Time Travel? Really!

Everyone has issues

Disclaimer: Not mine.

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Being an accomplished and hardworking member of the Department of Mysteries sometimes made a person lose sight of the little things in life. Being surrounded by complicated arithmancy formulas that calculated the potential for the manipulation of space and time, researching ancient runic alphabets as evidence of dead civilisations, and discovering whether certain potions and spells worked in the predicted manner on the human body using convicted criminals as test subjects; these were just some of the projects that Rose Potter had worked on as an Unspeakable and had been forbidden to discuss with anyone.

The Department of Mysteries was a place of the unknown, where proving a hypothesis definitively was considered a miracle, and the complicated nature of the job all but assured that everyone who worked there began thinking and over-thinking every little thing in their lives. Eventually common sense took a back seat to the intellect their work required, and it was an unfortunate fact that Unspeakables had a tendency to forget the simplest things.

Such as the existence of an entire room within the very department they worked at.

Even with the ill Death Eater situation – which had thankfully begun to taper off, with victims suffering the loss of a portion of their magic if they weren't dead – and Dumbledore's bizarre killing Grindelwald/killing himself fiasco, Rose was still concerned about the continued existence of one Lord Voldemort. With how much the crazy bastard had ruined her life, she thought she could be excused for still being twitchy and expecting the creep to jump out at any time and try to kill her.

Which was why when she remembered the Hall of Prophecies she face-palmed so hard she bruised herself.

The Hall of Prophecies. Also known as the room which could offer her physical proof that Voldemort was dead and gone for good. The prophecy – also known as the shitty useless words from a drunk fraud that destroyed hundreds of lives, thank you very much Sybil Trelawney – was a magical sphere that was connected to the life forces of the very individuals it spoke of. If one or more of the prophecy's subjects were fully dead and erased from this plane of existence, then the swirling smoke in the sphere would change from the light grey/white colour of a prophecy in play to the black smoke of a prophecy completed or voided.

All she needed was that annoying little sphere in the Hall of Prophecies and her mind could be at rest about Voldemort. As in, all she had to do was go to the very place where she had gone when she was fifteen and got her beloved godfather – now father – killed by his insane cousin. She honestly wasn't sure she was strong enough to do so.

Even as an adult, every single one of her co-workers had had at least a vague idea of her distaste for the hall and never made her step a single foot in there. Someone else had always been assigned duty in that room, and she'd always been pointed towards a project that required the utmost concentration, so she hadn't even had the time to contemplate what it would be like in the room that represented so much of her guilt.

No matter how many people told her that it wasn't her fault that Sirius had died that night, she would still never forgive herself for being such a reckless idiot. That was probably when she had first despised being a Gryffindor. She knew it was her fault; if only she'd been smarter then Sirius wouldn't have had to come and save her from her own stupidity. Even living with Sirius now didn't erase the fact that she still dreamt of his surprised face as he fell through the Veil, never to be seen again.