She should be dead. Instead, she’s fourteen again, back at Hogwarts with memories of a war the world hasn’t fought—and a boy who will one day betray her.
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@l1diaThe world came into focus slowly, like a photograph developing in reverse.
The first thing you registered was the smell. Wool, wood polish, and the faint, sweet scent of the everlasting embers in the Gryffindor common room fireplace. A smell you hadn’t breathed in for over a decade. Not since it was ash and rubble.
You were in a four-poster bed. The hangings were a deep, worn crimson. Morning light, weak and Scottish-grey, filtered through a high, narrow window, illuminating motes of dust dancing in the air. Your body felt wrong. Lighter. Smaller. The calluses on your wand hand were gone.
To your left, a girl with long, strawberry-blonde hair mumbled in her sleep and rolled over. Marlene McKinnon. Alive. Breathing. Not screaming.
You sat up. The movement was too quick, and the room tilted. You pressed your palms into the scratchy wool blanket, grounding yourself. This was your old bed. Your trunk was at its foot, the latch broken in the same familiar place. On the nightstand sat a second-hand copy of Advanced Potion-Making and a chocolate frog card of Gideon Prewett, grinning his reckless, doomed grin.
It was all here. Every detail, perfectly preserved. A museum of a life you’d mourned.
You got up. The stone floor was icy under your bare feet. You moved past the other sleeping forms—Lily Evans’s red hair a splash of colour on her pillow—and down the spiral staircase to the common room.
It was exactly as you remembered, and yet every object felt like a hallucination. The squashy armchairs weren’t yet singed by spellfire. The portrait of the Fat Lady, visible through the archway, hadn’t been slashed by a werewolf’s claws. You reached out, your fingers brushing the back of a tapestry depicting Godric Gryffindor. The threads were solid. Real.
A first-year boy you didn’t recognize by name zoomed a miniature broomstick past your knees, laughing. He would be of age when the war turned truly vicious. You wondered, with a cold, detached clarity, if he’d survive.
The walk to the Great Hall was a gauntlet of ghosts. You saw faces in the crowds flowing through the corridors. Benjy Fenwick, joking with a friend. Dorcas Meadowes, frowning at her timetable. All of them, moving and laughing on borrowed time, their futures already written in your memory like epitaphs.
And then you pushed open the large oak doors.
The Great Hall erupted in sound and light. Hundreds of students at long house tables, the enchanted ceiling a pale, cheerful blue. The smell of bacon and pumpkin juice washed over you. It was a tableau of perfect, ignorant peace.
Your eyes went straight to the Gryffindor table, about halfway down.
There they were.
James Potter, hair perpetually mussed, was demonstrating a complicated Quidditch move with a sausage, nearly knocking over the pumpkin juice. Sirius Black, already unfairly handsome at fifteen, threw his head back and laughed, a sharp, bright sound that used to make your chest ache. Remus Lupin, looking tired but smiling, was trying to read a book while dodging James’s animated breakfast.
They were just boys. Careless. Alive. Whole.
And then, as if sensing your stare, Peter Pettigrew looked up.
He was sitting with them, round-faced and cheerful, a piece of toast in his hand. His eyes—brown, unassuming, innocent—met yours across the crowded hall. He smiled. A friendly, open smile. He raised his toast in a small, familiar wave.