The grass near the Great Lake was damp with cold, the kind that crept through robes and settled into bones if one stayed still too long. Pansy Parkinson didn't notice.
She sat with her back against the rough bark of an old beech tree, one knee drawn up, parchment spread across her lap and weighed down at the corners with smooth stones she'd gathered absentmindedly. Her notebook was already crowded; layers of runes half-crossed out, arrows pointing to revised arrays, annotations packed so tightly they threatened to collapse into one another.
A custard bun disappeared with a distracted bite.
She chewed thoughtfully, eyes never leaving the page, fingers smudged faintly with ink and chalk. To her left, two empty wrappers lay crumpled. To her right, three cans of cola rested in the grass—one open, beads of condensation clinging stubbornly to the metal despite the cold. A thin frost rimed the ground around it, magic bleeding off in lazy excess.
Pansy exhaled slowly.
"No brute force," she murmured to herself. "No flooding the system. Precision first."
She raised her left hand, palm up, wand nowhere in sight.
A shimmer flickered briefly above her skin... too diffuse. She grimaced and shook her hand once, dispersing the magic before it could drain further.
"Still too wide," she muttered.
She bent over the notebook again, scratching out a rune and replacing it with a tighter variant, the strokes precise and economical. This wasn't about power. Power was easy. Anyone could pour magic until something happened.
This was about addressing.
Cells were small. Smaller than organs. Smaller than tissues. Most healing charms treated the body like a map drawn in broad strokes—heal the arm, purge the blood, soothe the nerves. Efficient. Crude.
Useless for what she wanted.
Another bite of custard bun. A sip of cola. She didn't bother chilling it again; it was already cold enough to bite back.
"Anchor first," she murmured. "But not spatial… structural."
Her fingers hovered over the page, then paused.
Pansy frowned, then slowly turned her wrist, studying the faint lines of her forearm beneath her sleeve. Skin. Blood. Cells. Billions of them, all nearly identical, all distinct.
She inhaled, focused, and extended her empty hand again.
This time, she didn't push.
She listened.
Magic slid out of her like a thread instead of a wave, thin and careful. It brushed against her arm and instead of spreading, it latched.
Pansy froze.
Her breath caught as the sensation sharpened, narrowing impossibly, collapsing inward until—
There.
One point.
Not pain. Not pressure. Just… awareness. A single cell, outlined in quiet certainty, as real to her magic as her own heartbeat.
"Oh."
Her eyes widened.
She swallowed, afraid to move too much, afraid the spell would unravel if she so much as blinked. The magic held. Stable. Elegant. Laughably low-cost.
She let out a shaky breath that turned into a laugh.
"No way," she whispered. "No bloody way."
Her grip tightened, not adding power, just confirming. The targeting held. One cell. No bleedover. No cascade.
Pansy's heart slammed against her ribs.
She dropped her hand and shot upright, parchment sliding off her lap and scattering onto the grass.
"It worked," she breathed, then louder, "It worked."
She scrambled for her notebook, hands suddenly clumsy, flipping pages back to the relevant array and scribbling furiously, ink splattering as she annotated margins with shaking excitement.
"Cell-specific anchoring," she muttered, words tumbling over one another. "No drain, no resonance collapse, scalable... Merlin, this changes everything."
Healing charms. Poisons. Regeneration. Precision treatment instead of magical carpet-bombing.
The excitement didn't fade. It settled.
Pansy leaned back against the tree, notebook still clutched to her chest, heart racing not with triumph now but with implication. The kind that crept in quietly once the initial thrill burned off.
One cell.
Not tissue. Not organ. One.
Her gaze drifted to her forearm again, to the place where the magic had latched so cleanly it was almost obscene in its precision.
If you could address a single cell…
Her thoughts began to cascade, orderly and relentless.
Degenerative diseases first. Conditions where the problem wasn't widespread damage but localized failure. Cells that forgot how to function. That replicated wrong. That refused to die when they should or died far too easily.
Most healing magic couldn't touch that. It soothed symptoms, slowed progression, patched damage after the fact. It treated the body like terrain after a battle.
But this—
This was preemptive.
Target the faulty cell. Repair it. Replace it. Silence it. Remove it before it poisoned the rest.
Pansy's mind kept moving.
If this worked on cells, it could work on anything. On systems, on failure chains. On curses that hid by distributing their damage thin enough that no healer ever caught the origin point. On magical illnesses that weren't illnesses at all, just mistakes repeating themselves faster than the body could compensate.
She closed her eyes, already seeing the framework expand.
Detection charms refined down to cellular diagnostics. Potions that didn't flood the bloodstream but knocked on one door. Healing that didn't exhaust the patient because it didn't ask the whole body to respond.
They could stop guessing.
They could stop accepting loss as inevitable.
They could stop accepting loss as inevitable.
Her fingers flexed, itching to try again, to test limits, to see how far the anchoring could be pushed before it destabilized. Could it track a moving cell? Could it differentiate between identical cells by function instead of structure? Could—
A distant shout echoed across the grounds.
Pansy blinked, the world rushing back in around her.
Voices carried over the lake, distorted by distance but unmistakably familiar. Animated. Slightly frantic.
She frowned and pushed herself upright, brushing grass from her sleeves. The parchment lay scattered around her feet like shed skin. She gathered it absently, stuffing it into her bag without her usual meticulous order.
Another shout. Closer this time.
"…I'm telling you, he was not in the dungeons—"
"—Ginny, don't let her wander off—"
"Luna, stay here for Merlin's sake—"
Pansy froze.
Luna.
Her stomach dropped.
She checked her watch, eyes narrowing as the date stared back at her, suddenly loud and undeniable.
13 February.
"Oh."
The word came out flat.
"Oh no."
She had forgotten.
Not just forgotten—she'd fallen entirely out of time, so deep in theory and application that the day had slipped past without so much as a ripple. No cake. No plan. No gift. Nothing.
Pansy swore under her breath and slung her bag over her shoulder, breaking into a brisk walk toward the castle.
As she crested the rise near the path, she spotted them near the Entrance Hall steps in a loose, unmistakably chaotic cluster.
Ron was pacing, hands shoved into his pockets, looking like he'd rather wrestle a Hungarian Horntail than deal with logistics. Hermione stood with her arms crossed, expression tight and calculating, clearly running through contingency plans that involved timetables, maps, and mild threats. Ginny hovered near Luna with the unmistakable posture of someone physically blocking an escape route.
Abigail leaned against the balustrade, watching the grounds with sharp eyes, while Astoria and Daphne murmured together, Daphne glancing at Luna every few seconds like she expected her to vanish into thin air.
Fred and George stood off to one side, whispering furiously and gesturing toward the gates.
"No, see, if Harry was here," Fred said, "he'd already have made this ten times more complicated."
"But where the heck is he?" George asked.
"Have you guys checked the library?" Pansy asked as she approached them. "He had been busy trying to create something, so library seems like an appropriate place for him to be."
The moment they stepped inside, the scent of old parchment and dust washed over them, layered with the familiar hush that demanded reverence whether one intended to give it or not.
"Library," Ron muttered. "Of course."
They moved deeper between the shelves, footsteps muted by thick carpet. It was Ginny who spotted the mess first.
Books.
Too many of them.
They lay open across one of the long oak tables, stacked and spread in a way that would have made Madam Pince faint—ancient tomes with cracked spines, newer volumes half-annotated in a precise hand, loose parchment wedged between pages as makeshift bookmarks. Runes glimmered faintly along a few margins, ink still fresh.
And at the center of it all—
Harry.
He sat slumped in his chair, head tilted slightly to one side, dark hair falling into his eyes. One arm rested across an open book, fingers curled loosely as if he'd fallen asleep mid-thought. His other hand dangled near the edge of the table, ink smudged faintly along his knuckles.
Even exhausted, even slack with sleep, there was something arresting about him—sharp lines softened just enough to make him look younger, lashes dark against pale skin, magic lying so quiet around him it felt coiled rather than absent.
For a moment, no one spoke.
"Blimey," Ron whispered. "He looks half-dead."
Ginny elbowed him automatically, though her gaze didn't leave Harry's face.
"He's been here for days," Hermione murmured, eyes already cataloguing the books. "These are restricted editions. And pre-Founders comparative theory. And—Harry, what have you been doing?"
Luna stepped forward first.
She didn't touch him. Just leaned in slightly and said, very gently, "Harry."
His brow twitched.
A few seconds passed. Then he stirred, slow and heavy, like waking through layers of water. His eyes opened, too sharp for someone that tired, and focused vaguely ahead drifting to Luna.
"…mm," he said intelligently.
Ginny grimaced. "That bad, huh?"
Harry blinked once. Twice. His gaze moved, lagging just a fraction behind the world, until it landed on the group clustered around him.
"Oh," he said after a moment. "You're… here."
He yawned mid-sentence, wide and unguarded, scrubbing a hand down his face as if that might pull him back into alignment. The motion pulled his sleeve up just enough to show faint bruises on his skin.
Hermione's mouth thinned.
"Harry?" she asked firmly. "How did you get those bruises in your arm?"
He considered this far longer than necessary.
"... side effect of my research, Hermione. Don't worry." he said finally and the bruises in his arm disappeared slowly, as if expunged.
Harry didn't elaborate.
He rarely did when he'd already decided the explanation was sufficient.
He straightened a little, rolling his shoulders once as if testing the absence of pain, then glanced at the group with a faint, tired smile that didn't quite reach his eyes.
"You should head to the usual classroom," he said, already half-turning back toward the table. "I'll catch up."
Ron opened his mouth. Closed it again. No one argued; experience had taught them how pointless that was.
They started to move—chairs scraping softly, footsteps retreating—but Harry's voice followed them, unhurried.
"Luna."
She paused instantly.
"Yes?" she asked, turning back.
Harry looked at her properly this time. Really looked. The fog in his expression thinned, just a little.
"Happy birthday," he said simply.
Luna blinked.
Color bloomed across her cheeks, delicate and unmistakable. "You remembered."
He smiled, soft and real despite the exhaustion. "I did."
Ginny noticed the way that smile landed. So did Daphne. Astoria's lips curved faintly, knowingly.
Harry tilted his head, as if recalling something mildly embarrassing. "I once forgot Daphne's birthday," he added, voice thoughtful. "Didn't make that mistake twice." A brief pause. "After that, I memorized everyone's in Nexus. And… everyone I value."
Daphne arched a brow, amused. Luna looked like she might float.
Before anyone could respond, Harry snapped his fingers.
The library stirred.
Books lifted gently from tables, chairs, even the floor—dozens of them—spines rotating midair as if guided by invisible hands. They drifted apart in neat streams, gliding back into their proper shelves with soft, respectful thuds. Loose parchment followed, sliding into place between pages as though they'd never been disturbed.
Madam Pince, somewhere in the distance, sighed in relief without knowing why.
Harry exhaled, the effort minimal but real. "I'll be back soon," he said. "Need to speak to Dumbledore first."
Hermione frowned. "About what?"
"A leave," Harry replied vaguely, already turning away.
That answer did not reassure her in the slightest.
The group filed out, Luna casting one last look over her shoulder. Harry lifted two fingers in a small wave, then vanished between the shelves.
The walk to the Headmaster's office took longer than usual.
Not because the castle resisted him—it didn't—but because Harry's thoughts were dragging, each step measured, deliberate. The exhaustion sat deep now, not in his muscles but behind his eyes, a dull ache that even magic couldn't quite smooth over.
He reached the gargoyle and spoke the password automatically.
It hopped aside.
The office beyond was empty.
"Figures," Harry murmured.
Dumbledore had told him—casually, almost as an afterthought—that if he ever needed the office and the Headmaster wasn't present, he was welcome to let himself in.
So he did.
The door closed softly behind him, sealing the room in familiar stillness. Fawkes' perch was empty. The portraits pretended to sleep. Instruments hummed quietly, glass spheres rotating in lazy, unreadable patterns.
Harry crossed the room, already mentally outlining the recalibration he'd need for the dimensional aperture. Time dilation was delicate work. Elegant, if done right.
He was halfway to the desk when he heard it.
Voices.
Muffled. Subtle. Coming from behind the office.
Harry stopped.
He stood still for a heartbeat longer, listening.
The voices weren't arguing. They weren't hushed in secrecy either. They carried the particular cadence of academic excitement—overlapping observations, restrained awe, the kind of careful enthusiasm professors only ever allowed themselves when something genuinely unprecedented had occurred.
That, more than anything else, made his brows lift.
He moved.
Past Dumbledore's desk, up the narrow spiral of steps tucked discreetly to the side, and through the door concealed behind layers of polite discouragement rather than true wards. They parted for him without resistance.
The hall beyond opened wide.
And Harry stopped short.
The professors were all there.
McGonagall stood rigid near the center, hands clasped tightly behind her back, eyes bright behind her spectacles. Flitwick hovered a little off the ground, toes barely brushing the stone. Sprout had dirt on her sleeves and didn't seem to care. Snape loomed near the edge, arms folded, expression razor-sharp and wholly unconvincing in its attempt at disinterest. Thorne seemed excited and exhausted at the same time. Remus seemed to be laying on the floor with a huge smile on his face, eyes closed.
And Dumbledore...
Dumbledore stood directly before an open gateway.
It shimmered like folded glass and liquid light, a vertical oval suspended between two rune-etched pylons Harry recognized instantly. The air around it hummed with structured magic, stable, self-sustaining.
They'd done it.
Harry felt the fog in his mind thin further, excitement cutting cleanly through exhaustion.
"Well," he said mildly, breaking the silence.
Every head snapped toward him.
McGonagall actually startled. Flitwick squeaked. Sprout dropped her gloves. Snape's eyes narrowed instantly.
Dumbledore, on the other hand, beamed.
"Harry, my boy!" he said, turning with unmistakable delight. "Perfect timing. Simply perfect."
Harry stepped fully into the hall, eyes still on the gateway. "You opened one," he said, tone pleased in that slow, deliberate way exhaustion gave him. "And it's stable."
He let out a quiet breath, half-laugh, half-sigh.
"That's... impressive," he said honestly.
Flitwick practically vibrated. "We tested it thrice! Temporal shear is minimal, anchoring held across all iterations!"
"I just gave you guys the beginner stuff about space time continuum, but you guys managed to pull off an intermediate time dilated gateway, professor." Harry chuckled. "And yet you guys treat me like I'm some monstrous genius..."
For a moment, no one spoke.
McGonagall stared at Harry as if she were trying to determine whether exhaustion had finally driven him into delusion. Flitwick's mouth opened, then closed again. Sprout slowly retrieved her fallen gloves without breaking eye contact. Even Snape looked… unsettled.
The silence stretched.
Harry frowned faintly. "What?"
Dumbledore blinked first. "Harry," he said gently, "my boy… do you have any idea what you just said?"
Harry glanced between them, genuinely puzzled. "Yes? You extrapolated correctly from the framework. That's what frameworks are for."
Flitwick let out a strangled noise. "You invented the framework!"
Harry tilted his head. "So?"
McGonagall pinched the bridge of her nose. "Mr. Potter, you were the first wizard—the first in recorded history—to open a stable dimensional gateway with deliberate temporal distortion." Her eyes sharpened. "At a ratio of one day to one hundred days."
Sprout nodded vigorously. "We didn't even think that was theoretically survivable."
Snape added flatly, "Most of us didn't think even imagine it much less theorize about it."
Harry looked at the gateway again, then back at them. His confusion deepened rather than cleared.
"But… you're already there," he said slowly. "One minute outside, two minutes inside. That scales."
They continued staring.
Harry sighed, rubbing his temple. "You're looking at it too… ceremonially." He gestured vaguely. "One minute to two minutes means one hour to two hours. Which means one day to two days. That's already dilation. I just compressed the ratios."
Flitwick whispered, reverent and horrified, "He says it like arithmetic."
Harry shrugged. "I didn't even push so much. I did minutes. One to a hundred minutes. That was the simplest stable expression."
McGonagall's lips parted. Closed. Parted again. "Simplest."
Dumbledore was watching him with open fascination now, blue eyes alight. "And you believe," he said carefully, "that you can… adjust this one?"
Harry nodded. "Of course, but only a little. Not too much. If I cross a certain threshold, my magic will be cut off again. And that threshold is 1:20."
He stepped forward, and his wand Elythral appeared in his hand, humming softly as if it knew that Harry was trying to defy a god.
He raised it towards the portal and the gateway responded. Space folded inward, runes reconfiguring themselves as Harry adjusted the harmonic anchor with precise movements.
The shimmer deepened. Thickened.
Flitwick gasped. "The ratio's shifting—!"
"Twenty," Harry said quietly.
The gateway settled with a low, thunderless thrum.
One to twenty.
The pressure in the hall spiked, then stabilized, the wards groaning but holding. The professors collectively exhaled as if they'd been underwater.
Harry lowered his wand immediately.
"That's as far as I can go for now." he said, voice calm but tired. "If I push any more, my magic will be cut off again."
The wand dimmed, reluctantly, and vanished.
Silence fell—this time not stunned, but awed.
Thorne looked at the gateway, then at Harry. "You just took our greatest achievement," she said faintly, "and improved it by an order of magnitude. Casually."
"Professor, you are looking at your achievement the wrong way. 1:2 means that for one minute outside, it will be two minutes inside." Harry explained.
"But now extend that, it also means that 1 day outside, is 2 days inside, which implies that 1 year outside is 2 years inside."
Harry yawned again. "See, you are needlessly trying to put yourselves down..."
A few of the professors exchanged looks—uncertain whether to feel reassured or quietly insulted.
Harry glanced between them, clearly registering the tension a beat late.
"I'm not diminishing it," he added mildly. "I'm saying it scales. That's not failure—that's success."
McGonagall opened her mouth, then closed it again. "Mr. Potter… are you telling us this so casually because you are exhausted, or because you genuinely don't see why we're alarmed?"
Harry blinked. "Both?"
That did not help.
He scrubbed a hand over his face, stifling another yawn. "On that note, I want two days off."
The room froze.
"Off?" Snape repeated, incredulous. "From what, exactly? Reality manipulation?"
"From thinking," Harry replied honestly. "From portals. From not sleeping."
Remus Lupin straightened sharply. "Not sleeping how?"
Harry frowned, considering. "At all."
Silence detonated.
McGonagall's voice went dangerously calm. "Mr. Potter. Was that a figure of speech?"
"No."
Sprout made a small distressed sound. Flitwick's moustache bristled. Vector dropped her parchment. Burbage looked faint.
Dumbledore stopped smiling.
"You mean," Thorne said slowly, "you haven't slept…?"
"A week," Harry finished. "Roughly."
The panic was immediate.
"A week?" McGonagall snapped.
"Seven days without sleep?" Remus echoed, horrified.
Snape's eyes went razor-sharp. "And you thought this irrelevant."
Harry shrugged weakly. "I was busy."
Sprout stood abruptly. "Have you been eating at least?"
Harry opened his mouth.
Paused.
"…Oh."
That single word did more damage than any confession.
Flitwick squeaked outright. "You haven't?"
"Not intentionally," Harry said. "Time got… slippery."
Dumbledore stared at him in silence, something unreadable passing behind his eyes.
Before anyone could speak again, the door creaked open.
Madam Pomfrey stood there, having clearly overheard enough.
"When," she said dangerously, "... how often do you pull such stunts?"
Harry tilted his head, thinking. "Voluntarily? This is the first time I've done it for a week."
Pomfrey inhaled sharply. "Voluntarily?"
Harry winced. "There was a time I didn't sleep for a month."
The room erupted.
"A month?!" McGonagall shouted.
"That's not survivable!" Sprout protested.
"Not without severe psychosis," Remus added.
Pomfrey was already moving toward him. "When."
Harry frowned, counting back. "October. Last year."
Dead silence.
"…You didn't sleep," Pomfrey said slowly, "for the entire month of October."
"Yes."
"And you didn't go mad," Snape said flatly.
Harry shrugged. "I don't know why. I also don't know why I couldn't sleep even when I tried."
Pomfrey looked like she might hex him unconscious on principle.
"You are going to the hospital wing," she said.
Harry shook his head immediately. "No."
"Mr. Potter—"
"I won't sleep there," he said calmly. "Too many interruptions. I'll use the Floo. Go home. Moonstone Dunvegan is quiet. I'll eat. I'll sleep."
Dumbledore finally spoke, voice gentle but iron-hard beneath it. "You will rest."
Harry nodded, "I do intend to do that professor, cause I have work after resting. I am trying to make a new potion."
The words landed like a dropped vial.
"A… potion?" McGonagall repeated, incredulous.
"Yes," Harry said, as if that were the most natural thing in the world.
Pomfrey stared at him. "What kind of potion, Mr. Potter?"
Harry hesitated, brow furrowing in genuine thought. "I don't know yet."
That did it.
Flitwick let out a strangled noise. "You don't know?"
"I usually don't," Harry replied mildly. "I think about the problem first. The potion comes after."
Snape's expression sharpened into something dangerous. "You invent potions by intuition?"
Harry tilted his head. "Isn't that how it's supposed to work?"
The professors were scared how this 12 year old kid kept giving heart-attacks over and over again. Several of them looked like they might need chairs.
Dumbledore walked Harry back into the office without comment, his presence quiet and deliberate. He watched as Harry stepped into the Floo, green flames rising around him.
"Rest well," Dumbledore said softly.
Harry nodded once. "I will."
The fire flared and then collapsed inward, leaving the office empty and far too quiet.
The living room of Moonstone Dunvegan welcomed him with warmth and silence. The wards hummed gently, familiar and reassuring. For exactly half a second, Harry stood there, breathing in air that felt like home.
Then he vanished.
No flash. No sound.
One moment the room was empty, the next it remained so, utterly unaware it had just been used as an alibi.
Harry reappeared in the classroom in a whisper of displaced air.
Several people jumped.
Draco Malfoy froze mid-sentence, eyes widening as Harry materialized a few feet away without so much as a crack. His mouth opened, then shut again.
"What in Salazar's name," Draco said slowly, "did you just do?"
Harry blinked, then smiled faintly. "Oh. Hey, cousin."
Draco stared. "You did not just Apparate."
"I did," Harry replied, stifling a yawn halfway through the word. "Soundlessly too, I think. Hard to tell when you're tired."
Draco looked genuinely affronted. "You can't Apparate inside Hogwarts."
Harry tilted his head. "Yes, well."
Pansy cleared her throat pointedly. "I invited him," she said before the conversation could spiral. "Draco, I mean. He is your cousin. I thought he should be here."
Harry looked between them, then nodded. "Fair."
He yawned again, longer this time, rubbing at his eyes. "Sorry. I'm running on fumes."
Draco glanced around at the group, clearly trying to catch up. "What is happening?"
"A birthday," Ginny said cheerfully.
"And a kidnapping," Ron added.
Luna smiled serenely. "A benevolent one."
Harry glanced at Luna and smiled back, softer this time. "Ready?"
She nodded.
"Everyone link hands," Harry said, already extending his own. "Tightly."
They shuffled into position. Draco hesitated, then found himself next to Astoria. Their fingers brushed.
Astoria flushed instantly.
Daphne noticed and smirked.
Draco looked down, then away, ears faintly pink.
Harry took it all in with vague amusement, then spoke again. "I won't be coming back to Hogwarts for two days."
Hermione frowned. "Then how are we supposed to return?"
"You Apparate to Hogsmeade," Harry replied calmly. "Then the twins bring you in through the secret entrance."
Fred grinned. "Already warming up the hinges."
"Leave it to us," George added.
Draco looked between them, utterly bewildered. "Why does this sound like a military operation."
Harry reached out and took Abigail's hand with one and Pansy's with the other, completing the circle. Pansy's grip tightened slightly, color blooming faintly across her cheeks.
"Hold on," Harry said.
And then they were gone.
No crack. No swirl.
Just absence, leaving behind an empty classroom and one very confused echo of displaced air.