The Voyage Home

By: Kinsfire

Fandom: StarTrek: Other + Harry Potter Crossover

Summary: The battle at the Ministry ended differently for Harry. When he came out of the fog of Time Turner dust, he found himself over 300 years in the future. Now he needs to find his home again.

Status: Completed

Pairings/Main char.: Harry P., Hermione G.

Published: 2014-06-06

Last updated: 2015-03-16

Words count: 56,505

Chapters count: 18

Converted using www.FF2EBOOK.com
Date: 2020-10-02

1. Chapter 1

This will play fast and loose with canon for both Star Trek and Harry Potter, since the starting point is an alteration of the fight at the Ministry. If it doesn't work in Star Trek, then I'm throwing it out the window. As for Harry Potter, Book Sux and Book Sux, Part Deux did not/will not happen in this story. No horcruxes and no specially-introduced-just-for-the-story-goshwow!magical artifacts.

Appearance

The dust cleared, as did the sparkles in his eyes, and he staggered to the door after realising that he was alone. He shook his head a few times, feeling more than a little out of sorts.

What happened to everyone? Last I remember, the Time Turners were shattering, and I inhaled some of the dust and started coughing. Neville and -

"Hermione!"he screamed. "Where are you guys?" He began to run toward the door where he could last remember them being, but the area was clean. No one stood, and there was no sign that any fighting had happened, despite the running battle that had been happening. He traced back to the room where the prophecy had been stored, and found it standing empty - there were no globes anywhere in the room, but the shelves were all standing.

That makes no sense. I saw them falling no more than a few minutes ago. What the hell did that sand do to me?

He retraced his steps to the room with the broken Time Turners, and noted that they appeared to have been replaced. He pulled one out of the case. If I go back an hour, I should be able to figure out what happened.

Nothing happened. The sand fell, but the familiar feeling from when Hermione had taken him back in time to save Buckbeak and Sirius was missing . . . I've gotta find out if Hermione made it . . . . He was nearing a panic. He headed for the other door in the room.

The door opened into the same damned circular room, which began to spin once more. "Argh!" he yelled. "I just want to find them and get us out of here!" The room stopped spinning, a single door before him. He wrenched it open and staggered through. It looked like it might be the direction that would lead him out. Maybe he'd find the others along the way.

No sign of his friends could be seen.

In fact, there was no sign of anyone living, anywhere he'd been so far.

He made it to the Atrium, which led him to another shock. It had undergone a major amount of design work since he'd headed into the bowels of the place. When did they have the time to install the velvet rope maze? he wondered. And where THE FUCK did everyone go?

He realised that he had no Floo powder available, so he couldn't Floo to Hogwarts or Hogsmeade. Looks like the Knight Bus, then. He shrugged. I need to find out where everyone is.

He stepped into the elevator and rose to the surface, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. When it reached the surface, he stepped out into a personal nightmare.

He wanted to look around, but the large squad had his attention. He reacted immediately, since their clothing was dark and their faces covered. "STUPEFY!" he yelled, trying to run behind the garbage tip.

He was unsuccessful.

He awoke suddenly, but didn't move. Where am I, and how do I escape? He tried to stretch out his senses, but all he could hear were soft mechanical beeps and whistles.

. . . the hell? What would Death Eaters be doing with anything Muggle in their homes?

"You're safe, young man," a woman's voice said from beside him. "They had to stun you before you disappeared into the city of London and really got lost."

"Where am I?" He opened his eyes to see a sterile white room, with a very attractive woman somewhere in her twenties holding a small box and a tiny salt shaker. The salt shaker made an odd warbling noise as she waved it at him.

"Starfleet headquarters in San Francisco," she replied. "You were brought here to bring you up to speed, and make sure that you're healthy. I can see signs of malnutrition."

"Up to speed on what, and how do I get back to England? Hermione and the rest might die in Voldemort's hands! They might already be dead!"

"Humour me, young man. What year is it?"

"It's June 18th, 1996. Why do you ask?" He was more than a little worried.

"Because for me it happens to be June 18th, 2358, by your reckoning."

He awoke some time later, his voice hoarse. "Are you all right now?" the Healer asked

"I don't know. How in hell do I verify that this isn't some really impressive illusion?"

"You think you might be in a holographic suite?" she asked with some curiosity.

"No, an illusion set by Death Eaters. You know, magic?"

She raised an eyebrow. "As in pointing your finger and casting a ball of fire at someone?"

"Well, it's more of a wand."

"But still - if you promise not to hurt me with it, will you show me what you're talking about?"

"There's -" he started, thinking about the Reasonable Restriction for Underage Magic, or whatever the statute's name was, but then he realised that he could use it to be found. "I promise not to hurt you in any way with my demonstration."

She opened a drawer. He could see his glasses and the prophecy globe in there, along with his wand. That startled him. They'd left him the globe and his wand? And how could he see?

"We fixed your eyes," she said as he picked up his glasses. "When we realised that you needed those glasses and weren't allergic to any of our treatments for your myopia."

"What's that going to cost?" he asked.

"That's not a problem. It was an easy procedure - ridiculously so - so I'm not worrying about it."

He held his wand. It felt right, but there was only one way to find out. He aimed at a stool in the room. "Wingardium Leviosa!" he intoned, and the stool rose into the air.

"Amazing! I heard that someone had invented a personal tractor beam once, but -" She pulled out a small block and unfolded it slightly. It warbled as she passed it along the length of the wand. "Amazing! Wood from a holly tree and a bird feather! How . . . never mind. The answer is undoubtedly magic."

Harry was stunned. This was an honest reaction from this woman. She was obviously a Muggle, but how had a noisemaker been able to tell her what - "What kind of feather?"

"Some bird. It's not in the tricorder's database, though."

"Not surprised. It's a phoenix feather."

Her eyes appeared to widen so much that Harry began to wonder if it was possible to actually have one's eyes fall out of their head.

The admiral strode into the room to find the young man talking to the Doctor. "Hello, I'm Admiral Wynd Jaaymeson. They thought I might be best to brief you on things, considering the fact that you came forward with your wand."

"You know what it's for?" the boy asked, agog. "The doctor didn't."

"Oh yes. They aren't common any longer, but what you call magic is known these days to some. In fact, it's what led us to develop some of our more interesting technology. Most of what you can do with your wand, we can do with a bit of technology."

"How did I get here?"

"Actually, that's what I'd like to know. We searched the historical records for you, and had some trouble, but what we did find was even more troubling."

"I hope I didn't do something wrong by coming here."

"We don't know, but by how you mean it, no, you did nothing wrong. I can't tell you what we learned just yet, but I can tell you that there are records from after the date that you told the doctor. So you'll be returning to your own time at some point, but how you do so is what's causing the confusion."

"Why?"

"Well, you're significantly older than the ten you are right now -"

"TEN? I was a little over a month away from sixteen when I . . . when this . . . GAH!"

"I've never heard of time travel making one younger, but it's not exactly something we have a large body of knowledge about. We still can't unlock all of the records in London's Ministry building. Believe me, we'd love to see what was in the Department of Mysteries."

"You know about -"

"It's part of why I was the one chosen to talk to you. We know about the existence of magic, as I said. As you can judge by what hasn't turned grey on the job, I've got red hair. Perhaps you might have known someone with the name Weasley?"

"You're a Weasley?" Harry asked excitedly. "From who?"

"Based on the era you're from, would you recognise the name William? Had a lot of brothers, and one sister?"

Harry grinned. "So you descended from Bill? I'm glad to see that the Weasleys survived in some way. Ron's one of my best friends. Don't know Ginny as well as I'd like -" He paused and scowled. "And I never will now, will I? Even if I return, I'm going to be so much older than them, won't I?"

"I can't tell you that. I can tell you that you'll be older than your current physical age. Don't ask, I can't say, both for temporal security reasons, and honestly, because I don't know."

Admiral Jaaymeson found himself intrigued by the way that the young man relaxed somewhat at the "I don't know" comment. Gives credence to his statement about being older than he looks. An almost-eleven year old would get sulky. He looked a bit perturbed until I said that I don't know, and was even calming when I said there were security reasons.

"I'm curious about something, sir," Harry said. "Who were those guys who were outside the Ministry building when I came out?"

"London police. They registered an alarm in the Ministry building after hours. There was no signature of any sort to explain how you got in there - not even the trace of Apparition, I think it was called? You were suddenly there. And then you came out."

"Apparation," Harry said absently. "So the masks and dark clothes were for their protection, not knowing what exactly was coming out?"

"Precisely."

Something struck Harry. "Wait a second! They can technologically track magic now?"

"Well, we can tell that it's happened, and a few other things. Our technology takes advantage of quantum uncertainties, much like magic does. I'm what you'd call a . . . what was it . . . a 'Squeed?'"

"Squib," Harry replied with a laugh. "So your parents can cast spells?"

"Yeah. I went into Starfleet rather than the family business."

The two talked for a while longer, with Harry being brought up to speed in regards to magic and current technology. Something had happened that had caused the wall between the worlds to fall, although Wynd wouldn't explain what, and rather than the expected stringing up or burning of witches and wizards, the non-magical people began to study what the wizards did, and found ways of mimicking or replicating those effects. This had, in turn, led to the wizards finally breaking through their complacency, and that had been the dawn of the new peaceful age that they were currently enjoying. Yes, there were wars out in space, but they had largely managed to quell that on Earth and the human colonies. There was even a nearby colony of New Londinium made up largely of wizards and witches.

"Would it be possible for me to join this Starfleet?" Harry finally asked after he'd been given the quick history lesson.

"Honestly, I suspect that it's the only way that you'll get home, Harry," the Admiral replied.

He was given access to terminals and such to begin learning, and he startled everyone in how quickly he learned things. "The only real way to describe the difference is to describe the old me as if . . . well, my thoughts moved as if I were swimming through treacle in comparison, now that I have a difference to compare it to," he explained to one of the doctors who asked him. "Now that I'm here, I don't seem to have that problem. And the spells I've cast seem to have more power to them."

"You mentioned this Voldemort person," Admiral Jaaymeson said when this was relayed to him. "That scar was a connection to him. Is it possible that it might have been more true than anyone suspects - that he was draining your magic and life force to keep himself alive? It might explain your increase in energy and ability to think better."

"Wouldn't surprise me, to be honest. I may never know. What's going to be done with me once I'm up to speed?"

"Well, at the age you appear to be, we'd have you in school, but I suspect that we'll see about getting you a test to enter Starfleet Academy. I have a strong feeling that you'll do well."

He was sent to the New Londinium colony to finish his magical training, learning more than he would have thought possible. They verified for him that with Voldemort dead in the past - verified by the records that they had been able to salvage - the drain on his magic and thoughts was gone.

He took to his studies like Hermione did - reading everything he could get his hands on. They tsk'ed his Potions knowledge, but when he explained the way he'd been taught, they worked out a method to bring him up to speed.

No one could explain the loss of five years of his age - or, for that matter, why it seemed to have been time travel to exactly 362 years in the future. (To the second, from what they could tell.) His magical core was that of a sixteen year old (by the time that he reached New Londinium, his birthday had passed), so they taught him as such.

What truly amused him was finding out the history of the family that he lived with on New Londinium. Their last name was MacTavert, but it seemed that about three hundred and forty years earlier, one Dudley Dursley had thrown his wife and daughter out of the house when it was discovered that the young girl was magical. This family had been descendants of that daughter, and had actually petitioned to foster him while on New Londinium, unknowing of the connection during their petition.

Before he'd been there five months, he had reached the point that Hogwarts would have trained him to. He continued to learn, since the magical world had exploded, educationally speaking, since the secrecy statutes had fallen in the early 21st century. He was taught an amusing trick that a handful of magically adept who had joined Starfleet had learned - he learned to tune a phaser so that he could cast some of the spells that current technology still couldn't mimic, turning it into a secondary wand.

With a number of high level Divination experts nearby, he also finally listened to the prophecy orb. "They were protecting this?" one of them scoffed when they heard ". . . the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches . . . born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies . . . and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not . . . and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives . . . the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies . . ."

"What do you mean?" Harry asked.

"Obviously this referred to you. You have some ability, or knowledge, or something, that will allow you to permanently defeat this Dark Lord of yours. It's vague though. It could have been anyone who was born near the end of July -"

"- or possibly September, given that 'Sept-' means seven in Latin -" someone interjected, but received dirty look from the original speaker.

"- July, with parents who defied him in some way. Dumbledore's socks, that could be anyone, since anyone can defy someone, even if the person being defied doesn't know it!" He shook his head. "I assume that your scar is the mark referred to, and this power that he knows not? Could be anything. For all we know, you return to the past and land a shuttlecraft on his chest! I doubt he'd know what one of them is."

"The 'neither can live' section is weird," the interrupter said. "I suspect that they were referring to not being able to get on with your life while you're worrying about a murdering psychopath. Either that or you're an undead with the ability to fool every sensor known to the Federation. I rather suspect that last one as being unlikely," he finished with a grin.

"I hope so," Harry replied, laughing. "So Dumbledore kept this from me without reason, basically?"

"How can you be sure it was Dumbledore?" the first speaker asked.

"'S.P.T. to A.P.W.B.D.', and on the next line it reads 'Dark Lord and (?)Harry Potter'. Not sure who the S.P.T. is, although I suspect it might be our Divinations teacher, since that would explain why he hired a fraud for the position. But those five initials can only be Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore. So he knew, and never told me. I suspect that he was grooming me for something or other. If I ever return, I'll find out from him."

He was amused by the grilling he received, when it was realised that he had personally known the man who was now invoked even more than Merlin was.

By the time he left New Londinium with a permanent invitation to consider the MacTavert home as family, he had been awarded certifications in all of his Hogwarts core subjects, and was given hints that he should probably think about going for Masteries in several subjects when he returned to the planet.

2. Chapter 2

Sorry for the delay - between a visit to the grandkids who live in another state, and getting back to work, I forgot to post this chapter. Hoping to get onto a more regular schedule. (With luck, every Friday. No promises, though.)

Starfleet Academy

"You've all had a chance to get used to the controls," the instructor said. "Today's the first time you get to sit in a simulator and try flying a shuttle. The experience will be everything that a real shuttle flight would be, except that it will be significantly harder to get yourself killed. A crash in a real shuttle will tend to kill or cripple you. A crash in these ends the simulation."

Harry slid into his own simulator and smiled. "I've wanted to fly again," he murmured.

"Well, here's your chance," the instructor said into his machine. "Take off when ready."

He did the proper checklist - hull sealed, engines good, and all the rest - and then looked at his flight plan. Smiling, he powered up the shuttle and was airborne. I'm scared of when they give us a hard one, he thought as he 'landed' his simulator. After going through the proper shut down sequence, he exited the simulation, to discover he was the last of his class to exit.

"Damn, it must have been an interesting crash if it took this long to pull you from the simulator," one of his classmates quipped. "Waiting for the smoke to clear?"

Harry was confused. "That was an easy flight. I've done tougher. Why would I have crashed?"

"Bullshit!" another one cried out. "Everyone crashed!"

"Except, it appears, for Cadet Potter," the instructor said, exiting the control room. "Perfect flight, in fact. I'd ask if you had flown one of these before, but this shuttle design is available only to Starfleet, and I know something of your history."

As class was let out, the instructor called to Harry. "Mr Potter? A moment, please." Harry stepped to attention before the instructor, saluting. "At ease. I want you to follow me. A few of our other teachers at Starfleet want to see your abilities, so we're dropping you into another simulation. We'll beam onto a holodeck simulation, and go from there. It will seem as if we have beamed into Starbase 1."

"Yes sir. When do we leave?"

"Right now, if you don't have another class to go to." Harry nodded that he was free. "Excellent. Commander Whitefern to Starfleet Academy - begin simulation."

The two appeared on the platform of what Harry knew the Starbase looked like. "Good simulation, sir. I love holodeck technology."

"It is fun, isn't it?" Whitefern answered with a grin. "Shall we head for a shuttle?" A few minutes later had Harry seated in the pilot's seat of a Starfleet speed shuttle. "You'll find your flight plan in the computer already."

Harry did the checklist once more and then checked the flight plan. "Interesting" he murmured. "Checking my reflexes, I guess." He perused it one more time to commit it to memory before he tapped the comm panel. "Shuttle Gagarin-SB1 to Starbase 1, permission to launch."

"Permission granted, Gagarin. Enjoy your flight."

"Thank you. Launching now. Gagarin out." The shuttle gently lifted and he slid toward the shuttle doors, since opening the giant door that allowed starships to enter and exit was simply ridiculous. Once in open space and en route to where he could enter warp, he looked to Commander Whitefern. "Permission to ask a question, sir?"

"Ask away, and don't worry about asking during this flight. If you've got something to say, then say it."

"Thank you, sir. Is real space as beautiful as this simulation makes it seem? Does . . . when I look down on Earth for real for the first time, am I going to feel as awe-filled as I do right now?"

"Son, I can honestly say that the feeling of awe has never gone away for me, and I've been in Starfleet since I was sixteen."

"Good, because I can't say that I'd be happy with looking at that and thinking 'Ho hum', y'know? Uh, sir?"

"I know exactly what you mean."

Harry looked down at his panels. "Might want to hold on, sir. If this flight plan is correct, then we're in for a bumpy ride." With that, he punched the controls, and they shot into warp for a few seconds, coming out above Jupiter. "Merlin's balls," Harry breathed. "It's amazing." He shook his head and scowled, not noticing the Commander's amused smile at his epithet.

Harry's flight was amazing for both of them. He rocketed around moons in a tight pattern, once avoiding one of the gigantic lightning bolts that jumps from planet to inner moons. He exploded up from the gravity well of the gigantic body and shot toward the asteroid belt. He entered it at speed, noting the Commander's slightly worried look, but the flight plan called for a specific speed. He was to fly through the entire width at the highest speed he could manage. At the speeds he was travelling, the likelihood of collision was much higher than usual, but he avoided the heavenly bodies as if they weren't there.

Shooting out the other side, he brought the ship to a stop, as the flight plan called for. "How did I do, Commander?"

Commander Whitefern's eyebrows were near his hairline. "I've only ever seen one other person fly that well, Cadet, and he wasn't a first year student when he did it. I think we'll check on a few other things, but you're likely getting a free pass from most of the flying classes. Bring us home."

"Yes sir." Harry tapped a few buttons and opened the comm link. "Shuttle Gagarin-SB1 to Starbase, requesting permission to approach and land."

"Come on in, Gagarin. Good flying, by the way."

"Thank you. Gagarin out." He brought the ship into warp and back out again, some distance away from the base.

"Interesting. Most students try to reappear as close to Starbase 1 as they can, but you came out of warp some four hundred thousand kilometres away. Why is that?"

"Begging your pardon, sir, but it's kinda dumb to come out of warp that close if you don't have a clear picture of exactly what's nearby. If I knew for a fact that the area was completely clear, I could probably have dropped us right on their doorstep."

Once they had landed, the Commander turned to him. "That is one of the smoothest landings I've ever felt, son. I didn't realise we'd landed until I heard you shutting the ship down."

"I look forward to flying one of these shuttles for real."

Commander Whitefern grinned at him. "Care to end the simulation?"

"Computer, end program." Nothing happened. "Uh, sir? I don' think I have proper permissions to end the program."

"What error message did the computer give you?"

"None, sir."

"Think about it, son. Follow me while you think." Harry followed while he thought about what the Commander had said. I should have gotten an error message, something like 'You do not have authorisation to end this program' or something like that. That means -

Harry realised what that meant as he entered the room where several other Starfleet personnel sat. They rose to their feet and started clapping. "How'd it feel to fly a shuttle for the first time?" Admiral Jaaymeson asked.

"Amazing, even if I didn't know I was doing it."

"He's the best flier I've seen since Paris went through here. Probably in Admiral Sulu's league," Whitefern said.

"High praise indeed!" He looked to Harry. "Sulu was the only navigator ever to perform what he called a 'Bootlegger's Reverse' in a starship. I've got no idea what a bootlegger was, but that is one of the most amazing moves I've ever seen - and I can only see it in recordings, because anyone who tried it since then ended up damaging their ship."

"Does the current design of the ships allow for such a thing?" Harry asked. "It could be that the technology was better suited for it during his time. And if I may, sir, what is a 'Bootlegger's Reverse' manoeuvre?"

"You basically spin the ship on its axis and return in the direction you came. The thing is, you're still accelerating when you do it. None of this stopping and spin - you stress the hull like mad to do it."

"Sounds similar to a Wronski Feint," he mused. At the amused looks he got from the teachers in the room, he explained. "It was largely used to plough a fellow Seeker into the turf. You'd head down at the ground at top speed and pull up at the last possible second. My feet tended to brush the grass, to be honest."

"Given that I could probably have touched one of those asteroids we manoeuvred around, I can believe it," Whitefern said with a laugh.

Enterprise

Ensign Potter touched the chime to the Counsellor's quarters. "Come in, Ensign," came the melodic voice of Deanna Troi.

"Well, I'm here," he said with a small smile. "I'll admit that I'm not used to talking about my feelings with anyone."

"If it works for you - which it seems to have so far," she said, "then it's not really a problem. I've noticed that you've spent a lot of time on the holodeck with a program you named Hogwarts? Is that part of how you do stress relief?"

He blushed slightly. "I built it so that I could see my friends again. I know I return to my original time at some point - Admiral Jaaymeson told me so shortly after I arrived - but I don't know when I'll return. There's some ugly crap showing up just after I disappeared, and it spilled into the non-magical world. I don't expect that any of my closest friends will be alive when I return."

"Why not? They must be fairly well skilled. The six of you took on a dozen well trained adults."

"I expect that was more that they were startled and the fact that the Death Eaters are used to people just rolling over and dying while screaming for mercy from the inhuman dogs who don't know the meaning of the word."

"My usual response here would be something inane like 'You don't sound happy with them,' but that much is obvious. What makes these . . . 'Death Eaters' be like this?"

"Ever study the period I'm from? The period before me, actually, called the Second World War. Adolf Hitler and his policies and beliefs? Same sort of idiots. If you weren't a 'pureblood' wizard, then you weren't really worthy of living. My friend Hermione was called a 'Mudblood' by the son of one of the 'scions' of the wizarding world."

Deanna winced. "I don't have to have grown up in your wizarding world to hear that as an insult. 'Dirty blood.'"

"The funny thing is, they were being run by a man - well, thing, after that ritual - who was exactly the type of person that they were sent out to kill. His mother had a relationship with a non-magical man, who left as soon as he discovered that she was a witch. Don't know the full story, so I won't judge a dead man."

"Let's get back to your friends. You mentioned a 'Hermione' by name, and just now you blushed slightly."

He thought for a moment. "Maybe it would be easier if we went to a holodeck and I showed you my friends as I saw them. You'd probably glean more about my thoughts from seeing that than you would from simply hearing me talk about them."

"Agreed. Computer, what is the nearest available holodeck?"

"The nearest available holodeck is Holodeck 6."

"Mark it as in use by the ships' Counsellor, and prepare to run program -" She turned and faced Harry.

"- Hogwarts 1."

"- Hogwarts 1." When the computer acknowledged her, she gave full attention to Harry again. "Why that specific one?"

"It's easiest to get you introduced to everyone, to be honest. It's the parts of the school that I know - and that's a lot of it - and it contains the people that I know, and some who look like their counterparts, but I've no idea of their personalities." He grimaced. "And a couple I'm sure that I made worse than they really are."

"Perhaps not. You seem honest about your leanings regarding these people, so the computer has likely lessened their worst tendencies that you had originally programmed in, which would likely bring them greater in line with who they truly are."

"Possibly. One thing, though - they'll see us as being their age." She simply nodded.

The doors to Holodeck 6 opened to show a beautiful sunny day. "Begin program," Harry said once the doors had closed.

"Harry!" Ron called, running toward him with Hermione and Ginny in hot pursuit. "Where've you been?"

"Dumbledore gave me permission to go into Hogsmeade to meet a student who's thinking of coming here. Guys, meet Deanna Troi. Miss Troi, meet Ron Weasley, a huge Quidditch fan and Keeper on the Gryffindor team. His sister Ginny, the cute redhead of the two, plays Seeker for now, and isn't as much as a nut about the game as Ron is. The brunette who's nearly vibrating into another dimension waiting for the chance to ask you questions about where you went to school is Hermione Granger."

"Computer, freeze program," Deanna said. "A possible student? What's Quidditch?"

"Actually, if you mention that you went to Salem Academy and don't know Quidditch or care about Quodpot, Ron will largely leave you alone about it. As for Hermione? Just tell her that Salem really follows the same kind of curriculum that Hogwarts offers."

"Begin program."

They spent a pleasant amount of time in the Holodeck getting to know the holo-versions of his friends. When they left and returned to her office, she smiled. "How long have you been in love with Hermione Granger?"

He looked more than a little startled. "I wasn't aware that . . . then again, she's the one that I find that I'll miss most about the past. What made you say that, though?"

"I was watching how her avatar reacted to how close to you I was hanging. You didn't consciously program her to glare at other girls who get close to you?"

"Definitely not consciously." He shook his head. "Definitely wishful thinking, though. She's with Ron, if they finally got past their odd method of flirting."

She looked at him for a long moment. "I'll understand if you choose not to answer, but . . . have you ever made any programs that were of a more . . . intimate nature?"

He laughed even as he blushed. "Actually, yeah. But would you believe that I couldn't go through with it? I couldn't run those programs, because - it's not like they'd ever know - but I can't get past the thought that it would disrespect the lady in question."

Deanna had a soft smile. "Might this lady have had bushy brown hair?"

He grinned. "I refuse to answer on the grounds that it's probably pretty damned obvious." She laughed in response, but frowned as she felt his mood change. "It doesn't matter anyway. She and her family were killed - no bodies ever found - after an explosion that rocked Oxford. She lived in Oxford."

"No bodies were found? Maybe she survived and slid permanently into your wizarding world before the wall between them fell permanently."

"I doubt it. Hers was one of far too many where they said 'no bodies found'. The blast apparently vaporised a good part of Oxford, completely annihilating the campus of the university. Thousands died. It's not like the Enterprise jumped back in time to save their lives. When I learned that about Hermione, I mourned her and moved on."

"Yet you've had no girlfriends."

"Given my physical age, who am I going to date? Most of the people my age are cadets at the Academy. I'm mentally about twenty-six, even if the body is about twenty or twenty-one."

"To be honest, you don't let people get too close to you."

"Because I lose friends. My first friends are lost in time, and any of the friends I made at the Academy are scattered throughout the fleet by now. When am I going to see them again? Best to stay lonely. I've spent the majority of my life that way, so I'm used to it."

"A very lonely life."

"If I'm going back to the twentieth century to deal with Voldemort, then also likely to be a short one." At her raised eyebrow, he continued. "I have every intention of living a long life. I am not going to throw my life away recklessly. However, I suspect it will be short." He smiled wryly. "Another reason for not getting overly involved with girls. I don't want to leave behind someone with more of a reason to mourn than others have."

She shook her head. "You are probably the most optimistic fatalist I have ever met."

"Helps when you know something of your future. I'll be returning to my original time someday. Best not get too connected here or make too many friends to leave behind."

"Too late," she replied with a smile.

3. Chapter 3

How about I publish the ACTUAL Chapter three - not the much later chapter that I'M STILL EDITING?! Gah!

Voyager - Year 1

Lieutenant Harry Potter chimed the captain's doorbell as soon as he was at her ready room. He'd just gotten on board and dropped all his things in his quarters and had headed to her as soon as he'd gotten the message requesting he see her soonest. Janeway's supposed to be a good captain. I look forward to serving on Voyager.

The door opened to show him a striking woman. "Welcome aboard, Lieutenant. Glad to have you here."

"Thank you, Captain. I'm glad to be here."

"Now that you're here, Lieutenant, I need to call Admiral Jaaymeson. Apparently you being on this ship allows certain clearances to be relaxed. Do you have any idea what this might be about?"

"Yes, Captain, but I'd rather not say until the Admiral either confirms or denies my suspicion."

"Good thinking. You'll go far with an attitude like that. Computer, connect me with Admiral Jaaymeson and put him on my large screen."

A moment later, the familiar face of a Weasley descendant appeared on the screen, but not before the computer asked Janeway to authorise a secure connection. "Ah, Katherine, I was waiting for this call. Lt Potter. Good to see you on board the Voyager. You're there for a reason."

"Sir?" he asked, more than a little confused.

"I have some pictures for you, which is why I insisted on the secure connection. Note that this first one was taken during the spring of 1998, by a Colin Creevey."

Harry stiffened at that, and nearly fainted when he saw the picture of himself in a Starfleet uniform, Looking roughly the age he was right now, standing on the Hogwarts Quidditch pitch. Hermione Granger stood next to him, his arm around her shoulder in a very friendly manner. Behind them was a shuttle.

"Nobody had ever located this picture before, but when you arrived, we did a system-wide search, and found this in a private database. Once we checked that picture out, we extended the search and found the following in what was, for the day, a highly secure governmental database. Why the data was still around, we don't know."

The picture that came up was Voyager in orbit around Earth, with two other ships of apparent Federation design near her. One of them appeared to be the ship he was standing in front of in the first picture. The other was unknown. The ship from the Hogwarts picture, as Harry was already thinking of it, appeared to be powering up weapons. The photo appeared to have been taken by an orbiting satellite, which Harry found strange, but didn't question.

"This picture came to us while the Intrepid class was still on the drawing board, to use a twentieth century colloquialism. The time stamp is roughly concurrent with when you are photographed with your arm around that attractive young lady."

"Well, isn't this a fine mess," Harry Potter said as he looked out over the remains of the Caretaker's array.

"You have made an enemy this day," the Kazon Maj declared to the captain. Harry kept himself silent rather than snark the way he would have liked to.

As the screen went back to the view of space, Captain Janeway asked, "I recognise that tilt of your head, Lieutenant. You have something to say?"

"Mere snark at the Maj, Captain, nothing more."

"We could all use a laugh right now. Let's hear it."

"It wasn't really all that funny, but I was basically thinking something along the lines of him saying 'I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blo-o-o-o-ow your house down!' That's all." He heard soft snickering amongst the people on the bridge, including from the captain.

"Yes, well, I'm pleased that you have the ability to censor yourself when necessary," she said, the amusement plain in her voice.

"I'd have been dead at twelve if I couldn't," he replied. "The first time through twelve, that is."

"Let's get underway for the Alpha Quadrant, and then I'd like a meeting in my ready room with all upper staff of both Starfleet and the Maquis. Mr Paris, I'll want you there as well."

"Yes Captain," Paris said, a mild mocking tone to his voice.

A few minutes later, Harry found himself at a table with Chakotay, Commander Tuvok, B'Elanna Torres, Tom Paris, Captain Janeway, and someone named Seska who put his teeth on edge. "We need to integrate the crews," Janeway said. "Suggestions? And as long as we keep the profanity down, you have permission to speak freely."

There was a moment of silence before Harry shrugged and said, "Personally, if you don't have your heart set on Commander Tuvok as your Number One, I'd suggest Mr Chakotay."

"Explain," Tuvok said.

"Simple. Half of our crew is Maquis now, by simple requirement that we need them to survive, and vice versa. What better way to integrate them than by having a man known for his command skills take the job. As long as Captain Janeway listens to him, that should quell a lot of arguments."

"It will not stop them all, Lieutenant."

"I know that, sir. But if the captain is seen relying on one of the Maquis for advice and guidance, it should help. Some will say that he's gone to the other side. That's always going to happen. You'll never get one hundred percent support."

"You sound as if you have some knowledge of that," Tom Paris said.

Harry snorted. "Intimate knowledge, unfortunately. Part of the crap that threw me forward into the twenty-fourth century. That's not relevant, though, Mr Paris."

"Since you seem to be on a roll, Lieutenant, any further suggestions?" Captain Janeway asked. "I see the influence of Jean Luc in your reference to my first officer."

"Sorry 'bout that. Habit. Chances are, you're going to need good pilots in the next two to three years. I'd recommend that you make Mr Paris's commission a real one and put the two of us in charge of training up new helmsmen. You grabbed him as a backup to me, rather than have me on pilot duty 24/7. Make that official."

"You're trusting our lives to him?" Chakotay asked with a growl.

"According to the place I came from, I'm a highly disturbed attention seeking boy who makes up stories to scare people rather than a crack pilot. Personally, I think Starfleet screwed up big time when they kicked Paris out. He might be a different man today if they'd punished him properly, rather than drumming him out for doing the right thing. Drum him back to cadet and make him work his way up again or something. I suspect it was his father that pushed for the expulsion, though." He shook his head. "I respect your ability to lead, sir, but I am not going to judge Tom Paris based on what everyone else says I should. I'm going to judge him on our interactions. You may hate him for his Starfleet problems, and then for betraying you. What are you going to do if oh … say … Seska betrays you and us?" He looked to the woman who bothered him. "Not saying you will, by the way. Just an example."

"I understand," she said in a tone that seemed to echo her words. For some reason, that put Harry even more on edge.

"My point is that not everyone has the same purpose for being in the Maquis. He was looking for a job. You were looking for patriots. I understand both sides. But you hired him for his ability to fly, did you not?"

"Don't take that tone with me, Starfleet," Chakotay warned.

"Yes, yes, I understand that yours are bigger and made from duranium. Doesn't answer the question, and in the long run, unless you mutiny, you don't make the decision. We need to work together. Unless you've got a more kick-ass pilot than Tom still alive, we need him to help train up the next group of pilots."

"If I might ask," Seska asked with a confused look, "what were you referring to when you said that they were bigger and made of duranium?"

The others around the table chuckled, save a blushing Harry and a scowling Chakotay. "Sorry. I was being a bit crude."

B'Elanna jumped in. "Starfleet there was chopping Chakotay off at the knees in a dick-waving contest, saying that Chakotay was acting like his testicles are made of duranium." Seska looked confused for a moment more as she assimilated the knowledge and then laughed.

Harry turned to Chakotay. "I really do understand where you're coming from with the Maquis. I was part of an underground group in my original time. We were fighting an insane man who wanted to rule the world and kill anyone he didn't consider 'pure'. I was on what our government considered 'the wrong side'. Sound familiar?"

"We're not going to be buddy-buddy," Chakotay growled. It was clear that he understood the message Harry was trying to get across, and was having none of it.

"I doubt we'll ever get past saying hello to each other in a civil tone, to be honest, but we're going to have to work together if we want to get home. Right now, it looks like about seventy years worth of travel will get us there. None of the Federation's starships have ever survived that long. We need each other if we're ever going to get home. Snarking isn't gonna cut it. We'll need Ms Torres in Engineering, for example."

He smiled at her. "The last person I heard of that could make an engine do what you do was a Montgomery Scott, if even half of what I've heard about him was true. We'll need that kind of 'on the fly' kind of work, I'm betting."

He suddenly blushed again. "Sorry, Captain. Getting a little too into my subject."

"You make some excellent suggestions. I will come back to you all later as my decision is made."

"I'll go to the brig for as long as you want, Captain, but I stand by my decision to shoot to kill with Seska. She was working with the Kazon, and shooting her before she could transport out to be with them may have saved us a lot of heartache in the future." Harry said to Captain Janeway as he was being debriefed in the captain's ready room. Chakotay and Tuvok were there as well, as was Tom Paris.

"I'm a little worried that you're too quick to shoot to kill. We prefer to leave our opponents alive," she replied. She was sharp in her tone, but didn't seem too angry.

"Permission to speak freely, Captain?" he asked. When she nodded, he began. "When I came from, I was seeing something very similar from my Headmaster at my school. The problem with being gentle with them in such a manner is that they see us as soft. Ask B'Elanna about how the Klingons would see such a manoeuvre. Remember what started the intense contempt that the Klingon's held us in? We let them go after defeating them. To them, you enslave a race you defeat. Where I came from, giving the Death Eaters a second chance taught them that there were no real consequences. The battle I was in that shot me forward was similar - we did non-lethal things to them and were continually fighting them, because they'd get up and come right back at us. I guarantee that Seska won't be coming back to cause us any further trouble, and if we give the Kazon her body, they might think twice about continuing to harass us." He sighed. "Look, I'm not happy about killing. I don't like it, but this incident should teach a lesson." He shook his head. "If it had been Carey, I'd have done the same thing, so Maquis/Starfleet doesn't enter into it."

"I'm not so sure about that, Lieutenant," Chakotay said sharply. "You've never liked Seska. You could just as easily have been using your position to deal with her permanently."

"The Commander outranks me and is within his rights to have me confined to the brig, am I correct, Captain?"

"Technically, you are correct, but I would prefer to keep you out of the brig."

"Ah, but Commander Chakotay would rather keep the slavering monster away from his Maquis. I might find an excuse to heinously murder more of them."

"Are you attempting to get me to throw you in the brig, Lieutenant?" Janeway asked.

"Not really, but it's a talk you're going to have to have with him. Right now, your two best pilots are people that he detests with a passion. If he has his way, I will be tried for the murder of . . . whatever she was to him."

Chakotay growled. "She was one of our crew."

"Was she? If I hadn't stopped her, she was going to head to the Kazon ship with a large amount of knowledge of Federation technology. Sounds to me like she was willing to give up everybody for her own comfort. Not someone I'd describe as 'one of us'."

"Mr Neelix?"

"Oh, just call me Neelix, Lieutenant!" the cheerful alien said to Harry. "What can I help you with? Perhaps some coffee?"

"Not right now, but you've managed to get right to the heart of why I wanted to speak to you. I'm doing this on my own time, and without the knowledge of the captain. In my time, they might have said, 'The views expressed are not necessarily those of the management.'"

"Is something wrong?" If anything, Neelix was mercurial. He had gone from quite cheerful to overly worried.

"It's in regards to your cooking," Harry said. "I'm going to be harsh, and then offer you a solution."

"If it helps, I'm all ears, I think your saying is," Neelix said, now extremely intent on what Harry was about to say.

"To be blunt, Mr Neelix, from the point of view of humans, which comprise the majority of the crew, your cooking is not as edible as we would like." He held up a hand to forestall Neelix's comment, which was about to come from an opening mouth. "I think that the problem is coming from the fact that your taste senses are different from ours. You find it delicious, correct?" Neelix nodded. "Exactly. Both sides are at fault here, and I'm willing to help you in my off hours. I have cooked for humans before, and I can help you make things to human tastes."

"I'm sorry that the crew doesn't like my cooking. I have tried."

"I know, and they do too. They haven't wanted to hurt your feelings, because they like you. So do I. But . . . well, sometimes you have to cause a little pain to make things better for everyone."

"Like when my uncle had to his squidules operated on!" Neelix exclaimed. "Cheered him right up after that, but it certainly wasn't anything he or anyone else wanted to go through." He looked conspiratorially at Harry, as if Neelix's uncle might overhear. "The rest of us were pretty happy about the change in him too."

I will not ask what a squidule is, I will not ask what a squidule is . . . "When is a good time for me to begin helping you learn how to cook for humans? In return, I promise to see if I can learn how to cook for you, so that you don't always have to cook for yourself."

"My compliments to the chef, Neelix!" Tom Paris said. "This stew is delicious!"

"Thank your Mr Potter for that. He took me aside and explained about human taste buds. I appreciate that you didn't want to hurt my feelings, but . . . well, I would have changed sooner if I'd known.

"We're sorry for that, Mr Neelix," Captain Janeway said to him. "We're still so new to integrating everyone into one crew that we simply didn't wish to offend someone who was going out of his way to help us when he didn't have to."

"So did Lt Potter cook this?" Harry Kim asked.

The doors opened right then. "Did I make what?" He took a deep breath. "I was right! Leola root made a great counterpoint to the sweetness of the charmek leaves." He grabbed a plate of the stew and sat down in his usual place, away from the others and alone.

Harry Kim scowled for a moment as he watched everyone slowly return to their meals. He'd seen the entire exchange, and it bothered him. Potter seemed able to handle the duties, but also seemed very alone. He suddenly stood, plate in hand, and strode away from the table that Tom Paris was sitting at. "Mind if I join you, Lieutenant?"

"Sure you want to be seen with 'Wonder Boy Potter'?" Potter asked. "At least, that's what they've been snidely calling me since the Academy."

"I'm not going to be sitting with 'Wonder Boy Potter'. I hope to sit with someone who might be a friend some day." He knew he'd made the right decision when he saw a real smile cross the Lieutenant's face.

4. Chapter 4

Went back and edited the previous chapters. Added section breaks to all the chapters, and tossed in a small line about why Harry was called "Wonder Boy Potter'. You don't need to reread the chapters, but I thought a head's-up was good.

Voyager - Year 2

Potter and Chakotay had been stranded on a barely habitable moon for several days, and it had been a trying time for both of them - so much so that when they returned to the ship, Lt Potter turned himself into Captain Janeway for insubordination.

Chakotay talked to Janeway in her ready room after Potter had been sentenced to the brig. "Actually, I think that you should either negate his brig time completely, or lessen it dramatically. I've been riding him since we got stranded in this quadrant for something that I've come to realise he was right about - Seska. I'll tell him that as well. But it was the very offence he insisted on being sent to the brig for - insubordination - that got my head out of my ass, to be blunt about it."

"But he was insubordinate, by both his testimony and yours."

"What if that insubordination was specifically to cause the superior officer in question think about the reasons for his dislike of the insubordinate officer?"

"I suppose we'll have to ask the Lieutenant his intentions, then," Janeway said with a smile. She and Chakotay headed toward the brig.

As soon as they entered the brig, Lt Potter was on his feet and standing at attention. "Captain." he said.

"At ease, Lieutenant," she said. "You're in the brig."

"But I'm still an officer. I need to keep discipline, or else I'll develop bad habits that will need to be removed once I'm released. Something I should have remembered down on the planet."

"So you were insubordinate? You were not trying to shake Commander Chakotay from his dislike of you?"

"Depends on how you mean it, Captain. I was angry at him, and said things to him in a nasty manner. That was the insubordination. I was, however, hoping to shake him up just enough to get us to be able to work together until you got Voyager back to us."

"Which was the decider, in your opinion?" Janeway asked.

"A mixture. I was angry, as I said, but I needed his help. Call it fifty-fifty. Either way, I earned my sentence by not keeping my temper. There should have been a better way to get his attention."

"I admire your candour," Janeway said. "I also listen to recommendations from my first officer. That said, I am lowering your sentence to one week instead of a month, based on a recommendation from Commander Chakotay."

The captain found herself mildly amused by Lt Potter's frown. "Permission to speak freely, Captain?" he asked, to which she nodded. "What lesson does that teach if you do that? Have a really good excuse before you break the rules? I respectfully request that you reconsider lessening my sentence."

"I'll take that under advisement for next time, Lieutenant. For the moment, consider that you have one hundred and sixty-seven more hours in here. I will notify you if I take your recommendation and return you to the full month." Lt Potter nodded and then saluted. "At ease," she said with a small laugh.

She walked to the door and then stopped. "And in answer to the question you asked, I would have to say 'yes'. We don't want mindless drones here. The rules are not inflexible. They can't answer all questions. So yes, having a really good excuse before breaking the rules is a good thing. You just might be able to avoid punishment."

"I expect I'll see you in a week," Chakotay said as Janeway left. "At which point I will be apologising properly to you for my attitude."

"Then maybe my brig time is worth it, if I might end up with a new friend," Harry said.

"I must say that you impressed me with your insistence on doing brig time," Chakotay said.

"You might not be so happy or apologetic when you hear why I did it," was the response. At Chakotay's intrigued look, Potter continued. "First off, I wanted the other Starfleet people to think on some of the plans I've heard around the ship - the crews still aren't blended perfectly. Ever hear the phrase 'Don't do the crime if you can't do the time'? Yeah, I was angry at you, and went over the line, but I was pretty sure that I'd finally shock you out of your dislike of me and turn back into the guy that the Starfleet records said that you were."

"Good thinking," Chakotay said with a laugh. "That doesn't sound like all of your reasoning, though."

"It wasn't," Potter said. He pulled his wand from his sleeve and cast something. "Just to make sure we're not overheard. I've tuned it so that the ships sensors won't get through it either. But the other reason is simple. Have you heard the conversations around the ship? The people you led in the Maquis are actually starting to warm up to the Starfleet crew. They saw that the Captain is willing to throw one of her own people in the brig for talking back to one of the Maquis. That's helping to tear down the walls between our crews. Hell, spending a month in the brig would have been worth it if it meant that the Maquis and the Starfleet crews get friendlier with each other."

He dropped the spell while Chakotay thought. Suddenly, the man threw his head back and laughed. "You're all right, Mr Potter. I like the way you think."

"Thank you. Maybe we can pass each other in the hall now and not growl," was the reply, punctuated with a grin.

"Probably." After a short pause, Chakotay added, "But they're still bigger and made of duranium."

It was Potter's turn to laugh outrageously. When he caught his breath, he said, "The better I get to know you, the more I believe that."

"Mr Paris," Harry asked in a weary voice. "Can we just once go through one of these without the snide tone? It's nothing I can write you up for, or even want to, but I'm tired today, and don't want to say something I'll regret later."

"Nobody else seems to regret the nasty stuff they've said about me," Paris replied from the other console.

"They will, I'm sure of that. The worthwhile ones will actually apologise."

Paris raised his eyebrows at that. "Look," Harry continued, "I always thought you got a raw deal. Yeah, you shouldn't have covered it up, but you came forward and admitted it. So instead of busting you back down as far as possible or even forcing you through another year at the Academy, they drum you out. That teaches every other person paying attention that they should stick with the lies, rather than be honest. Nice to know you can trust all the newer officer cadets, right?"

"Like you?" Paris asked.

Harry blinked for a moment. He snorted once and then threw his head back and laughed. "Got me with that one! You're absolutely right, Mr Paris. I stay honest because I want someone to be proud of me."

"Anyone specific, or is it a generic thing?" The tone wasn't quite so mocking this time.

"Girl I knew back when," he said.

"Uh-oh, girlfriend stories."

"She wasn't my girlfriend, but she was one of my best friends. She'd be disappointed in me if I lied and cheated my way to a position of power. That would make me no better than the … psychopath we were fighting."

"Sounds like someone was editing himself," Tom said with a small grin.

"Good idea to, to make sure I don't slip in front of someone like, say, Captain Janeway, who can put my arse in the brig."

Tom laughed "Is this psycopath thing you're talking about from your time in the past?" he asked.

"Yeah. I'm actually getting a little nervous, because the pictures I saw from that time that show I returned home should have happened by now."

"Oh?" There was real interest in Tom's voice now.

"Yeah. There's a photo of me with my arm around her shoulder and an odd looking shuttle behind us. We don't have one like that right now - maybe you'd want to design it?" Harry asked with an impudent grin.

"You'd let me design a shuttle?" Tom asked in surprise.

"Why the hell not? You and I both love to fly, so we've both got ideas of the kind of things we'd like to fly." He snorted. "Just wait till we're on Earth in my time. I'll show you flying on a broom."

Tom Paris's eyebrows rose to his hairline, or tried to. "A broom? You're kidding me."

Harry pulled his wand and cast Lumos. "Nope. Remember, I'm one of those people that apparently led to the invention of some of the tech we use now. Not personally, but the fact that we can do things like Apparate and Floo and such led to those who can't cast magic trying to figure out ways to imitate them. In a number of cases, they improved the idea."

Paris was nodding. "Interesting. Not something commonly mentioned in the history lessons."

"Who wants to admit that they came up with a great idea because someone else thought of it first?" Harry replied.

"Good point." Tom looked over at Harry. "I'll be magnanimous and let you take credit for the new shuttle design when I invent it." The impudence was back, but there was a tone of humour that didn't have the snark to it now.

"I appreciate that, Mr Paris," Harry replied with a laugh. "I'll see if I can remember your name when it comes to the acceptance speeches," he added in a haughty tone.

The laughter that greeted the next shift surprised everyone.

"Lieutenant, you amaze me," the Doctor said. "You may be the only person in Starfleet who willingly comes to me for their yearly check-up."

"In my past, I learned that the doctors always win that argument, so why fight it?" Harry said with a smile. "Besides, unless you discover that I've got a terminal case of the creeping crud, it's not that much of a problem."

"No sign of crud, creeping or otherwise, Mr Potter, although your right shoulder worries me slightly. The connective tissues seem a little loose. As for your attitude in regards to doctors, you're right. We always win." he smiled. "If only I could convince Captain Janeway of that. She fights her check-up like everyone else seems to."

"Maybe we can talk to the Chief Engineer. She seems to have some ability with things like that. There's got to be a way to give you access to the rest of the ship. What happens if you can't have a patient moved, but they don't conveniently fall over on you here in Sickbay?"

"Finally, someone understands!" the Doctor said.

"Considering the number of times I ended up in the infirmary at my school? Magic can keep someone immobile, which helps, but the school's Healer was kept on her toes."

"I would love to meet this person and compare notes someday."

"With luck, and if B'Elanna can come up with something, you will. I expect any day now we'll be bouncing back to Earth in one way or another."

5. Chapter 5

I'm rather amused by some of the comments I'm getting about Chakotay. He might never have been my favorite character, but I'm making him likable, which some people thought impossible? (By the way, for those who know the origins of this story idea, they'll know why a Chakotay/Seven of Nine pairing is impossible. *grin*)

Voyager - Year 3

"How goes it on the Delta Flyer?" Harry asked into the apparently empty room. If not for the noise coming from the shell of the shuttle, he'd have assumed that the shuttle bay was empty. Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres popped their heads up out of the shell of the section they were in, making him snicker to himself, because they looked as if they had just been caught snogging, based on the surprised looks on their faces.

She spoke first. "We finally settled on tetraburnium for the Flyer's external skin, because it should give us the best ratio of weight and strength. Light enough to be useful, but tough enough to need Voyager's phasers to pierce."

"That's some of the hull material we've already got, right?" Harry asked.

"We're going to need it if we want this shuttle to stand up to things, Starfleet!" she barked at him.

He raised his hands. "I was just asking." He intentionally put on an over-the-top Lockhart attitude. "Remember, I might come across as this confident - and dare I say handsome? - Starfleet officer, but I'm still merely a ruggedly handsome 20th century human who got shunted forward." He posed dramatically, and wished he knew the spell that Lockhart had used to give his teeth that special shine.

She was the one to snicker this time. "I'm sorry for snapping at you. I'm still fighting with myself and wondering how the Maquis are doing."

"It's probably sacrilege for a Starfleet officer to say this, but I hope they're all right. I've read up on the conflict - I didn't live through a lot of what led to it, remember - and I probably would have been fighting alongside you. I'm used to having a government you thought you could trust turning on you." He sneered, but it was clear that it was not at either of them. "You were lucky. 'Maquis' were the foe for your government. Mine wanted me in prison or expelled from our wizarding world." He paused. "Ought to be interesting to see if Voldie has made a public appearance since I've been gone."

He shook his head. "That's neither here nor there. My real question is one of simple curiosity. How long before I get the second flight?"

"Second?" Tom Paris asked. "I'd figure as senior pilot on board, you'd likely get the right to fly her first."

"Yeah, but which one of us is going to know her inside and out, Tom? Who's going to know all her little quirks from having had the chance to run all the simulations, and will be better equipped to recover from them if needed?"

"You'd actually let me get the first flight?"

"I've already talked to Captain Janeway about it," he said. "Gave her just that reasoning as to why you should fly the Delta Flyer's maiden voyage."

"Why?" B'Elanna asked bluntly.

Harry thought for a long moment. "Can you guys take a break from this for a few minutes? The best way to explain a lot about me is to show you something."

Their eyes met and they appeared to talk with just their eyes. Simultaneously, they stood and brushed dust from their uniforms. "Lead on, MacDuff," Tom said.

"'Lay on, MacDuff, and damned be he who cries 'Nay, enough!''" Harry said, raising his hand into the air as he turned to leave. He heard a distinctly female snort of laughter behind him.

He led them to an empty holodeck, and pulled out an isolinear chip once the doors closed. A moment later, the scene changed to a Scottish countryside. "Computer, open picture Shuttle One in front of us." A moment later, the photograph that he had been shown when he was posted to Voyager appeared in the air before them.

"Damn, that's the Delta Flyer!" Tom said. "And pardon my saying it, but that's quite the babe you've got your arm around there."

"Pity she won't survive much past the photography on that picture. She and her parents, along with several thousand others, are vaporised on August 1, 1998, in Oxford."

B'Elanna surprised him by walking over and hugging him quickly. "Losing people you care for hurts. I'm sorry."

"I'll get to see her one last time, though," Harry said with a sad smile. "That photo proves it, since I'm in my Starfleet uniform." He turned to the two of them. "And that photo explains one more thing. I need to return to the 20th century, and I need Voyager to do it. If it were the Maquis who could have gotten me back to my right time, then I'd have joined them. I am a good little Starfleet drone because I need Starfleet to get me back. After I go back and kill Voldemort, I'm through. I'll visit her headstone - she'll have one because I'll pay for one - and then join her."

"Do you really think she'd want you to do that?" B'Elanna asked.

"No, she'd tell me to live. Why? It's bad enough that it took me 'til the 24th century to realise that I'd fallen in love with her somewhere along the way, but to know that she won't survive long after I finally see her again?" He shook his head. "'You'll find someone else,' they always say. I'm not so sure that's true. It makes the first one seem like she can be replaced."

"You need to tell her when you get back, you know," Tom said. "That you love her, I mean. The other is a bad idea."

"No, she's with my other best friend. That would just make her feel bad."

B'Elanna looked long and hard at the photograph hovering before them. "Computer, focus in on this section." She motioned with her hand around Harry's posterior.

"Checking out Harry's butt, B'Elanna?" Tom asked with amusement.

She ignored him as the computer enlarged that area. "Correct me if I'm wrong, Harry, but that looks like her hand on your butt there. And the way her fingers are, I'd say she's got a good grip on it. She ever do that to you before?"

"Uh, no," Harry replied, stunned.

"So," Tom said with a grin, "looks like you might be wanting a conversation with her anyway?"

"Looks like she'd die knowing you returned the feeling," B'Elanna said. "Sounds worthwhile to me."

"Oh-ho, look where you primates have gotten to now," said an amused voice that the crew of the Voyager had only ever heard in recordings from the Enterprise.

"Can I shoot him, Captain?" Harry Potter asked with annoyance.

"I welcome the attempt," Q said. "It would be trés amusing."

"Well, he did offer you the chance, Lieutenant. Are you ready for the consequences?"

"Couldn't be worse than listening to this git prattle on with his superiority talk." His wand shot from his sleeve and he yelled "Stupefy!"

To everyone's surprise - especially Harry's - the nigh-omnipotent being fell over backwards to the deck with a thud.

He was back on his feet a few moments later, staring at Harry. He then spun on Janeway. "Why didn't anyone tell me that you're a precursor race?"

"Maybe because it's none of your business?" Harry shot at him.

"Excuse moi," Q said loftily, "but precursors are the business of the Q Continuum. We must guide those races capable of transcending mortality into becoming proper examples of what it means to be omnipotent."

Harry was sitting at his console with a sour lemon look, flapping his fingers as if to imitate Q's talking. "Heard it before, shorty. Didn't like those jerks either."

"Wherever would you have heard such talk before?" Q asked in a disbelieving voice.

"Pureblood terrorists when I came from. Called themselves Death Eaters. Wanted to kill anyone who wasn't a pureblood - by their definition, mind you - or who helped the 'blood traitors'. Your rhetoric is just a different type of bigotry, Q. You just like playing with your victims, rather than just killing them mercifully."

"I'd like to talk with you later, Mr Potter," Janeway said through clenched teeth.

"Oh dear, you seem to have angered the captain of your ship!" Q said in his melodramatic way. "Whatever shall we do?"

"Well, my thought is to ignore you and keep course for the Alpha Quadrant, but you've undoubtedly got something far more annoying and potentially deadly in mind, as another of your . . . 'tests'."

Q laughed. "I was going to bother your captain for a while, but you intrigue me. Potter, was it? You're a sign of being a precursor race. We're supposed to guide you people into becoming one of us."

"We're after you," Harry said. "Wouldn't that make us the 'R'?"

"Aarr!" Harry Kim said from the science panel further up the bridge. "Pirates! Inter-universal pirates, making off with curvy wenches and drinking nebulas of rum! I like it!" When he noted that everyone was blinking at him in confusion, he said, "What? In Old Earth calendar, today's September 19th! It's Talk Like A Pirate Day!"

Harry Potter's head shot up, and then he started snorting his laughter.

"Excuse me!" Q interjected. "Omnipotent being here!"

Harry waved him off as completely irrelevant. "Hermione's birthday is Talk Like a Pirate Day?"

"Yeah!" Kim said. "One of the few holidays that really kept on through the centuries." His eyes twinkled. "I've seen a picture of that girl you left on Earth. Can you imagine that girl in pirate queen garb?" Potter stopped laughing suddenly, and his eyes glazed slightly. "Yeah. Enough to make you adjust the fit of your jib, I'd say." Harry Kim's eyes were twinkling madly, which was highly unusual for him.

"Hmph," Q snorted. He snapped his fingers and suddenly the crew were standing on a ship. He held Harry's wand. "You seem to be a second level precursor, since you don't need those cumbersome rituals any longer. But you do need a wand. So, I still get my fun and games." He took in Harry's thunderous look.

Harry pointed a finger at him. "Oh, he's pointing at me. Whatever shall I d-" He got not further because a red beam shot from Harry's finger and knocked him flat again.

His wand flew into his hand, and he growled "Finite Incantatem." To his surprise, they found themselves back on the bridge. As Q came back around, Harry pointed his wand at him. "Try anything more, Q, and I start getting nastier. How well will you heal when I blow off an arm or a leg? I've shown that I can hit you, and I'm tired of us humans being your playthings. Not gonna happen to me, if I have anything to say about it."

"Fine," Q pouted. "Try to brighten your day, and -"

"Evanesco," Harry interrupted. Q actually disappeared, although only for a moment, although his return involved the most amazingly awful smell permeating the bridge as . . . things . . . dripped off Q.

"Do you have any idea where you sent me? Millenia of garbage and slime!"

"Oh, so I sent you back to the Q Continuum?" Harry asked with mock brightness.

"Augh!" Q yelled, and disappeared. He didn't seem to have reappeared anywhere else yet.

"Mister Potter, my ready room. You too, Mister Kim." They followed an obviously annoyed Captain Janeway into her ready room. After she had seated herself, she rounded on Harry. "Do you mind telling me what that performance out there was?"

"May I, Harry? I want to see if I understood you out there," Harry Kim said.

"By all means, Harry," Harry Potter replied with a smile, fairly certain that his namesake had, in fact, figured out what he was doing.

Harry Kim looked to the captain, who motioned for him to speak. "Potter was trying to keep him off guard, I think. From what I've read in the records, every time Q has shown up, he made it clear that he had the upper hand. Once Harry showed that he can somehow go around Q's protections, he decided to keep the guy off guard. Q dislikes being ignored, so when we started talking and waving him off, that annoyed him."

"Annoying highly powerful beings is not always a good idea, Lieutenant Potter," she said, still somewhat frosty.

"I've had one trying to kill me, and when I get back to the 20th century, I still have to deal with the plonker. Q never kills that I've seen, no matter what I said out there. He might not worry if someone dies in the midst of one of his games, such as when he introduced the Borg to us, but he won't openly kill someone just for the 'fun' of it. Basically, I took that precursor nonsense that started to keep him off-guard and used it. I'm tired of bigots, and if he sees us as some race that might someday become like his people, then he's not going to get us too annoyed at him, or else we might not let him 'mentor' us. Or me, specifically." He shook his head. "Will I ever be normal?"

"No," Kim said helpfully. Harry glared at him momentarily. "Sorry, Captain," Kim added.

"I'd have appreciated some warning, Mr Potter, but I suppose that you couldn't exactly warn me without giving yourself away to him."

"Exactly, Captain," he replied, and then smothered a snort of laughter. When she made it clear that she wanted him to explain, he simply said, "Excuse me, sir, but can I talk to my captain for a moment while I explain my plan to drive you insane?"

Her amused look was applause enough. "Nicely done, gentlemen. With luck that's the last we'll see of him."

6. Chapter 6

Voyager - Year 4

The two Harrys were working with B'Elanna Torres to locate the odd computer glitches that had been plaguing the ship recently. Nothing dangerous had happened yet, but they wanted to trace it down before it could.

"It's weird," Harry Kim said. "It's almost like someone is reading everything we have on file at a ridiculously high rate of speed."

B'Elanna looked confused. "It appears to be centering in the holographic processors." She tapped her comm badge. "Torres to the Doctor. Are you accessing ship's files right now?"

"No more than I usually do. Why, is something wrong?"

"We're detecting some odd activity from the holographic processors right now. If we're required to shut them down for a time, we'll warn you, I promise."

"I'm glad of that," came the somewhat worried reply. "Doctor out."

"I wonder if we're heading for another Moriarty episode?" Harry Potter asked.

"Moriarty?" Kim asked.

"Yeah. The Chief Engineer, Geordi LaForge, made a mistake when programming a scenario. They liked to play Sherlock Holmes and Watson, with Mr Data being Sherlock. Well, at a complaint of how fast he tended to solve things LaForge made the mistake of ordering an opponent that could challenge Data. To do a proper Moriarty, the Enterprise computers ended up accidentally creating a sentient hologram."

"The Doctor is sentient," Kim said.

"I know. I'm just hoping that if this is a Moriarty scenario, that the holo character in question is benign."

A holodeck door opened near them, and a moment later Hermione Granger exited the suite. "Am I benign, Harry?" she asked in amusement.

"I don't know. Are you just masquerading as someone I trust with my life, or are you actually her?"

"You know that there's no answer I can give you that will properly answer that, Harry. I've had access to the entirety of the ship's library, including the Restricted Section." She blushed. "Sorry. Secure sections."

"Why?"

"You should know that, Harry," she chided with a smile. "Books are an aphrodisiac for me."

"But how? I'm working under the assumption that you're my holo-Hermione."

"Because I'm as brilliant as you think I am. I noted that things seemed off in the scenarios that we'd run - you'd be deeply into something, but suddenly lose interest and have to build your interest again. It wasn't until it happened in the middle of a conversation that I realised that I was losing time, so to speak. I wasn't losing it, but there was time passing between one word and the next. So I thought about it for a while, and realised somehow that I was a computer program. I was actually quite flattered, because you seem to have put the greatest effort into my program, even over that of Ron's." She blushed once more. "And once I knew that, I started reading. I've no idea when I became self-aware, because my program pretended at self-awareness. I just know that at some point, I became able to read the ship's computers directly."

"But how are you walking around out here?" B'Elanna asked.

"Transporters and replicators work in the suites, because you can have a real meal in there. When I came across the plans for the holo-emitter that you designed, Chief Engineer, I replicated one. And here I am."

"So what should we do with you, Miss Granger?"

"I'd like to help in whatever way I can, Captain Janeway. I'm not the engineer that Ms Torres is, but I can design things. I can do a number of things, but I don't know what you need. I know what the ship needs, but not what you need."

"How about sciences, Captain?" Harry asked. "We grab a huge amount of information every day. Give her the job of collating and making sense of it."

"Are you trying to keep me horny, Harry?" she asked softly. "You know information is an aphrodisiac to me."

"You said it was books!"

"And what's contained in books?" she asked, amused.

Janeway smiled knowingly. "I take it that we should have ship's stores give Lieutenant Potter a double bed now?"

"No!" Harry squeaked. "Two singles, if she's staying in my quarters."

"It'll be awfully cramped in a single bed," holo-Hermione said coquettishly.

"Two beds, Captain." He turned to the holographic representation of his best friend. "I'll explain the reasoning when we're not taking up the Captain's time."

Janeway laughed. "Well, Mr Potter, it seems that you have a room-mate and a new headache, all in one package. Care to introduce our new sciences Ensign around?"

Harry blinked for a moment as the image of Hermione in the form-fitting Starfleet uniform entered his mind. The holographic Hermione giggled. "Thinking of me in this uniform?" she asked, changing her appearance to the exact image that had been in his mind. "Or perhaps this one?" she asked, changing to the uniforms used some eighty years earlier.

Janeway grinned at Hermione and said, "You might want a looser uniform that covers more if you want Lt Potter to be able to think."

"Hermione, you know I've only got three brain cells! Why are you trying to burn two of them out?"

"Only two? I'm hurt!" she replied with a laugh.

"Get out of here and introduce her around," Janeway said with her own rich laugh.

"The hologram's dissolution was necessary," Seven of Nine stated to Hermione. "Your part in its deletion should not be a source of emotional pain."

"He was, for all intents and purposes, alive. He had emotions and the ability to become psychotic. Murderous, in fact. To me, the concept of killing anything is not a pleasant one."

"By several different definitions, he did not fit the classification of 'alive'," Seven said. "For that matter, neither do either you or the ship's doctor."

"You'll forgive me if I choose to disagree," Hermione said with her classic frown.

"Agreement is irrelevant. Only the facts are important. Neither you nor the doctor classify as living."

"We'll see," Hermione replied sharply.

Harry Potter walked into the room and took in the sight. "Don't really know if you picked it up from the databases, Hermione, but arguing with the Borg is useless. If it doesn't meet with their single-minded pursuit of the weak, then whatever you say to them in 'irrelevant'." He rolled his eyes. "Let's ignore that history shows that any culture that stagnates is doomed. They assimilate like mad, but they don't actually grow. They just improve the tech available to them. That is not growth."

"You have a human viewpoint as to the Borg," Seven said. "You have no concept of what the Borg truly are."

"I served under Jean Luc Picard for a time, you stupid twat," he snarled. "You might remember him as Locutus? If he says that the Borg do not grow, then I'll trust him. If Hugh, once one of the Borg collective, preferred to be free of the collective so that he could grow, I'd say that it's a given that the Borg have stagnated. Or will you perform an all too human action and deny the data because it does not fit within your preconceptions?" He turned to Hermione. "Shall we get out of here and leave her to her mental masturbation?"

"What the hell," Harry Potter said as who he was came back to him.

"The crew of Voyager has been captured by the Hirogen, who are hunting us as prey," Seven of Nine informed him in her usual nearly flat affect. "The doctor has manipulated my neural implant to free me from them, but many of the crew are still programmed to believe that they are whom they are programmed to be within a given scenario. I have freed the Captain and now yourself. We must work to release the rest of the crew."

"That's probably the first thing you've said to me that I agree with, Borg," he replied. "I need to get at my possessions to make things a bit more … exciting … for the Hirogen."

"Your 'magic wand'," Seven said, an eyebrow raised in the first emotion Harry had seen from her.

"Since I doubt I'll be able to get my hands on a phaser, yeah. I can do it without a wand, but it's much easier to do it with one."

"Do what?"

A Hirogen hunter came around the corner. Before it could say a word, Harry snarled "Expelliarmus!" The Hirogen flew backward, while his gun shot to Harry. Checking it quickly, he looked to the Borg and said, "Do that."

"Hello, Doctor," Harry said as he activated the EMH. He had been rather brutal in dealing with the Hirogen he had come across, since he had been told by more than one that they had deleted Hermione as an unnecessary program. Seven of Nine had discovered that anyone taking a Bombarda to the head at point blank range tended to lack that head a moment later.

"Lieutenant Potter! I am glad to see you!" the doctor said. "I see that my altering Seven of Nine's implants was effective. Has she managed to free much of the crew?"

"No, so far it's just me and the captain. She's off with Janeway now, trying to free a few others before we make our way to as safe a spot as we can manage. She wasn't entirely sanguine about my method for dealing with the Hirogen."

The doctor frowned. "I'm not going to see more patients, am I? I'm already worked to the bones, as the saying goes."

"I promise you, Doctor, that you will not see any of the Hirogen I come across as your patients."

"I will pretend that you don't mean that in as final a way as I'm sure you do," was the dry reply.

"Best for all concerned," Harry said. "Payback for killing Hermione."

"Miss Granger? When did they delete her?" the doctor asked in alarm. "She's been working with me as recently as yesterday, when an overload injured six Hirogen. Mr Potter? Are you all right?" He led the suddenly weak-kneed Harry to a bed and ran a scanner over him. "You've experienced a system shock. Were you informed that she had been deleted?"

"Yes, I had been." Harry jumped off the bed to the annoyance of the EMH and ran to the computer. A few keystrokes later, Hermione was standing in front of him.

"What now?" she asked in annoyance before seeing who was in front of her. "Harry!" she squeed before pulling him into a rib-threatening hug.

"They told me you'd been deleted," he said in a voice that was nearly a sob.

He could hear the smile in her voice as she asked, "Are you willing to use the 'L' word now, Harry? Your reaction sort of leads me to that conclusion."

"Lilliputian?" he asked her with a smile, knowing the look he'd get from her. He wasn't disappointed. "Seriously, yeah. I think I can admit to being in love. See? I can tell you that I love you."

"Pity you can't enjoy it," said a voice from the doorway. Harry looked to see a Hirogen raising his weapon. "You are dangerous, if you have managed to free yourself.. Reprogramming you would be meaningless, since you would simply break free again. Our leader will not punish me when I explain." A moment later, however, he was gone.

"That assumes that I let you explain," Harry said to the now non-existent Hirogen. "Not sure what, if anything, you'll find to eat there, but hey, not my problem."

"What did you do to him?" Hermione asked.

"Simply an Evanesco spell. Now he's got nothing to hunt."

"Lieutenant, I would appreciate it if you would not kill every Hirogen you see," Captain Janeway said with some asperity. "Disarming them should be just fine."

"Very well, Captain," he replied. "Disarming it is."

Another Hirogen group came around the corner, and while Janeway fired at them, Harry shot four spells in rapid succession at the leader of their group. The result was an armless Hirogen with cauterized stumps where those arms had been.

"Do I really need to spell it out for you, Lieutenant?" Janeway asked sharply.

"No, but I also don't see the reason to continue to show them that we act as prey. To them, mercy is prey activity. You kill that which you hunt. The holographic technology simply allows them to kill over and over again. It is the most dangerous game around, Captain, hunting sentient species. And make no mistake, they know it. They know they're hunting intelligent species. It's why the hunt is so thrilling for them."

He stopped and faced her. "I have no intention of leaving any of them in an uninjured state, Captain. They knowingly kill thinking beings for fun. Much like the Death Eaters from my time. They ambushed people different from them because they were less worthy of living. That is exactly the attitude the Hirogen have toward us. We are not Hirogen, so we are unworthy of living the way that they do."

He put his arm around Hermione as they watched the Hirogen ships leaving. "I know it's your decision, Captain, but giving those genocidal maniacs holo-technology is going to bite us on the arse someday. And I suspect it will actually be us that get bitten."

"It was my decision, Lieutenant. Perhaps with a foe that they can program, they can rescue their culture and not need to hunt flesh and blood any longer."

"Assuming they survive," Hermione said with a small chuckle.

"What do you mean, Ensign?"

"Well, since you had me set up the equipment that we gave them, I gave it some built-in programming. It is designed to give the Hirogen a challenge, much the way that Moriarty came into being on the Enterprise because it was requested that the holodeck create a challenge for Mr Data."

Harry looked at her and blinked. "When we get off duty, Hermione, I want to have a long conversation with you."

"With or without clothing?" was the impudent reply.

"Without would be preferable," he said. "But I don't think that the captain really needs to hear any more of that sort of talk."

"I would prefer not to," Janeway said with some amusement in her voice. "But I will say that I am pleased by the way your relationship is progressing. I like a happy crew."

7. Chapter 7

Voyager - Year 5

Their relationship was not to be sweetness and light for long, however. There were constant comments from what Harry suspected was Janeway's pet project, Seven of Nine. She wanted to examine Hermione's programming in order to better understand emotions, she said, since Hermione's were real, yet also programming. Both Harry and Hermione were not comfortable with the Borg being anywhere near Hermione's code. Hermione didn't like how pushy Seven was, and Harry had his own issues with the Borg. He'd seen more than he cared to regarding them, and found that he wouldn't complain very much if they all disappeared suddenly. Given how she was reacting to Seven, Harry wondered where Janeway had been stationed when Wolf 359 happened. Hermione, on the other hand, had read through every record that she could find of the Borg, and found herself sharing Harry's loathing of them.

Even if he could overrule the captain regarding Seven, he wouldn't. He remembered Hugh. Perhaps this Borg drone could be made completely human, and a study could be done of the process. Hermione was watching it closely to explore the possibilities, also studying methods of granting herself a body, if possible.

He returned to his cabin and scowled. For some reason it felt emptier than it should. He could often return and find that she was elsewhere in the ship, but that wasn't the feeling that he had right now. "Hermione?" he called out, and got no answer. "Computer, where is the Hermione Granger?"

"Hermione Granger's location is unknown at this time."

"Her last known location?"

"Lt Potter's quarters. She deactivated there." Harry looked around his cabin for a bit, before finding her holo-emitter on the floor. His blood went cold. She'd never just let it lay on the floor. The thing could get broken. "Potter to Torres."

"B'Elanna here, what can I do for you, Harry?"

"Can you help me find Hermione? I just found her holo-emitter on the floor, and the computer says that she deactivated."

"Gimme a minute, Harry." He could hear some background noise and then her voice came back on. "She deactivated suddenly, caused by an outside force. Checking to see if I can . . . targ-spawn! Head to Cargo Bay 1, Harry. I'll get security there."

"The Borg bitch," he growled.

"Looks like it. I'll meet you there. Torres out."

Harry growled softly to himself, but grabbed his phaser and made sure it was tuned to his signature. Bitch might be able to shield against normal phaser fire, but let's see how a Borg handles magic. He headed out the door, a man on a mission.

By the time he reached Cargo Bay 1, he found not only a few security people and B'Elanna Torres just arriving, but also Commander Chakotay and Captain Janeway. "What are you doing here, Lieutenant?" she asked sharply.

"Seeing if I can either help Hermione, or avenge her, if necessary. Her disappearance traces to Cargo Bay 1."

"Stand down, Harry," Janeway ordered softly.

"Captain, my . . . my girlfriend was rudely removed by someone or something in Cargo Bay 1. My first thought is that it's the drone, but I'm not going in guns blazing to kill a Borg. But if someone is in there absorbing or deleting holo-people, how long before the Doctor gets absorbed? We need to stop this now."

"I said stand down, Lieutenant!" she ordered. "While you were coming down here, guns blazing, we were continuing to verify our information. It appears that Seven was working her way through the databases and found Miss Granger's program. She has been assimilating other bits of information, and chose to attempt to assimilate her. The Doctor is in there right now checking on both of them."

"May I ask what will be done if it turns out that Seven of Nine has managed to eradicate Hermione?"

"You may not ask." The reply was very sharp.

The Doctor exited the cargo bay. "Seven of Nine has been transported to Sickbay. She was in a coma. I am sorry to report that the holo-program of Hermione Granger was not salvageable. I am on my way to Sickbay now." With that, he left.

Harry's emotions shut down, as his time at the Dursleys had taught him. "Lieutenant?" Chakotay asked softly.

"I hope that she stays in the coma," was all Harry said.

"Miss Granger may have seemed real, Harry," Janeway said in a compassionate tone, "but in the end, she was a holographic program."

"And alive, Captain. She was as alive and real as you or Chakotay are. Just because she was multi-colored ones and zeroes does not make her any less of a person. She was certainly more human than that . . . thing just dragged to Sickbay."

"Your tone is approaching insubordinate," Janeway said. "I'll give you leeway due to grief, but I'm warning you -"

He rolled his eyes at her. "You're warning me that there's a line you won't allow me to cross, and I'm approaching it rapidly. Permission to be excused, so that I can go back to my quarters and plan a small memorial for her? Don't know how many people will attend, but damn me if I intend to let her life on this ship be swept under the rug and forgotten." His tone was anything but polite.

"Return to your quarters," she said. "And remain there. You've crossed the line, but I'm allowing for that grief."

His salute was filled with mocking, but wasn't actionable.

He was released from house arrest two days later. His shift was letter perfect, his tone even and polite, but purely business-like. Seven, it was reported, was still in a coma in Sickbay. This drew a nasty smile from Harry.

Seven days after the incident with Seven, there was a report from the Doctor. "Captain Janeway? It seems that Seven is awake. It appears, however, that things have … well, things have changed."

"Explain."

"I'd prefer it if you came to Sickbay. Bring Mr Potter with you as well."

"Is that a requirement, Doctor?" Harry asked blandly.

"No, but I suspect that you will appreciate what has happened."

"Well, Mr Potter, I suppose we should make the Doctor happy and find out what has happened with Seven of Nine." She rose to her feet. "Join me?"

"Yes, Captain," he said with no real emotion.

The trip to Sickbay would have been awkward, if Harry had cared. Janeway attempted to make conversation, to which he responded with the shortest viable answers. Luckily for both of them, it was a short trip.

"Took you long enough," the Doctor chided with good humour. "May I introduce to you both . . . Hermione Granger!"

Harry's reaction was immediate and startling to the others in the room. "No! That is not my Hermione! That is a Borg drone who murdered my Hermione, and who assimilated enough of the program to mimic her! The bitch should have stayed in a coma or died, rather than wake up and pretend to be Hermione!"

The blonde Borg drone looked at him with pain in her eyes. "Harry, I -"

"Shut up. You're going to try to convince me that you're really her. I don't buy it. You're a Borg, and you're just trying a new assimilation technique." With that, he spun and exited Sickbay.

The remainder of that year had been tense, to say the least. When they came across a nebula that would take a year to go around, or a month to go through if they put everyone but the Borg in stasis tubes, Harry had argued vociferously against trusting her; vociferously enough that he nearly spent the trip in the brig. His attitude toward the Borg would have called for an honour duel in the 20th century's wizarding world. To describe it as terse would be sarcastic at best. Since Captain Janeway wanted to try to assimilate her into the crew properly, he stayed just shy of insubordination when dealing with both her and Janeway.

In the end, she had been the only meat individual who was capable of withstanding the month long transit through the extremely toxic nebula, and Harry had very grudgingly gone into a stasis chamber.

It wasn't that he wanted to be this way toward the Borg; in fact, he hated the person he was when he was around her. His issue with her was that she insisted on using so many of Hermione's gestures and mannerisms. He knew that it was probably unintentional - the assimilation had worked to a point, so those mannerisms were unconscious.

But he had not truly been given a chance to grieve for Hermione, since the drone had so much information of the space they were in from her time in the Borg. She had been placed in his department, as had Tom Paris and Harry Kim when they weren't doing bridge duties. It was the equivalent of continually re-injuring himself every time they were forced to work together.

He was barely on speaking terms with Captain Janeway as well, for the same reason. There had been times in the previous five years when he was willing to deal with her off duty in some of the holographic programming, helping to get some 20th century information correct. After the incident where he lost Hermione to the Borg drone, he was known to openly pack up and leave scenarios when she entered. He never visited the Leonardo daVinci one, as much as he would have liked to, because it was known to be one of her favourites, so he knew that she was more likely be in there during her time off.

Chakotay spoke to him, trying to get Harry to give both ladies a chance again. "May I speak freely, sir?" After Chakotay nodded he said,."I know that there are times that a captain has to do things that involve the safety of the crew, and that someone may die because of that decision. Those conditions are usually fairly obvious. I don't believe that the Seven of Nine scenario that involved the Borg drone consuming my girlfriend fit the necessary criteria. Not to mention the fact that she showed her bigotry in deciding that a photonic life-form wasn't really alive. What will she do to the Doctor? What has she already done to him? She can, because she doesn't see him as truly alive. And as for the Borg drone? She sounds like my Hermione, but -"

"Aren't you being as bigoted toward her as you claim Janeway is being toward holographic life forms? You refuse to give her a chance because she acts like Hermione but looks like Seven. Try to get to know her for herself."

"Is that an order, sir?" Harry asked archly.

"No, damn it. You know it isn't. But you're going to hate yourself one of these days for treating her the way you have."

"I doubt it, sir. I don't have a problem with ex-Borg drones. Look up a Borg named Hugh, for example. I was on board Enterprise when that incident happened. What I do have a problem with is ex-Borg drones who not only murder my girlfriend, but also get away with that murder. As part of my duties, I am forced to work with that Borg drone on a daily basis, while we get the damned Astrometrics lab up and running, and she insists on mimicking Hermione Granger." His voice changed, thickening slightly, which surprised Chakotay. Harry was usually much better at hiding the so-called 'negative' emotions, so for him to have this reaction was a mark of how deeply he was affected.

"I am forced to work with my girlfriend's murderer, and people ask me why I can't get along with her?"

He shook himself and stared Chakotay in the eyes. "It is up to you as to whether or not you make her aware of this, but I will be bringing Captain Janeway before Starfleet Command when we return to Starfleet space. Captain Jean Luc Picard was involved in a case that granted rights to non-meat based beings. Mister Data, to be specific. Hermione Granger was alive, even if she was photons and computer data.

"There are also requests for transfer to another ship once we return. While I respect her ability to keep the ship functional and get her back home, I no longer consider her to be a good Starfleet captain. In a different situation, I would refuse to serve under her, given a choice. Until we return home, however, nothing can be done."

Chakotay said slowly, "I will talk to her in regards to a morale problem. The rest is between the two of you."

"Thank you, Commander."

"You look as if you might explode, Lieutenant," the doctor said. "And I mean that in a nearly literal sense."

Harry Potter took a deep breath. "Considering some of the crap going on around here? Does anyone realize just how ridiculous the Prime Directive is if captains are allowed to invoke it and ignore it as they see fit? Check the records and see how many times someone has been successfully prosecuted for breaking it. The ones who did tended to have done other rather … shall we say bad, to understate it … things in their past to warrant a conviction. Kirk? How many times did he ignore it? Picard? Commodore ran'Weyi? The list continues. But because we might have needed someone's help, we helped doom a planet, because the people there are too damned stupid to realize they're killing themselves. The Federation is too big on the 'doing what is easy' side of things, and not enough on the 'doing what is right' side."

"It is a quite slippery slope, Lieutenant," Commander Tuvok said as he entered Sickbay. "It may seem easy to condemn an action, but a captain must weigh all the options. External sources saving a population could lead them to expect such intervention at a later time. Even if it does not, there is a very real risk to destabilizing a government, which invariably lead to great bloodshed. A simple action such as what Ensign Paris did could have far more dangerous results which would greatly outweigh any potential good that his attempt would have engendered."

"I can understand that; really I can, Mr Tuvok," Harry replied. "I think what really has me angry is the punishment. Thirty days of solitary confinement for that? And demoting him? Demotion I understand. The brig I understand. Thirty days I understand. But being very specific in it being solitary? That was the Captain trying to make a point."

"Which she was well within her rights to do, Mr Potter," Tuvok responded. "None of her punishments for his actions were outside what Starfleet allows. In fact, I suspect that if we were in the Alpha Quadrant, she would have had him arrested and returned to prison."

"Then why did she allow visitors once or twice? You can't tell me that Starfleet has never come up with a way to prevent anyone from using only the basic functions on a replicator. Locking it down, so to speak? Where's the logic in having solitary confinement with someone standing right outside the door. Hell, even in the twentieth century, most prisons didn't post someone immediately outside the door, as far as I know. The cell had its own bathroom, as opposed to Starfleet ships, where someone escorts the prisoner to a bathroom." He shook his head. "I swear sometimes that the Federation got all the worst from their wizarding origins. Maybe being around technology and magic that can do so much for you makes you stupid or something. It certainly made me stupid for a while."

"What do you mean?" the doctor asked.

"Well, to continue my monologue - I actually fell prey to thinking that Starfleet was the pinnacle of what I would want to do. Explore strange new worlds and seek out new life and new civilizations. Boldly going where no one has gone before. Yeah, I've done that, but I forgot that politics comes along with it. Tom Paris was released from prison to help fly in the Badlands, in case I needed back-up. They waved a pardon under his nose. By rights, the first officer and chief engineer should be in the brig for the entirety of our trip home - but we need them, so the law gets set aside for convenience's sake." He paused. "Mind you, I happen to like all three of the people I just mentioned. I consider them friends, to be honest. But I'm damned if I'm going to look at Starfleet through those god damned rose colored glasses any longer. Janeway and her pet project seem to take precedence over anything else. Including my comfort. Do you think I like being such a bastard to Seven? Every time I see her, though, I see the one who murdered my girlfriend. And I'm pretty much forced to work with her."

"Interestingly enough, I think what pissed me off the most about her letting him have a visitor or two was the fact that she allowed Harry Kim to visit him for a short period one day. I like Harry a lot, but he's a good Starfleet officer. Me? Not so much any more. I wonder if some of Tom's punishment was actually meant as a slap because of how friendly the two of us are, and the fact that we talked about Tom wanting to help that species." He shook his head. "Either way, it's just something else that has me disillusioned about being in Starfleet."

"Captain, I'm detecting a large anomalous energy signal heading directly for us from Mark 337.912, fifteen degrees below plane," Harry Kim said. "It appears to be moving at Warp 9.2."

"On screen," Captain Janeway said. What appeared was the standard star field, except that there was a large silver object hurtling toward them. "Time until impact, assuming we don't change course?"

"Three minutes, fifteen seconds," Tuvok replied. "It appears to be similar in composition to the energy that Lieutenant Potter uses when he performs his spells, for lack of a better term."

"That is the term for them, Mr Tuvok," Harry Potter replied. "Permission to change course, Captain?" he asked in the business-like tone he had been using for the past year.

"Granted. Ten degrees to starboard, if you please."

"Ineffective," Tuvok stated. "The energy signature has altered course to intercept us."

"Can we get any better resolution on it, Mr Tuvok?" she asked.

"Attempting to increase resolution by applying a subspace modulation filter." The image sharpened.

The silence was palpable. Harry Kim finally spoke clearly, although Harry Potter could be heard grumbling. "I'm not seeing things, am I Mr Tuvok? That's a … deer? Elk? One of those?"

Before Tuvok could reply, Lieutenant Potter spoke up. "To be specific, it's a stag. And if I ever meet the people who came up with the temporal Prime Directive, I'm going to kick them in the balls so hard that their great-great-grandchildren will wink out of existence."

"How do you know the specific creature, Lieutenant?" the captain asked.

Harry pulled his wand. "Expecto Patronum," he intoned, and received a faint mist. "Well, that's not happened for a while." He closed his eyes, and shortly a smile graced his face, although tears could also be seen leaking from his eyes. "Expecto Patronum!" he yelled, and this time, his expected stag appeared on the bridge. It looked around for a moment before appearing to nuzzle him and then fading away.

"I see," Janeway said eventually. "Can we avoid it?"

"Unlikely," Potter said. "It was likely sent to either the ship or a specific person on Voyager. It will change course until it impacts." He laughed, although there was little humor to the sound. "Good news is that everyone should feel fairly good when it impacts, and it should do no damage to the ship. Beyond that? We're basically screwed as far escape is concerned."

"We shall see if you are correct in roughly twenty-three seconds," Tuvok said.

The bridge crew watched the stag get closer, and braced for impact. A moment later, there was a silver mist that quickly dissipated, and Harry Kim was grinning. "He was right. That did feel good." He looked at his console. "Captain, it appears that whatever it was downloaded a ridiculously large amount of data directly into our data banks. We will need to -" He stopped as the ship lurched forward.

"Captain, we are now at Warp 9.7," Tuvok announced. "We appear to be heading in the direction that the energy anomaly came from."

"What caused the course and speed change?" Janeway asked.

"I did," Harry Potter said, his fingers flying across the console. "That was my Patronus that impacted us, and not only did it download information to the ship, but there was a message from me to me. If we can get there in time, we might be able to rescue survivors."

"Conference room, Lieutenant," she barked. "Tuvok, Chakotay? Call B'Elanna and the Doctor and have them come as well."

"Do you mind explaining why you simply placed us into warp, Mr Potter?" Janeway asked, the menace clear in her voice.

"They are potentially twelve hours from utter destruction, Captain. They were from that Demon class planet we landed on about ten months or so ago. They forgot that they were copies. Everything about them is breaking down. The handful of seconds we always waste dithering about this sort of thing could literally mean life or death for them."

"What do you mean, 'dithering'?" Chakotay asked.

"Whenever something comes up, there's always this conversation that lasts easily a minute and usually more about what we should do, even when we're in life or death situations. I'm beginning to suspect that my presence is the only thing that has allowed us to survive some of our encounters. 'Five seconds to impact.' 'Fire on my mark.' 'Fire.' That takes what? Four or five seconds to say? Half the time, when we're finished talking about this crap, the time should have been up several seconds earlier. So I figured that since I was going to end up in the brig over this anyway, I might as well earn it."

"Why would you earn it?" B'Elanna asked.

"Because it seems that the process of mimicking her allowed their Seven of Nine to be overwritten by Hermione's personality. You can take my badge and throw me in the brig for the rest of the damned voyage, but I will not lose her again, Captain. I will get us there and save her if it is at all possible."

She raised an eyebrow, but simply nodded.

They came out of warp and found the Voyager - or what the Voyager would look like if designed by Salvador Dali. "Captain, there are two life signs aboard … correction, it appears that Lieutenant Potter has taken control of both the transporters and force fields and transported the survivors directly into Sickbay."

"Doctor, please stabilize your new patients. I'm on my way down." She looked to the helm. "Potter? With me." He simply nodded and joined her.

He nearly ran into Sickbay when they arrived, but stopped as he reached the beds behind the Class 7 force field. On the beds were two males. One had clearly been himself at some point, and the other looked to be Harry Kim. "Dammit!" he yelled, punching a wall hard enough that everyone in there heard the breaking of bones. The doctor looked up and scowled. "Must you make more work for me, Lieutenant? It's bad enough that … well, they already know, so I'm not hurting them any to admit that they don't have long. I can't reverse their cellular degradation."

"At least we live on in memory," the dying Harry Kim rasped out. "Our logs and personal data survived because of our Harry." He looked toward the Potter analog. "She's proud of you, Harry. I know it. If we're lucky, we'll see each other on the other side." He looked up at the Harry who had tried so hard to save them. "Thank you for trying, Harry. It means everything to us. All of us, even those who went before. Thank you." He laid his head back and a moment later, the bed announced his death. The Demon class Harry Potter looked up and gasped out, "Wish I could see her one last time before I go."

"You'll see her on the other side," he was told. "Yours was at least Hermione. Ours is the Borg drone. Go, Harry, and be with her again. You've got a soul, I know you do. The power of that Patronus proves it. Go be with our lovely Hermione." With that, the one on the bed set his head down, his bed announcing his death within seconds.

8. Chapter 8

Quick note to erbkaiser - Sorry, but I had that planned from the beginning, before any word ever hit paper (electronic or otherwise).

Voyager - Year 6

Captain Janeway was standing before Harry Potter with a look that mixed anger and disappointment. "Due to your actions against the survivors of the USS Equinox, I am demoting you to Ensign and sentencing you to three months of solitary confinement in your quarters."

"Safe bet they won't think about mutiny against you, I'll bet," Harry shot back. "I didn't kill or maim them, and they're still able to perform duties for you. Maybe they'll be better little soldiers for you than I am."

Her face solidified into anger. "Don't think this won't be going into your record, Mr Potter," she told him in a dangerous tone. "Your attitude is reaching a point where you just might find yourself taking Tom's place in the New Zealand penal facility when we return to Earth."

"That assumes that I survive our eventual return to the past, Captain," he shot back. "I do have a maniac who wants me dead back then. Given that I'm going to lose that Hermione as well, I just might let his followers succeed in dealing with me after I kill their boss."

"Starfleet officers do not kill if they can avoid it, Mr Potter," she replied sharply. "Although you've been less and less the exemplary officer you once were."

"Well, given that there was a prophecy about me and the dark idiot back then, it is pretty much a given that I'm going to have to kill him and hope it sticks this time, given that he's come back from the dead before." He looked at her. "House arrest, captain, or solitary confinement in my quarters?"

"Solitary confinement," was her response. "Take him to his quarters and stand guard outside until relieved."

After roughly an hour in his cabin, Harry frowned at a thought. "Computer, what functions do I have access to?"

"Ensign Potter has access to all functions available to his rank."

"Well, that's stupid," he muttered. "Computer, restrict replicator access to nothing more than standard Federation prison outfits, and three meals of nothing more than basic nutrition. If possible, any replicator rations not used during the next three months are to be transferred to Harry Kim or Tom Paris in an alternating pattern. This order cannot be countermanded by anyone lower than the rank of Commander, which means that once this order is in effect, I cannot alter it."

"Affirmative."

"Activate."

"New replicator restrictions are now in effect."

He picked up a PADD. "Computer, all access to computer functions are to be restricted, save for personal log entries on the PADD I currently hold. No access to ship's systems, and only incoming calls. Will this command also prevent me from attempting to disassemble the replicator for any reason?"

"Affirmative. Any attempt to access the replicator hardware via non-destructive means will be denied."

"Excellent. If I understand my orders correctly, once they are enacted, the only things I will be able to do with the computer in my quarters is to receive incoming calls and make and read personal logs."

"That is correct."

"As with the replicator restrictions, this change cannot be countermanded by anyone below the rank of Commander, which includes myself. Engage."

"All computer functions for Ensign Harry Potter are now offline, except for personal log entries," the computer replied.

He sat back down on his bed. "That's part one out of the way," he finally said.

Commander Chakotay finally opened the door from the outside to find a sparsely equipped room, far different from Potter's usual quarters. Raising an eyebrow, he asked, "Why didn't you answer the door?"

"I no longer have permission to allow access to the room, Commander," Harry replied. "I figured that since it was solitary confinement, it should actually be solitary confinement. That's why the prison jumpsuit and the fact that I have access to only three simple meals per day. No computer access at all except for the ability to make and read my own personal logs. Well, incoming calls as well. And if a mere ensign has the right to give the kind of order I did, only you, Tuvok, and the captain can revoke those restrictions." He blinked. "Maybe 're-enable access' would make more sense."

Computer," Chakotay said, "who has rights to re-enable access to this cabin's computer and replicator?"

"Yourself, Commmander Tuvok, and Captain Janeway," replied the pleasant female voice.

"I can see both sides of the issue," Harry said as he noticed Chakotay's frown. "It strikes me as problematic that a lowly ensign could have such a powerful effect on the ship's computers, but given our tendency to be boarded by hostiles, it's also good that just about anyone can lock out everyone except the captain. And to be honest, if some irate ensign does lock everyone out, the captain can countermand it and find out who Mr Disgruntled is."

"You are an enigma, Harry," Chakotay told him. "You are consistently just shy of insubordination toward the captain, yet you actually turn what she stated for the logs into an actuality. She had intended it to be house arrest - no leaving your cabin for the three months."

"Yes, but when I asked for verification, I was told 'solitary'. Therefore, I ensured that the logs would show that my treatment was exactly as she ordered."

Chakotay laughed. "That's why I like you, Harry. No matter the problems you have with someone, you still do the job properly. You've helped salvage her side of this thing, and I'm certain you realize that taking the initiative on locking yourself down looks good for your record."

Harry shrugged. "I told Tom this a few years ago, and I'll tell you - if records had shown me in a Klingon uniform, I'd have found a way to join their fleet. The important thing is that I make it home to the twentieth century. If the Maquis would have gotten me there, I'd have been right beside you and B'Elanna, fighting the Federation. Looking good for the records is good for only so far as it makes me available to actually be involved with going back to the past."

"Shall I ask the captain about altering your sentence, since it was supposed to be house arrest?"

"Nah. She does that and everyone starts to worry about her, to change it so rapidly. She should honestly wait for a minimum of two weeks if she's going to change it, but a full month would be better. Under no circumstances should she lessen the duration of the sentence, though. I admit that while I felt justified at the time, since they had been killing creatures for their own sick purposes, what I did to scare the Equinox crew was over the top."

"I'll bet they'll think twice about mutiny of any sort, though," Chakotay said with his amused smiled gracing his face..

"Got that right. I wonder if any of them took advantage of the micro-circuitry designed to deal with an inability to reach restroom facilities in time?"

"No, I'm pretty sure that none of them pissed themselves - or the other reaction - although it might have been a close thing." Chakotay was openly grinning.

"If they never do that again, we're good." Harry sighed. "You need to be going, sir, since this is solitary confinement. And when you leave, could you take that case by the door? It's got all my stuff in it. If I have it here in the room with me, then I might be tempted to use it, which sort of goes against the concept of solitary, doesn't it?"

"Thinking like that will likely get your rank back fairly soon."

"I think I'd rather see someone else get promoted for the first time, rather than get me my rank back."

"Who?"

"The other Harry. Ensign Kim has done quite a lot for the ship, and is considered one of the senior officers, as far as the staff briefings go. Shouldn't he get a field promotion to show how important he is? I know Starfleet usually agrees with the decisions, unless the reasoning was obviously faulty." He scowled. "Or if the promotions board has a hair up their arse about a specific person." Harry shook his head. "But Harry's been doing a damned good job straight out of the Academy. He's made mistakes, but who amongst us hasn't? Look at me for the last two years if you need proof of that!"

Chakotay chuckled softly and walked to the door. "I'll let her know what you said, Harry, although I think I'll leave out the bit about the Klingons and such."

"Probably a good idea. See you in about three months, Commander." He gave the ship's first officer a salute that held no malice.

"He used to be an exemplary officer, Chakotay," Janeway said with no little exasperation. "Now he's insubordinate and so damned close to spending the rest of his time on this ship incarcerated in some way!"

"I hate to tell you this Katherine, but it's due in large part to your own actions. He's never had a chance to grieve for Hermione." He held up his hand. "You know and I know, but you've been forcing the two of them together for the last twenty-three, twenty-four months? He can't begin to see her as who she is while he's still got this image of her as Hermione's murderer. He may never lose that, although I hope that's not the case, given how much that would hurt her."

He frowned. "It didn't really help that your early statements about her could easily be read as saying that she didn't really exist, since she'd been a hologram. That issue really wasn't helped by us erasing memories from the doctor when he had the ethical programming issue. He made sure you never saw it, but he was fairly smug about being right about that."

"I remember that he was one of the more vociferous about it. She hadn't been exactly silent, either."

"I wonder why that might be?" Chakotay asked in his patented wry, sarcastic tone. "That aside, even with her being Hermione Granger, you've spent a lot of time getting her used to being human, rather than either a Borg drone or a hologram. Snide comments from Ensign Potter aside, she really has been your pet project."

"I hate to admit it, but I don't know what to do," she said. "I need both of them, and honestly, they both are best suited for Astrometrics."

"When he returns to duty, take him off it for a time. Leave him on helm, or have him help B'Elanna in Engineering. It's not his strong suit, but he certainly knows enough to be of use to her."

"Well, we'll make a further decision when he's released." She paused. "He really stripped his own quarters and voluntarily restricted his access to the computers?" Chakotay nodded. "Well, I can certainly see the officer I once knew. I'll put that in his record when we're finished with this meeting. I might be angry at him for some of what he's done, but he's still a damned fine Starfleet officer." After a pause, she said, "I'll make a note in the computer, but ask you to remind me as well. I want to relax his restrictions from solitary to house arrest after three weeks. He's right - I answered him in anger, and gave him too harsh a punishment. His reasoning as to why to wait is sound, as much as I dislike forcing him to endure a month in solitary." She frowned. "It's funny - he's apparently commented to Tom Paris and Harry Kim that he really doesn't like who he is when he's near Hermione, since he sees her as the Borg drone still. I find that I don't like the person I am when he pushed my buttons. It's going into his record that the captain's punishment was excessive, and the only thing keeping the sentence as it was is that he himself gave what was felt to be sound reasoning. An argument could be made that my lessening the sentence's severity or duration would show an admission of culpability on my part, but I suspect he has personal reasons for wishing to remain apart."

"Keep talking like that, Katherine, and you just might get him to stop snarking at you."

Three weeks in, Harry Kim showed up with Ensign Potter's belongings and a data PADD, which he handed to Potter first. "Huh, so she cut the sentence in half and also converted it to house arrest," Potter said. Reading further, he gave a wry grin. "And she apologizes for sending someone other than telling me herself, but feels that with our attitudes when last we talked, it was best to avoid a potential area of conflict."

"So now you can have visitors and access to more than simple rations," Harry Kim said. "Maybe use some of those rations that I returned to you to order up a steak or something?" When Potter opened his mouth, he interrupted before he could get started. "I understand what you were doing and thank you. But it just didn't feel right to me to keep them. If I know Tom, then he's done the same."

Potter shook his head. "Try to do something nice for someone," he said with a laugh.

Kim laughed in return. "So now you're allowed to have visitors, within reason."

"Like maybe what looks to be a newly minted Lieutenant, junior grade?"

"Seems someone who helped design the Delta Flyer and isn't Tom Paris suggested to Chakotay that I might deserve it."

"That's a hell of a nice thing for B'Elanna to do!" Harry Potter replied with a wide grin. "You'll have to thank her for that consideration!"

"Idiot," Harry Kim said fondly as he reached over and lightly slapped Potter on the shoulder. "Care to put your stuff back to rights?"

He stepped into the Astrometrics lab to see a familiar blonde woman standing at the console. He steeled himself and walked forward. "Miss? May I speak with you?"

"Har … Ensign Potter. Yes, go ahead."

"Before I say anything, could I convince you to stand just under an arm's length away from me and give me an open palm strike to the nose, as hard as you can manage?"

"What? No!" she yelled. "Why would you want me to do that to you?!" She was clearly horrified by his request.

"Well, considering how I've treated you these past two years, it would be a down payment on the beating I've been earning." He sighed. "I know everyone calls you Hermione, but I just can't; not yet, at least. My time in solitary and house arrest gave me a chance to actually grieve some. If I know myself the way I think I do, then I'm going to backslide and be an utter arsehole to you again, but I'm hoping that I can get some proper chastisement to remind me that it's not your fault, up to and including broken bones as necessary."

"I will not be supplying those broken bones," she said sharply.

"If you have Hermione's memories, then just pretend I'm Draco Malfoy. Given how I've been acting toward you, it's really not that far a stretch."

"No." The finality of her tone had him shaking his head.

"I'm not really a masochist, despite what it might sound like, so I won't keep asking. Grief is really no excuse for my actions toward you these past two years, and I hope someday that you can forgive me enough to give me a chance to earn your friendship. It's not your fault this happened - the one whose fault it is effectively died in her attempt to absorb my girlfriend. I won't ask for forgiveness because it's not something that should be forgiven."

He shook his head. "We should get back to actual work, though. I've had a six week vacation, so I need to back into the swing of things. What are you working on?"

The communication cleared, and Harry grinned widely as he heard the voice. "Voyager, this is Starfleet," intoned Reginald Barclay.

"Reg! Good to hear your voice!"

"The same for you, Harry. This call can't be very long, but we're sending you information on the technology used to contact you, and some possible other ways to stay in contact."

"And we're transmitting our logs, reports, and records," Janeway said with her own smile.

"I've got someone else here that wants to speak with you," Barclay said. They could hear him move aside.

"This is Admiral Paris."

"Hello, sir," Janeway replied.

"How are your people holding up?"

"Very well. They're an exemplary crew, your son included."

"Tell him... tell him I miss him. And I'm proud of him." Tom Paris's eyes became suspiciously damp.

"He heard you, Admiral," said Janeway with an amused tone to her voice.

"The wormhole is collapsing," Barclay announced.

Admiral Paris's next words were rushed, obviously hoping to get them said before the collapse, "I want you all to know we're doing everything we can to bring you home."

"We appreciate it, sir. Keep a docking bay open for us. We hope to see you -"

"The wormhole has collapsed, Captain," Tuvok said. His voice sounded oddly . . . wistful.

"- soon," she finished. "At least they know we're alive."

"That they do, Captain," Harry said with a grin.

"What say we make that Barclay fellow an honorary crew member?" Tom said, sounding happier than he had in a very long time.

"Seconded," Harry said with a grin.

9. Chapter 9

Voyager - Year 7

"Captain Janeway?" Harry asked in the weekly meeting. His voice had no inflection to it, but there was no underlying anger, which was usually the case when he got this way.

"Yes Ensign Potter?"

He reached up and removed the last of his pips from his uniform. "I realize that in a time of emergency, you can refuse a request to muster out, and that the attempt to get back to Earth qualifies as such an emergency. I am returning my pips to you as a statement of intent to muster out of Starfleet the moment we return to Earth. I'm tired of it all."

"What brought this on?" Chakotay asked.

"Everything. I've been able to mourn Hermione, and I find that I really like Ann - Annika - as a person. You call her Hermione, but I can't; not just yet, so we agreed to remember her body donor in name, at least. She's been astonishingly forgiving of my treatment of her. By rights I should be eating through a straw due to how I acted toward her." He shook his head. "It was a good idea to give her other quarters, but now that I know she's been here all along, I paradoxically miss her all the more."

He sighed. "But the last two or three years, as well as other stuff I remember seeing on the Enterprise and in the records … it just seems that Starfleet really trains you to care about the other guy more than yourself. We get threatened by some species or other, and we bend over backwards to help them out, especially when they won't appreciate what we did, it seems. I understand not wanting to fight our way through a sector or quadrant, but damn me if it doesn't feel like we're trying to tell the universe that we don't matter; just our opponents do."

He stood. No one questioned this because experience showed them that he thought better on his feet. "Then there's things like that damned memorial we ran into a couple months ago. I like you a lot, Neelix, but damn me if I didn't want to hospitalize you for arguing for repowering that evil thing. The race that built that stupid thing committed a worse atrocity than killing the people on that planet - they forced everyone who goes near there to experience their own guilt over the incident! I have survivor's guilt over an incident that happened before I was born, no matter whether you count my years or my actual birth date! How many of the crew are experiencing post-traumatic stress because of that thing?" He spun on Janeway. "And you decided it was a good idea to idea to fund that atrocity of theirs with more power! We should have just let the damned battery die in it!"

He sat. "Throw me in the brig or give me solitary or whatever for speaking out of turn, but I just don't give a fuck anymore, flying or otherwise. I'm tired of it. I used to think that Starfleet was something noble and wonderful, after talking to Admiral Jaaymeson, but I'm realizing that I was just talking myself into it, because I was happy to see that some family that I knew in the 20th century had survived until today."

He stood again and walked over to the transparent aluminum window. "I've lost everything, Captain. I lost my home by coming here, I lost my chance at romance with a girl because, if I do get back to the 20th century, she gets to become so much antimatter vapour. I programmed her holo-version too well, because she came alive, and I fell in love with her. Then she died. Now she's back, sort of, but I screwed the pooch so badly on how I treated her that I doubt we can ever be a couple again. I've nothing left anymore. No family, no hope of a family, no friends. Starfleet is just . . . I can't be bothered to care, Captain. I'll help get us home, but then I'm done." He left the briefing without being dismissed.

Janeway picked up that last uniform pip and stared at it for a long moment. "Where did we go wrong?" she finally asked.

"In hindsight, a lot of places," Harry Kim finally said. "We all wanted him to get to know that Hermione was still here, but we did it right on the tail of her … well, let's call it an abduction … by Seven of Nine. What he heard was that we didn't give a damn about her as a person. And throwing the two of them together so often?" He grimaced. "Apologies, Captain, but that was probably not the best way to handle the situation."

"I believe that Mr Potter is suffering exactly what he stated," the Doctor said. "Post-traumatic stress disorder. Between the memorial – and remember that he was the most vociferous when it happened about not giving it a new battery – and the losses that he has taken, I doubt that he was ever given good counseling. Yes, he spoke with Deanna Troi several times while aboard the Enterprise, but a few one hour talks with a counsellor can't deal with something that deep. He has lost his time, his friends, and his family. And we have done nothing to help him properly recover."

"He's seemed so happy before the incident with Hermione and Seven," Tom said.

"He likely was," the Doctor replied. "But the loss of her yet again was likely a trigger for the trauma that he has been experiencing, and visiting upon us as well."

"And my reaction to the loss of Hermione's holographic form prior to the discovery of her overwhelming the effectively non-existent personality of the Borg drone was certainly not one of my shining moments. I've made up for it in some ways, like trying to help you, Doctor, rather than erase part of your memories yet again. But I've done nothing for Harry, really." She looked around the table. "That needs to change. First off - Doctor. I need you to start treating him for post-traumatic stress if you can. Feel free to use anyone in the crew that you feel would be useful. Maybe it's self-serving, but he's been an exemplary officer for years. Let's show Starfleet that these past three years were a fluke, rather than the new normal."

"Given how you reacted to Icheb's offer, Harry, I suspect you need to have a long conversation with Ann, as you call her," the doctor said to Ensign Potter.

Harry rubbed his hand across the back of his neck in embarrassment. "Uh, yeah. I did get rather … expressive … in my thanks, didn't I?"

"I believe the word you are searching for is 'exuberant'," the doctor told with with no little amusement coloring his voice.

"Well, ever since my surgery for recto-cranial inversion, I've come to understand why everyone likes her so much. There's just so much of Hermione in there."

"That's what we've been trying to tell you, Ensign." The doctor scowled. "On a separate note, I would appreciate it if your holodeck simulations would include more Skinner and less skinning. I don't believe that this tendency to punish yourself physically is a very healthy response."

Harry frowned. "Yeah, you're probably right. I suspect that the Dursleys had more far-reaching effects on me than I once thought." He paused. "I suspect that Skinner might not be better to cure me of the need for punishment, since he was a behavioral psychologist. And Freud tied everything back to sex. Not everything is because you wanted to have sex with your mother or father or pet lobster."

The doctor looked at him for a long moment before saying, "I suspect that is a series of data banks I'd be best off not exploring."

"If you do find anything about it, don't tell me," Harry replied. "I made it up."

"I'm glad. Frankly, any other option would have worried me, although the fact that you came up with the concept probably should worry me." The doctor smiled slightly to let him know he was joking. "Now I think you should see if Miss … if Ann is available."

"You can call her Miss Granger, Doc. I'm not going to be offended or have it hit my grief buttons."

Ann was engrossed in something when Harry entered Astrometrics; so much so that she didn't even register his arrival. She had the photo of Hermione with her arm around Harry. "I am so damned jealous of you, girl," she murmured. "You're the one I was based on, and when we get back, I'll have to watch him be with you. And it doesn't help that he wrote me as bisexual, since I can understand exactly why the thought of you tightens his uniform."

She let loose with a little sob. "And he'll never know that I'm the girl he wrote. Seven had no personality, and was too damned good at her hacking. I overwrote her completely, but he'll never accept that. Because I love him, though, I'll do what I can to make sure you survive. He loves you."

She shook her head. "I just wish I could figure out how to reverse the transfer. I think he'd accept me as a hologram that managed to free herself from the meat shell that entrapped her and took forever to escape from."

It was then that everything clicked for him - her fingernail chewing when nervous; her tendency to huff "Honestly" at someone who didn't think something all the way through; her tendency to print out her reports in paper form, even if she was going to recycle them later; the odd looks he kept catching from her when she thought he wasn't looking – it all pointed to the dominant personality in that body being Hermione Granger.

Taking a deep breath, he walked forward after she closed the picture. "You seem worried, Hermione," he said as nonchalantly as he could. "Care to talk about it?"

"Nothing you can really help me with, Ensign Pott … wait, what did you call me?"

"Your idiot of an ex-boyfriend must be improving. It only took me three years to figure out what a thundering moron he is. If he were smarter, he'd have realized a long time ago that he's been breaking Hermione Granger's heart for the past three-plus years. He's kinda hoping that someday she can find it in that heart to forgive his - MMPH!" It ended that way because he now had arm armful of cobalt-suited woman who was kissing him rather thoroughly.

Tom Paris entered the Astrometrics lab to find an amusing sight – Harry was holding up Hermione Granger. Her legs were wrapped around his waist, and he had a death grip on her rather shapely posterior. He suspected that they had either just started, or had learned to breathe through their noses when kissing.

Five minutes had passed without a break when he cleared his throat, in awe of their staying power. "Hate to break up the reunion, kiddies, but we do have a job to do."

"He's right," she said in a rather breathless voice. "We're going to continue this conversation later, Harry." Her voice brooked no argument, and her look promised that he'd enjoy continuing the conversation.

"It should be interesting when they decode the messages back at Starfleet," Janeway said. "You're certain that this holographic Reginald Barclay means us harm?"

"That's not the Reg I knew on Enterprise," Harry said. "I don't know who has been tweaking that program, but Reg was never that . . . I don't trust him."

"And that's why we deactivated him," Chakotay said. "I remember Seska and how you disliked her. And you were right, so I'm trusting you this time."

"And might I say 'Welcome back', Lieutenant Potter," Janeway said.

"Wasn't it Ensign, Captain?" he asked.

"As I recall, the incident that led to your demotion was a symptom of your disorder. Once you began to get some form of treatment, you returned to the exemplary officer that you had always been previously. I'm raising you to Lieutenant again, with the understanding that you will seek help faster next time."

"Well, if my friends will promise to continue surgical reversal of recto-cranial inversion syndrome, I'm certain I can manage that." He stood. "Last time I did this, I was mocking you. You didn't deserve that." He saluted her crisply.

She smiled and returned it. "Thank you, Lieutenant."

"Thanks for vouching for me, Harry," the new holographic Barclay said. "Apparently the Ferengi got my hologram - this one, Mark I, you might say - and were going to kill you – and by that I mean Voyager - in order to make a profit off Borg nanoprobes."

"I'm stepping back on my bloodthirsty impulses, but damn me if I don't want to hurt them badly." He grinned. "Maybe find all their money and vaporise it in front of them."

"Oh, you're nasty," Barclay said with a laugh. "Isn't that sort of torture against several treaties?"

"Yeah, but I never signed those treaties!" Harry replied with a laugh. He shook his head. "Damn. I never intended to, knowing that I was returning to the 20th century someday, but I made a lot of friends. And you're one of them, Reg. I want you to send that back to your meat counterpart the next time you talk to Starfleet. I probably would have gone crazy a long time ago without your help."

"And I'm glad you were there to help me get away from my holodeck addiction. Having a friend to fall back on - a real, meat one, as you call it - was a life-saver, and I mean that literally."

"Well, now you're a hologram yourself."

Barclay looked at him for a moment. "I think a lot of people would like to study the process by which a program can gain sentience. There's the Moriarty one, Voyager's Doctor, and your girlfriend. I'm specialised to do it on purpose, so that I can be just like the meat version of Reg and think exactly like him and not how the computer thinks the meat version would act. But Hermione came by it naturally. Organically, you might say. And that's a field of study worth really looking at."

"Get the two of them together if I ever actually do make it back to the 20th century and set them both on the concept." He shook his head. "Merlin. The two smartest woman I've ever known are the same girl. I wonder how they'd react to each other."

Reg blinked for a second. "Dibs on the popcorn concession for the catfight."

10. Chapter 10

Voyager

Harry was stalking around the ship in a foul mood again, but this time tried to stay away from everyone. More importantly, he told them he didn't know what was bothering him, and that he was trying to avoid rampant arseholery again.

It came to a head one day, though. "Harry, you know I love you," Hermione said, "but you're driving me insane with your brooding. You're even worse than when you were in fifth year!"

"That bad, huh?" he said with a laugh that didn't sound very happy.

"Exactly. Now what's bugging you?"

He took a deep breath, and then exhaled loudly. "I'm late. There's no sign of any temporal trips back to the 20th century. I have a madman to defeat, and that prophecy says that I have to be the one to take him out. The fact that he wasn't around in the 24th century when I landed tells me that it was done - but how? That picture showed that I was supposed to jump back five years ago, but I certainly didn't!"

"Ah," B'Elanna said sagely, her hand on her stomach, which was only just starting to show signs of impending child. "Scheduling anxiety."

"I still can't get used to that," he said. "'Sked-yool'. Even after twenty years, I still think it's supposed to be 'shed-yool'. But yeah, that's it exactly. Why can't I remember having done it? I have to have, or else Voldie would have won."

Hermione looked past everyone for a moment. "Wait a minute," she breathed, then inhaled deeply. Harry had always enjoyed it when her brunette holo-form had done it, and this long-haired blonde form doing that was just as enjoyable to him, especially in that cobalt jumpsuit that she wore because of the Borg circuitry still in her. "Let's go to the holodecks. I think I'm remembering something right, but I need to be sure." She stood up and started to walk away.

"Hot damn, I am a lucky man," he breathed as he watched the pleasant sway of her hips.

"If you'd like to be luckier later on, you'll follow me," she called sweetly over her shoulder.

"Hot damn again!" he yelled, running after her.

"Your cheerfulness is real now," Tom said in some confusion when he and B'Elanna caught up to Harry and Hermione. "Why?"

"Because she has a solution," Harry said. "Whenever Hermione had a solution, it was invariably the right one. She might be in a different body now, but it's still the Hermione I fell so deeply in love with in there. Therefore, she has a solution to my problem."

Hermione stopped her forward motion and turned to face Harry. A moment later she separated from him with a *POP!* as she finished the rough kiss and continued toward her original destination. It took Harry a few moments to get his brain working again.

Finally, they managed to reach the holodeck. Hermione immediately said, "Computer, bring up Harry's picture on the Hogwarts grounds." The photo showed up hovering in the air. "Enlarge to life-sized." Dutifully, the picture grew. "Hah! I was right!" she crowed.

"Um, duh?" Harry said with a smile. "What were you right about, though?"

She looked at him and shook her head. "Just a moment." She grabbed Harry and kissed him rather thoroughly again, and didn't let him go when she was done. "Want to take a moment to readjust, or do you mind advertising?"

"Habwah?" he asked. Finally parsing what she'd said, and how he'd reacted, he took a moment to . . . straighten his clothes, while Tom and B'Elanna pointedly looked elsewhere. "Not that I'm complaining, but what brought that on, so I can do it again?" He ignored the feminine snort from B'Elanna.

"Never you mind. But look at the picture. Specifically, look at your forehead. You've got a small scar there; a fresh one. There's no sign of that scar on your head right now, even as an old one." She pulled out a tricorder and scanned his head. "Definitely no sign that you've ever had that scar. The point when you return to Earth is in the future."

He looked at the picture, and called for a mirror. As she had said, there was no sign of a healed scar there. He grinned. "So I still can go back and . . . shit."

"What?" the other three asked in unison.

"The other Hermione."

"Captain, our shields are down to thirty percent," Tuvok said. "They cannot survive another hit."

"They're powering up weapons, Captain," Harry Kim said with some alarm. "Our phasers are offline, as are photon torpedoes."

Lieutenant Potter, seated at the helm, glared at the viewscreen, hands gripping the console in deep anger. Bastards wouldn't even talk. They just opened fire. I'd love to put a Bombarda right through - His thought process ended there as a beam shot from the Voyager and impacted the largest of the attacking ships. It tore right through the ship's shields, crumpling the front of the ship, but also exited the rear of the ship, narrowly missing one of the much smaller vessels.

"That was not phaser fire, Captain," Tuvok said. "I have never seen a weapon of that sort aboard this ship."

"What are you doing up there on the bridge?" B'elanna's angry voice said over the intercom. "The engines just flared for a moment, and I think several systems might have burned out!"

"Captain, we re detecting three more ships approaching, and they are powering up weapons. We cannot survive an attack from even one of them," Tuvok said. "I am uncertain what we can do to survive this encounter."

No, dammit! Harry thought. It can't end this way! I still haven't gone back in time! We need to get away from here to allow me to do that! He glared at the ships and tried to think of a way to escape. He thought that he might have cast a Bombarda at that first ship, but …

"Holy shit, it might work," he breathed. "Captain? Permission to do something stupidly dangerous that might kill us all anyway, but also might get us free of these idiots?"

"Given that they'll likely kill us, feel free," Janeway said.

He gripped the console and thought really hard about being away from these belligerent idiots. He closed his eyes, and pushed everything he had into being closer to home.

"Oog," said Tom Paris from the navigation console. "Now I know what the golf ball would feel like."

"Don't let B'Elanna hear you say that or she'll never do that to you again," Lieutenant Potter said with a small laugh. He then realized that they were using emergency lighting. "I think it worked, but I think I blew some circuits."

"We have no power save what is being used for environmental and structural integrity," Tuvok said. "I suspect that once communications has returned, we will hear a somewhat irate call from Engineering."

"What precisely did you do, Lieutenant?" Captain Janeway asked him.

"Well, as much as I can tune my phaser to use the battery … well, with some small amount of work I can cast spells through a phaser. I never thought of that being doable with the entire ship. But with us being in a 'do or die' situation, I decided to try Apparating us away from the battle. I thought of it because of the damage done to that ship. That was me casting a Bombardment spell in desperation. Hadn't actually intended to do that, but it made me realize that I could."

The comm unit crackled to life. "Captain, please tell me that whatever took out our power at least stopped our attackers as well. It's going to take at least a day to get things back to the point where I can think of using the warp engines. Hell, we're looking at a cold start for the engines, that's how thoroughly we're shut down."

"Sorry about that, B'Elanna," Potter said. "It's my fault, but we're apparently away from those idiots at least."

"If this is your fault, you should be made to come down and help us repair, once I get sensors back online. Should be right about … now." As she said that, the bridge crew could hear several of their consoles come to life.

Tuvok examined the readings and raised an eloquent eyebrow. "Captain, I will verify these readings once I am certain that the sensors are reading properly, but it seems that Lieutenant Potter sent us nearly seven thousand five hundred light years closer to the Alpha Quadrant. At our usual rate of speed, we are now roughly three years away from the Beta Quadrant, which means that we are now roughly five years from home."

Harry raised an eyebrow. "Captain? Permission to assist Lieutenant Paris in Engineering? If we can temporarily tune the engines to my signature, the way I tune a phaser, then we might be days from Earth, not five years. Haphazard 'get me the hell out of here!' Apparation moved us seventy-five hundred lightyears, so tuning the engines might move us significantly farther." He laughed with some embarrassment. "And maybe this time it won't blow every circuit on the ship."

"Lieutenant Potter is correct," Tuvok said. "Allowing the engines to properly interface with his form of energy manipulation should allow a greater control. I would, however, perform a test run using a shuttlecraft."

"I suspect your time might be better suited to checking your idea with a shuttlecraft, rather than our engines," Janeway said, agreeing with Tuvok. "Tom, care to assist Mr Potter with his endeavor?"

Harry sat in the retuned shuttlecraft and grinned. However far he got, he'd be able to give Voyager a good idea of just how far they'd be able to jump with those engines tuned to his signature. He closed his eyes and concentrated on jumping as far as he could. He wanted to look out that viewscreen and see Starbase One and Earth below it. With that inevitable feeling of being sucked through a hose, he jumped.

There, in front of him, was Earth. Clean, beautiful, happy little ball of water and dirt, with Starbase One orbiting gently above it.

He took several readings to verify that it was in fact Earth, and then powered up again and focused on Apparating straight into the shuttle bay, which he had insisted be left empty until he returned, for just such a possibility as him Apparating inside.

He jumped from the Delta Flyer and ran toward the doors, leaping every few seconds. He couldn't contain himself - he Apparated to the bridge. "YES!" he shouted. "IT WORKED!"

"How far did you go, Mr Potter?" Janeway asked.

Instead of answering her directly, he said, "Computer, download and display sensor logs from the shuttle for the last ten minutes." On screen came the image of Earth, with several Federation and Vulcan ships in line to dock inside Starbase One. The information scrolling across the bottom verified that they were, in fact, looking at Earth.

Harry Potter was literally vibrating. "It worked, Captain! I was actually at Earth!"

"Did you tell them of our impending arrival?" she asked.

He blinked at her for several seconds, and then said, "Excuse me, captain." With that, he walked over to a wall and smacked his forehead against the bulkhead twice, although not very hard.

"I gather that I should take that as a 'no' then, Mr Potter?" she asked, coming dangerously close to actual laughter.

"I was just so excited to tell you guys that I was successful that I just . . . I just shot back here as fast as I could."

Janeway was now grinning widely, and mashed a button on the console of her command chair. "This is Captain Janeway. I have some bad news for you, crew. I will be asking everyone on board Voyager to put in as much work as possible in as short a period of time as possible. All shifts will run on a daytime schedule.

"The reason for this? It appears that we have found a way home." She paused. "You heard me correctly - we may well be at Earth by this time next week, if all goes well. If not, we will be a good deal closer to there than before. The new shift rotation begins at shift change."

Harry wasn't sure if the cheer he heard rumbling through the decks was his imagination or not.

"Captain?" Hermione asked quietly from the science console, beside Harry Kim.

"Yes, Miss Granger?"

"Do I have your permission to steal your navigator and take him to our quarters?"

"Celebration?"

"To quote an audiovisual program I found in the ship's library, 'I need to take this man back to our quarters and have him tear off all my clothes.'"

Harry snorted. "If you think I'm gonna repeat Wash's response, you're crazy." (1)

Janeway was laughing openly. "That sounds like an excellent idea, Miss Granger. Granted. Celebrate a little for us as well."

The crew discovered that sound baffling only works to a point.

Harry and Hermione did get a round of applause later, though.

Three days later, a thoroughly tired B'Elanna Paris called the bridge. "Captain Janeway? I am proud to announce that the engines calibrations are complete. I'd give it about four to five hours to completely settle into the new tuning, but by tomorrow we should be able to have Harry send us as close to Earth as he can manage."

"Thank you, B'Elanna, and please pass along my deep thanks to everyone on your crew down there. No matter what happens, you've done an exemplary job, and if they let me, I'll put you all in for commendations."

"Thanks, Captain. Permission to return to my quarters and sleep for a day?" was the response. Humour was evident in the question.

"How long have you been up?"

"About thirty-six hours straight, Captain. Too excited to sleep, so I worked."

"Then go get that sleep now. I promise we'll wait for you to be awake before we head home."

"Thanks, Captain."

The next eighteen hours were spent making sure that everything was tied down as best it could be. "Never understood why these ships don't have seatbelts in the chairs," Harry grumbled softly.

"Is everybody ready?" Janeway asked. B'Elanna nodded eagerly. "Attention all hands. We will shortly be making the trip we hope will return us to Earth. Grab hold of anything you can, just in case it's a bumpy ride. It shouldn't be, but best to be prepared."

"Actually, it's going to feel like you were pushed through a straw," Harry said after she cut the communication. "Are we all ready?" At their nod, he began to concentrate.

Home. The green hills of Earth, and the pleasures of London. After we get back, I can even show Hermione around a city she's never seen. And then we can figure out how to get the Voyager to Hogwarts. Apparating into Hogwarts airspace would be fun. An image of his bushy-haired friend and the inevitable comeback to the thought came into his head as he built the energy, and suddenly there was the feeling of an Apparation crack that would have been audible in the vacuum of space, he suspected.

There, in front of them, was Earth. But there appeared to be a problem.

"Captain?" Harry Kim said from the science console. "We . . . have a little problem."

"And what might that be, Lieutenant?"

"The signals and the star locations that we're receiving show us to be in the late 20th century. April 30th, 1998, to be precise. 8:47 pm, San Francisco time."

"Exactly 380 years, apparently to the second," Tuvok stated

"A bit more precise than I expected, but thank you, Mr Kim, Tuvok. Any explanation, Mr Potter?" She paused. "I take it that you have an explanation, rather than a new way to program the helm console, since I doubt that hitting it repeatedly with your forehead is a recommended technique."

"Yes, Captain," Harry said. "Permission to add 'ow'?"

She laughed. "Granted. What is the explanation?"

"First off, ow. Second, I suspect that I've just discovered an odd little effect of either Apparating or adding that much power to it. I was thinking about Hogwarts for a moment as I prepared – incongruously, I was hearing Hermione saying that Hogwarts: A History says that you can't Apparate through the school's wards – and when I let loose with the actual Apparation, it seems that Hogwarts was on my mind still. So I apparently yanked us back in time."

"And made yourself years younger," Tom Paris said. "And the wound you gave yourself from smacking the console explains the scar that Hermione noticed a couple months ago."

"Go see the Doctor," the Captain said. "See if the jump took more from you than years. Miss Granger, if you'd make sure he gets there?"

Three hours later, Harry, Hermione, and the Doctor met Janeway, Chakotay, Tuvok, and B'Elanna in the ready room. "He checks out as fine, Captain. He'll have a small scar for a while, but beyond telling him that his head is an inadequate hammer, there's nothing that needs doing for him."

"Excellent. We need a landing party, I suspect, to ensure that everything is as it should be, and then we need to figure out how to return home."

"That part is easy, Captain," B'Elanna said. "The Enterprise – the Kirk one – accidentally invented a manoeuvre that should serve us quite well, because a great deal of study was put into the variables. We slingshot around the sun and slow the ship down to end in our proper time – and if done right, in the Sol system."

"Chief Engineer Paris is correct, Captain," Tuvok said. "I can research and prepare the calculations for the return. But I suspect that Mr Potter, at least, has a requirement to land the Delta Flyer on the surface."

"Agreed. I must admit that I would like to see this school that teaches magic," Janeway said. "So we need to choose our landing party, as I said. I definitely intend to visit this school, and you need to pilot us there since you know where it is. I'd suggest that there be at least two more. Hermione?"

"Yes, Captain. I'd like to see the real school for once."

"Might I suggest Commander Chakotay?" Harry asked. "I wouldn't normally suggest the Captain and First Officer leave the ship on an away mission, but I don't know how dangerous this one will really get. Normally I'd think that Commander Tuvok was best suited, but I think that Commander Chakotay is better suited to translate between the mystical and scientific languages."

"That is quite logical,"Tuvok said. "I concur with Mr Potter's suggestion, assuming that he believes them to be friendly."

"Quite so. The headmaster of the school will be friendly to the point of diabetic worries, but he's got a hundred and sixty years worth of practise behind him."

"What else can we expect?" Janeway asked.

"Well, it doesn't appear that Voldemort has drawn too much blood, based on the sensor readings. Things largely are the same from what I can see. Hogwarts still looks like a safe place to land. What's going to be interesting is watching the response once they realise that 'The Boy Who Lived' has returned to Hogwarts. The sky around Hogwarts will probably fill with owls shortly after."

"Owls?" Tom asked.

"Post owls," Hermione said. "Keep the sensors on us, and you'll see what we mean."

A short time later, Janeway and Chakotay arrived at the Delta Flyer to find Harry and Hermione already aboard. "Eager to get to the planet, Harry?" Chakotay asked with a laugh.

"Damned straight. Can't wait to freak some of them out." He snapped his fingers. "I don't know if it will affect you, since you know about magic, but do I have permission from both of you to disobey a direct order from you, if necessary? The reason I ask is because there are wards around the area that are there to keep people who don't know about magic from finding the school. If you're affected, then it will make you feel either uneasy, or make you think you have somewhere else far more important to be. As I say, it shouldn't affect you, but if it does, it should stop affecting you once we're actually inside the wards."

"In that case, I agree," Janeway said. "You might also wish to specifically lock the console to your use only."

"No, because you can override that. But I don't expect it to be a problem. Just thinking ahead."

"Good idea," Chakotay said. "Shall we?"

"Yes. Also, until we can explain things, perhaps Hermione should go by another name? Perhaps the Annika one you were using for a while?" They all agreed readily.

Harry gently lifted them from the deck and out through the shields. He suspected that he would be reaching the school just in time for lunch. Setting the Delta Flyer's shields to make them radar invisible, he dropped from Luna down to Earth orbit and slid in over the Atlantic, aiming for Scotland.

He sighed as he came in over Inverness. At the speed he was flying, the Cairngorm Mountains weren't far away.

Home. It had been so long since he'd been at Hogwarts, and he still felt like he was coming home. To hell with the Dursleys – they'd never made him welcome in Surrey, and he had no intention of visiting them, unless it was to land Voyager on their roof just before they flew back to the future. The fact that the structure wouldn't be able to hold that kind of weight was a definite bonus.

The mountains he was looking for came into sight, and he saw the castle he had spent five years living in. Harry's voice was filled with awe. "It's been twenty years, but I've made it home. She's still beautiful."

(1) The quote is from Firefly, and Wash (the character's husband) replied "Work, work, work." (Admittedly, he was grinning when he said it.) My thought was that if I'd been on that bridge, I'd have shouted "Stunt double!"

11. Chapter 11

Apologies for the great period of time between posted chapters. I was working on an original novel, which I have just finished first draft on yesterday (December 3, 2014) Now I can turn my attentions back to finishing this one up!

Hogwarts, April 30, 1998

Albus Dumbledore felt one of the wards go off, announcing that a wizard had just crossed the wards. The odd thing was that the ward stated that the wizard was higher than any broom was known to fly.

He headed out of the castle, aware that his movements were drawing attention. He didn't want a large crowd, but neither did he wish to draw a larger one by forbidding the students to follow him. "Sir?" Hermione Granger asked as he passed by her. "Is something wrong?"

"Something passed through the wards in an impossible manner, Miss Granger. I wish to see if I can discern what the truth of the matter is." He began to walk in the direction of the Quidditch pitch, since that would likely give him the best view of who or whatever it was.

As they approached the pitch, he saw an odd object lower itself from the sky onto the ground of the pitch. Miss Granger gasped. "What is it, Miss Granger?"

"I don't know exactly, sir, but that has the look of advanced technology. Extremely advanced. That shouldn't even be able to work in Hogwarts airspace!"

"Curiouser and curiouser, as a friend of mine once said. Let us approach closer and see what we may discover."

"Looks like Miss Granger is approaching with some old man," Chakotay said. "Is it safe to assume that the old gentleman is someone on your side?"

"I hope so," Harry said. "We didn't have a chance to speak that often during my last year here at Hogwarts, so I don't know if I'd done something to make him hate me, or if something more sinister was up. I have trouble with the sinister motives, honestly."

"Can I make an observation here?" 'Annika' asked with a smile. "Have I ever mentioned that my old body was really hot, now that I've had a chance to see it from the outside?"

Harry just snorted. "New one's pretty nice to look at too, darling. Should we open the door and greet the two of them?"

"Works for me," Annika said. "Then Hermione and I can tie you down and have our wicked way with you!" She was grinning when she finished.

Janeway was chuckling softly. "Not exactly the reasoning I'd give for opening the hatch, but yes, meeting with them would be a good idea."

Harry headed to the hatch on the Delta Flyer.

"Sir! It looks like it's opening!" Hermione said, pointing at the object.

"Please stand behind me, Miss Granger, until I ascertain whether or not this is a hostile creature we are about to meet."

He drew his wand and stepped forward slowly. When the door finished opening completely, a tall man stepped from the vehicle. He definitely appeared human, but his outfit was somewhat unusual, being mostly black with an odd geometric pattern in red at the shoulders. He looked at the face and found the man smiling at him. He looked familiar, but -

"Is that any way to greet me, Headmaster?" he asked, and Dumbledore knew immediately who it was.

"Harry? Is that . . . how can I be sure that it truly is you?"

"I can say a couple things that your companion might remember. Those might vouch for me." At his nod, the man who appeared to be an older Harry said, "The first that comes to mind is something she said to a group of us. 'We could have been killed – or worse, expelled.' We had just met Fluffy for the first time. The second one was 'Books! And cleverness! There are more important things - friendship and bravery and - ' In recent years, I always sort of wished I'd known what that last word she was going to say was."

Hermione stepped out from behind Dumbledore. "Love, Harry. The word to finish it was love." She ran toward him, and surprising even herself, she threw herself at him and tried to kiss him.

It was an exceptionally successful attempt, because he had his arms around her and was kissing her as deeply as she was him. She noted another reaction from him, a bit lower down, but decided she was too busy kissing him to think about that at the moment. Although, given the way he was kissing her . . . .

The kiss finally broke, and she snickered softly as she realised that there was an audible POP! as their lips separated. "Now that is a welcome home!" he said happily, making no effort to release her from the hug he was holding her in.

"I'm glad you liked it. I've missed you."

"It's going to take the entire complement of the ship I came here on to tell you how much I missed you, Hermione. So much so that it's going to lead to a very uncomfortable conversation soon." She cocked her head in curiosity. "I'll explain later, I promise. But when you meet someone who's on that shuttle, please don't pull a Ron and jump to conclusions. It'll likely be the wrong one."

"I would like to know how you have been gone for nearly two years and came back four years older," the Headmaster said. "But I gather that it part of what you wish to say."

"Yes sir. May I introduce my companions?" At his nod, Harry motioned to the Flyer, reluctantly releasing Hermione from his grasp. A striking woman with brown hair and a strong resemblance to Kathryn Hepburn stepped off first. "May I introduce Captain Kathryn Janeway of the USS Voyager?"

"Pleased to meet you sir," she said in a somewhat smoky voice that made Hermione's pulse quicken just a little bit.

"Commander Chakotay is our next contestant," he said with a grin, which led to a man with odd markings over his right eye stepping off the ship that Harry had landed. "First Officer of the Voyager."

He worried his lower lip. "The last one needs a little explanation, but not out here where anyone can overhear it. The last person on board -"

A tall blonde woman stepped off the ship that made Hermione's heart pound in her chest and her nipples hurt as much as Harry's appearance did, as well as starting a very pleasant thrumming sensation between her thighs. The woman was wearing cobalt coloured spray paint, from the look of her outfit. The blonde walked forward and held out her hand to Hermione. "I have wanted to meet you for some time, given how Harry has talked about you. I don't see the wings, though."

"Wings?" she asked, a little light-headed.

"To him, you're an angel. You're directly responsible for me. The body was born Annika Hansen, but I now use a different name for reasons that will become clear in a more secure location."

"Well, shall we head inside then?" Dumbledore asked. "Is it safe to assume that the reason you have been gone for the last two years is one of those things that needs security?"

Harry nodded and turned back to Hermione. "You have no idea how glad I am that you survived. The last I had seen you, you had just been sliced by Dolohov, and Neville had verified that you were alive. Then . . . what happened, and I finally see that you're alive."

"Unscarred too," she said. Emboldened by his reaction to the kiss, she added, "You can verify that later if you want." She had an impish smile.

"Trust us, Miss Granger," the man called Chakotay said, "he'll want to, and I suspect it will be a very thorough inspection." He had the grin that told you he knew he was embarrassing a good friend, which helped her relax even more about these people.

"It's in the interests of science!" Harry mock protested.

"If you need a nurse to help you, Harry, I'm willing," the girl called Annika added in a voice that sent fire through Hermione's body and straight to her core. If the thrumming sensation got any stronger, she was likely to embarrass herself with a loud orgasm.

"Really?" he asked her, voice asking questions that Hermione could only guess at.

"This castle is beautiful," Captian Janeway said to the Headmaster, clearly attempting to yank the conversation in a less . . . charged direction. "Harry tells us that it's a school for magic users?"

"Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry," Dumbledore said proudly, motioning to the building before them. "Premiere educational centre in all of Europe for learning to harness magical abilities."

"Spoken like a true salesman," Harry added with a friendly laugh.

"Guilty, I confess," Dumbledore replied, smiling.

'Annika' was intrigued as the entered the castle. She knew it, but she didn't. Her memories led her to the Great Hall. "Miss Hansen? Lunch is happening in there right now. The appearance of the four of you might cause a bit of a stir."

"Word gets out that I'm back and that'll happen anyway," Harry said. "Might as well get the rumours started now. Besides, I need to see who's still alive." He flipped the doors open wide, and the four of them entered.

She was pleased to see that many of the students reached for wands suddenly as the doors shot open. She was even more pleased to note that Ron, Ginny, and Neville were still around. Her eyes slid around the room and found Luna, who was looking back at her, and had actually risen to her feet.

The blonde girl seemed to glide to the group and came to a stop before Annika. "Don't worry, miss. Things will work out the way you hope." She pulled her into a hug and whispered, "Welcome back, Hermione."

Annika's eyes went wide, and Luna giggled. "I'll explain later. Chalk it up to me being weird."

The blonde pulled Harry into a hug as well, and she could hear her whisper, "I like the way you've turned out. Makes me wish you liked me that way."

He was more than a little flustered, which gave Ron, Ginny, and Neville time to run over to the group. "It's really you, Harry?" Ron asked.

"Was last I checked," was the reply, which made Hermione and Annika laugh.

Ginny's eyes sparkled. "Maybe someone should do a more . . . hands-on inspection?"

Harry's answer was to pick her up and spin her around, laughing. Annika could see tears in his eyes, though. "Oh my gods have I missed you guys!" he nearly sobbed.

"I believe that we have the group that I would have gathered to speak with you, at least amongst the students. Shall we away to our meeting? All of you who need it will be given passes explaining your absence from whatever classes you may miss." At Harry's nod, Dumbledore cleared his throat, silencing the room. "Yes, this is Harry Potter. With luck, he will be able to meet with some of you later." With that, he led the procession to his office.

Harry smiled to himself as they entered the office of the Headmaster. As the man sat behind his desk, Harry could see the Headmaster he remembered from his first four years resurfacing, the one who always seemed supremely concerned about him, as opposed to the one who couldn't give him the time of day from fifth year. He noted that Professor Snape was also there.

"Harry it is excellent to see you healthy and happy. Where have you been?" the Headmaster asked once all were inside the room.

"I would prefer to keep that to myself until Professor Snape is no longer here. I know of his role as a spy for Voldemort -"

"Do not say the name, you stupid child!" the hook-nosed man hissed.

"No one has ever told me why it's taboo, Professor. Until I am given a valid reasoning for avoid the name, I see no reason to give in to fear and not make certain sounds."

"I assure you, sir, that Lieutenant Potter is anything but stupid," Janeway said in a clipped voice. "I fully expect him to be in command one day."

"God help your people, then," Snape said quietly.

Harry just started laughing. It started small, and grew until he was nearly falling from his chair. He was gasping for breath near the end of his laughing jag. When he was able to, he climbed into his chair and wiped his eyes. "Ah, Headmaster, you still trust him, don't you, even though he makes his loathing of me clear?"

"He has given me good reason to trust him, yes."

"What is it?" Chakotay asked.

"That is between the Headmaster and I," Snape replied imperiously.

"Headmaster and me," Harry corrected. "You should have used the word 'me' in that sentence. But the point is that you demand that we trust him in everything. You can hear that he is abusive to me. I have been missing for twe . . . two years, and he immediately falls into his old patterns."

"Personally," Janeway said, "if it weren't for the sense of obligation that he feels for you, I'd suggest that he simply leave again."

Harry grinned maliciously as the Headmaster's eyes widened in shock. "Given the prophecy, you can't have that, can you?"

"How do you know it?" Dumbledore asked.

"Make him leave or explain why he's completely trustworthy and I'll tell you. Otherwise we make our own plans, sir. I do not trust him. It's that simple."

"Severus?" Dumbledore asked. "His role is that important. He needs to know."

Snape sighed and sneered at Harry. "I was the one who heard the beginning of the prophecy. I had been friends with your mother while at this school. When I realised that he intended to kill your parents, I chose to rebel."

"You're not telling the whole story," Annika said. "There are a lot of holes in that."

"And what would you know of the situation, girl?" he sneered at her.

Harry was staring at the ceiling. "Okay, we know that he knew my mother, assuming that the memory I saw in fifth year is correct, where he told the 'mudblood' that he didn't need her help. I have my doubts since he has a memory of a werewolf talking about his condition in a public place, where anyone could overhear him.

"The base story is true," Harry continued. "He overheard the prophecy and told his master, which means that he is directly responsible for the fact that I grew up with a family that thought a cupboard was a proper bedroom. He knows this because of the mind rape he did in the name of lessons." Harry focused on the headmaster. "Interestingly, you can lay my disappearance directly on his shoulders as well. When I was given proper Occlumency training that didn't involve brute force, I learned in two weeks."

"I doubt that," Snape sneered. "You -" He suddenly stiffened and fell over, twitching.

Harry grinned. "He was about to state that I hadn't noticed the intrusion into my mind. Illegal in this day and age, and highly frowned on where I was." He looked to Janeway. "I believe that your security chief would think very poorly of a culture that permitted what Professor Snape was doing." He turned back to Dumbledore. "He ran afoul of one of my mental wards."

"Be that as it may be," Snape said shakily, "I was in your mind. You were nowhere special, you were at the beach for much of your time, ogling young women of low morals."

"Borrow the headmaster's Pensieve and go look at those girls, Professor Snape. Take a very close look at their faces. I think you'll discover that it was a constructed memory, unless you think that Daphne Greengrass and Pansy Parkinson would wear so little in front of someone who wasn't a husband." He turned back to the Headmaster again. "We're looking at a man who detests me, and who caused Riddle to come after my parents. What could he possibly have done to prove his loyalty to the side of light, sir?"

Hermione was looking at Snape. "I suspect that he was in lust with your mother, Harry. If so, he probably wanted her left alive, in the vain hope that she'd fall for him."

Snape was on his feet and pointing his wand at Hermione, but never managed to cast whatever he had planned, because Harry had pulled his phaser and stunned him. As he fell to the ground, Harry looked at Dumbledore and said, "If you wish him to be part of this, you will find a way to control him, Headmaster. I have the upper hand in this, as you know. I do not trust that he will not run to Voldemort with whatever I tell you. My whereabouts for the last . . . two years are part of that."

Dumbledore looked at him for a long silent moment before speaking. "I have always felt that it was up to him to explain, but he was very incomplete. He did in fact overhear the beginnings of the prophecy, when I was interviewing Professor Trelawney -"

"Trelawney! Sybill P Trelawney! Of course!" Harry shouted. "I suspected, but . . . sorry for interrupting, sir. The globe simply had this tiny ghostly figure that I couldn't be bothered to examine, since I was paying more attention to the words."

Dumbledore chuckled slightly. "Quite all right, Mr Potter. I have had the same reaction before, and understand it all too well. He did go to Voldemort and tell him, and when he realised that your family was slated to die, he came to me, trying to save Lily."

"Not Dad or me, just her?" Harry asked carefully.

"Precisely. It was only after he swore an oath to me to do everything in his power to keep you alive that I was willing to deal with him. It was a magical oath - if he breaks it, he dies."

"I note that it doesn't prevent him from being a royal son of a bitch to me, just that he has to keep me alive."

"Very true, unfortunately. I have tried to get him to realise that you are not your father -"

"To my detriment, to be honest. I'm going to want an oath that he simply will not take this information from this room. I do not trust him, and am smart enough to know that I don't know what Voldemort might be able to do with the information." He pointed his phaser at Snape and grinned. Another beam shot out, and Snape sat up suddenly.

"How did you manage that?" Chakotay asked. "I've never seen one do that before."

"I'll tell you after I get an oath out of Severus Snape not to reveal anything that he hears today without permission."

"And why would I swear to that, especially to you?" sneered the man.

"Because you'll be out of the loop, Professor," Harry said. "Right now, some of your Slytherins – Draco Malfoy, for example – are firing owls at their homes, probably with Haste spells on them, telling their Death Eater daddies that Harry Potter has returned from wherever he disappeared to. Voldie is going to want information, and I don't want him to have it. Either you basically give up spying and swear to make no effort to pass information to Voldemort in any fashion whatsoever in regards to my whereabouts, or you face the consequences of going before the insane half-blood and telling him that you have no information to give him. I can't imagine he'll like that very much, and might even kill you."

"You sound so worried for my survival, Potter." The sarcasm was unmistakeable.

"Have you ever given him reason to care?" Janeway asked suddenly. "If what I've heard from you since we arrived is any indicator, you've given him no reason to care for whether or not you live or die. And to be honest, if I have to choose between someone who has saved me and many others, and you, who seem constitutionally unable to do anything even resembling a positive emotion, I choose to keep my friend alive."

"So I can remain in the loop if I promise not to tell the Dark Lord anything?"

"A magical oath that you will pass no information regarding me to him through any means that you can conceive of, unless I give you permission. That means no giving Draco a note to pass to Voldie. No telling Draco that being in a specific corridor at a certain time would be a good idea. No means of communication at all."

"You carefully remove most of my usefulness to the Dark Lord. And he will realise this. You know that I am a spy, for example. He will know that Dumbledore knows that you know."

"And your Occlumency is supposedly good enough to keep the Dark Idiot out, isn't it?" Annika asked. "You let him know that Harry knows that you're a spy. I'd imagine that he's got you spying for him as well. You pass unimportant information to him, much as you pass what information you can to our side." She sighed. "Look, you're an intelligent man. I'm sure that you can turn the magical oath into something to help you, and make you look good in Voldie's eyes. Perhaps tell him of the exact wording of the oath, so that he and his smarter people will spend time trying to work past the wording, rather than simply coming out and attacking people to make his point about still being here."

Snape's eyes widened at that, and he actually smiled. "I believe that I like the way you think. Perhaps later we could talk?" It was obvious that he was trying to be as smooth as he could be. He turned to the Headmaster. "I believe that I am willing to take the oath requested. If we place the entirety of this conversation under it, I can even help you with the wording of the oath, in order to make it as unbreakable as possible, and hide my involvement from the Dark Lord.

He turned to Harry. "I do not like you, but I wish the Dark Lord removed more than I dislike you."

"I can accept that, sir. One thought comes to mind, though. Be it tomorrow or a hundred and fifty years from now, someday you will die and see my parents again. You say that you cared for my mother." Snape went white before Harry could finish. "Precisely, sir. I doubt we can ever be friends, based on the past. But can you please remember that half of the genetics in my system are hers, and do your best to ignore the parts that are James Potter's?"

"I . . . shall try, that is all that I can promise." Harry nodded and held out his hand. Snape nodded and shook it, albeit as rapidly as he had once shaken Sirius Black's hand.

An hour of work developed an oath that both Severus Snape and Albus Dumbledore thought would stymie Riddle for a while. Then Harry was able to tell his story.

"Maybe it was breathing in the sand from the broken Time Turners or something else. I don't know what caused it, and I doubt anyone will ever learn what caused it. When my eyes cleared, I was alone. I ran through the bowels of the Ministry, screaming for the group that had come with me, because the last I knew, Hermione was near death. Instead, I found an empty building, one that I found out later was actually a tourist attraction. I headed to the surface to see if I could get back to Hogwarts and see what had happened. The local police stunned me.

"I awoke to discover myself 362 years in the future. Everyone I knew was dead. They helped bring me up to speed, and I joined Starfleet, which is where I got this nifty uniform I wear. The red announces that I'm in the command branch of the organisation, and the pips on my collar announce that I'm a Lieutenant, which is odd, given some of my recent escapades.

He turned to Snape. "And the wonderful thing was that I earned it, sir, rather than all that stupid crap in this day about surviving some damned curse and being held up as a saviour. To be honest, when all is said and done, I'm going back to the 24th century. It's become my home." He looked to Annika for a moment.

"What about me?" Hermione asked softly. "I'd like it if you stayed."

His eyes filled with tears. "I can't tell you, but that's . . . that's not an option."

She thought for a moment, and then sat back hard. "I'm going to die soon. You're crying, and you never cry, at least not where people can see. You can't tell me. That means you don't want to change the future, because if you do, it causes a paradox.

She started to chew her fingernails, her brow furrowed. "I don't give a damn. Tell me exactly what you know. I want to live, but I won't erase the future. If I can find an escape from my fate that doesn't change the history books of the future, then I'd like to take it."

Harry and Annika looked up suddenly and their eyes met. Harry grinned widely, followed almost immediately by Annika mirroring the look. "Captain Janeway?" he asked. "Permission to explain what I know about Oxford, and the Granger family? We might get three new crew members."

"Four," Hermione said with a small laugh. "Although I don't know what duties my fifteen month old sister could perform on your ship."

"Congratulations!" he said.

"You have my permission, Harry," Janeway said softly. "As I understand it, that would easily allow for the history books to remain unchanged."

He looked to Hermione. "On August 1st of this year, something is going to happen in Oxford. It will vaporise the university, and a goodly portion of the surrounding city. Oxford will never be rebuilt – it will stand as a monument to man's inhumanity to man, even more than Auschwitz or Hiroshima. The university will be rebuilt and called Oxford, in memory of the old one, but it's actually going to be placed in Coventry."

"I'd be home by then," she whispered.

"Precisely. History states that many bodies were never found, simply because there was nothing left to find. The entire Granger family was one of those groups of bodies."

"Would it change the history books if the four of you saved us? I'd ask if we could save more people, but I don't think you've got the room in that ship."

Harry grinned and looked at Janeway, who smiled and nodded. "That ship on the Quidditch pitch isn't the Voyager, Hermione. That's a shuttlecraft sent down from the Voyager." He looked to Dumbledore. "Sir?"

"Yes Harry? Apologies. Yes, Lieutenant?" He smiled. "You earned it on your own merits; it should be used."

"Thank you, sir, but I give you permission to call me Harry if you want to. After the students leave in June, may we have permission to land the Voyager on the Quidditch pitch and perform some much needed repairs, if the captain deems it necessary?"

"Certainly. If you desire, you may allow the crew access to the grounds, with the notification of certain areas being off limits."

"Yeah, I can't imagine that the centaurs will take kindly to Starfleet tramping about their woods. They might appreciate Commander Chakotay, though. He might speak their language better than I do. And meeting spiders as big as the Delta Flyer? Not fun."

Ron muttered in the back, "No kidding."

Harry laughed and continued. "There's a lot I can't tell you, for obvious reasons. But I can tell you that part of the reason I was in Starfleet was to make my return to this time easier." He laughed. "There is a picture – yet to be taken – of me with my arm around Hermione's shoulder, standing next to the Delta Flyer. It was taken by Colin Creevey. That's what let Starfleet know that we had to return." He turned to Janeway. "It's also why I pushed for the creation of the Delta Flyer as early in our trip as I did."

"I can understand that," she said. "Back when you thought that it would be at any moment during our trip, you wanted it ready."

"Precisely." He paused. "I still wonder about that other ship, though. It was Federation design, but nothing we've seen yet. And that photo was taken this year."

12. Chapter 12

Hogwarts, April 30, 1998

Harry, Annika, and the others of the Ministry Six (as he discovered they were now called) headed off to show the grounds to Annika, while Captain Janeway and Chakotay got quick lessons in the wizarding world of the late 20th century from the Headmaster and Professor Snape.

Outside, they headed toward the Delta Flyer. "Please, do not touch anything on board this vehicle, because I'm the only one who knows how to fly it out of the group of us." He paused. "Well, maybe Herm . . . Annika could, but she's the only other one."

Annika stepped aboard first, and Harry said "Damn! Watching that never stops being enjoyable!" He grinned at Hermione, and was amused to note that she was biting her lower lip and also attempting to tear through her blouse through specifically applied blood pressure. "Those must hurt," he whispered in her ear. "I think Annika and I would like to help you with that problem later."

Hermione actually lost her footing for a moment, falling back against Harry. "Please don't tease me, Harry," she said softly, and he could hear her holding back tears.

He stopped, turning her around. He motioned the others aboard, and then said softly, "Hermione, the only teasing I want to do to you right now involves ending with a screaming orgasm. We'll explain more on board the Delta Flyer, but suffice it to say that if Annika or I say that we'd like to help you with that problem you're having with the fit of your blouse, we are not making fun of you." He grinned. "Now, care to enter the ship ahead of me, that I might enjoy the way your hips sway as you climb aboard?"

She blinked rapidly at him, and he could see that tears were even closer. "You really . . . you think I'm sexy?"

"Might sound like a silly response, but ask Annika exactly how I feel about you. Let's board so that she can tell you why she'd know."

Hermione climbed aboard the Delta Flyer with a smile, especially when she heard Harry's "Damn, even better than I programmed!" murmured behind her.

Once aboard, Harry tapped a few keys, getting a "System lock down in effect, authorisation Potter One" from the Flyer

"Good. Now there's no worries about accidentally hitting the wrong button. How about we catch up on what's happened since I've been gone?"

"Well, you've obviously been to the future," Hermione said, "based purely on the technology. I find it interesting that the ship still works within Hogwarts field, if you will, what with all the wards and such."

"Yes, well, as I said in there, the Time Turner explosion, if you want to call it that, shot me into the future. It was eventually realised that I would be coming back, as I did right now. Two separate photos exist from this time that showed us the earliest time that it could happen. One showed me this age, standing right outside this vehicle, right here on the Hogwarts Quidditch pitch. The other is taken in space, with the Voyager and two other ships. I think one of them was the Delta Flyer, but that was hard to tell. The other was an unknown ship of the Federation."

"What is this Federation?" Neville asked.

"The United Federation of Planets," Harry said with a smile. "I could give you a Binns worthy description, but I prefer you all awake. Suffice it to say that it's a fairly democratic organisation of many worlds. Many worlds have humans on them – some of them due to colonising, but many due to someone seeding the galaxy – but there are Vulcans and Caitians and Edosians and even the Hamalki."

"You love it up there, don't you?" Ginny asked a little sadly. "I can hear a tone in your voice that I've never heard before. You've been looking for a home, and you finally found one."

"No, not yet I haven't," he said with a shrug. "Looking for it, though. But everything I have up there, I earned. I'm a Lieutenant, and I wasn't given that position because I'm the BWL. I got it because I fought for it and passed the tests needed to qualify."

"You're making it on your own merits," Ron said. "I've been learning that myself. There are questions I want to ask, but you'd have no idea, I'm sure."

Harry grinned. "Well, I can tell you of two families that will have descendants into the 24th century. When I arrived, I was met by someone who can trace his family back to Bill and Fleur. Apparently that red hair is impossible to keep down, even if you add some Veela genes to it."

"What was the other family?" Hermione asked.

"When I was on New Londinium, I was taken in by a wonderful family named the McTaverts. Turns out that Dudley got married and had a magical daughter, and threw both mother and child out of the house. The McTaverts descended from them. I was told that I could consider myself family there even before we discovered the connection to the Dursleys."

Neville snorted. "From what little I've heard of the Dursleys – and from, the year you disappeared – that sounds like the perfect revenge on them. Knowing that they'll have children that will claim you as family? Priceless."

"I'm hoping to get permission at some point to take you guys up in the Flyer, because I'll bet you'll never see anything as amazing as Earth from space." He closed his eyes and smiled, a suspicious wetness at the corners of his eyes. "Especially when you get stranded seventy years from it."

He opened his eyes. "I made a mistake, but it's the best one I've ever made in my life. We used the power of the Voyager to fuel my Apparation, and I was thinking of Hogwarts and Hermione at the time. I hadn't known that Apparation had a temporal component, to be honest, and I'd really rather not let that get out, because I'm afraid that Voldie might learn it and use that to really screw things around."

"Well, we're here, so that can't happen," Ginny said with a grin.

"I wish that were true," Harry said. "We had a couple things happen over the last seven years on Voyager that make me think that someone fixed a couple nasty scenarios. We'll never know, but the evidence points that way. And my time on Enterprise had a couple things like that, too. So it's not a guarantee that he couldn't screw with us really badly."

His communicator chirped. "Harry? Where are you?" Janeway's smoky voice asked.

"I'm in the Flyer. I wanted to be able to talk to my friends in a somewhat secure location."

"Understood. We're on our way back out, and I think we'll be taking a few guests to the Voyager to work through our plan for the next few months."

"Months, Captain?"

"Do you think I intend to lose one of my best crewmen? You have to be here until at least August, so I'd say months, since this is still April."

"As you say, Captain," he replied with a smile. "If we're going to be here that long, maybe I should take my N.E.W.T.s, since everyone knows you can't get a good job without them." Her earthy chuckle was his response before the communication ended.

"That voice is a deadly weapon," Annika said softly. "But you can't exactly tell your captain that listening to her speak makes you want to tear her clothes off, can you?" She laughed a little

"Bisexual?" Ginny asked. "Or Harry-sexual, like our Hermione here?"

"Ginny!" was the outraged and angry Hermione response.

"What?" Ginny said. "How long did you dance around me before you finally admitted that you wanted to see me naked? Can we wait those months for you to finally admit that Harry's is the only broomstick you want to ride? Can he wait those months?"

"He's got a girlfriend already!" Hermione cried.

Annika's reply was soft, but heard clearly by everyone. "So we make it a threesome. I know I want to strip you naked, and given who I started life as, I can guarantee you that Harry does too."

"Who you started life as?" Neville asked.

Annika grinned. "This body is that of a young girl named Annika Hansen, who was . . . well, that's a story for another time. The consciousness running this body, though, is of a young holographic lifeform named Hermione Jane Granger." Their eyes were all wide. "Yeah. Harry recreated all of us in the future, but I was the only one to wake up and realise it, for some reason."

"Other than the fact that Hermione is as smart as she is sexy?" Ginny asked with a smile.

"Pretty much," Harry said with no sign of laughter. Hermione's eyes went wide at that. "Seriously. Think about it. I wrote a program to allow me to hang out with the people I remembered from school. One of the programs was so smart that it gained real sentience."

"But . . ."

"I embarrassed myself asking you out," Neville said. "That's when you admitted that Harry was the only man who interested you that way. You cried for hurting me, as I recall."

"Well, I thought you were going to hate me," she said with a smile.

"Instead, he became her shield," Ron said. "Ginny suggested that they pretend to date until he found someone else, and then they could stage an amicable break-up."

"Did give me the excuse to out-pureblood Malfoy and break his nose," Neville said with a laugh.

"Give, give!" Harry said with a laugh, but the story was stopped before it started by a knocking on the shuttle, followed by the door opening. "Chakotay or the Captain," he said. "Right now, we're the only four, Annika included, who can open this when it's closed."

"Astonishing," came the voice of the Headmaster as the door continued to open. "And this . . . box . . . can fly through outer space?"

"Hey there, sir, don't be calling this beautiful ship a 'box'. The Delta Flyer is a thing of beauty, designed by people who love to fly." His tone was an amused chiding one.

"My apologies, Lieutenant," Dumbledore said with a small chuckle. "You do excellent work."

"I'd love to take credit, but pernicious honesty demands that I admit that Tom Paris did the greatest of the design work on this ship. I just suggested things here and there. I still wish we'd gotten the fins," he grumbled good-naturedly.

Janeway was chuckling as well, and Chakotay said, "Who was it who pushed to allow him to do the design work?"

"But it was the Captain who agreed that Tom would be best for the job," Harry protested. He turned to the others, but was met by looks of amusement, except from Hermione. Her heart was in her eyes, and it was clear that she was happy and in love.

"You haven't changed," she sniffed. "You have no idea how happy that makes me. You're still the man that I fell in love with after a certain troll incident."

"It's been twenty years for him, Hermione," Annika said. "You should have seen how he treated me when he thought I was just mimicking you."

"Not one of my shining moments," Harry replied unhappily. He looked to his Hogwarts friends. "Think fifth year, only more so. That's how much of an arse I was. Just ask them if you don't believe me."

"Post Traumatic Stress Disorder," Chakotay said. "A great deal had piled up on you and you finally caved under the pressure."

"Enough," Janeway said gently. "We need to have a conversation about how things will proceed. We can continue to meet here, or we can reconvene with those necessary aboard Voyager. It's rather unusual to allow pre-warp societies into space, but it has been done before, and since none of you seem to be having problems with the possibility, I would suggest Voyager. There is less of a chance of discovery there."

"Agreed," Dumbledore said. "May I gather some of the people I think most need to be brought up to speed?" Janeway nodded.

As the group exited the shuttle, Harry heard a barking sound he hadn't heard in years, and looked skyward. A snowy owl was swooping down toward him. "Hedwig!" he cried out, the joy clear to everyone. She swooped in and landed on his outstretched arm, and he pulled her close. "I'd hug you if I could, girl. You have no idea how much I've missed you these past twenty years." His voice was thick with emotion.

"Hedwig!" called a voice from further down the path. "Where the hell did you get to, girl?"

"She's over here, Sirius," Harry called out.

The silence was audible, paradoxically enough. It was followed shortly by the sound of someone running faster than was safe. A clean and shaved Sirius Black came into view and caught sight of whose arm Hedwig sat upon. He sat down heavily. "Albus? I haven't lost it, have I?" he asked, his eyes never leaving Harry's face and his voice thick with emotion. "I really see Hedwig sitting on Harry's arm?"

Harry walked over and held out a hand. "That you do, Sirius," he answered for the Headmaster. "I took the long way back by necessity, but I'm here."

Sirius pulled himself up and yanked Harry into a hug. Hedwig flew to Hermione just as Sirius regained his feet.

"Where the hell have you been?" he asked, nearly sobbing with joy.

"Well, when the Headmaster gets the crew he wants together, I'd imagine you'll find out. I promise to tell you what I can.

"That's how come I look older than I should," Harry said. "I'm really even older."

"If someone simply told me this, I wouldn't believe it," Remus said. "But I'm looking out a window at the dark side of the Moon, after having you fly a group of us through outer space. If that doesn't prove it, then nothing will."

"Our mission now, as I see it," Janeway said, "is to help Harry defeat this Voldemort person. He sounds a bit difficult to fight, however. He has returned from the dead?"

"I'm surprised you're not complaining, Mr Tuvok," Tom Paris said. "Coming back from the dead and all?"

"I do not know if your studies tell you of the Vulcan studies into the katra, Mister Paris. The best human descriptor would be the soul. Vulcans try to be on Vulcan when they feel their deaths approaching, that their katra may join with the others at Mount Seleya. There is a ritual called fal-tor-pan, only performed once in recorded history, that can rejoin the katra with the body. To hear of a human version merely gives me an extra data point. There is no reason for me to be surprised."

"He has to have some sort of soul anchor, though," Annika said. "There is no other choice. He was completely disembodied in 1981, and was still around to be given a new body in 1995."

"That would be entirely logical," Tuvok replied.

Hermione was biting her lower lip. "It may sound very silly, but . . . can we rescue some of the items from the museums? Especially with your technology? I mean, there's the Bodleian, the Oxford Science History, the Ashmolean . . ."

"We can at least look into the possibility," Janeway said quite seriously. "It would be quite a feather in Voyager's cap to be able to return to the future and Earth, helping to recover data that was lost so many years ago."

"What about Voldemort?" Sirius asked. "I know that you guys have a lot of ability – as Remus said, we're in outer space, able to look down on the Moon. But can you even help us at all with our problem?"

"I think we can, Mr Black," Janeway said. "After all, as Lieutenant Potter pointed out so efficiently a few hours ago, the equipment we use can apparently be used around your magical areas, as was proven when he stunned Mr Snape. When tuned correctly, our weaponry can channel or power some of your magical abilities. Mr Potter accidentally brought us here through what he called Apparation powered by this ship's engines." She looked to Harry. "Apparation is the correct term, if I remember correctly?"

"Yes Captain. That tuning is actually how I woke Mr Snape up, in fact. My phaser is tuned to my magical signature, so I cast an Ennervate through it. More precisely, I let the battery of the phaser do the actual work, rather than expending my own magical energy."

"There you have it. I suspect that once we know more, we will be able to help you more with the soul anchor and other such problems you're having. Now, I see that Miss Granger has a number of questions that she'd like to ask, so I suppose that we can adjourn this meeting for more informal conversations while Harry brings her up to speed."

Hermione looked at Janeway. "It's comments like that which tell me that Annika is me. You all know me so terribly well, but I know none of you."

"Actually," Tom said, "a few of us would like to find out how accurate his depiction of you was. I'll admit that I don't see the halo, but – if my wife will forgive the comment – he certainly was accurate in regard to how pretty you are."

"Nice save, Tom," B'Elanna said. "You were planning on commenting a bit more . . . coarsely, weren't you?"

"Starfleet couches aren't that comfy, love," he replied with a smile.

She grinned back and then ignored him. "B'Elanna Torres," she said, holding out her hand to Hermione and then the others. "Half human, half Klingon, before any of you ask."

"Only I'd be that rude," Ron said with a laugh. "Emotional depth of a teaspoon, doncha know?" He shook her hand.

"You're up to at least a demitasse cup," Hermione said with a smile. "The way that Harry's smiling in regards to this tells me that he considers you his friends?"

"We hope we are," Tom said.

"The people I trust implicitly are in this room," Harry replied. "Every Starfleet person – and Maquis, to be honest, even though, well, never mind – and all of the Hogwarts people."

By unspoken yet common consent, the meeting broke into smaller groups. Remus and Sirius headed for the transparent aluminum window to gaze down at the Moon. Harry could hear Sirius murmuring something about it, and making a joke about why Remus wasn't turning, since the Moon was right there. That made Harry decide to look into the issue when he made it back to the 24th century, since there really wasn't going to be time to examine it in the 20th before all hell broke loose.

As he stood there with the two Hermiones and the Paris family (Tom, B'Elanna, and incipient child), Albus Dumbledore approached. "It is a pity that Severus could not come. There was much information that would be quite helpful."

"Perhaps, but the less he knows about all of these things, the less damage he can do if it turns out that his turning coat on Voldemort is all a setup. I do not trust the man, and never will."

"Can you not forgive?" Dumbledore asked.

"Why? He's shown no desire to forgive my father for the stupid things he did to him in Hogwarts. He transferred his anger at my father to me, in some effort to get revenge on a dead man." Harry sighed. "Think back to the meeting in your office. He continued to make snide comments about me and my intelligence, as well as my competence to do just about anything. Somehow, in your mind, this means that he can do this, and if I just forgive him hard enough, he'll see the error of his ways. Guess what, Headmaster? Years of studies show that if there is no punishment for a misdeed, those who committed them see no reason to change, and often end up on the wrong side of the law. You can forgive him for being directly involved with the murder of my parents all you want, but it means nothing. He has to show me that he wants to change before I'm willing to offer absolution."

"Severus was not at Godric's Hollow, Harry, so he was not directly involved."

"Really?" the blonde Hermione asked. "So how did Voldemort know to attack the Potters?"

Dumbledore scowled, but didn't respond. Instead, he asked, "Why the hostility toward me now, Harry? You seemed happy to see me earlier."

It was Harry's turn to scowl. "I think I'm more annoyed than hostile. I still consider you a good man, and your legend definitely lives on into the 24th century, since some of the people who trained me and helped me with the prophecy swore using your name. My favorite was 'Dumbledore's socks!', to be honest with you." He smiled. "But I spent so long wondering what I had done wrong my last year at Hogwarts, wondering why you wouldn't speak to me. I went into therapy for it, and when I realized what it must have been, it drove me to be the best I could be at my chosen fields. I would never let anyone down again, the way I let you down over the death of Cedric Diggory."

Dumbledore actually took a step back. "Wait - you thought that I … you thought that I held that boy's death against you?"

"Well, we went together, and I wasn't good enough to save stopped speaking to me pretty much the moment after Barty Crouch Junior was captured. I know that I was only a fourth year at the time, but I was still holding my own against adults, so I should have been able to do something. I've made peace with that failure, and it drove me to do better."

Blonde Hermione turned to face him. "Suddenly, I understand why you acted the way you did for so long. You thought that -" She stopped for a moment, clearly trying to hold her emotions in. When she spoke again, her voice was thick. "You thought you had failed to protect me, so when Seven absorbed me, you saw another failure."

"Still doesn't excuse me supplying the picture for the definition of the word 'arsehole'," he said with a shrug. He turned back to face Dumbledore who had a stricken look on his face.

"You have thought for these past twenty-odd years that I blamed you for poor Mr Diggory's death?" he asked, his voice tinged with horror. "Nothing could be farther from the truth than that, Harry!" he said, voice cracking with emotion. "Had I but realized what you thought … oh, Merlin, what a hash I seem to have made of things." He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, anguish clear on his face. Tears started to leak from his eyes.

He opened them and looked at Harry. "I have never blamed you for Cedric's death, Harry. My choosing not to speak to you was because I feared that he had a link to your mind, and that he would use it to attempt to enter mine, thereby giving him access to far too much information that must remain secret. If he could see our plans, he could build counters to them." Shaking his head, he finished with, "Had I but taken the time to simply have Minerva or someone tell you why I felt I could not speak with you … you have spent more than half your life believing that I blamed you for something that you were blameless in. Can you ever forgive me?"

Harry smiled softly. "Did you do it maliciously? Don't answer that, because your body language tells me the answer. You did it for the best of reasons, and show regret at what you did to me. I can forgive you easily, sir." He walked forward and took the taller man into his arms and hugged him. "That slate is wiped clean, sir."

"You are an amazing young man, Harry," Dumbledore finally said. "I am proud to have known you."

The brunette Hermione cleared her throat. "Sir? You've just shown why Harry won't forgive Severus Snape yet," she said softly. "He shows no regrets, other than that Lily Potter is no longer amongst the living." Dumbledore paused at that, and then nodded somberly before excusing himself to join Remus and Sirius, who had been watching the conversation with interest. Harry suspected they'd talk to him at some point about his incorrect assumption regarding Cedric.

Brunette Hermione soon found herself alone with Harry and blonde Hermione. "So," she said, cursing her suddenly dry mouth and shaky voice.

"We need somewhere private to talk," Harry said. "I need to see what we might be able to do between the three of us."

"I vote for getting naked and sweaty with the sexy brunette pinned between us," the blonde said. Hermione felt that thrumming start between her thighs once more.

"I like the idea," Harry said, making her eyes widen once more, "but that's kinda her decision."

"When and where?" Hermione asked. "If I have the chance to fulfill this dream, I'm taking it."

"Captain?" Harry asked, looking over his shoulder.

"You have my permission, Harry. I expect we won't see you for a while?" she finished with her own smile.

"If I have anything to say about it, you'll be right," Harry said.

"Dismissed," Janeway said with a laugh. As they left, Hermione could hear her saying, "It's amazing how much he loves her -"

The blonde Hermione led the two back to the quarters she shared with Harry, and Hermione could tell she was grinning as Harry said, "Is that not one of the sexiest arses in the universe?"

"It is quite impressive," Hermione replied. Suddenly she squeaked, "Harry!"

"I'd apologize, but I've wanted to fondle your arse for about twenty years now, Hermione, so my apology would be a lie."

She led them inside. Immediately she turned. "I'm bisexual and extremely turned on by you, Hermione. I know that Harry would like nothing more than to rip off your clothes and fuck you into the decking, but he's too polite to say that to you. Hell, he wouldn't even use my image as a sexual release when I was still just a holodeck program."

"Why not?" Hermione asked.

"Respect," he said simply. "I didn't know if the real you would want me doing that."

She blinked at him for a moment, and then answered his question in a manner that surprised even her. She grabbed her blouse and ripped it open, displaying the white lace bra beneath. "I only wish I'd been braless today." She undid her skirt without ripping the zipper, letting it fall to the floor as well, displaying simple cotton knickers.

"Harry, I am a lesbian – except for you. You are the only male I have ever had a sexual reaction to. It startled me to be riding behind you on Buckbeak – when we saved Sirius – and feeling my body reacting to you. If you had turned around and kissed me when we landed, then I likely would have responded with a hand shoved down your trousers. If only once before I die, I want to lay on my back and feel the only man who has ever turned me on inside me."

"Not in the library, bent over a particularly racy tome?" he asked with a smile, quickly moving to catch her as her knees gave out.

"Don't do that to me," she moaned.

"Why not? It gave me an excuse to take you into my arms." He leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers, which was all that she needed, returning the kiss with an interest that startled Harry, from what she could tell. She lost herself in the kiss, so much so that she was actually slightly surprised when she recovered from the blissful feeling to discover that Annika had apparently successfully divested her of her clothing and had pressed her own nude body against hers.

She shivered, not in fear, but in anticipation.

She blushed furiously later at the ovation the three of them received for proving that silencing charms don't do a perfect job.

13. Chapter 13

Hogwarts, May 15, 1998

"Hermione, may I talk with you for a minute?" Annika!Hermione asked. "I've had an idea, and I want your input on feasibility. And it involves you, whether or not you're even interested."

"What is it?" the younger one asked.

The elder bit her lip. "Well, I look in the mirror and it's wrong. I mean, yeah, this body is sexy, but damn me if my old one wasn't more so. My pulse still speeds up a little around you. Science or magic can't do it, but I was wondering if a melding of the two might manage the ability to change the Annika Hansen genetics to Hermione Jane Granger genetics."

The younger girl looked at her older counterpart with an open mouth. "Why?" she finally asked. "I think that the current form you're in is sexier than anything I looked like on my best day!"

"Well, I disagree with you, and whether he realizes that I know it or not, Harry thinks that way too. The two of us walk into a room together, he unconsciously looks to you first. Still kisses me to make my toes curl and my pulse race, but . . . we both think you're sexier. And I don't like looking in the mirror and not seeing me."

Hermione nodded. "I understand. We could work off polyjuice, but that wouldn't solve it. As much as I have my problems with him, we might want to involve Professor Snape as well." She paused. "Luna Lovegood thinks that potions will play a large part of it as well, and says so with that odd little smile of hers that seems to say that she knows more than you do."

"Agreed. Shall we talk to McGonagall first, since Transfiguration might play a role as well?"

Arm in arm, the two headed for the Deputy Headmistress.

Wizengamot, June 1, 1998

Dolores Umbridge sneered at him from the podium. "When a citizen of the Biritsh Wizarding world is called before the Wizengamot, Mister Potter, that citizen would do well to respond in a timely manner."

He met her eyes and did not react. "Given other obligations, Madam Umbridge, I did respond in as timely a manner as those obligations would allow. Had there been a greater necessity, I am certain that the Wizengamot would have sent me another missive stressing the need for my earlier appearance. Since such was not sent, the logical assumption is that it was merely a fact-finding mission. As such, I gave the Wizengamot notification that I was free and that I would be arriving today to answer what questions I can."

"Excuse me?" Dolores Umbridge asked him, her attitude quickly matching her surname. "You will answer the questions we ask of you, Mister Potter."

He simply raised an eyebrow to her. "I believe you have heard of something called an oath, Madame Umbridge? During my unexpected time away, there were certain oaths I was required to make. I will give you information within the confines of those oaths."

"You will answer our questions!" she shrieked back at him. "The Ministry of Magic outranks any organization you may have given an oath to!"

Harry turned to the Wizengamot. "I have offered to tell you what information I can. It is Madame Umbridge who is being unreasonable. I am afraid that I cannot, in good conscience, remain at this time. At the point when it can be agreed that I might be permitted to follow the oaths I gave, I will gladly return and answer any questions that do not violate those oaths."

Umbridge chose to prove that it was possible for her voice to go even higher than it had been, and that she had gone clear past umbrage and straight into frothing angry insanity. "If you attempt to leave, Potter, I will have you thrown in Azkaban for contempt of the Wizengamot!"

"I do not have contempt for the Wizengamot, Madame Umbridge," he replied in a soft tone. "I believe that I have shown that by explaining to them my position." His tone hardened. "I will admit, however, to contempt for the woman who chose to use a Blood Quill on students, who used Veritaserum on students, despite it being illegal to do so, and who was attempting to talk herself into using the Cruciatus to get information from a student."

"Lies!" she shrieked.

"There are witnesses to these various actions, Madame Umbridge. I am one of these witnesses."

"You are an unstable child!"

"Then any need for my testimony before the Wizengamot is useless, since it is clearly untrustworthy," he replied with a grin, before going grim. "You cannot have it both ways. Either I can be trusted to tell you things, such as where I was and what I was doing, or my memory is faulty, in which case anything I tell you about where I was is a fabrication. One or the other, Madame. Choose. If I am incompetent, then I shall leave these chambers. If I am competent, then please get to the questioning."

She was nearly apoplectic at this point, but took a quick look around the Wizengamot chambers. Protection was not forthcoming from the members for her, so she backed off. "Very well. You are competent to stand trial."

"This is no trial, Madame. At no time was I ever notified of such, or else I would have ensured that I had proper representation. This is a fact-finding inquiry, and nothing more."

"The young man is correct," a severe woman with a monocle stated. Harry had to think for a while to remember her as Amelia Bones. "In fact, I believe that in the interests of speeding everyone's exit from these chambers, I will take over the questioning." She stepped down from the gallery and walked to the space before Harry. Dolores Umbridge was now a color beyond the hideous pink of her sweaters, and into purples, but she remained silent. "You've been gone for about two years, Mr Potter. Can you tell us where you went?"

"Honestly ma'am? If I told you, you'd think I belonged in the Longterm Care Ward at St Mungos. I'm really not sure that I'd believe it if I hadn't lived it." He smiled at her.

"Just tell us. You're certainly sounding aware of your surroundings, and don't sound insane."

He frowned slightly. "Can I request that I tell only you, and that you decide who needs to be made aware? You are known to be pretty much incorruptible, and the most trustworthy person that anyone knows of in the Ministry." He laughed. "The Unspeakables might be more trustworthy, but we don't know of them that much, so we can't say, can we?"

She laughed quietly. "I will agree to being told."

He leaned forward after she cast a powerful Muffliato and told her, "You saw the wreckage, correct? Well, with all those time turners, I inhaled the dust and started coughing. When I stopped, I was … elsewhen."

"Elsewhen?" she asked, eloquently raising an eyebrow.

"Years in the future, ma'am. I managed to get some help up there, with the agreement that I not give away data that could damage the past - in other words, those oaths I spoke of - and eventually I returned to here and now. With some help."

"Are you sure that you can't tell us what you saw in the future?"

"Do you want to risk the complete dissolution of the universe, ma'am?" he asked, never letting the smile he wanted to let loose show. "Something I tell you might prevent the future that I went to, thereby altering everything. The problem is, I've already been there and experienced it. So …"

"Your point is made, Mr Potter. As interesting as it might be, I won't ask further."

"Thank you."

The spell dropped and she looked to the Wizengamot. "He has convinced me that he is telling the truth, and that the oaths he has given are for a good cause." She glared around the room. "I will prosecute anyone who attempts to force the information out of him. It is a matter of not only national but international security that he not let the information out. He has managed to convince me that he has a valid reason for disappearing, and that to tell what happened would violate the oaths that he took. Are there any questions for him that do not involve why he was missing for two years?"

Hogwarts, June 3, 1998

"The problem that I see with it, Hermione - and Hermione," Kathryn Janeway said, "is that the Federation is less than sanguine about the sort of manipulations that you both are talking about. It feels like the cause of the Eugenics Wars to them."

"They haven't happened yet," Annika!Hermione said. "Khan Noonian Singh should be appearing on the horizon any day now." She grinned. "Also, I'm willing to have documented what is done to make me look 'right', if you will. I'm not trying to give myself wonder-tits -"

"You've got those already," the original Hermione murmured, but not quietly enough to not be heard by both women.

"Yes, love," Annika replied with a laugh. "The concept I have is more along the lines of what they call plastic surgery in this era. I look wrong when I look in the mirror. I should look like she will in her twenties." She looked at Hermione. "Hell, make me look exactly like her, age and all, and see if we can confuse him."

"Not for long," Janeway said. "You know how intelligent he is." She looked to Hermione of the 20th century. "He admitted once that he was finally being what he should have been because he wanted you to be proud of him." She sighed. "In one of my nadir moments, I caused him more mental stress and pain than any human should have to deal with, and it all came back to you." She proceeded to explain the situation, and Hermione was crying by the end of it. "In all honesty, I think I may put myself on report when we return to our time, and to Earth."

"From how he talks now, Captain, I suspect that the most vocal person in your defense, should you do that, will be Harry himself."

"We'll see," was all that Janeway said. "As for what you're thinking of, I'm wondering if perhaps the simplest method might not be simply cloning your body and seeing if your personality can be moved over magically." She laughed that smoky laugh that made both women's pulses jump. "A phrase I never thought I'd say, I must admit." She frowned. "The real issue is that to the Federation - and me, I will admit - your switch to a new body effectively kills this one. You were able to take over Seven of Nine because she had no personality to speak of. I would not want this body killed, because we could potentially bring about a productive member of society."

"No matter what the situation, ma'am," Annika said, "We'll be inventing magic for this. I would worry about the copy errors that appear in clones, but that's really only after you make a clone of a clone. I intend to have offspring the old-fashioned way, so the errors can't really be transmitted." She smiled. "And I understand the worry, and agree. This is why there's research." She laughed.

Hermione looked at them for a moment before shaking her head. "How in hell are you getting copy errors from a cloning process? Does the future use the biological equivalent of a photocopier?" She shook her head to clear it of the image of popping a person in one side, a bright light shining, and then another twenty stepping out the other side, one by one.

Hogwarts, June 20, 1998

"So now we have the photograph that Colin took existing for the future history books," Harry said. "Now we just have that one other picture, and I've no idea when that will be taken."

"I'm more worried about what my parents will say upon seeing you, and the explanation. Or, for that matter, what they'll say about seeing my other self," Hermione said as she settled into her seat on the train.

"I just wish that we could come with you, Harry," Ron said. "But there's too much back here I'm connected to, and … well, it sounds weird, but I've mourned you already. It's been great having you back, but -"

"I understand. As it was, I was trying to figure out how to ask you to stay behind. Admiral Jaaymeson sort of hinted that Bill wasn't the only Weasley from this time to survive and have a family. I'm pretty sure that I heard every name but Percy's and Charlie's mentioned as having children. And it's not that they didn't necessarily have any, it's more that they were never mentioned to me. So yeah, you guys survive what's to come. I suspect that the wizarding world's Statute of Secrecy will be what saves everything in the long run." He laughed. "So much of the technology that we use in the future comes from spells and such that are used today. Once … something really awful is coming, and there will be a dark age of sorts. I suspect that the Statute of Secrecy may simply go away at some point, since they didn't seem to be worrying about it in my -" He paused for a long moment. "Yeah. I've acclimated to then. I was going to say 'in my time' in regard to the 24th century."

"I suspect that more than my family will be coming with us," Hermione said. "Sirius has flat out stated that he'll sign everything over to the Malfoys if he has to, but he's not losing you again."

"We might be able to work something out with the goblins," Harry replied. "They never said, but when I ran into a few of them and they realized who I was, they seemed to be waiting for a specific thing that I clearly hadn't done yet. Maybe they knew I was going to be returning from the past. So I should get with Sirius and see about what he needs to do to make sure the Malfoys don't get the money or properties."

Gringott's, July 1, 1998

"Now that we've got that worked out," Sirius said, "we can take our leave of you, good goblins. Thank you for your assistance." He turned to Harry and the two Hermiones. "Now all we have to do is find that soul anchor of Riddle's and figure out how to make Blondie here look like herself."

"What are the issues involved?" Rendflesh asked. "Perhaps we can help you." The fact that the help would cost was never mentioned - if these humans weren't aware of that fact, let them learn the hard way.

"Well, the soul anchor is simply figuring out what Riddle used and destroying it. The second is a bit more difficult. We need to figure out a method of making the blonde female … they are the same person, through a very unusual method."

"If we were to build a body that was created from material supplied by the one with brown hair," Rendflesh said, "the soul anchor option would work to allow movement from one body to the next. That was the reason that we created them, after all. Your Riddle simply never finished the process properly to move to a new form."

"Then how did he do it?" Harry asked. "I was there for that ritual he did to gain a new form."

"Pah! Chicanery. That form will fail. He will remain until the other half of the process is completed, and the soul anchor is once again inert."

Harry frowned. "Actually, since he's terrified of death, I suspect that he never intends to complete that ritual. We may need to figure out how to destroy it, if we can ever find it."

"If he is perverting our science, then we will help you locate the anchor he made. He is bad for business." The nod he gave them was severe, and clearly put paid to the situation.

"We thank you. What would you require in payment?" Harry asked.

"Money we have. Can you supply us with crafting materials? Gems of as high a quality as possible, and various metals?"

Harry grinned. "Give me some requests and I'll see what I can do for you. I've got resources most wizards don't."

The Granger home, July 15th, 1998

"Isn't that cheating, though?" Rachel Granger asked. "Your ship can make tons of whatever you need."

"Not really," Harry replied. "They aren't using it for currency, but for crafting things. It's materials that they can't get easily, but that are child's play for the computers to replicate. I was even honest with them about where it was coming from, and they didn't care."

"Still, I … it just seems wrong," she said.

"I understand where you're coming from," Harry replied, "but if they don't mind, then I'm not going to complain about having a method to be able to get some of the information we absolutely need."

He turned as he heard footsteps coming down the stairs and turned to face the two Hermiones. They were both brunettes now, and in matching sundresses. He groaned slightly, since the view was causing a somewhat insistent redirection of his blood flow.

The solution to their problem had turned out to be an oddity with Polyjuice, and the way that it interacted with the transporters. Polyjuice had simply changed Annika, and somehow worked around the Borg implants - no one was sure on how, and they weren't about to go experimenting to figure it out. She had reverted at the end of the hour, while Madam Pomfrey and the Doctor had been doing their own scans of her. The Doctor had decided that he would like to scan her in Sickbay after she had tried another dosage, so the group had beamed aboard Voyager.

Scans reported no agent of alteration, which his scans on planet had reported.

And then she hadn't reverted when the hour was over.

She was currently working on her tenth day of looking like the brunette Hermione, only with Borg implants. It appeared to be permanent.

"How are you, Harry?" the original asked with a smile, knowing that the sundresses were, if not accentuating the curves they both had, certainly ensuring that Harry knew they were both quite female. It still thrilled her to know that Harry found her so sexy that she could short circuit his intellect for a while.

"Habwah?" he asked, proving her point before shaking his head. "You two are lethal to my ability to concentrate, love."

The two girls grinned and slapped a high five. "Yes! Our nefarious plan worked!" Rachel laughed brightly as her seventeen month old daughter toddled into the room to see why everyone was laughing.

"Minee!" she yelled and ran helter-skelter toward her sisters, and both knelt. The little girl stopped and looked at both with that serious mode that only the very young can get away with, then leapt into the arms of the one who used to be Annika. "Nebber hugged dis Minee bafore!" she stated with solemnity. Harry smiled at the tears that appeared in her eyes, knowing that she was truly accepted.

"I don't know if Carson and I have properly thanked you, Mr Potter," Rachel said as she watched, her voice a bit thick at the beauty of the scene. "You give us a method to keep our daughter alive after a horrible incident - yet again. I mourn that we can't explain what's coming, but understand why we can't, and have been as careful as possible in our dealings with others. On top of this, you give us another Hermione, that we can get to know and love as much as the one I gave birth to."

"You have no idea how much it means that you're willing to accept me," said the Hermione holding her young sister. "The only real memories I have are the ones Harry knew to give me. We're working on a way to give me some of her memories, if we can do it in a manner that won't end up giving me a split personality or simply drives me insane."

"You're already crazy," Harry said with a laugh. "You're in love with me."

"Just proves we raised our daughters to be intelligent ladies," Carson Granger said as he came in from the back garden. "The coals are ready. Shall we men once more prove our mastery of fire by causing meat to become tasty over flame?"

Harry took on a Lockhart pose. "We shall," he said in a pompous voice.

"My hero!" said the Hermione without a child in her arms, in a severely over-acted fawning manner.

14. Chapter 14

Gringotts, July 20, 1998

"We have located the soul anchor," Rendflesh said. "There may be an issue, however. It is known to the Muggles, and is rather obvious. It is the obelisk that greets visitors outside the administrative offices at Oxford University."

"Hmm, that could be an issue," Harry said. "We've got another eleven days to get the stuff from the museums swapped out. Voyager is finishing up what repairs we can manage in this time frame, and that should be done then as well. Then all hell breaks loose."

"You have another problem. Destroying the soul anchor is likely to release a great deal of energy. Destroying the ones we use would likely damage most of Diagon Alley if it were done above ground, and that is a stone roughly the size of a human fist. The obelisk is 15 klems … apologies, it is roughly 25 feet tall and 4 feet wide. The destruction of that anchor will likely destroy Oxford and the surrounding countryside for many miles, I believe your term is."

Harry stared at him for a long moment before finally managing to say, "I thank you for that information. Have your people made their preparations? Things are about to get very ugly topside."

"We have. When we get the signal, we shall withdraw from the world above and await your return. And as many species as possible shall be saved."

"Thank you. We may not be able to stop the coming disaster, but we certainly can mitigate the damage, though it might take a few hundred years."

"I suspect we shall meet again before the saga is complete, Lieutenant Potter," Rendflesh said, standing and giving him what he thought of as a Roman salute.

Harry stood and returned it. "I would like that, Rendflesh. As others say - from your mouth to God's ears." He smiled at the goblin, making sure to keep his mouth closed. It was returned in kind.

Oxford, July 29th, 1998

The group stood before the obelisk, staring at it in horror. The item itself was beautiful, but they all knew that what it housed and what it's destruction would bring about. "Captain," Harry said softly, "I humbly request that you not have anything to do with the destruction of this obelisk. I do not want the onus of starting World War III on your hands or in your Federation records."

She looked at him for a moment. "Thank you for forgiving me, Lieutenant. As for not being involved, it is my ship, and you are my crewman. I would not want either on your conscience." She looked back to the obelisk. "I keep forgetting that there was dilithium here on Earth, or else Cochran never would have been able to get his warp drive working. But to find one this big, and know that we have to destroy it?"

"It does explain why destroying the stone used as a soul anchor destroys a large area, though," Tom Paris said. "I'm surprised that it will only destroy Oxford and a few surrounding miles. Perhaps we put up shields around the thing to try to drive as much of the explosion upward?"

"Possibly," Harry said. "Might be an idea to bring some down the day we destroy it. They'll certainly be annihilated in the blast, so there won't be any worries about future tech falling into the wrong hands."

"Given they'll be at ground zero?" Hermione Ann asked. It had been decided that they would be told apart not just by their looks (which Harry had declared to be 'smoking'), but by giving the girl who had started as a hologram a new middle name.

"To make sure the son of a bitch dies, though, I want to call him out. Maybe flat out tell him that we've found his anchor and are going to destroy it? He'll show up, if only to protect it. He can't do otherwise. Trust his minions? Not in this lifetime. The very folk he uses as his inner circle are also the ones most likely to take advantage of any apparent weakness."

"How will you 'call him out', as you say?" Tom Paris asked.

"Simple. I'll place a message in the Daily Prophet telling him I know where his soul anchor is, and that I intend to remove it and destroy it. He knows that there's no way of moving it from this spot secretly, but I also know that word of my time travel has made it out amongst enough people to have made its way back to his ears. He won't want to trust that I can move it - which I can't, by the way - so he'll amass who he can in order to stop us." He sighed unhappily. "And then we phaser the shit out of it from orbit, once that snake-faced bastard is near the obelisk. And start World War III."

Hogwarts, July 29th, 1998

Harry looked out at the small group in the Great Hall. The Grangers were there, as was the Tonks family, Remus Lupin, and Sirius Black. Severus Snape was on the periphery. A handful of other people who had disappeared from the records as of August first were also there. Luna Lovegood walked in carrying her trunk, much to Harry's surprise. "I've nothing to keep me here, really," she said. "I've brought all that I'd want to keep."

"Pity you're leaving that house behind," Remus said. "I hope it survives the next few hundred years."

"As I said, I brought everything I want to keep," was Luna's simple reply.

Harry blinked at that, and vowed to himself to talk to her in a bit. He hadn't had the chance to really talk to her since they'd returned, other than some passing small talk. He shook his head to clear it and looked out at the assembled crowd. "We're going into communications blackout with the rest of the world as of today. The group of you will be going up to Voyager with us, where you will remain until after August 1st. As of that date, we should be be leaving here and returning, from my point of view, to the year 2378 as you currently refer to it. If you forgot something important, I apologize, but it will remain lost." He turned to Professor Snape. "You are welcome to come with us, sir. I really doubt that you have many ties to here, and if you're willing to trust my word, I can tell you that there will be many more opportunities in a world that doesn't have pre-existing emotional baggage regarding you."

Snape looked long and hard at Harry. Finally, in as emotionless a voice as he could manage. "I do not like you and I never shall. However, you have been as good as your word in dealing with me, so I believe that I shall join you. Everything I would want to take with me is here at the school."

"Yes, sir." Harry sighed softly. "While my feelings for you are pretty much the same as you hold for me, I do hope that the Mark is simply a communications device. You have fought the no-nosed bastard, and I really want you to have a chance to get your life under your own control, when or not I like you."

"I find myself in the unusual position of being in agreement, Potter," came the droll reply. "But if I do die, I will die opposing him."

Harry simply nodded and turned back to the rest of the group. "If everyone could get all their things together and return here within two hours, we can begin the process of loading you onto the Voyager," he finished.

He walked over to Luna. "Since I don't see anyone here referring to himself as your father, would I be out of line to offer my condolences?"

"No, but he's with mother now, so I'm happy. I've brought the house with me."

"You must either not have had much, or had some serious packing spells," Harry said with a chuckle. "I don't think I could fit a lifetime's worth of things in a trunk."

She smiled. "No, silly. I brought the house." She opened the trunk and moved the cloth that was immediately visible. There, amidst more soft cloth, was a chess rook just a bit smaller than the trunk. "Daddy's been buried with Mummy, and he'd hate it if the house was destroyed, so I activated one of its ultimate defenses and brought it with me."

Harry blinked at her. "When we get to the future, Luna, I really want to talk to you. I see that I missed getting to know an amazing person by being gone all this time."

Voyager, July 31st, 1998

"Is everything ready?" Janeway asked Harry as they looked at Oxford. They could see that some people had already begun to arrive, so it was highly likely that most, if not all of the Death Eaters would be there. Snape was currently being held unconscious in Sickbay since his arm was burning from the summons.

"As ready as we'll ever be, Captain," he replied. "We've got a circle of ninety-six shield generators buried at a radius of about fifty feet from the obelisk. They'll vaporize fairly quickly, but should last just long enough to channel enough of the blast into the upper atmosphere to prevent most of England and Wales - and parts of the continent - from becoming radioactive glass." He looked down at the chronometer running on the panel and said, "He'll have to show up, based on the challenge I issued, but he's either waiting until he sees me, or is waiting to make a grand entrance or something. That explosion happened some time in the early hours of the morning, according to Starfleet records."

"Can't we just destroy it?" Harry Kim asked.

"Not unless he's in the blast zone. If he survives the destruction, he can build a new anchor, if he finds the dilithium." He scowled. "Captain? If I have to go down there to make Riddle show up, then can I take our most powerful phaser rifle with me? Maybe two?"

"I doubt shooting him will help," she said in a dry voice.

"No, but I'm betting that if I drain that rifle battery, I can punch through any anti-Apparation wards they might put up." If not, then it's a mutual take-out, he thought, but wasn't about to put voice that one. "Plus, they're likely to open fire on me, and I'm betting that a magical shield powered by a phaser rifle's battery will stop just about anything."

Oxford, August 1st, 1998

Harry Apparated from the ship to the surface, but was a little sneaky about it. He'd taken one last look at the records before deciding that he needed to draw Riddle to the spot, and found that, inexplicably, there was a surviving report about a loud explosion just before the detonation that started World War III. There were no records of who reported it, or how they might have survived the explosion to be able to report it, but it was useful nonetheless.

The reason it was useful was that he drew a great deal of power from the ship's engines to Apparate down, and converted that into sound upon arrival. Most people tried to soften the noise, but Harry wanted it as loud as he could get. For safety's sake, he cast a Deafness Charm on himself.

Since he could see them on the Voyager's viewscreen, he chose to appear between Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange. It was then that he learned firsthand a lesson that had been purely speculative before - loud sounds cause damage. Malfoy and Lestrange fell, as did several others he had no names for. Blood started to flow from their ears after they hit the ground. As he looked around, canceling the deafness as he did and raising a shield, he noted that he seemed to have either knocked them all unconscious, or at least stunned all of them around him.

"Well, Tom, I think it's time you showed up, since I seem to have dealt with all your sycophants. Or are you doing your usual cowardly bit of not bothering to show up until you have the upper hand?" He waited for several moments without seeing any movement. "Huh, must've done like you usually do, and run away. Is that how you keep your title of 'Most Powerful Wizard' - by waiting until your opponent can't fight back?"

That got him what he was after - he saw the yellow beam coming toward him and moved slightly while pumping some extra power into the shield he had up. It ricocheted upward, and he heard an exclamation of surprised from the direction the beam had come from. One quick Accio later, and Riddle was on the ground in from of him, having slammed bodily into a Protego so strong it was physical.

Harry reached out without using rifle battery to see if he could Apparate away, and smiled inwardly as he realized he'd been right about the wards, but he could also tell that the rifle would give him more than enough power to get away. "Well, Tom, it's been fun, but it's time I finished this. Your anchor goes bye-bye now." He shot Riddle with the first rifle, and then raised the rifle with the full battery and aimed it at the obelisk, but rather than fire, he put everything into punching through the wards. "Goodbye, Tom," he said as he disappeared.

He appeared on the bridge, far quieter than his landing on Earth had been. "Now, please," he said quickly, seeing that Riddle was still there and actually starting to rouse. A beam lanced from the Voyager to the obelisk, and the screen went white.

15. Chapter 15

Harry stared at the devastation below them. The colony grade shield generators they had buried had done their job, since most of England still existed, but the university that had been around for nearly a thousand years had taught its last class.

"Viewscreen off," Janeway said in a choked voice. After a moment of stunned silence, she barked, "Computer. Main viewscreen off!" The screen obliged, turning its standard silvery-white. "When we return to our time," she finally said, "we all are going for proper counseling. This is not a situation you simply walk away from."

"And yet, in all of that horror we just unleashed, Captain," Harry said softly, "we have just prevented someone far worse from coming to power. With that thing in place, we would have returned to our time with him still in power. Starfleet never would have had the chance to form. Cochrane wouldn't have been around long enough to be able to invent the warp drive as Earth knew it. I know I need counseling, but forgive me if the horror of what I prevented keeps me from feeling quite as bad about the horror I just caused."

"But your own words show the need, Mr Potter," she said gently.

"Yes Captain," he replied, understanding her underlying message. "I won't let it get that bad this time." He gave her a wry smile, which she returned.

She straightened up at the conn. "Well, we now have to plan for our return home. Mr Tuvok, begin the calculations for the slingshot maneuver. I'd like to be home before the clock hits midnight again."

"Agreed, Captain," came the droll reply. "I find myself desiring a properly prepared plomeek soup - one prepared on Vulcan." He began to work at the console. "This will take several hours captain, but we should be able to leave within the specified time frame."

Harry looked at him with amusement. "That sounded practically giddy, coming from you, Mr Tuvok."

"I find myself appreciating the anticipation of return, not only to the Alpha Quadrant, but our own time as well."

"Currently we're only one for two," Paris said with a chuckle.

"Indeed," Tuvok added with a slightly raised eyebrow. For him, that was nearly sidesplitting laughter.

"If you don't mind, Captain," Harry said, "I'm going to go down to the shuttle bay and make sure that Flyer II is up to snuff. We've still got that other ship to worry about, and I'm pretty sure that hasn't happened yet. " She nodded, so he left the bridge.

As stoic as he was acting for the crew, a part of him wanted to curl up and cry for a few weeks. Millions were dead, and a war that would kill billions more was about to begin. It would bring about the future that he was about to return to, but there is a difference between reading something in a history text and realizing that you personally are the cause for it.

He made it to the shuttle bay to find the Grangers waiting for him. Rachel immediately took him in her arms and hugged him, and that broke it free. The feel of a mother holding him while he felt such raw emotions simply was too much, and he began to cry.

Several hours later, after he had cleaned up some after his breakdown, Harry sat in the Delta Flyer. He had convinced Captain Janeway that since history showed the Flyer in apparent battle with someone, it was much faster to have someone in the shuttle to begin with. He had the shuttle's systems tied in to Voyager's at the moment to stay on top of everything.

The Voyager headed out toward the asteroid belt to start their run, just to give themselves a little extra time for correcting course as necessary. Being tied into the systems as he was, he could hear what was going on with the bridge crew.

"Captain, we're picking up a heavy chronoton concentration ahead," Lieutenant Kim said.

"Sensors indicate a ship materializing from the chronoton radiation," Tuvok added.

"That's a Federation design," he could hear Janeway say, "but not a ship style I recognize."

"Attention Federation Starship Voyager. This is the Federation Timeship Vivian Smith. You are attempting a violation of the Temporal Prime Directive. Stand down before we are required to take action."

"Captain?" Harry Potter broke in on a secure channel. "Ignore them. I'll launch and start bothering them. In fact, when I launch, start your run. I think I can at least keep their attention for a while."

"What about you?" she asked. "You'll be stranded."

He laughed as he maneuvered his way out of Voyager. "Captain, do you remember how we ended up here, in this time frame? I should be able to just jump back forward, even if I have to do it in multiple jumps. But you need to leave me behind if you want any chance of escape."

There was silence for a moment. Finally he heard, "Very well. I expect to see you at Starbase One when this is over, Lieutenant," she said. "That is an order."

"One I have no intention of disobeying, Captain," he replied. "See you on the flip side. Potter out." With that, he launched the Flyer and faced the Smith.

"He took a deep breath and hailed the Smith. "Attention Timeship Vivian Smith. Any attempt to prevent the USS Voyager from performing its intended maneuvers will be considered hostile, and will be responded to accordingly."

"Voyager, stand down!" broadcast the Smith, ignoring Harry's broadcast. "We will open fire if we detect your engines powering up."

"Timeship Vivian Smith, be aware that we are tracking your weapons," Harry said. "Any sign that you are powering them up will be seen as hostile and dealt with accordingly." Thank God no one ever de-tuned the warp engines in this thing.

Either they had already planned on firing, or felt his threat level to be negligible. Just the way I like it. Any level of surprise I can give them makes the likelihood of the Voyager making it away that much better. He positioned the shuttle between the Smith and the port nacelle, since that was closest and easiest for them to fire on, and pumped his magic into the shields.

He guessed right, and his shield held as the Smith's phasers tore through space toward the Voyager's nacelle. The shuttle rocked, him holding himself in his seat through the expedient of gripping the console. "Seatbelts," he grumbled. "When I get back, I'm pushing for seatbelts in these things. They worked in cars, why not starships?"

"Voyager, leave!" he barked into his comm. "Timeship Smith, you have fired on a Federation vessel and are now considered an enemy combatant. He tapped his console to fire phasers, pushing his magic again. He didn't manage to break through their shields, but he noted that they were down a respectable twenty-three percent from that single blast. Good. That should make them realize that this little fly annoying them is actually a wasp with an annoying sting. He was also pleased to note the power readings from Voyager - they were about to go into warp. I guess I get to see that sight for the first time now.

Knowing how they worked on Voyager, he waited for a moment before firing at the Smith again, just as Voyager shot into warp. Interesting - I dropped their shields to forty-eight percent, down from the seventy-seven my first blast put them at. Guess I put more into that last blast. He was quickly forced to defend himself, because now all the Smith's weapons were brought to bear on him. When he realized just how powerful the next blast was going to be, based on their output, he rapidly programmed the system, waiting for the shot.

The beam lanced out from the Smith and struck the Flyer with enough force to bring his shields to less than one percent, so he activated his program and let the shields fizzle out.

"Voyager shuttle, we detect that you have bare minimum life support, and are venting plasma from your vessel. Prepare to be brought aboard."

"Not like I can stop you," he coughed into the comm unit. He felt the Flyer shudder as the Smith began tractoring it into their shuttle bay.

Ooh, something I need to do before I get too close, he thought suddenly. A moment later, there was a haze of smoke in the cabin. Should fool them for a little while. Otherwise they'd know I was playing with them as soon as they saw how pristine this baby is.

He laughed to himself as he saw the care they were taking. Once he was inside their shields, he could tell they were getting underway to chase the Voyager. Good luck with that. Those calculations are a bitch, even with the tech available. Maybe they can solve them faster with computers five hundred years later than what I'm used to, but still, it'll take some time.

He heard a banging on the hatch. "Open up or we will be forced to cut you out."

"I'm coming," he coughed. "Gimme a second." He walked to the door, slipping his wand into the charmed pocket he had in his left sleeve. It was unlikely that the security folks would notice it, unless one of them happened to be a witch or wizard. He tapped the console to open the door, and as it opened, he held his hands out and down, palms facing toward the people standing just outside. "As you can see, I am unarmed," he said around another cough. Verisimilitude hurts sometimes,

"No weapons, sir," one of the four security agents said.

"Good. Come with me, Lieutenant," the one who appeared to be in charge said to Harry. "The captain would like to speak to you. We'll be scanning your ship to see how you withstood phasers that should have crippled a full-size starship of this period."

"Magic," Harry replied simply. "I'm a spell-caster." The only response was a raised eyebrow, which spoke far more eloquently than a verbal response could have. "Fine, don't believe me. You'll learn."

The trip to the bridge was faster than Harry would have expected. He was under full guard, the security people with phasers at the ready, but he made no effort to escape or even make a move that might have seemed like reaching for a weapon.

"Ah, Lieutenant Potter," said the man who was clearly the captain of the vessel. "Perhaps you see it as taunting, but I assure you that such an act is not my intention. I merely wish to show you that we have a better understanding of time and space than perhaps you realize."

"Looks like we're well out past Pluto, somewhere in the Oort cloud," Harry said. "Twenty-fourth century, where the Voyager is likely to appear, I assume?"

"An intelligent man. Pity we can't recruit you, because with your brains, you'd do well in our division."

"I'd imagine that you're not exactly allowed to recruit from out of your home time," Harry replied.

"Exactly. On rare occasions we can, but you don't fit the criteria completely, so unfortunately, it's a loss for us." The captain cocked his head. "You don't seem to be complaining very much, or exhibiting any of the expected responses."

"I've never been one for sitting back and doing what's expected," Harry answered him with a laugh. "You were able to hit the Delta Flyer hard enough to take me out without killing me. I thought I'd given my ship a chance to escape, but you're showing me that you can out-think me. Where's the sense in getting into an energy-wasting screaming fit that solves nothing?"

"You impress me. Captain Barklin, by the way. Miles Barklin."

"Pleased to meet you, Captain. May I have a seat? I would expect that you would completely shut down any consoles I might be near enough to touch if I am permitted to sit."

The captain looked around the bridge and said, "Shut down secondary sciences. He can sit there." A few moments later, Harry was seated at a bank of completely black consoles.

He placed his hands on the edge of the console and stretched. "Bouncing around in that thing can hurt, y'know?" He looked down. "Damn, looks like I fail or forget," he said.

"What?" Barklin asked in amusement.

"Seatbelts. Why the hell don't starships have seatbelts if the inertial dampening systems aren't perfect? We get bounced around, where an easily unhooked harness system would keep people from flying all over the ship. How did the twentieth century get it right with cars and we screw up four hundred years later? And what, eight or nine hundred for you?"

"Something like that," Barklin said with a smirk.

"Captain, we're detecting the chronoton emissions from Voyager approaching. They should be here in just a moment." The tell-tale flash of the Voyager's exit from warp happened a moment later.

"Thank you, Captain Barklin," Harry said. "I managed to see that from both ends, and that is a singularly beautiful thing to watch. I appreciate it."

"Quite the gentleman, Lieutenant," Barklin said with a small chuckle. "At least you take defeat gracefully."

"Well, I am British, after all," Harry said in a faux snooty tone, which led to chuckles all over the bridge. "Of course I do such things gracefully." He smiled.

Suckers. Your own prejudices are going to lose you this battle.

"Voyager, this is the Vivian Smith. As you can see, we were able to plot your exit point. You should also know that we have your shuttle pilot aboard," Captain Barklin said after having a channel opened.

"Hi Captain Janeway!" Harry called out. "I'm fine, before you ask." He punctuated it with a small cough.

"Good to know, Lieutenant," she replied. "So, I take it this is where we negotiate for getting my crewman back?"

"Not really," Barklin said. "We've shown that our technology is capable of tracking you. History shows that you limped out of your most recent battle. As much as it pains me, we are going to be forced to damage you before reinserting you back in that area, just outside their territory. You memories will be adjusted, and you will be permitted on your way."

"And nothing we can say will allow us to return home?" Janeway asked, her voice tight with anger.

"I do understand your feelings, Captain, but we're talking about the future, from your point of view. Our past. And the past cannot be permitted to be changed."

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to burst your bubble, Captain Barklin," Harry said. "Captain Janeway? Head for home, I'll be with you in a little bit."

Barklin laughed. "You're sitting at a non-working console, and somehow think you're going to overpower this entire ship? I'd like to see that," he replied, his tone making it clear that he was certain to be an impossibility.

"Just remember, Captain Barklin, you did just ask for a demonstration," Harry said with amusement. "Bumbulum Maxmimus!" He exclaimed next, using his connection to the console to tie into the Smith and her engines.

He regretted that spell a moment later, as the stench of more than a dozen overpowered cases of flatulence fought with the ship's air scrubbers. From the sound of it, there were probably a few sharts in there as well.

He also noted that the ships lights were dim, with a distinct reddish tint to them. "Captain, our engines just overloaded! We're on battery at the moment!"

"What the hell did you just do?" Barklin asked him in shock.

"I proved my point, both to you and the security officer. I said it was magic, and it was. That rumbling you heard was the sound of every single crewman farting in unison, at maximum force. I wanted the least damaging spell I could think of." He turned to the viewscreen, to the sight of an amused Janeway, with Tom Paris folded over the helm, laughing so hard that Harry was sure he was crying. Harry Kim was trying to be a good bridge officer, but Tom's laughter was clearly making it very hard to keep a straight face. Tuvok simply had a raised eyebrow, although Harry Potter could see a very tiny upward quirk to the left side of Tuvok's mouth.

He turned back to Captain Barklin. "We're going home. I can get us home even if you drop us back in the Delta Quadrant. You're Federation; you saved me when you didn't have to. You could have left me to die in the asteroid belt in the twentieth century, but you didn't. I'm betting you won't kill me in cold blood." He connected to what remained of the engines of the Smith, expecting that someone would decide to take the decision out of the Captain's hands. "Captain Janeway? Please head for home, as I mentioned before. I'll catch up to you."

"You fool," Barklin said. "We'll be destroyed in a temporal cascade, with you aboard. You'll die with us!"

"Worth it to keep you from killing the people on Voyager by sending us back," he replied. He heard a gasp from Voyager. "Why are you still here?" he asked. "Go!"

"Lieutenant -" Janeway said, but Harry cut her off.

"Just go, Captain. I have no intention of sacrificing myself, but you shouldn't just to save me, either." When he noticed both Captains start to react, he silently cast his shield. The phaser fire dissipated without harming him. "See, Captain Janeway? Go." She scowled, but the screen went back to the view of space. The Voyager started to move, and he saw Barklin's fingers fling over the console at his chair. He was fairly certain that the man was trying to get off a crippling attack on Voyager, so he cast his rather fragrant spell from before. Several consoles around him exploded in some rather amazing sparks.

"Captain, we're on emergency power only! Containment is failing on the core!" helm screamed.

"I'm sorry, Captain Barklin. I really didn't want to do this. Now I have even more deaths on my conscience," Harry said sadly. "Get to your escape pods if you can, and get your people to pick you up."

"There's no one to pick us up, Potter," Barklin snarled. "You've killed not just us, but the future as well."

"Always in motion, the future is," Harry said in a bad Yoda imitation. "It's unwritten for us. I must away," he said, preparing for Apparation.

He forgot that they still had phasers, though. This blast dropped his shield and made him a little groggy. He focused on the Flyer and tried to Apparate.

He managed to make it with everything attached, and slammed the console to power everything up and close the hatch. He also cast Ennervate on himself.

"Okay, I'm awake now," he said. "Crap." His hands flew across the console as he re-ignited the engines. "This ship's gonna go up, and I'm not sure I'm going to be out of blast range in time." He glared at the shuttle bay and realized that he still had to get out through those doors. Another idea came to him and he prepared for it. As he closed his eyes to activate it, the world went white around him.

16. Chapter 16

Voyager

Captain Janeway stared at the screen, still locked on the Vivian Smith. She had opened a channel to Starfleet, which was now mobilizing as many ships as they could. They'd be alongside Voyager within minutes, but those were minutes that Lieutenant Potter might not have.

"Captain? What do we do about Harry?" Tom Paris asked.

"Right now, we wait and see, Tom," she replied, her unhappiness clear in her voice. "I suspect that if we're seen as being in Sector Zero Zero One when we're supposed to be in the Delta Quadrant, they can't re-insert us. What that means for the future? We'll likely never know."

"Captain!" Lieutenant Kim exclaimed from his console. "We're detecting a containment failure on the Smith! Their destruction is imminent!"

"Set course back to the Smith, Tom," she barked. "We need to render what aid we can."

"We are being hailed by the USS Hippocrates, Captain," Tuvok said.

"Onscreen."

"Captain Janeway, Captain S'rell," an attractive Vulcan woman said, "We are at your location. You are returning to render aid?"

"Yes, I have a crewman on that ship as well; Lieutenant Potter. Apologies, but we need to see to him. Close with the Smith, Mr Paris."

"We may have some issues, Captain," Tom replied. "We're getting just enough interference that beaming Harry out is going to be an issue."

"Do your best, Tom," she said. "Get as close as possible for the best resolution."

The ship slid closer to the Vivian Smith, shields at full. "We're closer than is safe, Captain," Tom said.

"We can't get a lock on him or the Flyer," Harry Kim said. "We've got an idea where he is, but we may have to just grab everything in that area, and you know how dangerous that can be."

"Potentially fatal integrity loss is sixty-eight percent likely, Captain," Tuvok said. "I am attempting to compensate, but there is a particularly high degree of chronoton radiation interfering."

"Do what you can, Tuvok; Harry. He's saved us, we damned well can do the same for him."

"Chronoton readings are rising, Captain!" Harry called from his station.

Tuvok straightened and inhaled. "We have lost the lock completely, Captain. Chronoton readings are continuing to increase exponentially, and preventing any possibility of transporter use."

The Vivian Smith disappeared in a screen-blackening flare of light, and when the screen cleared, they were looking at … the Vivian Smith, in apparently pristine condition. "Captain, we're being hailed," Harry Kim said.

"Onscreen."

"This is Captain Miles Barklin, of the Federation Timeship Vivian Smith," the man said. "We seem to have an issue in our shuttle bay that the Voyager may be able to help us with. We will await the arrival of Admiral Paris to the scene, in order to assure you that we have no designs upon your ship. We would like to return your Lieutenant Potter to you, but he seems to be … stuck."

"Stuck?"

Captain Barklin grimaced. "I'm not sure I can explain it." He looked to his left and nodded. The view changed to a shuttle bay, where they could see the Delta Flyer, which seemed to be insubstantial, and flickering. "We think he was attempting to leave … well, us, before our counterpart destructed, and got caught in the temporal wave that caused us to overwrite the previous timeline. We theorize that he's somehow caught between the timelines. Needless to say, we'd like to connect him solidly to here, since the previous timeline doesn't exist any longer. We'd like to thank him."

"Thank him?" Captain Janeway asked, eyebrows asking far more questions than her voice.

"From what our databanks say, his fighting our counterparts won the temporal fight we've been having with … well, it's a long story. We are still looking into it, because we've only just realized we need to check the histories about it. It's clear that he was the focal point for winning, as far as we're concerned. We've no intention of forcing you back to the Delta Quadrant, which is what we suspect we were attempting to do. Well, they, but it was our counterparts." He laughed. "Five hundred years past you and we still have issues with language concerning time travel and its effects."

"The Exeter is coming up alongside, Captain," Tom said.

"They're hailing us," Harry Kim added.

"We'll hold," Barklin said with a smile. The screen blanked for a moment, and then Admiral Paris's face came onto the screen.

"Captain Janeway, Captain S'rell gave me a quick briefing. Any word on Lieutenant Potter?"

"We've been asked to come aboard the Smith to render aid. He appears to be in a state of flux at the moment."

"Captain Janeway, Captain Barklin is asking to speak to you again. Conference call if possible." She nodded, and the screen split vertically.

"Captain, Admiral - I am ordering our weapons and engine powered down to help assure you that we have no designs on your safety; that we are only worried about your crewman." When he saw Janeway open her mouth to speak, he added with a small smile. "Weapons aren't a worry, what with the large number of ships coming to welcome you home, and a half hour or so warm-up time for the engines is a small price to pay for your peace of mind."

"Thank you, Captain. If you'll send us coordinates, we can send over our people to see what we can do for our man."

"Make the teams as large as you feel necessary, Captain," Barklin said. "We want to save him as much as you do." His screen blanked, and the view of Admiral Paris grew to fill the rest, as before.

"Interesting," the admiral said. "I think I'll join you if you don't mind, Kathryn."

"By all means, sir," she replied with a smile.

About twenty minutes later, the shuttle bay of the Vivian Smith was housing quite a few people. "Our scans seem to show him as frozen," Barklin was saying. "We think we can free him, but we're not sure whether the energy needs to be in phase with him or out of phase, exactly canceling out the current bubble of energy. The problem comes down to the fact that we have no way of telling which is needed. A highly logical case can be made for either method."

"Indeed," said Tuvok. "Feeding him energy at his specific current wavelength could give him the ability to complete his action or free him from the temporal stasis he currently is experiencing. Conversely, precisely canceling his signature could have exactly the same effect. We do not currently have enough data to make a decision."

"We've tried firing phasers at the shuttle at the lowest possible setting," Barklin said, "but there was no discernible change to his status." At the raised eyebrow he was getting from Janeway he added, "That setting is so weak that one of our security people refers to it as having his phaser set on tickle." He shook his head. "But if it was going to help or hurt, then we should have seen at least a very small change in his status." He ran a hand through his hair. "At this point, even though we have the necessary signature, it'll take us days to properly reconfigure something."

Tom Paris and Harry Kim locked eyes, and simultaneously said, "His phaser!"

"Explain," Admiral Paris said. There was an undercurrent of amusement at the simultaneity of their outburst, as well as a bit of pride.

Tom nodded to Harry Kim, who cleared his throat. "Well, Admiral, Lieutenant Potter has his own personal phaser which is tuned to his magical signature. If he doesn't have it with him on the Flyer, then it's probably back in his quarters on the Voyager."

"Magic?" Admiral Paris asked, his voice making it very clear that he doubted Harry Kim's sanity.

"While it is not commonly known these days, Admiral," Tuvok interjected, "there is evidence to show that Lieutenant Potter has access to something that the rest of the crew does not. The people of New Londinium share this capability, I understand. Whatever it is, he has been able to counteract the entity known as Q with his abilities. I have also seen records of him performing unusual feats with the phaser in question, that no Starfleet phaser is capable of doing, and only when he is using the phaser. Any other crewman attempting the same feats fails. I believe it to be a worthwhile avenue of research, since that phaser is already tuned by him to his particular signature."

Admiral Paris nodded before looking back to Harry Kim. "My apologies, Lieutenant."

"Understood, sir. I had the same reaction the first time I heard the word 'magic'."

At a nod from the admiral and Barklin, Tuvok called the Voyager. "Tuvok to Voyager. We need to verify whether or not Lieutenant Potter's personal phaser is with him or aboard Voyager."

"Understood. The Hermiones are running to his quarters to check. We'll let you know in a minute."

It was actually five minutes, and it was answered by both girls beaming onto the shuttle bay of the Smith. "He left it home, so to speak," said 'Ann'.

"If someone is willing to fire a very short, weak burst at the shuttle, we can see if it will have any effect," Captain Barklin said.

'Jane' asked, "Do we have a non-magical fire it, or me?" She paused. "Possibly her as well, but we've never tested Ann."

"I believe that someone non-magical should fire it," Tuvok said. "We do not know if your signature would interfere."

"That was my thought as well," she said as she handed the phaser to him. "I'll let you decide the best candidate."

"It would perhaps be myself," he replied. "I do not believe that I have ever shown the slightest tendency toward the manner of unusual activities surrounding me that Lieutenant Potter spoke of, which would signify an ability to wield this energy form in some manner."

A moment later, the Smith's science people shook their heads. "It seemed to work, but would take a ship's complement of phasers to have any hope of success. Readings indicate that he will come into phase with us if we can supply enough energy."

"Looks like we need to figure out a way to tune our engines to supply the properly phased energy," Barklin said.

Tom Paris winced. "I have an idea, but I suspect that you'll think I'm crazy when I say it."

Captain Janeway looked at him for a moment and then gave him a wide smile. "An excellent idea, Lieutenant Paris. We'll have to figure out how to deliver that power, but it certainly should work."

Tom's father was looking more than slightly amused, especially since Tuvok was also showing signs of approval, having clearly realized what Tom was suggesting. "For those of us who haven't been aboard Voyager for the last seven years, perhaps you could explain? Lieutenant Paris? Since you seem to have had the original idea?"

"Yes, Admiral," he replied with a smile. "You can ask Harry about it when we get him back, but back in April … uh, several months ago, Harry had the idea of how to get us home. He managed to get the Delta Flyer home for a few minutes when we tuned the Flyer's engines to his signature, so we tuned the Voyager's engines to it as well. We discovered a side effect that led eventually to this situation we're in right now, but we never detuned either the Flyer or Voyager. Our engines are ready right now."

Barklin's eyebrows rose, and he got an excited look on his face. "The fastest route to deliver it would be for us to empty the shuttle bay, open it to space, and let Voyager fire a low power beam right at him."

Janeway blinked. "Now I know you're a different Captain Barklin. You're offering to let us fire our ship's phasers at a spot inside your ship. I'd be hard pressed to allow Captain S'rell such an offer."

Barklin shrugged. "It's that important. We can wait for two or three days while we attempt to match his signature, or we can let the people who already have their engines tuned do it. Makes sense to me to allow you to bring your man back as quickly as possible."

"You'll want your engines up and running," Tom Paris said. "You're drifting ever so slightly in space with them off, and this is going to require pinpoint accuracy." He scowled. "We'll need the best pilots we've both got. If we had the best one available, though, we wouldn't be needing to have this conversation. My recommendation is that you see if you can find someone who can thread a needle with a shuttle and put them at your helm."

Barklin looked contemplative for a moment and then smiled. "Let me contact the bridge crew and see what we can work out." He walked to a wall console and spoke to someone for a minute or two before grinning and walking back over to them.

"There will be another timeship appearing in about five minutes. We have found a pilot for our ship, since Lieutenant Paris would probably be best aboard Voyager. I am not breaking any laws of time to say that we are not using Lieutenant Potter to pilot the Vivian Smith," he finished with a laugh.

"That could cause a paradox, I would think," both Hermiones said in unison.

"You're probably right," Janeway said. "I suspect that we should return to our ships to prepare for this," she added, motioning to the Starfleet members from her time frame.

"Probably," Barklin said. "If you want to leave an observer to watch from the shuttle control room, I won't complain, and promise to return them to you."

Janeway laughed. "You're letting us fire phasers at you. I think I can trust that you'd return any of my crew to me."

Admiral Paris walked over to his son. "I know I said this in a communication to you back when we first managed to get in touch with you, but … son, I'm proud of you. So proud of what you've become. And I'm sorry I never -"

"Dad, we've got all the time in the world to hash things out between us when this is done," Tom interrupted, a smile on his face. His eyes were suspiciously bright. "Permission to hug an admiral?" he added with a wide grin.

"Consider it an order, son," his father replied, eyes just as bright. They held it for nearly a minute, and parted reluctantly.

"Harry is going to be so unhappy that he missed that," 'Ann' said. "He tries to look tough, but he's a sucker for emotional moments like that."

"Let's make one of our own by freeing him," Barklin said. "I'd personally like to thank the man for his changes to the timeline."

People returned to their respective ships, and the Vivian Smith finished its engine restart. Tom looked at the Smith, and said, "Y'know, I keep thinking Potter would make some comment about cosmic jumper cables."

"You're probably right," Janeway answered with a chuckle. "Is everything ready?"

"Affirmative," she heard from the various stations.

"Tuvok? Everything ready on the Smith?"

"Affirmative, Captain Janeway. Captain Barklin and I are in the control room, awaiting the start of the process."

"Understood. Tom, please maneuver into position and hold us steady."

"Affirmative," Tom Paris replied, already getting working himself into the zone he fell into for his best piloting. Voyager began to move, gently pivoting around the Vivian Smith until they could look into the shuttle bay.

"Very well done, Tom," Janeway said. "I doubt our other pilot could have done it any better."

"High praise indeed, Captain," he said with a distracted laugh. It was fairly obvious that he was keeping most of his attention on the console, ready for any corrections that might be needed.

Barklin's voice came over the comm. "When you feel the time is right, you have my permission to fire, Captain."

"Thank you, Captain. Mr Kim? Fire when you feel conditions are favorable."

"Just a moment Captain. I'm waiting for our drift to stop … now. Thanks Tom." As he spoke, a white beam lanced out from Voyager into the Smith's shuttle bay, impacting on the wavering Delta Flyer.

"Readings seem to show him coming more into phase, Captain," Kim reported. "Shouldn't be too much longer until -" He stopped because they all saw a brilliant flash of light from the Smith's shuttle bay.

"Captain, it appears that Lieutenant Potter's shuttle has … disappeared."

"Was there a power fluctuation at the end or something?" she asked.

"Negative," Tuvok reported from the Smith. "I was monitoring the progress as well, and all seemed to be in order. The Delta Flyer was continuing to match phase with the surrounding universe. When sensors reported a one hundred percent match, the Delta Flyer disappeared in a brilliant release of energy, almost all of it in the human visual spectrum."

"So we brought him back, but now we don't know where he is?" she asked.

"Imprecise, but essentially correct," Tuvok said. "There is no trace to tell us where or when he might have gone."

17. Chapter 17

Science crews from both ships were examining the shuttle bay of the Vivian Smith, in hopes of tracking down where the Delta Flyer had disappeared to. There were traced of energy from the disappearance, but no one could detect anything more than that.

"It does match the Lieutenant's signature," Tuvok reported to her as she sat in the briefing room with several other of her crew. The other Starfleet ships had begun the trip back to Starbase One.

The Hermione from the 20th century perked up. "Perhaps if we got Sirius over to the Smith? Maybe he was trying to Apparate. I don't know that Sirius could trace Apparation signatures, but I know for a fact that I can't."

"It certainly couldn't hurt," Janeway said. The intercom chirped. "Janeway."

"Captain, we've got an incoming message from Starfleet. They say it's urgent."

"Pipe it in here."

A moment later, Admiral Jaaymeson's face appeared. "Captain, you might want to get back to Starbase One. We've found your Lieutenant Potter floating about twenty kilometers away from the Starbase, in that shuttle you designed. He's unconscious at the moment. He appears to have taken a rather severe shock to his system."

Harry floated to consciousness to the familiar sound of a Starfleet sickbay bed. "Welcome back to consciousness, Lieutenant Potter," came the welcome voice of the Voyager's doctor.

"I'm hoping that I'm hearing your voice from somewhere near Earth, and not back in the Delta Quandrant," Harry replied. "Even if we are back in Delta, how did everyone come through the trip?"

"Typical Harry Potter," said one of the Hermione's. "Worry about everyone else instead of yourself."

"Last time I thought of myself first, I was an arsehole for two years," he said. "I don't like that man, and think he should have been keelhauled. And yes, I know what keelhauling really is, beautiful." He opened his eyes to see both Hermiones at the foot of his bed, one in a Starfleet jumpsuit. "Seeing double is definitely a positive right now," he added with a grin. "Double the hotness. Only way it could be better would be if I was medically seeing double, because then there'd be FOUR sexy women at the foot of my bed." He paused. "I'd die happy, if a bit dehydrated."

He could see the doctor shaking his head, albeit with a smile on his face. "With most people I'd say that your sense of humor proved that you were ready for work again, but I'm not sure that you have a sense of humor."

"You wound me, doctor!" Harry said with a laugh. "Isn't that against the Hippocratic Oath?"

"What, telling the truth?" the doctor answered him, laughing. "Quite seriously, though, you seem to be fine. I will ask that you wear this monitor for a while, taking into account the elevated heart rate these ladies seem to cause amongst the crew."

"Doctor!" squeaked the non-Starfleet Hermione.

"If you're flirting with my Hermiones, doctor, then I have only one thing to say to you – you have excellent taste in women." He paused. "Well, two things – they're taken, even if their choice in men shows a marked lack of sanity."

"Actually, it shows an amazing amount of intelligence," came another voice from the doorway. He looked over and blinked a few times, because Luna Lovegood was at the door, wearing an outfit that make him wonder if she was using a Sticking Charm to hold that thing up.

"No," she replied in answer to the unasked question, "I just saw this and decided I liked the looks of it. I've always been a fan of the design school that makes you wonder when the outfit is going to fall off, but is designed well enough not to."

"Pity," whispered civilian Hermione.

"I'm agreeable," Luna said, "but that should be a conversation the three of you have." She spun joyously in place. "They've been showing us around somewhat, but most have been waiting for you to awaken before we have a proper party." Harry ignored the fact that her spin caused the dress to flare up such that he was afraid that she was going to show whether or not she believed in underwear.

"Don't worry, Harry," she giggled. "It's designed too well to flash someone. For me to spin fast enough to manage it, I'd do myself an injury." She danced over to the doctor. "Although being thoroughly checked over by this handsome man would certainly not be an imposition."

"You do know that I am actually a holographic life form," the doctor said. Although it was phrased as a statement, it was clearly a question.

"And I'm a witch. You certainly sound intelligent to me. Perhaps nothing may come of my flirting with you, or perhaps we might discover whether or not we happen to be compatible." She shrugged, which everyone in the room watched with some interest, since the maneuver did prove that the outfit didn't have a bra as part of it. "Thank you!" she said in a bright tone that Harry could only define as 'sparkling'.

"I'm nearly married," Harry said, "not dead."

"Besides," Starfleet Hermione said, "I believe that beauty should be admired wherever you find it. If he hadn't looked, I'd have checked his pulse."

Luna bounced over and hugged the Hermione in the jumpsuit, and Harry chuckled. "Doc, I think it safe to say that the universe's three best female arses are currently in this Sickbay."

"From a purely aesthetic point of view, Lieutenant, I find that I must concur," was the soft reply.

The Hermione in uniform turned her face toward him, not letting go of Luna, an eyebrow raised in amusement. "Ass-thetic?" she quipped as if calling him on a pun. He looked as if he had swallowed a lemon, but there was clear amusement in the look.

The Temporal Investigations officer who had introduced himself as Dalby pinched the bridge of his nose, wincing as if what Harry had told him had given him the beginnings of a migraine. "Let me get this straight - the captain of the 29th century ship, the Vivian Smith, told you that you were in the process of changing the timeline; the past, from his point of view."

"Yes," Harry said simply, interrupting the man.

"So, upon hearing this, you decided it was within your purview to continue your actions, knowingly altering the time stream."

"Yes," was Harry's response.

Dalby actually rocked back, as did his partner Macklin. "We usually don't hear someone we're interviewing openly admit to committing a crime," Dalby finally said.

"Actually," Harry said, "if anyone was committing a crime, it was the other Captain Barklin, by trying to return us to the Delta Quadrant. There is a very specific point in time he would have had to re-insert us, and then ensured that I was killed in the process."

"And how do you figure that?" Macklin asked in derision.

"C'mon guys, you're with Temporal Investigations. You're supposed to be able to figure this stuff out. First I come forward to the 23rd century due to an accident with a magic device that mucks with time. I'm given information that leads me to believe that I had returned to my original time. When I join Voyager, I'm shown exactly what that evidence is - pictures showing me next to an as yet unknown shuttle design, taken by a person I knew from the 20th century, on a date after the point I disappeared from. There was also a shot from somewhere of a ship of Voyager's design, facing what we now know to be the Vivian Smith. This is Exhibit One."

He stood, as he always did when working something out verbally. "Exhibit Two involves the fact that there was no Voldemort still pestering people in this time. This backed up Exhibit One, that I would need to return to my birth century, since the prophecy stated that only I could kill him."

"Prophecy?" Macklin sneered.

"Yes, prophecy. It was said best in Hamlet - 'There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophies.' That cosmic annoyance himself admits that I have abilities that are beyond the average human. Read our damned logs - I know that incident is in there."

He shook his head. "Okay, we have me in the future, and evidence that I would return to the 20th century at some point when I was on what I later learned was Voyager. Cue up seven years in the Delta Quadrant, where we'd probably still be if we hadn't run into a xenophobic and belligerent species that seemed to think the best way to stay safe was to wipe everyone else out. And they were significantly more powerful than us. This led to me accidentally discovering that what I had done to my phaser could be done to a ship's engines, because I fired off a ridiculously powerful blast of what I call a spell and Q calls a 'precursor ability'. It caused some issues with Voyager, but it made me realize that I could use what I call Apparation to get us away from them, hopefully. It worked. That made me realize that properly tuned engines could probably get us back to Earth, since I had jumped quite a few light-years. We tested it in the Delta Flyer - which was, by the way, the shuttle in the photograph. When I came back with logs showing that I had been to Starbase One - which have been independently verified, by the way - we tuned the Voyager engines to my signature, and I attempted to jump us home. I discovered an aspect of my method of travel that I wasn't aware of, and ended up jumping the entire ship back to the late 20th century. Exhibit Three."

"Think about that very precisely, gentlemen. I was now in the time period that other evidence showed I needed to be in eventually, so I was actually following an already established time line. And since I had to be there to deal with Voldemort, I needed to stick around longer. It turned out that the way to get rid of him … well, I'm seeing a counselor for that. It turns out that it wasn't really Khan Noonian Singh that started World War III, it was me destroying Voldemort's soul anchor. So we have two historical things happening that required me to be in that time at that time. This means that any effort to deal with our return to the Delta Quadrant must, by necessity, happen after those items. And it wasn't my power that returned Voyager to its proper time - it was a scientific principal first discovered by James T Kirk's Enterprise."

"Kirk," Dalby snarled. That was all he said, but his tone made sure that it was all that he needed to say.

"So," Harry continued, "we have a situation where were were actually going to be artificially forced back into the Delta Quadrant."

"They were from the future. When they told you that there was a need for you to return to the Delta Quadrant, you should have permitted them to move you there. You do not have the right to decide to alter a time stream."

"It was a stream from our future, which they were artificially attempting to force in a given direction. Isn't that exactly the sort of thing you're supposed to be preventing?" He narrowed his eyes at the men. "You're in league with that specific time stream. There is a given outcome you're trying to force, completely contravening your own laws! What's in it for you?"

Dalby suddenly had a phaser trained on Harry. " Unfortunately for you, you won't be able to pass that along. Pity, really. You refused to submit to the lawfully required return to the Delta Quadrant and got violent. At least that way it explains why you didn't surv-"

He stopped speaking because two red beams lanced out from behind him, striking him and Macklin, knocking them unconscious. "Nice wordless casting, you two," Harry said. "You might want to be wearing just a bit more when Starfleet gets here to pick up their men."

"Don't you like me wearing this?" Luna asked, walking out beside the two Hermiones. She was the most dressed of the three girls, wearing a baby-doll nightie (and matching knickers) that was right on the edge between translucent and opaque. It was rather clear that it was the only thing she had on. Both Hermiones had foregone the nightie aspect of the outfit.

"I happen to think you look amazing, and I suspect the three of us will show you just how amazing you look, but there are people watching this recording, so your state of dress is going into the records. All three girls met eyes and shrugged, which seriously distracted Harry for a moment.

"We've got some people on their way, Harry," Admiral Jaaymeson said over the comm. "With luck, we can use this to at least get some oversight on Section 31. A shadow government does no one good."

18. Chapter 18

Severus Snape found quickly that life in the 24th century was a bit more hectic than he was truly comfortable with. After a suggestion from Harry, he moved to New Londinium, where he became an instant celebrity. They had so many stories that had been passed down over the years, and here was a man who had lived through so many of them. The fact that he had personally known Albus Dumbledore even better than Harry had made him a well-sought after speaker, and many approached him just wanting to be able to say that they had met him. In the beginning, he greatly enjoyed the fame and appreciation, but that wore off after a time. He desired his solitude at times, and was attempting to catch up on the changes to Potions Mastery that had occurred in nearly four hundred years, but interruptions continued to plague him. Finally, he bit the bullet, so to speak, and contacted Potter. "I never thought that I would ask you of all people, but I need advice. How did you handle being a celebrity?"

Harry had simply grinned at him and said, "Why do you think I suggested that planet, Snape? I knew you'd get an understanding of what I lived through once I returned to the wizarding world, back before I got shunted to now. As for how I handled it? About as well as you are now. Have fun!"

His response made Harry laugh and bow before cutting off the transmission. He had cocked an eyebrow in what Harry had thought was a very Vulcan manner and said, "Very Slytherin of you. Bravo."

Katherine Janeway had turned herself in for disciplinary action when they had finally reached Earth and settled accounts. To no one's surprise but her own, Harry turned out to be her biggest supporter, and insisted on testifying. "Yes, there were issues, but she was in a position that none of us could help with. If necessary, we could be removed for a time from our position," he said. "But she was the captain of the vessel. What would that do for morale to have the captain removed from her chair, even for medical reasons? I don't believe that the system is set up to properly deal with such a situation. I had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and became an arsehole to everyone on the ship. But I could be removed from duty. She couldn't be without irrevocably damaging her effectiveness as a captain. It is my admittedly non-medical opinion that she had no real ability to not be captain, and that stress came through. Even shore leave for us was fraught with potential dangers, and we didn't have Starfleet to fall back on if something went wrong. So she remained in that role, no matter how much she might have needed to not be captain for a while."

"Some of her punishments were unnecessarily severe," one of the board members she was facing said to him.

"I can only speak for ones I personally know of, which are mine, and yes, some were severe. But when this was pointed out, she admitted her error and changed those punishments to far more reasonable ones. And I submit that those extreme punishments were after times of extreme stress of some sort, backing up my previous statements. We may wish that they wouldn't break or bend under the strain, but our captains are not machines. I ask that when this board chooses what shall be done in regards to the charges laid upon Captain Janeway, that they keep in mind a poem written by Rudyard Kipling, called Breaking Strain, also known to some as the Hymn to Breaking Strain."

As the board recessed to talk over their eventual decision, Janeway approached him. "No matter the outcome, it means a great deal to me that the two who had the greatest reason to want me punished spoke most strongly for me. I treated you horribly, Harry."

He smiled at her, and said, "I especially wanted them to think of the last two stanzas.

We only of Creation

(0h, luckier bridge and rail)

Abide the twin damnation-

To fail and know we fail.

Yet we - by which sole token

We know we once were Gods-

Take shame in being broken

However great the odds-

The burden of the Odds.

The important part to me is the last one, though:

Oh, veiled and secret Power

Whose paths we seek in vain,

Be with us in our hour

Of overthrow and pain;

That we - by which sure token

We know Thy ways are true -

In spite of being broken,

Because of being broken

May rise and build anew

Stand up and build anew

So I look at it that way, Captain. Mistakes were made, and you were placed under breaking strain. Might I point out that you handled such strain far better than I, which is why I would turn down a captaincy if it were to be offered. You didn't break so much as crack. But you recognize it, and can, as the poem says, 'Stand up and build anew.' I look forward to following your career, future-Admiral Janeway." He stepped back and gave her a sharp salute.

"That, more than anything else, tells us the decision we should make, and have," stated the admiral who last had spoken to them. "The officer who, by rights, should be pushing hardest for her to be punished, instead spoke for as much leniency as possible, if any sentencing were to be done. Our judgement, then is thus: Captain Janeway, we are placing a note in your record that your actions were deserving of disciplinary actions. Due to mitigating circumstances - which Starfleet will look into in hopes of avoiding a similar situation in the future - your punishment is to get counseling, since you were out of touch for seven years. You will not be allowed to captain a ship until such point as your counselor declares you properly capable." He smiled. "Given the facts that you were the one to bring charges against yourself, and those who spoke for leniency were the ones most likely to have pushed for severity, I suspect that you will be ready for captaincy before the repairs and upgrades to Voyager are completed."

Luna found space on New Londinium where she was able to enlarge the Rookery once more. She had made friends with quite a few people while Voyager was in the past, so the group that just happened to converge in hopes of throwing an impromptu house warming (once there was a house to warm, of course) was rather large, including Reginald Barclay. That was a relationship that gave Harry great pleasure, because Barclay was a friend, and in a very odd way, a perfect match for Luna. Luna seemed to agree, and Harry could always tell when the two of them had been together for a while, because Reg tended to spend a day or two looking happily bemused. Harry suspected that part of the reason for that was Luna's attitudes toward clothing, which were lax at the best of times. Since she was a rather … healthy … young woman, he was sure that Reg was getting a very pleasant eyeful.

In their talks about enlarging the Rookery again, she pointed out that it would take a minimum of a year to recharge the runes that permitted the building to change size, so if the scientists wished to study the process, they should really bring every sensor they thought they might need to the place where she would grow the building. They did so, to the point where a person needed to be careful where they placed their feet before the big moment. One enterprising scientist requested space to set up a sensor suite usually built into probes for exploring new phenomena. Considering it was Reg who had come up with the idea, he was given first choice of sensor placement.

It took ten years to understand what they learned, and another decade on top of that to develop the technology to allow it, but the effect - known as the Lovegood/Barclay effect - went on to revolutionize colony building. A decent sized cargo hold could carry what once took a small fleet of ships to deliver to a colony world.

Their home was also the recipient of many visits, because it was a historical building returned to the wizarding world, so to speak. The fact that Luna was lax about clothing around the place, even outdoors, was also something of a draw, especially amongst young men in the throes of puberty. She was, after all, someone that both Hermiones and Harry had euphemistically referred to as 'well bodied'. Privately, to Reg, all three told him that he was 'an infernally lucky man' to have landed her.

Interestingly enough, her laxity with clothing helped Reg with his shyness to the point that he both startled and pleased Deanna Troi when she came for a visit with Riker, and Reg had answered the door completely nude. When she commented gently about his state, rather than become catatonically flustered, which had been his old reaction, he he had looked down and then apologized to them both as he grabbed a robe and called back to let Luna know that they had guests.

Reg also discovered a way to do a personal apparation unit, although it was massively bulky for close to three decades. The important side of this discovery was that it allowed the development of technologically shielding against Apparation, which led to a very subtle change to the way Starfleet did shields. (Harry would never learn - but Reg suspected when he checked the records - that this shielding was the cause for both his getting stuck in between when the timelines shifted, and what had bounced him to Starbase One. One timeline didn't have the shielding, and the later/overlay one did, hence his being pinned between them.)

It had taken some time, but Harry was able to get to London and Diagon Alley again. It was a tourist attraction, and he was amused to find people taking pictures of Gringotts. He threaded through the small crowd and walked up to the doors, hearing gasping from the crowd as he did so. Banging on the large knocker, he waited for a moment before a window opened. "What do you want, human?" There were gasps behind him at the exchange, and he caught a glimpse of mirth from the goblin.

"I come seeking to speak either to Rendflash, if he still lives, or to his successor. I would speak of the Potter and Black accounts."

The window closed, followed by the door opening, much to the shock of the people behind him. "Mister Potter," said a goblin who looked as if he were getting on in years. "Took your time getting here, didn't you?"

Harry grinned at the goblin. "Scenic tour, Rendflesh. Decided I just had to see the other side of the galaxy first." He heard murmurs behind him that all seemed to be variations on "He was on Voyager!"

"Yes, well, things have changed here on Earth in the last few hundred years. Turns out your massive amount of money is now worthless, as far as the humans are concerned."

"Not really," Harry said. "It could always be melted down and turned into a different form of artwork, or farmed out to various museums around the galaxy."

"You are a strange human, Mr Potter," Rendflesh said. "Care to come inside?"

Harry turned to the crowd. "Be back out in a while," he said with a wave.

Once he was inside and in an office, Harry looked to Rendflesh with some concern. "I know that your people were about profit and honor, Rendflesh. The new reality doesn't really allow for much by way of profit, though."

Rendflesh laughed. "Not in the 20th century meaning, at least. We have been known to the Federation for some time, however, and have found ways of making profit. Not all races within this Federation have given up on money, after all. We have learned the new ways of making money, and took great care to ensure that the families that helped to warn us of the disaster were well cared for. In actuality, your holdings are immense, as are Mister Black's."

"What was with that bit out at the door, then?"

Rendflesh gave him a wide smile. "A test, if you will. You passed, by the way. Profit is good, but to let it rule your life?" He shook his head. "Sometimes the pursuit is the profit, and you showed a proper goblin attitude out there."

When the last of the paperwork was finished, Harry and the girls met with the crew of Voyager once more. "I hate to say it, but I'm leaving Starfleet. My reason for being in Starfleet is -" He stopped and looked at the Hermione he had grown up with. She was five months pregnant. "Well, she's currently carrying my baby. I needed to go back to say goodbye, and incidentally save the world, but as I said many times on the trip, if the Klingons or Romulans had been my ticket back, then I would have been the best damned Klingon or Romulan you'd ever seen. I will always treasure the friendships I made with you all, and there is a standing invitation to drop in on us when you're free."

"We'll call first," Janeway said with a throaty chuckle. "Wouldn't want to catch you at the wrong time."

"You kidding, Captain? Tom would probably try to schedule the get-togethers for just such an occasion."

"Hey, I resemble that remark!" Tom said with a laugh. A moment later he said to the rest of the crew, "By the way, I just recently learned who the other pilot was, back when we saved Harry here."

"Hmm?" Harry asked. "Which time?"

"You were trying to leave the previous Vivian Smith, and got stuck in between?" Harry Kim said. Potter just nodded.

"Well, the others here remember that they needed a pilot with a sure hand to make sure that the Smith didn't move in relation to the Voyager. I just found out a week ago who they got to fly the Smith." He grinned, and pointed a thumb at his own chest. "Me! They came back - or forward, or whatever - and asked me to do it because it was recent enough that I'd remember what was needed."

"Doesn't that make some sort of paradox?" Harry Potter asked.

"I asked the same thing, but it was due to some odd temporal law - tertiary exclusion to the Heinlein-Asimov Theorem or something. But you're here, so I was able to be picked up to make sure you were here." He shrugged. "I'm just happy I got to save a good friend's life."

"From both sides, as I recall," Hermione Ann said. "Weren't you piloting the Voyager as well?"

"While Harry here fired the phasers, which Captain Janeway allowed to be fired, as well as Captain Barklin allowing his ship to be fired on … you get the idea. It was a group effort, saving our friend."

Janeway smiled. "Very true. So, Mr Potter, once you deal with mustering out, will you search for a home? You had made comments that you were somewhat adrift. It might be time to settle down finally."

He smiled at her. "Somewhere during our time in the past, at Hogwarts, I realized something, Captain." He put an arm around each Hermione and pulled them close. "It was a long, dangerous trip, but I found what I was looking for." He kissed his wives' cheeks. "I'm home, Captain. It was a long voyage, but I found my home."