrux, you changed things. I think your Unspeakable friends had to know this was going to happen. They would not have risked time travel in the first place if they could have accomplished the destruction of the Horcrux by other means.”
Harry shrugged helplessly. “I suppose, if history always snapped back into place, then I couldn’t have traveled back in time. Because if I’d always come back in time and destroyed the cross, there would have been nothing for me to come back in time with.”
“Exactly,” said Snape, and his eyes shone. “So time must be more like the last theory in the book I showed you.” He tapped the line in the book Harry still held, as if he might have missed it. “It must be like a dragon that cannot be annoyed by the bite of a mosquito. If you had read on, you would have seen the speculation by these theorists that time repairs wounds to itself by simply growing and healing around them. This must be one of the reasons that so few people can see time travelers. But the ones who can affect history, do so. What happens becomes what happened. In the case of objects, they may simply vanish. In the case of human memories, they may be modified.” He eyed Harry intently.
“I can’t Obliviate you,” Harry said. “I know that. It’s hard to do that to a Legilimens in the first place, and I wasn’t ever good with Memory Charms. But I think something else must have happened. Perhaps you modified your own memories because you were so disgusted with yourself for giving into my charms.”
Snape uttered a short laugh, presumably to show what he thought of Harry’s use of the word “charms.” “Or perhaps things have already changed, and what was once true is no longer true.”
Harry shivered. “But what would that mean? That Voldemort could come back even though I destroyed all his Horcruxes?”
“I do not think so,” said Snape, and turned his head to the side as if the answer was written on the wall there. Or on invisible pages in his mind, Harry thought, watching him. “It would take multiple journeys to the past to find the Horcruxes and remove them before you destroyed them, and most Death Eaters who managed such things-if they did-would probably prefer to spend time working to find the spirit of the Dark Lord himself, and making sure his return would succeed.” He turned to Harry with remote eyes. “But it does make me wonder if the Unspeakables know considerably more about time travel than they have told you, and spend part of their time guarding against such occurrences.”
Harry snorted. “I doubt it, or they wouldn’t have let me come here and flail around like this.”
Snape smiled coolly. “And what makes you think that you have not done exactly as you were meant to?”
Harry blinked at him. “I mean-they didn’t explain much to me because they said that they didn’t know enough. They said-they said that I had to leave as soon as possible because there was the chance Voldemort would come back any time, or these new Death Eaters would try to murder someone and succeed, and-”
“But if time can change, then you could have left even after that happened, come back in time, and destroyed the Horcrux,” said Snape softly, his eyes fixed on Harry. “And it all would have changed.”
Harry curled his fingers. “What does that mean? Does it mean that if you came back into the future with me, you would be alive?”
Snape’s eyes widened. Harry winced as he realized what he’d said. “I didn’t mean-I mean-damn it.”
He did reach for his wand after all, only to find that it wasn’t next to his hand. He looked over, and found Snape spinning it between his fingers, his gaze soft and pensive on Harry’s face.
“You appear…somewhat excitable,” Snape said. “Even if you recognize the difficulties of attempting to Obliviate an Occlumens, I thought you might try, in your desperation to save your friends and your home.” Once again, he tilted his head at the heartsblood jewel he held. “Never mind that you would have to take this back into the future and deposit it where you found it to really make the timeline suffer no change. Beside my dying body, I assume?”
His voice trembled a little. Harry covered his eyes and muttered, “I’m sorry.”
“You say that often,” said Snape, and his voice sharpened. “I would prefer a different outcome. One that would preserve the timeline that you wish for, and one that would give me the result I wish for.”
Harry snorted and dropped his hands. “What would that be? Where I fall in love with you? I just-I haven’t felt love for you. I’m sorry.”
Snape gestured negligently with Harry’s own wand, and Harry found his lips sealed shut. He pulled irritably at them, and Snape gave him a nasty smile and shook his head.
“I told you I was tired of hearing those words,” he said. “Now. There should be a way to do what must be necessary to preserve your existence and mine, or the existence of the man who died in the Shack, and to gratify my desire.”
Harry made a grab for his wand. Snape let him take it, with a droll look that Harry could have lived without. Harry unsealed his lips and demanded, “Why does there have to be? We don’t always get what we want.”
“How true,” said Snape, taking a long, gliding step towards him. “And do you want me?”
Harry glared at him. Snape simply looked back at him, unaffected. He wasn’t the overexcited man Harry had first met, now that he was freed from the influence of Slytherin’s bowl, and yet he wasn’t the grumpy man who had died unfairly in the Shrieking Shack, either. Harry wondered whether either of them really knew who Snape was right now.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Snape paused with his eyes once again fastened on the wall as if he was reading invisible instructions there. Despite the ridiculousness of it, Harry ended up turning to look, because Snape’s attention was so compelling. There was nothing written there, of course.
Snape’s hand came to rest on his shoulder, and he bent down to whisper into Harry’s ear. “You should think more deeply about your own desires. I know what I want. I want the chance to see what will happen between us without the bowl, and without your own stubborn conviction that it lies with you to stabilize time.”
“Since I was the one who messed it up in the first place, I should,” Harry countered tensely.
“No,” said Snape, and he sounded supremely smug. “You were yet another tiny parasite on the body of the dragon, and you may have corrected some other mistake, some worse one, that we were unaware of. In fact, is that not what you came here to do? To destroy the Horcrux that had escaped the destruction of the others?”
Harry grunted and tried to turn his head. Snape held him still with the hand on his shoulder, and then made him freeze completely by bending down and pressing his lips into the skin behind Harry’s ear. Harry heard himself make a startled sound.
“Yes, I thought that would hold you,” Snape murmured. “Now. Listen. There is a spell that I know has sometimes been performed in cases where someone had to flee the country or developed a disease that they wanted to keep secret.”
“Neither of those really applies in this case,” Harry hissed.
“It comes close enough,” said Snape, sounding unruffled. “And before you can ask, yes, the magic is Dark. It takes so much magic from the intended caster that he tends to be weak for years afterwards. But the main magic is a prohibition.”
Harry blinked, his mind abruptly cast back into Auror training. “That sounds more like a ritual than a spell.”
“It is both.”
“You didn’t say-”
“Nor did I say it was not.”
Harry sighed in exhaustion and gave up on that part of the conversation. “Fine. What’s the prohibition?”
“The caster may never come back to the place he left.”
Harry turned around despite the pressure of the hand that was trying to hold him in place. “And what good is that going to do? You know as well as I do that you have to stay here, to hold the timeline in place!”
Snape smiled coldly. “So I would have to, except that the spell will create another copy of me, and leave him in my place.”
Harry stared at him, then opened his mouth, then closed it. Snape nodded slowly. “Good. I can see that you are thinking. That is an improvement over the last several things you might have done.”
Harry ignored that for long moments. He was thinking, although he didn’t know whether what he had to say would make any sense to Snape. He said it anyway. “Does that mean the Snape I knew in my timeline wasn’t the real one?”
Snape turned his head a little to the side. “He was as real as I am. He was me, if I was left to develop through time normally.” He paused, seeming to understand that Harry wasn’t satisfied, and added soothingly, “He was me, until you came back.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I am not sure that anyone who is not an Unspeakable does.” Snape eyed him measuringly. “Now. Will you help me in this? Or will you insist that I remain behind, and perhaps change things even further now that I know my death is coming and that you never wanted to return?”
Harry shook his head. “I did think the best thing was to stay away and for me to go back to my own time. But I wanted to make sure no damage resulted to you more than I wanted to stay away.”
Snape paused as though that was a momentous revelation. Harry, watching him, realized abruptly that maybe it was, for him. Harry was in his own head, of course, thinking his own thoughts, and so to him it wasn’t any big deal, but it really might be to Snape.
“Well,” said Snape, and his voice was soft. “This does change things.”
Chapter Fourteen.
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