Chapter Text
“You two have a new assignment!” Lavender exclaimed as she burst through the doors of Theo and Hermione’s Unspeakable laboratory, deep within the bowels of the Ministry, wheeling a trolley in front of her.
Her entrance cut through the staid, concentrated quiet of the room, startling Theo and causing him to lose control of the charm he was using to tease a minute brass screw into a complicated, unusual-looking machine in front of him.
“New assignment? Doesn’t Croaker know we’ve reached capacity?” Hermione snapped, without looking up from the small disc of green light that was emitting from an inconspicuous looking steel black box on the workbench in front of her.
Lavender pushed the trolley over to their workbench and lifted a thin file from it. ”Well, it’s more of a part of an assignment. You’ll be supporting the Missing Person’s Department of the Ministry,” Lavender leaned forward conspiratorially. “I think you two were specifically requested to help.”
Despite her unwavering tendency to irritate, Lavender also had a lot of uses as their PA – mainly, she seemed to have an uncanny ability to know things she shouldn't.
“Missing persons? What's that got to do with us? We work in Temporo-Spatial Research and Development.” Theo put down his wand, clearly resigned to having had his concentration disrupted by Lavender’s visit.
“Well – here’s the brief,” Lavender started to read from the file. “Professor Julia Kathleen Rumpleton. Missing since 31st December 2010. So about six years ago now. Last seen when leaving home to work at her private lab. No confirmed sightings of her since. She was a previous Unspeakable in metaphysics…a polymath… ‘Professor Rumpleton is a highly intelligent, inquisitive individual with many interests, including the mating lives of flobberworms and Muggle architecture’…says here she even wrote fiction in her spare time – children’s fiction, apparently.” Lavender looked at them and shrugged bemusedly.
“Right. Okay. I still don’t get what that’s got to with us?” Theo said, and Hermione had to admit that she shared his confusion and frustration. She found that her and Theo often felt similarly about things. It was one of the reasons he was so good to work with. That, and his intellect, and calm manner, and how he smiled at her when she’d had a good idea, his dark eyes sparkling like –
“Oh. Right. Well, it’s got this to do with you,” Lavender said, and with a dramatic flair, she reached out and whipped off a blanket that had been covering an instrument on the trolley.
The instrument was a complex looking contraption, made up of various brass cogs, small wheels, numerous tiny mirrors, several clock faces, and a large concave steel disc that sat in its centre.
“What’s this?” Hermione asked, her interest kindling, as the three of them all came forward to surround the machine.
“That’s what the higher-ups are hoping you two can work out. It’s only just been found a week or so ago, in a secret annex off Rumpleton’s private lab. They think it might be some kind of time machine…and have something to do with her disappearance. They’ve had a preliminary look at it, but didn’t get very far so are passing it on to you two now.”
Hermione had been working with various magical time machines for several years now, but had never seen anything like this.
She took the file from Lavender, and frowned down at the notes they’d been given. “They’ve tried all the usual spells to find out its purpose, but none of them have worked,” she reported to Theo.
“Exactly,” Lavender confirmed. “Can’t even work out how to turn it on, apparently. No matter what they do, it remains inert.”
“I assume someone’s tried this?” Hermione asked, pointing to what looked like a small muggle power switch on the side of the machine.
“Oh, no – I think they’ve just tried spell work!” Lavender exclaimed enthusiastically, and Hermione just had time to roll her eyes – suppressing her frustration that magical kind always overlooked simpler, Muggle methods – when Lavender reached forward with a manicured finger. “Let’s see what it does then –”
“No, Lavender –”
“Wait –”
But Hermione and Theo’s protestations were too late because Lavender had already pressed down on the small, shining switch.
There was a tense silence. A silence that stretched on for so long that Hermione thought, maybe, nothing was going to happen. She was about to release a sigh of relief, when a whirring noise started, much like a muggle vacuum cleaner turning on. It increased in volume, then a bright, blinding light radiated from the machine’s disc, encompassing the three of them standing about it.
Hermione felt herself being pressed inwards, as if the atmosphere around her were giving her an unnecessarily aggressive hug, then felt herself being pushed upward. She couldn't see anything except the blinding light, and could only hear the loud, vacuum-cleaner type sound, and the distant and faint sound of someone – possibly Lavender – screaming.
Then there were colours: greys and blacks, all pixelated, like a muggle digital photo close up, and Hermione had an odd, uncanny sense that all the matter around her – all the atoms – had separated. The pressurised feeling continued – she felt as if the atmosphere were pushing into her ribcage, making it hard to breath and –
And then, it all suddenly stopped. She could breathe easily again and the pixels she was seeing all came together before her eyes, like a camera lens coming into focus. She found herself flying backwards through the air and landing with a hard thump on what appeared to be a pavement in a muggle street.
She instinctively got to her feet, reaching for her wand, and swore as she realised she’d left it by the apparatus she’d been working on, now useless and impotent, on her workbench.
“Do you have your wand?” She demanded of Theo, who was getting to his feet alongside Lavender. They had apparently been thrown to the ground too. He shook his head, grimacing apologetically.
She looked questioningly – desperately – at Lavender, who shook her head too.
“You know I can’t take it into the Department of Mysteries.” Lavender said regrettably.
Hermione had known that, but she still couldn't help but hope. For security and safety reasons, only Unspeakables were allowed to take their wands into the department laboratories.
She looked around her. They were on a fairly narrow street with white-rendered buildings, much like the streets surrounding Whitehall, where the entrance to the Ministry was. It was thankfully deserted; it seemed that no one had seen their inexplicable appearance.
“Have we travelled in time? Was that a time machine?” Lavender asked, her eyes straining with a mix of anxiety and excitement.
“Possibly,” Hermione replied. “If we have travelled in time, this doesn’t look too far removed from our own, so we might have just gone a little way into the past or the future. This looks like we’re around Whitehall. Let’s find the phone box and see if we can get into the Ministry, it should be in the next street.”
“And then what?”
“And then we can find out what date it is, and find someone who can help us get back to our own time,” Theo replied, and Hermione looked at him gratefully; she rarely had to explain her thinking process to him.
“Exactly. We just need to make sure we don’t see ourselves, of course.”
“What I don't understand is that all the time machines I’ve known don’t shift the traveller in space – we should have ended up in the same lab in the ministry,” Theo pondered as the three of them headed up the road.
Hermione had been thinking the same thing, and she didn’t have an explanation for it. “That is strange…” she agreed.
The three of them made their way to the corner of Great Scotland Yard and Scotland Place, to the spot where the red phone box stood that funnelled guests down to the Ministry.
Only, it wasn’t there.
Instead, there was another type of phone box with large plain glass windows and steel metal frames. The words BTConnect were printed on the glass, alongside a corporate logo.
Frowning, Lavender opened the door and peered inside. Hermione could see over her shoulder that it was full of call girl cards and that someone had graffitied something illegible in the space above the phone.
“Urgh! It smells of piss!” Lavender exclaimed, and made a quick exit, holding her nose.
Despite the stench and the naked bodies on display, the three of them braved the phone box again, and tried dialling 62442, but nothing happened. The phone was, in fact, dead – there was no dial tone.
Hermione dug about under her shirt, and produced a small beaded bag.
“Where’d that come from?” Lavender asked.
“I always carry it on me in the lab, just in case an accident like this happens. It’s got a few emergency supplies in it, including muggle and magical money.”
“Genius,” Theo said admirably, and Hermione hoped he couldn’t see her blushing at the compliment.
“I just wish I’d had the foresight to put in a spare wand…” She finally unearthed some muggle coins from the bag and tried putting them in the slot on the phone. But the phone remained dead; there was a tinkling sound and the coins rattled out onto the small change tray.
Giving up, the three of them spilled back out onto the pavement.
“So this means we’re in the future, right? That red phone box has been there for ages, so it would still be there if we'd gone a little way into the past. So they must have replaced it with that thing, and changed the Ministry entrance,” Lavender said.
Hermione nodded slowly in agreement. It did make sense…but there was something niggling at the back of her mind, an idea which hadn’t quite formed yet but which made her uneasy nonetheless.
“Let’s try Diagon Alley,” Theo suggested. “I think our first step should be to get into the magical world.”
Hermione didn’t have any better ideas, so the three of them started to walk through the London streets towards Charing Cross Road.
Nothing else seemed too out of the ordinary. The clothes the muggles were wearing weren’t too removed from the clothes that were worn in their own time. The shops, bars, pubs, cars, buses, all seemed fairly similar too, only with small, subtle differences; Hermione only recognised a few of the shop names, and the buses were plastered with adverts of brands she had never heard of.
“Why don’t we just ask someone the date?” Lavender asked.
“No, we shouldn’t draw attention to ourselves, we don’t know what’s happened to us in this time,” Theo said cautiously. “And also –”
They’d just approached the junction of Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue, and Theo had stopped dead, looking over the frantic traffic and hordes of tourists at the grand façade of the Palace Theatre. The other two did the same, and Hermione’s heart thumped threateningly against her ribs as she read a huge sign in jagged gold lettering above the Palace entrance.
“ Harry Potter and the Cursed Child ,” Lavender read incredulously. “So – so, by this time, Harry seems to have gotten famous in the muggle world as well the magical one…or – or something….”
“That doesn’t make sense. For muggle and magical kind to integrate to the extent where they’d be showing a play about Harry would take decades,” Hermione spoke her thoughts out loud. “But we were just saying that we can’t have gone far into the future...”
Her stomach was turning nauseatingly; the ill-formed idea she’d had in her mind was starting to morph into something clearer.
“Let’s ask in the box office, let’s go to buy tickets and ask what it’s about,” Lavender said eagerly, and before the other two could stop her, she was bounding into the small box office to the side of the building, and up to one of the kiosks inside.
The ticket seller – a portly man, probably in his late fifties – scoffed when Lavender asked if there were any tickets for that day's performance.
“You’re joking, right? This sells out months in advance! You’ll need to go on the website.”
“Actually, we’re buying for a friend,” Hermione butted in. “We don’t really know much about the play ourselves, could you tell us more?”
“I dunno really either,” the man said, shrugging. “Not a fan of Harry Potter myself.”
“What don’t you like about him?” Lavender asked.
“Well, it’s for kids, innit? I’m not really into all that magic mumbo-jumbo.”
“Right. Okay. Thanks,” Lavender said uncertainly and the three exited onto the street again.
“So. The play seems to be for children,” Lavender’s voice had a tone of authority, as if she were reaching for some certainty, any certainty she could find. Hermione didn't blame her, everything about this time was so very similar to their own, but at the same time so different too. It was all very odd. “So in this time, Harry might have done something good for kids. For muggle kids – which would make sense, cos he grew up as a muggle child, didn’t he, and he’s always had a thing for helping people? And maybe some people are still sceptical about magic, whether it exists, hence why the man called it mumbo-jumbo…”
Lavender prattled on as the three continued up Charing Cross Road. Hermione was only half listening, because her idea – her theory – was starting to become more defined in her mind.
It was a theory that was so far-fetched and – well – frightening, that she didn’t want to entertain it fully until she’d ruled out all others.
“Wonder who the cursed child is…” Lavender was saying as they reached the north end of Charing Cross road, where the entrance to the Leaky Cauldron was.
Except, it wasn’t. The entrance to the pub just wasn’t there.
“They’ve got rid of the Leaky as well?” Lavender said in despair. “We must be further into the future than we’d thought for this to have changed as well! Or d’you think it’s because we don't have our wands? It means we’re like muggles and can’t see it?”
“No, we’d still see it, even without our wands, just being magical is enough,” Theo said, looking gravely up at where the sign for the pub should be hanging. He looked pale, and Hermione wondered if he was entertaining the same kind of idea that she was.
“That’s the other thing – it doesn’t feel magical at all, does it?” Lavender asked, turning to them with an unusually solemn expression. “Do you two feel it too? Or rather, not feel it? It’s as if this time doesn’t have magic.”
Hermione nodded in agreement, and heard Theo murmur his assent too. For as long as Hermione could remember, she had felt magic; when she was younger she didn’t quite know that that’s what it was, of course. But as she’d grown older, and learnt of the magical world, she’d realised that that’s what she could feel in the air around her, like an unseen energy. Which, she supposed, it was.
Here, though, there was an ominous, dull kind of inertness around her, as if the atmosphere were devoid of magic.
“Oh look! They’re wearing Hogwarts scarfs!”” Lavender exclaimed, pointing at two young women, one of whom was standing in front of where the entrance to the Leaky should be, posing, whilst the other took a photo of her.
Before Hermione could stop her, Lavender had sprinted up to the two girls.
“Hi! I’m a Gryffindor too!” Lavender greeted them cheerfully, gesturing to the yellow and maroon scarf that one of them was wearing; the other one had a Hufflepuff scarf wrapped tightly around her neck.
The girls looked a bit unsure but smiled at Lavender, as if amused. “I just wondered,” Lavender continued. “I’ve been out the country for a while – how do we get into Diagon Alley now the Leaky’s not here?”
The girls’ smiles faltered, and they shared a slightly bewildered look. Then, the Hufflepuff smiled conspiratorially, as if playing along with an unspoken joke. “Well, you need to be magical to see the entrance. If you can’t see it, maybe you’re not magical?” she suggested.
Lavender laughed dismissively. “No, I'm definitely magical! I'm a pureblood even. I graduated from Hogwarts years ago now.”
The girls’ expressions changed again, into one of guardedness. The Gryffindor took the arm of her Hufflepuff friend and started leading them away. “Okay, well…we’re not sure why you can’t get into Diagon…sorry…” And then the two were quickly crossing the road.
“Honestly! I mean, I’m a fan, but I'm not that crazy! London gets more full of mad people each day…” Hermione heard the Gryffindor say, before their voices got lost in the traffic.
Lavender was looking perplexed and forlornly at the two retreating girls, when Hermione noticed Theo had gone a few yards up the road to one of the newspaper stands, and was returning with a Metro in his hand, frowning grimly down at the front page.
Of course. Hermione silently berated herself for not thinking of it earlier – a newspaper would not only tell them today’s date, but also a little about what was happening at the current time.
“Fuck,” Theo murmured as he came to a stop beside them, scowling down at the paper.
“What? What is it?” Lavender moved nearer him to peer at the newspaper, and Hermione did the same on his other side. “That’s today's date! I mean, the date of this morning, in our time – 9th November 2016! So we’ve only gone forward a few hours? But then – where's the Leaky? And the Ministry? And what’s that play about?...” Lavender trailed off, a raw vulnerability evident in her tone, which made Hermione’s heart lurch in sympathy.
Theo looked at Hermione meaningfully, his eyes intense and knowing. She knew then that he had come to the same conclusion she had about what had happened to them.
“I got the Metro this morning,” Hermione said gravely. “I often get it on my way to work, to keep up to date about what’s happening in the Muggle world. But the headline on the newspaper I got was different to this. It was about how Hilary Clinton had won the US election, but this – this is reporting on Trump’s win.”
“I feel sick,” Lavender grimaced down at the paper. “This is definitely the worst thing that’s happened since we got here. No one should be the leader of anything with hair as bad as that!”
“Well, this pretty much proves it then, even without the other weirdness we’ve come across,” Theo said.
“Yes,” Hermione agreed, and momentarily forgot the predicament they were in as she got lost in the complex, dark depths of Theo’s irises. This sometimes happened when they shared a breakthrough idea of some kind, and it always left Hermione with an odd, albeit not unpleasant, feeling in her stomach.
“It proves what?!” Lavender’s inpatient bark brought Theo and Hermione’s attention away from each other and back to Lavender. “Will you two stop talking in this – this –“ Lavender waved her arms about, clearly exasperated. “This cryptic way and tell me what in Merlin’s name is going on? What time have we been transported to?
“Lavender,” Theo started, his voice gentle and patient. Hermione felt a bout of affection for him, for being like this with Lavender. He must know this was going to be hard news for her to hear, and difficult for her to understand. Hermione was struggling to get her head around it herself. “Have you ever heard of the multiverse theory?”
Lavender’s frown deepened, if that were possible. “Yes. No. I think so – like parallel universes?” She pouted.
Theo nodded. “The multiverse theory purports that our universe may not be the only universe there is, and that they are other universes. Many others. Indeed, there may be an infinity of universes, all with their own laws of physics, their own collections of stars and galaxies, and maybe even their own intelligent civilisations. You see, because quantum theory allows particles to possess contradictory properties until they are measured –”
“Too much information,” Hermione advised Theo, when she could see Lavender's eyes start to glaze over.
“Right. Yes. Well, anyway, despite there being very good evidence for the multiverse theory, no one has ever managed to prove it beyond doubt. And certainly no one, that we’re aware of, has ever managed to travel between universes.”
Lavender looked on edge, her eyes darting between Theo and Hermione desperately. “So? So what? Why are you going on about this lots-of-different-worlds theory?”
“Because the question you should be asking isn’t what time we’ve been transported to,” Theo explained solemnly, and looked pleadingly at Hermione, clearly needing her help, so she finished for him:
“The question you should be asking is what world we’ve been transported to.”