Author's Note:

Justin: I CAN FINALLY USE MY PSYCHOLOGY SKILLZ!

Tequila: mmm… okay? I thought we were just writing about what would have happened if Merope kept giving tom riddle sr. the love potion?

Justin: Nooooo, we're writing about the crucial effect of the child's oral stage and the parental relationship!!

Tequila: o.O

Justin: Just trust me on this one, Teqi.

Tequila: --shrugs-- w/e, Justin… oooh, look, a CHICKEN!

Disclaimer: if only time had rippled for us… back to when we could have hit a nice train-riding lady on the head and stolen her notes… ah, well…

Mommy's Little Secret

It is a large house, tastefully decorated and stylish in every particular.

There is a lady in the kitchen, fixing her husband's morning coffee with her son beside her.

The child is happy, and round and rosy with health.

The little boy's voice is high and clear in the large, sumptuous kitchen. "Mummy, what're you doin' to daddy's coffee?"

The young woman, not pretty but well dressed, looks up from where she has just let three drops of a smoking violet liquid fall into an ordinary mug of coffee. She turns and winks at the toddler clinging to her hip. "Shh, Tommy, no need to worry. This is just," she giggles quietly, "Mummy's little secret, alright?"
The little boy nods and laughs—he knows a secret! He and mummy, and mummy who's nice an' smells like sunshine.

Then the man, who looks just like the boy, only even more handsome, comes in and he looks a bit surly, a bit upset, but then he drinks the coffee and his face clears and he leans down to kiss the woman on the lips, murmuring words of love. And he lifts up the boy, and throws him into the air, and the child laughs again.

"Hello, Tommy-boy! Getting to look more and more like your old man every day, eh? Chip of the old block, huh Merope?"

"Yes Tom. Just like you." And she smiles her devotion and he bends down to kiss her one more time and the child is still laughing.

And all the way down the ribbon of time there is a ripple, and the world shivers and shakes, and somewhere down the long road of the future about fifty-odd years later, a young man named Harry Potter wakes up on his seventeenth birthday to his mother's face, beaming and grinning and telling him he'll be taller than dad, soon, if he keeps this up. And oh, she made a cake for this evening—he'll love it—and Padfoot and Ron and Hermione will arrive later, and Happy Birthday, darling!

And everything must happen somewhere, mustn't it? Every ribbon of possible future will bend and stretch and curve into being somewhere in an unknowable multiverse…