Disclaimer: All rights to JK Rowling, except possibly where ideas have been pinched directly from other authors (such references will be to amuse / show off only, and will have no bearing on plot).

1. Beginnings

As soon as Harry collapsed onto the crimson blankets, a warm tingling ran up his limbs and into his chest that banished whatever part of the Scottish September chill had snuck into the tower. For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, he felt at home. For a part of him, it was the first time he could remember ever feeling at home. As the welcome sounds of Ron's snores, Neville's grumbling, and Dean and Seamus's whispering filled his ears, Harry had never been so happy to start school.

Ok, so he'd been pretty delighted the first time around, at his chance to learn magic, finally escape incarceration at Privet Drive, and meet people who wouldn't act as if they'd prefer him dead (funny how that last one had turned out); and he had vague recollections of optimism back when he had started primary school before the other students had learned to ignore him from fear of his cousin, but this was different. Seeing everyone who had been scarred through the war so young, so innocent, and in more than a few cases, recently returned to the living, Harry knew that he had a chance to change things.

A chance that he fully intended on taking.

He objectively realised that, as wars went, the Second War could have certainly gone a lot worse. At the gates of Hogwarts herself, Voldemort and his Death Eaters had been utterly ruined, and while some of the actions taken by both sides in the war had seemed dubious in hindsight, on the whole it tended to be the older generation who'd paid the price for it. Dumbledore. Moody. Snape. Remus and Sirius. All great people whom he loved, but considering just what his own generation had got up to, younger casualties had been remarkably light. Every loss was deeply mourned, but to defeat Voldemort? A year, even a month before the Dark Lord's downfall, at the height of his reign of terror, Harry would definitely have taken it.

He had not come back because of the war.

But after the war, came the plague. A few apparent disappearances of isolated cases at the start. As an Auror, Harry had been sent to many cases where previously healthy individuals had died or disappeared suddenly, investigating murder cases with no evidence pointing to the existence of a murderer. Then St Mungo's started noticing common symptoms between their worst patients. Though the numbers of the infected were small, they were growing quickly. The wizarding world needed a cure, fast.

Then Ginny got sick.

A hammer blow had fallen on Harry's heart as he watched his wife whittle away while he looked on. In a soulless St Mungo's ward, thinning limbs lay bare on the sheets, harrowed eyes resting loosely in their sockets, as her body, mind and magic became powerless. All his hard won peace withered and died in front of him with his wife. And while his personal tragedy developed, the same story became writ large across the community as wizard after witch after wizard fell to the dread ailment, while the medi-witches and -wizards of the hospital gazed powerlessly at them, helpless.

Any of them could be next. A full ten years after the end of the war, a great fear went up amongst the magical population that would have rivalled that caused during the peak of the era of Voldemort. After months of desperate searching amid the collapse of wizarding Britain, through panic and disaster, a cure was found. A cure, but no salvation, and it was then that all hope was truly lost.

For the tomes of old had encountered this curse before, and the cure stated was a lengthy but reasonably straightforward potion to be administered to the patient seven times a day for seven days. Unfortunately, the potion hinged on an active ingredient of the saliva from a rare magical specie of ring-tailed jay. The last known colony of these jays was considered an item of national and strategic importance and taken to the safety of the Department of Mysteries for further study in 1994.

When the Ministry was retaken from Voldemort four years later, there was no sign of them, nor had they been declared missing, for those few who had known of their existence beforehand were either dead or lost in the chaos of a newly won peace. Unnoticed amongst the carnage and the madness that reigned in the absence of their greatest foe, it transpired that the Dark Lord's most damning act was the one nobody even realised had happened.

As frustration boiled over at the lack of a physical enemy to enact vengeance on, and Hermione's gaze met his rage-filled eyes by Ginny's grave, Harry knew only one thing for certain.

They were going to get that bloody bird back.

The first thing Draco felt was clean.

The pale smoothness of his left arm, unsullied by that mark which in his previous body had never truly disappeared.

The sudden absence of the racking tension in his bones, which had never felt the shaking and wrenching of the cruciatus, the curse from which you never fully healed.

And the simple workings of his mind, with a lifetime of suffering and war unseen, free from the heavy weights of both the tortures that he had not yet endured and those that he had not yet committed.

Clean.

He knew, at once, that he had made the right decision. Not just because it had worked, one small mishap aside, but because even if it hadn't, the mere chance of feeling as pure as he did now was worth any injury or any risk of being cast into non-existence. It was in those first moments, lying sprawled across a foreign yet achingly familiar Hogwarts bed, that Draco vowed to himself that this time would turn out differently. Better. Because there was no greater motivation you could have, than knowing that you had this much to lose.

It was an irony, he thought, that he had made the right choice for the wrong reasons. Eight long years after the war's end, despite the best stewardship of himself and his wife Astoria, his one ray of light in the misery of the times, the Malfoy fortunes in both luck and wealth had ebbed and waned, seemingly eternally cursed by the shadow cast upon the losers of the war against the Dark Lord. Damned into eternal infamy and shorn of the family gold through fines, new taxes, and businesses' sudden aversion to Malfoy investment, he had squandered the last of his inheritance on one final throw of the dice; to return to a time before a war it would have been easier not to lose in the first place.

Except the coins had not been squandered, for against all odds, he had succeeded. To be stretched out on dark green blankets in a low, wide dormitory with four other recently sorted Slytherins, he had manipulated the runes on the archway in the Department of Mysteries into sending him not into death, but backwards in time itself, his mind, memories and magic returning to his old, younger, self. The work had been long, difficult, and secretive, but it had worked. The clock had been wound back.

Except this time around, he was far more powerful, more knowledgeable, better able to spin the world around him. Draco had plans for this new life, and he intended to get as many of them started as soon as he could. It was refreshing, for once, to be able to approach a project with an optimism and excitement that he wasn't quite sure he'd have approved of in someone else. Top of his list of future ills to be avoided at all costs was to keep his recently healed soul undamned and untorn, but there was still plenty of traditionally questionable magic he could perform that would give him an edge without descending that far into wretchedness. With the right intention, and steering clear of two thirds of the unforgiveables, he was confident of being able to retain the nobility and purity a line such as his demanded.

The only upset he'd found so far was that he was a day late. To pick the right side in the war (or at least to avoid the wrong one and leave his reputation intact), he'd reconciled himself to being, if not friendly to, at least civil with the future war hero and all round golden boy Potter, which meant changing many of his relationships from day one of his return. Unfortunately, returning as he did the night of the welcoming feast, he had vague, eleven-year old memories of a row on the train which had gone every bit as badly as last time. Making up with Potter would have to wait a while, then.

And to think he'd been so sure that himself and Astoria had done everything correctly. One of the calculations must have come out wrong, Draco mused, a simple rounding error perhaps, or else, more ominously, there could be another factor at play.

But that was surely just a minor inconvenience, for a day was nothing when he had a lifetime ahead of him to enjoy, and now he had a unique chance to put things right; a chance to rebuild his future to reign after the war's end. After all, Draco thought, the only change from his previous life was his memories and personality, and he would like to think himself not so incompetent that he had been a deciding factor in Voldemort's defeat. It was unthinkable that him not taking the Dark Lord's side would lead to Voldemort winning the coming conflict. All he had to do was stay out of the way of a most uncivil war, outsmart and coerce a bunch of preteens into looking to him as a role model and leader, and get out of Hogwarts as future master puppeteer of the wizarding world. Things should be easy, right?

As the days following Ginny's funeral ground on, the conversation about retrieving the jay from the shadows of the past had become less theoretical and the many calculations involved had started to get somewhat solvable (at least to Hermione; Ron and Harry had no idea what they meant). Sitting in silence at the table in the kitchen of Grimmauld Place, staring at Sirius, still blasted from the tapestry, and thinking of Remus and Tonks, his friend and cousin, and the other dead; brothers, friends and teachers, the three friends had decided on aiming for more. They had to go backwards in time anyway to fetch the magical jay that would save the world as they knew it from the dread of plague; they could then, should then, also right the other wrongs of the past. If they were going to mess with time, they might as well save as many people as they could.

The discussion turned to the practicalities of the "trip", as they'd started referring to it; the key was the Veil of Death. What could transport souls from one realm to another could also be made to carry them across time, and in the face of utter annihilation the Ministry had provided the war heroes with the access and Unspeakables required to unlock its secrets, while not entirely aware of just what they were planning to do with the information.

Reluctantly, they had decided that to simplify the necessary Arithmancy involved to the point where they could realise their ambitions, they could only send one person back to the past. As a skilled Auror, ex-Boy-Who-Lived and general miracle worker, Harry was the one who got to relive the wizarding war. They had also agreed that the summer before Fourth Year was the most sensible time to return to. After all, the first three years had gone very well indeed, without serious injury (mostly) and involving several very generous slices of good fortune they couldn't be assured to have again a second time around. On the other hand, any later and they'd have Voldemort to deal with, as well as considering that they had to get to the damned jay before any trail they managed to pick up could go cold.

Which lead to Harry's first problem; with him now being eleven, they'd obviously missed that time slot. By quite some margin. They'd spent a long time going over the starting conditions for Fourth Year: preparations for the Triwizard Tournament, the best way to deal with Moody / Crouch, and to stop the return of Voldemort. While the three friends had spent some time refreshing the memories of the first three years so that they could talk about them as if they'd happened fairly recently rather than the best part of a lifetime ago, they hadn't gone into anywhere near the same depth, the depth they needed to have gone into, to pull everything off without a hitch.

Harry scrunched up his face and thought about what they'd gone over, as if all the problems of the year could be solved by his eleven year old self lying alone on a Hogwarts bed immediately. He remembered something about a troll. He wasn't looking forward to Halloween. Then again... he wasn't looking forward to a lot of Halloweens.

Other aspects of the plan now needed tweaking as well. Originally, he had intended to reveal his new self and his mission to his friends as soon as he could. However, there was a big difference between letting people in on the secret who you'd known, trusted and fought alongside for three years (including one very recent venture where time travel had been directly involved, which would help with the incredulity of such a feat) that you'd come from the future, and getting to know someone with the opening line "Hi, I'm a time traveller!". This would now require more subtlety, not least because if he messed things up and had to start again he'd have to sort out the theory himself and not rely on Hermione. At least for a few more years. On the other hand...

On the other hand Harry could finally let himself relax into a long-overdue childhood. He'd "arrived" in the past the day after his trip to Diagon Alley, and after a brief but decisive confrontation with his relatives ("Look, Aunt Petunia, Hagrid showed me how to do spells!") he'd secured a definitive detente with them ("Get your things to your room, boy, and don't let any of that nonsense out of it or it'll be locked in the cupboard forever!"). This meant he'd spent the last month in peaceful isolation, doing some rather belated planning on how he wanted his year to go and reacquainting himself with how to be an eleven year old (spending a perhaps unhealthy amount of time in front of a mirror practicing his "adorably innocent" look that he found as embarrassing as it would be effective). This has then been followed by a train ride with a refreshingly honest Ron, bossy Hermione and arrogant Draco and a rather philosophical conversation with the sorting hat that was thankfully only able to summarise his predicament with a weary rendition of "Gryffindor...". Now, he could finally rest in the fondly remembered bed he'd longed so much for ever since Ginny's funeral and the launch of this mad plot.

He could also ensure that he and his friends were far more prepared for the trials that were to come. And instead of worrying about how a sudden change into a more serious, experienced Harry Potter would be perceived by those around him, he had the benefit of being surrounded by people who had never known him at all. The majority of them would, after all, despite their natural nosiness and debilitating desire to get to know the Boy-Who-Lived (on his duvets, Harry gave a silent shudder), still be eleven, and therefore not be all that difficult to outsmart.

Right?