Pendulum by HeartFailure

Chapter 8

It was complete darkness, encompassing him, numbing his senses. The only sensation left was the pendulum pulsing warmly inside his clenched hand. His head was a disturbing mix of clear and foggy, a litany of It's done. It's done. echoing faintly in his mind as he tried to grasp what was happening. I killed him, he was running back to his flat pushing everyone cheering out of his way.

And the pendulum pulsed and burned and he had this sense of urgency gripping his chest, this need to go somewhere.

But how in hell did he arrive in whatever this place was? It was not enough that he experienced limbo when he was young, right. He scoffed, or something like this as the air seemed fixed around him.

He screamed as a face appeared right in front of him, lights coming from behind it blinding Harry. He hastily blinked away the dark spots appearing in his vision and focused on the face of an older man grinning madly in front of him. His salt-and-pepper hair were spiking up his head, small wrinkles forming at the corner of bloodshot eyes that were scanning him intensively.

"It worked, it worked ! Merlin ! It was genius, wasn't it ?", and he laughed like he was making any sense at all.

"Who the fuck are you ? Where are we ? What the fuck !"

The older man laughed harder now, he probably would have doubled over if he weren't a floating head in this nothingness. The pendulum vibrated still in his hand, sole reminder that his body was somewhere down.

"Well, it's going to sound completely insane, and you're going to be angry because even if you don't feel like it you have anger issues man."

He looked at Harry with something akin to understanding and...pity ? Was this man for real ?

"Wow wow wow, it's not therapy here, so cut the shit and explain yourself."

The other man had the audacity to giggle before clearing his throat and becoming serious. He talked and Harry could only stare, his mind buzzing, his eyes big and the blood leaving his face the more he listened to the tale.

"If you would let me explain without interrupting me, I think it'd be better. We have all the time in the world here so I will start from the beginning. I think it all started when I was your age, even if I didn't know at the time. I was going to work everyday, I was eating, sleeping, smiling when I needed to, reassuring people that everything was fine, I was fine. And then the years passed, I began to refuse invitations to see friends, I lost my edge at work, I felt numb, empty. I would spend hours thinking about what if ?"

He took a shuddering breath, as if reviving this period of his life was truly painful.

"What if I could be another person ? What if I could change things ? What if I was dead ?", he chuckled lightly, looking somewhere in the darkness, before focusing his green eyes on Harry again. "What if I could go back in time ? So I quitted my job as Head of the Auror department and spent the next thirty years travelling the world and learning as much as I could about time, space and multidimensional theories. You know how we thought all our lives that we were not smart but it didn't matter because we were good at Defense? And we were famous. Not true, we are smart, we just need a goal."

Harry didn't want to understand what the older man implied, it was impossible. It was theory, not something achievable, they all knew that. It was a fantasy, a movie scenario ! But he spent nearly a year in the past, didn't he ?

"I will spare you the explanation, it's a lot of physics, luck, trials and errors and it's not fair that you would get the answer on a plate while I did all the work."

He had the gall to wink here.

"I managed to design this pendulum so he could give us a goal. Kind of. I sent myself back to 2010, just before I started to drift. There's only a tiny problem with the enchantments on the pendulum, it's that if the aim is really close to be completed, it acts like a sort of compulsion. That's why when your Aurors came to inspect my stall, I was acting bonkers and yelling about changing the course of time. We didn't completely lose it over time ! But in the end, it played in my favour."