đtomarry Time Travel promp đ
The Weight of Borrowed Time
( if anyone wants to use my promp to write a fanfic, please do it, just remember to tag me)ďżź
After rescuing Sirius and Buckbeak in their third year, something goes wrong with the Time-Turner. Harry, separated from Hermione, is thrown alone into 1941, at the end of Tom Riddle's third year at Hogwarts.
Disoriented and with no way back, Harry is found by Albus Dumbledore (still the Transfiguration professor). Dumbledore deduces the time travel and, after hearing Harry's story, including Tom Riddle's future he faces a moral dilemma. He knows what Tom will become, but also knows Harry cannot alter the past without catastrophic consequences.
Dumbledore creates the identity of Harry James Evans, a war orphan, assumes legal guardianship, and enrolls him at Hogwarts for fourth year, the same year as Tom. The Sorting Hat places him in Slytherin.
Harry is forced to navigate a world where he can trust no one, where every gesture is calculated, and where Tom Riddle the charming, brilliant, dangerously perceptive has decides that Evans is an enigma worth unraveling.
What begins as mutual surveillance evolves into something genuine. Harry sees in Tom the boy who has not yet become Voldemort; Tom sees in Harry the first person who challenges him without fear. They fall in love, but love is not redemptive.
Their relationship carries through fourth year in secret made byfurtive meetings in the library at night, whispered conversations in empty corridors, a tacit understanding that two orphans of the world have found something rare in each other.
In fifth year, an explosion occurs. Harry challenges Tom openly, questions his ambitions, touches the raw wound of his fear of death. Tom, who never tolerates challenge, breaks.
In a moment of blind rage, he releases the Basilisk to frighten Harry, provoke him, force him to see who he truly is. The intention was never to kill Tom only want to dominate, control, make Harry yield.
But the monster slips from his control.
Myrtle Warren is in the wrong bathroom. The Basilisk's gaze kills her instantly. Tom stares at the body and, in desperation to avoid discovery, does exactly what his canonical counterpart did: creates his first Horcrux and frames Rubeus Hagrid.
Harry already knew this story â read it in Tom Riddle's Diary in second year. Knows Hagrid is innocent. Tried to defend his friend, but no one listened. No one listens to a suspicious Slytherin who speaks Parseltongue.
Harry breaks up with Tom that same night. There is no dramatic scene only an empty gaze, a rough voice:
"I know what you did, Tom. I've always known. And I will never forgive you."
For the first time, Tom has no response. Not because he feels guilt but because Harry knows. Has always known. And that leaves him more exposed than any accusation.
They remain separated for the rest of fifth year.
A full year of silence in corridors, of burning glances, of nights where each feels the other's absence like an open wound. They are too obsessive, too passionate the two orphans who found in each other the only mirror reflecting something beyond emptiness.
But they do not reconcile.
Harry spends sixth year in self-imposed isolation. He does not speak to Tom. Does not actively avoid him, he simply no longer sees him. Tom becomes a ghost in the same hallway, a shadow Harry refuses to acknowledge.
He defends Hagrid subtly when he can. Plants doubts, questions evidence. No one listens, but he does not stop.
He discovers no way back. The Time-Turner that brought him is destroyed, and no other temporal artifact responds to his research. Every book, every question, every night in the library yields nothing.
Then comes the last hope: the Unspeakables.
The Department of Mysteries. The guardians of the Time-Turners. If Harry becomes an Unspeakable, he will have access to secrets the world hides. Could study, manipulate, perhaps reverse what was done.
But for that, he needs Outstanding grades in Divination, the subject he hates most, the one he has least aptitude for. And he must survive until then.
Tom, meanwhile, consolidates more Horcruxes in secret. The distance from Harry allows him to pursue immortality without the complication of proximity. He tells himself this is better. Tells himself he does not need anyone.
They do not speak. They do not touch. They exist in parallel, burning with a separation that neither knows how to end.
They reconcile in seventh year. Not through forgetting, but through exhaustion.
Tom, who has consolidated more Horcruxes in secret, finds himself alone at the top. Harry is the only person who truly knew him, the only one who never yielded. Tom's love was never healthy it was possession, competition, fascination, but it was genuine in the only form Tom could offer.
Harry, broken by a year of isolation without hope of return, without allies, without purpose beyond escape, finds Tom familiar, warm, the mistake he knows he will make.
The reconciliation is silent. A meeting in a corridor, a gaze too long, a night in the library where words do not matter. They do not speak of Myrtle. Do not speak of Hagrid. Do not speak of Horcruxes.
They speak of nothing, and therefore survive.
Tom finally explains himself. Not with apologies Tom never apologizes. But with explanation in the only language he commands:
"I never wanted to kill her, Harry. Never. I wanted you to be afraid. To see me. To know who I truly was, and still not run."
The admission is brutal in its twisted honesty. Tom wanted Harry to know him all of him, including the darkness and choose to stay. The Basilisk was a crooked test of love. Myrtle's death was an accident covered with manipulation.
Harry forgives. He does not forget, does not justify. But understands that loving Tom Riddle is loving someone broken in places where light does not reach.
The reconciliation is not smooth. It is made of nights where one wakes in panic, conversations that turn to accusations, kisses that bleed. But it is real. They cling to each other with the desperation of those who know the entire world would collapse if they let go.
Harry still does not know what a Horcrux is. He traveled in time before Dumbledore revealed their existence. To him, the word means nothing. Tom maintains absolute silence about the soul fragment he deposited in the diary the last lie that protects what remains of their love.
During separation time, Tom murders his biological family the father who abandoned him, the grandparents who rejected him. Not for vengeance, but for cleansing. Because they are a weakness he will not tolerate. Harry suspects, feels the change, the new distance in grey eyes. But does not ask again. Fears the answer.
They marry after Hogwarts. A small, almost secret ceremony with just a few witness, a magical contract binding them more through mutual desperation than tradition.
Harry secures an internship at the Ministry to be trained as an Unspeakable. The realization of an old dream. He is surprised when Tom refuses to join him.
Tom goes to Borgin and Burkes. When Harry asks why, he replies with a smile that does not reach his eyes:
"There I find things the Ministry hides. Things that interest me."
Harry lets it go. He is too happy, too busy, to chase shadows.
Years pass. Harry becomes a high-ranking Unspeakable. And finally discovers how to return: with a complex and dangerous ritual but possible.
He holds the result in trembling hands. Looks at the life he built: Tom, who knows him better than anyone; the growing belly, six months into a planned pregnancy; the child carrying traces of both.
The pregnancy was never announced. Tom does not know, never knew. Harry guarded the secret with paranoia.
He decides to stay.
It is during this time that Tom uses Hepzibah Smith's house-elf to access Salazar Slytherin's relics, the locket and Helga Hufflepuff's cup. Harry, suspicious for months, investigates alone. Uses his Unspeakable access, breaks protocols, invades memories.
He discovers everything: the elf, Hepzibah, the artifacts. And finally, the truth he never thought to seek the Horcruxes, the soul fragments, the immortality Tom built through murder.
The disillusionment is dep, to real. Not just merely betrayal a repetition. Harry lived this before, in his other life. Saw Tom Riddle become Voldemort. And now, in his bed, in his marriage, the same pattern unfolds.
He does not think. Does not plan. Goes to the Department of Mysteries in the middle of the night, alone. He creates the ritual from memory every rune, every component. His hand does not tremble. His heart does not race.
The portal opens, a golden fissure in the air.
Harry hesitates for a second. Thinks of the baby he carries. Of Tom, sleeping at home, not knowing he will wake alone. Of the love that existed, real and sick.
Then steps through.
He returns to the exact place and moment he left the grounds of Hogwarts, 1993, the night he and Hermione used the Time-Turner to save Sirius and Buckbeak.
He is still an adult in his twenties. Still pregnant, six months along. Still wearing clothes from 1944 that smell of another time. He stumbles in the grass, disoriented, and looks up at a castle he has not seen in over a decade of borrowed time.
Hermione is there. Young, thirteen, staring at him with wide eyes. She was waiting for him, for the Harry who never returned from the Time-Turner. Instead, she finds a stranger who looks like Harry grown, who speaks like him, who carries a belly that makes no sense.
Dumbledore arrives within hours. The younger Dumbledore had prepared for this, had left sealed instructions in a vault at Gringotts, had ensured that if Harry ever returned, there would be a path.
Harry is taken to the Ministry. His identity is verified through blood magic, through memories extracted under strict protocols, through the testimony of the Unspeakables of 1993 who examine the temporal signature still clinging to his skin.
His colleagues from 1944 had left documentation. Sealed records. Proof that Harry James Evans was Harry Potter, that he had served the Department of Mysteries across decades, that his return was always a possibility.
The Ministry, faced with an impossibility, does the only thing it can: guarantees his employment.
Harry is reinstated as an Unspeakable, his seniority from 1944 recognized through magical contract. He is given access to the same level of clearance he held before, his expertise in temporal magic now invaluable. His colleagues â those who understand the risks of paradox â protect him. They know what he is, what he carries, what he has lost.
The Potter fortune is his. The vaults at Gringotts, untouched since his parents' death, now accessible to a man who is legally Harry Potter but emotionally someone else entirely. Combined with his Unspeakable salary generous, commensurate with the danger and secrecy of the position makes Harry financially comfortable.
He buys a house in a quiet wizarding village. Not Godric's Hollow, too many ghosts. Not the Potter cottage, too many memories of a childhood he never lived. A new place, with wards he designs himself, with rooms for a child who will grow up without the other father.
In 1995, Voldemort returns.
