Chapter Text
February, 1999
When Pansy’s future daughter arrived, it was a Saturday morning in mid February, and they were in the Slytherin girls’ dormitory, getting ready to go visit the new outpost of Madam Malkin’s in Hogsmeade. A flash of blinding white light, a loud bang, and then, after a beat, a sort of thumping sound. Tracey jumped and fell off her chair, Daphne dropped her bottle of Sleekeazy’s Hair Potion, and Pansy, who was the closest, gasped, and threw herself towards the safety of her bed.
A girl sprawled on the carpet, dark-haired, and wearing, bizarrely, muggle clothes, a short skirt and purple jumper. She blinked, disoriented, and then pushed herself up on her elbows.
“Who are you?” Pansy demanded from her bed, pointing her wand with a trembling hand.
The girl looked up, and her eyes widened. “Mum?”
She wasn’t joking. The girl, who it turned out was named Charlotte and was thirteen years old, not fourteen or fifteen, as Pansy had thought, claimed that she had been sneaking around in some passageway with her friends when she’d tripped, fallen, and ended up here. She also claimed that she was a third-year Hogwarts student, that it was February 2026 where she came from, and that she was wearing muggle clothes, because, as she said, very flippantly, “Everyone does it—especially on the weekends.”
Through out this entire conversation, she kept staring at Pansy in an entirely unnerving manner, so much so that Pansy, already at the edges of her sanity, finally said, “What?”
“I can’t believe you still have a fringe,” the girl said, in a horrified tone. “It’s awful. I thought you got rid of it much earlier.”
“Excuse me?!” Pansy shrieked. “How dare you!”
But the girl was utterly unperturbed. “Wait, what year is it?”
“It’s 1999,” Daphne interjected. “So 27 years before your time, I suppose.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my hair,” Pansy said, now glaring. “And I refuse to believe that you’re my daughter. I would never have raised a child who was so rude. Or a juvenile delinquent.”
The girl flushed. Before, she had looked older, but now she looked very much thirteen. “I’m not a juvenile delinquent! Dad told me about the passageway. He used it all the the time with his friends!”
Tracey elbowed Daphne out of the way. “Who’s your father?”
“Oh, he’s—” The girl broke off and went very still. “I guess I shouldn’t tell you, if you don’t already know. I don’t want to ruin anything about future.” She looked uncertainly at Pansy. “You mean—you don’t know?”
“I don’t know what?” asked Pansy, quite unnerved. “Who is it?”
Having a strange girl interrupt a perfectly pleasant Saturday morning was already too much for her. She had no capacity to contemplate the theoretical implications of time-travel.
“I mean…” The girl—Charlotte—opened her mouth, and then closed it again.
“But don’t you know when your parents got together?” Tracey cut in. “I mean, we already told you it’s 1999. We’re in our eighth year.”
Charlotte pushed her hair out of her face in a strangely familiar gesture. “I dunno. They always just said that it was sometime after the war.”
Pansy crossed her arms over his chest. “I think you’re making this all up. Prove it. Tell me something only my daughter would now.”
Charlotte looked hurt, and younger still. “You don’t believe me?”
“But, Pansy, don’t you think she looks like you?” said Daphne, the traitor.
The girl had a dark, wavy hair, lots of it, and a sort of upturned nose. Her hairline looked vaguely like Pansy’s mother’s did, heart-shaped, but while Pansy and her parents all had dark brown eyes, this girl’s were much lighter, more hazel-ish, really. And she was taller than Pansy had been at thirteen. “Lots of people look similar,” she scoffed.
Daphne raised her eyebrows. “She has your nose, and your hair.”
“Please. Very dark brown hair? There are three dozen people in this castle alone that have that hair color alone. And the texture is completely different! Look how wavy it is!”
Daphne looked at Charlotte again, frowning. “Well, what about…”
“Fine,” Charlotte said, with an impatient twitch of the hand. “Your middle name is Araidne, the scar on your left knee is when you fell off your broom when you were nine and then you refused to fly for two years, when you were thirteen you drank an illegal hair-growing potion and ended up in the Hospital Wing throwing up slugs for 24 hours straight.”
“Lots of people know these things,” Pansy said.
Though scar was fairly specific.
“There’s a curse in your family—well, Grandma says we’re not supposed to call it a curse, that’s just the old way of talking. Anyway, all the women in your family always have daughters first. Always. No matter what.”
Fuck.
Nobody knew about that except her family. “All right, you can stop. I believe you.”
Charlotte smiled, triumphant.
They quickly determined that Charlotte had really no idea about how she’d gotten here. She’d been in a passageway that none of them had heard of, behind a statue of a hump-backed witch. She didn’t have a time-turner, she knew nothing about time magic, but she was oddly unconcerned about the whole situation, saying confidently, “Dad will realize I’m gone and he’ll come to and get me,” as if fixing time-travel accidents was something all fathers did for their daughters.
She was much too self-possessed, honestly. If Pansy had accidentally time-travelled 27 years at age thirteen, she would have been near-hysterical and demanding to see the Minister of Magic himself.
“Wait,” Pansy said, “why wouldn’t I get you?”
Was she dead in the future?
“Mum’s much too busy,” Charlotte said, as if explaining something very obvious. “And besides, Dad’s much closer.”
Pansy imagined that she would work, maybe as a reporter, but she assumed that she would stop working after she had children. “But why is your mother too busy?”
“Oh, because—”
But Pansy was not meant to discover the answer, for just then, Daphne glanced at her watch, and cursed loudly, causing them all to jump. It was now a quarter till ten: they were meant to have left for the grand opening of the new outpost of Madam Malkin’s ten minutes ago.
Tracey gestured to Charlotte. “But shouldn’t we take her to someone? Professor McGonagall?”
Daphne bit her lip. “But all the new acromantula silk cloaks might be gone if we don’t leave now…”
That was true. And those cloaks were supposed to come all the way from Belgium.
They looked at Charlotte. “Well, we’ll just take her along,” Pansy said. “And if we run into anyone, we’ll say she’s my cousin. You don’t mind, do you? You don’t need to go back to the future right now, do you?”
“No, I guess not…but…” She suddenly perked up. “Will you buy me something, then?”
Pansy frowned. “Does future version of myself not buy you clothes?”
Charlotte hesitated, and then a strange look came over her face. “No, not really. I mean, like twice a year, and sometimes not even that,” she said. “It’s really terrible. I don’t have anything to wear to Ella Harper's birthday party, and it’s in two weeks!”
“Really?” said Pansy, horrified. What kind of mother was she in the future? First, being too busy, and now, allowing her daughter to be upstaged by the other girls? Unthinkable!
“Yes,” Charlotte said mournfully. “It’s really embarrassing.”
“Wait,“ Tracey said, eyes narrowing, “Are you lying?”
“What?! No, of course not!” Charlotte said, but now her cheeks had pinked.
“You are lying.” Pansy stared at her, feeling quite ridiculous. “How could do you that?”
Tracey snorted. “She really is your daughter, Pansy.”
“It was worth a try,” Charlotte muttered, not looking as cowed as she should. “And it’s kind of true, honestly. We have money, but Dad’s always going on about how I have perfectly good clothes that I should wear at home, and how he doesn’t want us to be spoiled, and then Mum agrees with him. It’s so boring.”
Pansy frowned. Why in Circe’s name would she agree with that?
They dressed Charlotte in some of Pansy’s clothes, because her muggle clothes were too conspicuous, and set off to Hogsmeade. The entire time, Charlotte kept up a stream of commentary about everything from the dormitories (“They’re a lot bigger in my time”) to the fashion (“Why does everyone wear such awful earrings?”). It reminded Pansy of her cousins Feodora and Cressida, twelve-year-old twins, who last Christmas spent the entire time practicing their hair-charms on Pansy (an ordeal her hair had taken a month to recover from) and regaling her with the drama surrounding Spellbound, the Wizarding World’s new pop-stars. In a word: exhausting.
“I guess you’re going to be taller than me,” Pansy said, finally.
“Yeah,” Charlotte said, pleased. “Mum always says that she only married Dad because he’s tall.”
Daphne laughed at that, and Pansy sent her dirty look.
“If you won’t tell us who your father is, we can at least guess,” Tracey said, with mischief in her eyes. “Is it…“ She snuck a darting glance at Daphne and Pansy. “Do you think it would be…?"
“No,” Daphne said immediately. “I doubt it.
“I can’t believe you suggested that,” Pansy said.
It was ridiculous for Tracey to suggest that she’d get back together with Draco, more than two years since they’d broken up, and after everything that had happened in the war.
“Who are you talking about?” Charlotte asked.
“Draco Malfoy,” Daphne said.
“Is that—do you mean Scorpius Malfoy’s dad? You dated him?” Charlotte tilted her head. “But that’s so…odd.”
“How is it odd?” Pansy asked.
Charlotte shrugged, careless. “I don’t know. I just can’t imagine Mum with anyone besides Dad.”
Pansy bit her tongue, so she wouldn’t say, am I supposed to be some sort of virgin child bride?
“That makes sense,” Daphne said. “There are things you never want to think about your parents. Last Christmas, my mother kept telling me and Astoria about everything she used to get up to with Marcus Flint’s dad behind the Quidditch changing rooms, and I sincerely hoped for temporary deafness.”
“So not Draco,” Tracey concluded. “What about…Kevin Entwhistle? Theo Nott? Terrence Higgs? Ivo Vaisey? Graham Urquhart?”
“Theo’s gay, Tracey!” Pansy interjected. “And you’re assuming it’s someone we already know. Maybe it’s not.”
All this talk about her future was making her feel a bit strange. At fourteen, she would have jumped at the chance to know, mostly because she’d been certain she knew exactly what it was. But now, she’s nineteen, and lived through enough to understand that maybe you don’t want to know what happens.
“I can’t tell you!” Charlotte said, and then as if convincing herself: “I’m not going to tell you. I’m not.”
“Tell us something else, then,” Daphne said. “You said we before. So you must have siblings.”
Charlotte hesitated for a moment, but then, unable to help herself, said, “I have an older sister, Lily—she’s a seventh year, and since she made Head Girl she’s been completely insufferable. She keeps hogging the map, saying that she needs it for her special duties, but that’s absolute rubbish. And then there’s James. He’s the baby. Well—not a literally, he’s eleven, but he acts like a baby—” Abruptly, she stopped walking. “Oh. I shouldn’t have said their names.”
“Why not?” asked Pansy.
Charlotte looked down the path with sudden interest, and said, “Look, we’re almost at Hogsmeade!”
“You mean the names are clues,” Pansy deduced. “But I don’t see why they would be. They’re not uncommon names, even among wizards. Even in our year, we already have a Lily—Lily Moon.”
Some families had naming traditions: constellations, roman emperors, exotic plants. Her father’s family had the greek tragedies, and her mother’s family had alliteration. (It was clear who won that battle, with her.)
“But don’t you see?” Tracey said, a dangerous look in her eyes, “his name must be James. Now we have to think of all the Jameses we know…”
By the time they arrived at Madam Malkin’s, they had made their way through all the the Jameses they knew, from James Abbott (Hannah Abbott’s cousin, and a third-year Hufflepuff, a truly terrifying thought) to James Yelverton (one of Millicent’s uncles on her mother’s side, and nearly forty years old, with a Gobstones gambling habit). They had to fight their way through a rather large contingent of fifth-year Ravenclaw girls, but in end, they got the cloaks. In a fit of strange, possibly maternal sentiment, Pansy bought Charlotte one, and she practically glowed with happiness.
“Definitely your daughter,” Tracey muttered to Pansy as they exited the shop. And then, to the whole group: “Where are we going now?”
“I need to go to the Scrivenshaft’s…” Pansy trailed off.
In the middle of the street, there was an unfortunate mass of Gryffindors and wannabe-Gryffindors, shouting and jostling each other.
At the beginning of the year, she had done a truly excruciating apology tour. It had been awkward and uncomfortable and honestly too long (why in Circe’s name had she needed to spend all of second-year telling Lisa Turpin that she looked like a horse?). And apologies or not, she didn’t really enjoy being confronted with all her past mistakes in one location, so she averted her eyes as they maneuvered by the group.
“Are you all right, Charlotte?” Daphne asked, just as they managed to turn the corner.
“I don’t know,” Charlotte said, and Pansy saw now that she was looking very pale. “My stomach is weird. Maybe time-travel is bad for me.”
“Tea, then?” Daphne asked.
“We’ll have to go to Madam Puddifoot’s, I suppose,” Pansy said.
She should have been the one to notice, instead of Daphne. Though, honestly, she didn’t really feel like a mother with a child. More like she’d acquired a particularly odd cousin, really.
“Three Broomsticks is too crowded, anyway,” Tracey said. “I’d rather be stuck with all the couples than have to listen to a bunch of people yell about the Magpies. I can’t even hear myself think in there.”
By the time they pushed into the frill-covered tea shop, the color had come back into Charlotte’s cheeks, and she exclaimed, “It looks exactly the same! Though the Valentine’s Day decorations are still up in my time.”
Pansy asked, “Does Madam Puddifoot’s still run it? I’d think she’d be too old.”
Charlotte shook her head. “No, it’s a lady named Mrs. Dobbs.”
“What’s her first name?” Daphne asked, as they found a table. “Maybe we know her.”
“I don’t know her first name…” Charlotte trailed off, but then brightened. “But I do know that Uncle Ron used to date her, and she gave him this ridiculous nickname, ‘Won-Won’, everyone was making fun of him for it last Christmas—“
“—Uncle Ron?” Tracey interrupted.
Charlotte froze. “Oh.”
“Are you talking about Lavender Brown?” Daphne asked.
Charlotte jumped her feet. “Ihavetogotothebathroom!” And she was gone before anyone could answer.
A dazed silence enveloped them. The lace covered table-top seemed to swim before Pansy’s eyes. “But her uncle can’t be Ron Weasley…” Pansy whispered.
“Pansy…” Daphne said, with a gentleness that made her want to scream.
“Oh my god,” Pansy moaned, covering her face with her hands. “I don’t think I’m meant to know my future.”
Before, it had mostly still seemed like a fun game. But now, every time she got to the words, Uncle Ron, her mind stuttered and went still. Too much to think about.
“So…” Tracey said slowly. “That’s why she was acting weird earlier. When we saw the group of Gryffindors. Because Ron Weasley was in it. And she remembers him from the future.”
A long silence, and then Daphne whispered to Tracey, “But does Ron Weasley have a brother named James?”
“Probably,” Tracey murmured. “He has a ridiculous number of brothers. I don’t even remember most of their names.”
Pansy dropped her hands from her face. “Enough. We have talk about something else. Anything.”
After Charlotte returned, they moved the conversation to things about the future that were hopefully safe and innocent, like who was going to win the next Quidditch cup and what shops would come to Diagon Alley and whether or not Madam Dubois was going to come out with a new line of shoes. Soon enough, it was one, and it was decided that Daphne and Tracey would going off to run errands, while Pansy would go back to the castle with Charlotte and try to find Professor Slughorn.
“We’ll see you later,” Daphne said, squeezing her arm and looking at her with infuriatingly sympathetic eyes.
“Maybe don’t time-travel again,” Pansy said, after Tracey and Daphne had disappeared around the corner. “I think it’s bad idea.”
“Sorry,” Charlotte said. She looked just as Pansy’s cousins had when they’d fucked up her hair—all doe-eyed and avoidant. “I really wasn’t trying to do anything—promise!”
“Why were you even in that passageway?” It came out sharper than she meant it.
“Oh.” Charlotte’s gaze flickered away. “Just exploring. You know.”
An obvious lie. But a problem for her hypothetical older self to solve.
A headache was forming behind her eyes. She didn’t know what to make of this future version of herself, who was apparently too busy and didn’t believe in buying in clothes and, oddest of all, was married to a Weasley.
Quietly, they made their way through the streets of Hogsmeade. “Is your…are your parents happy?” Pansy asked finally.
Charlotte looked up, surprised. “Oh, yeah, of course.”
Well. At least she wasn’t destined to have a marriage like her paternal grandparents, who lived in separate wings of their house and communicated solely through house-elf. And really, Ron Weasley had so many brothers, one of them had to be not completely objectionable. She would just have trust her future judgment.
“And do you…like your parents?”
Charlotte shrugged. “Sure, I guess so…”
“You don’t know?” Pansy asked, voice rising.
Charlotte brushed her hair out of her face. “I mean, they’re just my parents. I don’t know. The famous thing is weird sometimes, but it’s never bothered me as much as it bothers my siblings. When James was nine, he made this whole plan to switch places with his best friend Andrew, because he was tired of all the attention. When Mum and Dad found out, they were so upset—I think Dad almost cried. But anyway, I don’t think it’s so bad. Mostly just weird.”
“Wait,” Pansy said. “What do you mean, ‘the famous thing’? Are you saying…are you saying that…?”
Unable to continue, she broke off.
Of course, Harry Potter had been part of her grand apology tour—it had been terribly awkward, but otherwise unremarkable. Though a few older Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs still had a problem with her, most of them seemed to operate under the idea of that it would be weird to hold more of a grudge than Potter himself did.
And with everything else that had happened in the battle, the Daily Prophet had never even reported on her words—apparently a few sentences spoken by one teenage girl were not considered newsworthy. So while she was known within Hogwarts, it wasn’t like she was famous, especially in the broader Wizarding World.
But now, what Charlotte was implying—
“What are you talking about?”
“The Great Hall,” Pansy said faintly. She had stopped walking, putting a hand on the side of a building. “You mean…people are more upset about it in the future than now—?"
“Oh.” Charlotte looked puzzled. “You mean that. No, no one really remembers that. That’s not why you’re famous. And Dad doesn’t care, of course—he’d be the first one to tell people to mind their own business.”
She was weak in the knees with relief. “Oh. Good.”
Charlotte was staring at her now. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she breathed.
“You’re really upset about it,” Charlotte said wonderingly. “Wow. I never would have imagined that. Dad makes jokes about it sometimes, and you always laugh. I never really thought….“
Pansy frowned. “Why would he make jokes about it?”
How odd that one of the Weasley brothers would make jokes about her attempting to give up Harry Potter to Voldemort. She had assumed all the Weasley brothers liked Potter, given that Ron Weasley and Harry Potter were friends. But perhaps she was wrong.
“Er—“ Charlotte hesitated. “Dad just thinks he’s funnier than he is, really.”
Clearly some bizarre Weasley sense of humor. One that she would apparently enjoy 27 years in the future. Best not to think too deeply about it.
Now, she started walking again. “So why are your parents famous?”
Faintly, she remembered that Ron Weasley had an older brother who had been Head Boy and gone off to do something with the Ministry. Perhaps he was the one named James. That wouldn’t be too bad—she wouldn’t mind being a Ministry’s official’s wife.
“You’re famous for being a reporter, obviously. And Dad’s famous for—well, everything, I guess.”
“What do you mean, ‘everything?’”
Charlotte made an odd face. “You know, just old war stuff—”
But she was not meant to find out what the end of the sentence was, because just then, they came around the corner, and ran directly into someone coming in the opposite direction. They all went stumbling, and Pansy had to grab the side of the building to steady herself.
“Sorry, sorry,” Charlotte exclaimed, and then in a completely different voice. “Oh. Oh my god.”
Pansy looked up, just in time to see Harry Potter say to Charlotte, “Are you all right?”
Charlotte looked at Pansy, strangely wide-eyed and panicked.
“What are you—?” Pansy started.
But then she saw it.
Dark hair like hers, but also like his. The way that Charlotte had pushed her hair off her face, those fucking cheekbones, the eerie, unearned confidence. Uncle Ron. And the kind of person that would go and fix time-travel accidents for his daughters.
“Oh, no,” Pansy said.
And then she promptly fainted.