Harry Potter and the Time Fluke

Appeasing Slughorn

With the departure of nearly all the students, a peaceful serenity settled over Hogwarts. The faculty that remained had secluded themselves away in their offices, or left the castle for day-trips—to where, Harry knew not nor did he care—and the handful of students that stayed behind had more chance of running into a ghost than they did a fellow living human. Harry and Tom were the exception, since they bunked together.

As the only two Slytherins that opted to stay at Hogwarts over the break, Harry had no qualms accepting Tom's invitation to room together in Tom's dorm rather than in separate ones. Also, since they had begun this new relationship, Harry didn't say no when Tom coerced him into sleeping in the same bed. Although he did feel like a cradle-robbing pervert sometimes since he was mentally twice Tom's age. But he was fifty years younger than Voldemort... The situation confused him to such a degree at times that he simply decided to forget all about it and focus solely on their physical ages of the here-and-now.

Of course, that didn't mean the duo spent every second of every day in each other's company. They would likely have killed each other if that were the case. Most of the break, Harry was found in the library, pouring over his old notes and making new ones.

After two whole days of perusing books on his own, Harry came to the conclusion that he was very, very lucky that the prototype transportation spell he had discovered and written down (which Aquila found) that theoretically should have sent him back to the future had been translated incorrectly into Latin from an old Egyptian scripture by an eighty-six year old warlock over three centuries ago. In fact, when he went to look at the spell in it's original Egyptian format, he found that it was a charm for pulling out infected teeth. And since the book was so obscure and wizards were terrible when it came to fact-checking—Harry thought fondly back on Lockhart—no one had found the mistake until now. And Harry wasn't planning on publishing his findings either because, well, why would a fifteen year old boy from Slytherin be studying advanced theories of time and space if he weren't trying to go into the past and conquer less-developed magical and muggle civilizations?

Plus, Harry really didn't like attention pushed upon him, and being able to translate ancient Egyptian at his age? That would bring unwanted everything.

To be honest, though, his translation abilities had nothing to do whatsoever with fluency in the language. No, he simply took the time to reference the spell in Latin—which he was mostly fluent in by now—and compare the words to the multiple Latin-to-Egyptian dictionaries he previously hadn't even been aware Hogwarts owned, which were collecting dust on the back shelves.

He doubted the rest of the wizarding community would see his accomplishment as something so minuscule though.

Harry was very relieved when he found out the spell didn't do what the blurb below it in the text where he'd discovered the charm claimed. In fact, with all the mistranslations and embellishments, all the spell was meant to do was exactly what it did. Be an extremely flashy annoyance. Any disappointment with not having an actual spell to return him to his proper time didn't bother Harry quite so much as it probably should.

Due to sloppy execution, his obsession with finding a way to return home had come back and bit him in the arse. What if the spell had been translated correctly? What if the incorrect translation had done something else? Something harmful? He could be dead right now because he had been naïve in thinking that his research was safe and lazy when it came to secondary investigation of his findings. Either way, it was time for a break. Time to just sit back and enjoy life, like when he was a child in the nineteen-thirties with no one but Tom at his side and London as their playground. There was no need to find a solution that very second; he wasn't even sure if there was a problem, when he thought hard about it. He'd been given a second chance at life, a second childhood to live—one where no one was actively trying to kill him.