Warning: Official policy states that no spoiler tags should exist on recap pages. Read at your own risk.
Back to Privet Drive... / Welcome to Sunny Surrey
Eleven-year-old Harry goes about his day as normal, except with a persistent headache and unexplained flashbacks to things he's never actually seen, causing him to lash out at the Dursleys with knowledge he shouldn't have, and scaring them into avoiding him. When he goes to sleep at night, he encounters his future self within his dreams, and after discussing the situation, agrees to merge together.
Harry then wakes up with his future memories fully integrated, rejoicing in his successful travel to the past. He goes alone to meet the Hogwarts Express at King's Cross Station, and "meets" the Weasleys, although Ginny, instead of Molly, talks to him first. He takes the opportunity to arrange for them to be pen pals, intending to help her feel more included instead of being isolated at home. On the train, he intervenes to smooth out Ron and Hermione's first encounter; they still don't see eye to eye, but neither ends up with a grudge.
Tropes That Appear In This Chapter:
- Adaptational Early Appearance: Stan Shunpike and Ernie Prang, the Knight Bus's driver and conductor, appear two years earlier than in canon when Harry summons the Knight Bus to go to Diagon Alley.
- Armor-Piercing Response: When Petunia insults Harry's parents, Harry responds by going directly for her Freudian Excuse, managing to shut her up for the rest of the day.Harry: My parents were not worthless. My father was a star Quidditch player and my mother was one of the best Charms witches of her generation. If you weren't so bloody jealous of her and her relationship with my father, you wouldn't feel the need to make up petty lies.
- Didn't See That Coming: The older Harry admits he should have expected that integrating his soul with his younger self wasn't going to be easy given his resistance to the Imperius curse.
- Dramatic Unmask: The older Harry reveals himself to the younger Harry by pulling back his bangs to reveal his lightning-shaped scar.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Here the older Harry from the Bad Future talks to the younger Harry like an alternate personality. For the rest of the fic, Harry since acts as though all of Future-Harry's memories are his very own, as though he had completely overwritten the young Harry. This is explained away as their individual souls not having finished merging at that point.
- Eye Color Change: In Harry's vision, the older Harry's green eyes are duller and murkier, reflecting his more jaded and weary outlook and years of fighting.
- For Want Of A Nail:
- The first thing Harry changes is, rather than just getting his inheritance from Gringotts, Harry cuts a deal with one of their managers to use his money to purchase interests in his Uncle Vernon's company, essentially holding his foster-family's financial futures hostage so that they don't cross him. Since Goblins enjoy these kind of financial games, the manager agrees to his terms.
- While Harry did meet Ginny at the same time he had met the rest of her family, their first meeting with nothing more than a cliff-note, learning more about her in his second year. Here he tries to establish a dialogue with her and makes himself her pen pal when they meet at the train-station, having fallen in love with her in the Bad Future.
- The Glasses Gotta Go: The older Harry had his vision corrected by Hermione after she grew tired of him constantly losing his glasses.
- Painful Transformation: The integration of the two souls merging is described as an unpleasant experience as the younger Harry opens the chapter screaming in agony.
