~*An Accident in Time*~

Written by: Cisselah

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.

A Woody Allen Quote

Part I - the Accident

9:30 am ~ 29th July 2024 ~ Ale street 141

It was the 29th of July when James Potter II realized that he was screwed, and not in the way he usually wanted either. No... And he was not only screwed because on 29th of July he was stuck in a room with two grumpy Aurors that had definitely not had their morning coffee, but also because it was 29th of July 1980 and he was going to be late for a birthday party that wasn't supposed to happen for another fifty years or so.

It all started, like with so many other things concerning James Potter II, with a girl. It was a very nice looking girl, to her defense, with curly hair the color of wine and soft cream skin. But not even the unknown girl in the bed - what the hell was her name again? - could make him forget what he really, really wanted to forget.

It wasn't her in the bed.

"Did you hear about Samantha Goyle's wild night with Christian Zabini?" Please don't talk "Of course you did. You hear everything..." Giggles and soft fingers stroking his arm. He made a low noise that could have been of course I did or get the hell off me. The girl translated it as Opinion Number 1 and continued her advances.

"Do you want to do something fun? I could show you something...-" He caught her hand, which had been slipping dangerously low, and threw it away as he sat up and opened his eyes. Walls painted a vibrant color of purple greeted his eyes and made his headache increase. How much had he drunk last night? He didn't know and he didn't want to know either. Slowly rising - and purposely ignoring the girl's protests - he stood up and started to search for his boxers.

It had been fun while it lasted - or at least as fun as any of this shit could be these days - but now he just wanted to go home and sleep off the hangover. The girl had been reasonably pretty and very much willing (Good with her tongue too) but she wasn't who he wanted her to be. The only reason he had followed her home last night had been because she had the same hair color as Selina.

Oh Morgana, he was pathetic.

"Look," he told the clingy girl without looking at her. "Last night was fun, but I'm not going to repeat it" Firm and direct, that was always the best way to deal with girls of this kind. Girls who wanted to make him breakfast and cuddle and mean something.

God, he hated the mornings after.

"What do you mean you aren't going to repeat it?"

He found the boxers hidden half underneath the bed where he had kicked them off and slipped them on again. He still hadn't looked at her, because if he did he would find another face behind all that glamorous dark brown hair, that hair that turned deep red when the light shone on it, and he wasn't certain he could take that right now. So instead of facing the growing anger of the clingy girl, he started to search for his clothes among the mess on the floor. Did she ever clean?

"You're going to leave? Just like that?!" She sounded really pissed off right now.

"Just like that," James confirmed and abandoned the search for the missing pants. If they weren't here, then where the hell were they? He hadn't started dancing on the tables again, had he? He tried to remember. Had he left them in the kitchen perhaps?

"Why?" She really sounded distraught. "Why?!" she repeated.

Why? Why did he do anything he did? Because he was drunk. Because he was wild. Because he was James Potter and he always did the exact opposite of what he should have done. He shouldn't have drunk so much shots, he shouldn't have flirted with the bartender and he sure as hell shouldn't have follow her home to have sex with her because she had the same hair color as Selina.

But he did all those things and now he woke up the morning after with a hangover and another girl in the bed next to him.

Why? Because he was a coward. Because he couldn't - wouldn't - tell her that he was so insanely in love with her that some days he thought he would die. He was a coward because the moment he realized that he was in love with her, his best friend since first year, he had resorted with new intensity to drinking Firewhiskey and sleeping with girls.

But he couldn't tell the naked girl that. Merlin, he could barely tell himself that. So he settled for a half-truth.

"Because I really need an aspirin"

She cursed him.

Later on when explaining this, James would always say that he had no idea she could hide a wand when there was not a single piece of clothing on her body, he would say that the hangover made him slow and sluggish and that he was much too busy wondering where his pants had gone to see her curse coming, but the truth was that he felt like he deserved it. So when she decided to curse him, he let her.

Had he known what kind of shit it would cause, he would simply have ducked. But as it was the curse hit him square in the chest and he had one single second - one single fucking second - to see the witch's triumphed smile before the yellow curse hit him in the chest and threw him backwards. He collided with the wardrobe and the doors broke open as he tumbled inside and hit a shelf hard. For a moment of so he was too disorientated to even try to understand what he was seeing.

When James had crashed inside the wardrobe he had ripped down one of the shelves and its contents had tumbled down over him. Placed in his lap were days old flowers, a dozen unopened letters, a broken wineglass, candles and a signed photograph. The wine that had been inside the wineglass had spilled out over James's boxers and chest and some had even fallen into his messy hair. He didn't care about that, though, because he was much too busy staring at the photograph.

At first he thought it was his brother. But what would a photograph of Albus be doing in a bartender's wardrobe? Then he noticed the scar.

Flowers. Letters. Candles. His father on a photo.

It was hard to say whether the sickness was because of the curse or the fact that the girl he had slept with had an altar of his dad in her closet.

"James? James, darling, are you okay?"

Not really, no... He wanted to say. I think I'm about to be sick all over my dad's face.

Instead he said; "You really need a new hobby"

She was not amused.

"You fucking bastard!" she shrieked. "Harry Potter is my true love! My soulmate! Don't you dare mock me! Don't you dare mock our eternal love" She was so upset that she missed her target and blasted apart some clothes. Suddenly James had a bright pink dressing robe hanging over his head, obscuring the view of the potential threat. His Auror training kicked in and he tried to get rid of the blasted thing.

Said blasted thing tried to strangle him.

Things grew chaotic for a while when James tried to avoid being strangled by a pink robe and the crazy witch tried to strangle him with something silky that smelled of sweet perfume.

It was in time like this when James missed his best friend. Selina would have whipped out her wand, said a few curses and then they would have been on their way home to drink some potion to cure the hangover. But no, he just had to screw it all up. He just had to fall in love with her. And now he needed to avoid her, so that he wouldn't do something terrible that would ruin their friendship forever.

The door opened and someone stepped in.

"Galen, I've got the device and... What the hell happened to the sacred shrine? Who is that?!" a high-pitched voice asked. The shrill tones cut harshly against James delicate hearing. He was grateful though, because the pink robe stopped trying to strangle him and the crazy, naked girl loosened the scarf from around his neck and turned towards the voice. James took a second to free himself from the Pink Death.

The girl in the doorway looked three times crazier than the naked one that had tried to kill him. She had hair that looked like it had been put inside a mixer and then spray painted neon green and bright orange. One of her eyes was brown and the other blue and her eyebrows were pointy things that looked so sharp you could cut yourself on them. The craziest thing about her was her dress. It was big and black and purple and scary. It looked like Grandma Weasley's dress turned evil. Her nails were pale blue all except one that was painted glittery pink.

She looked like Dracula versus Evil Witch from Hansel and Gretel with a nice touch of Queen "Off-with-his-head" Hearts.

James really wished he had cut back on the Firewhiskey.

"Is that James Potter?" the Evil Witch asked breathlessly. "Oh, Galen... You finally caught someone who looks like Harry!"

James really wished he hadn't drunk anything at all.

"You have the device? Give it to me!" the naked girl exclaimed, forgetting all about James. Normally naked girls didn't not notice him, but he was kind of glad this one did.

The Evil Witch opened her hand and held out a weird device that looked like a clock turned monster under the bed. The naked girl gave a gasp of wonder and leaned forward to rip it out of her hand.

"You finally did it! Now we can go back in time to get Harry before he turned slave under that redheaded bitch!"

James Potter was many things. He was an alcoholic. He was a manwhore. He was very cruel in various situations. He was a spoiled party boy. Yes... James Potter was many things...

He was also a Momma's boy.

"That's it!" he said and rose up to grab the naked girl and show her exactly what happened to people who called him a son of a bitch. Normally he didn't fight girls, but seeing as said girl had tried to strangle him with a scarf he figured it was pretty much okay. He didn't get the chance to do so though. In all his hurry to defend his mother's honor James had forgotten two very important things.

One. He was still disorientated from that spell.

Two. He was wrapped up in a pink robe that didn't like to let go.

These two very important things led to one very important thing.

James Potter II tripped and his course was redirected with more or less three and a half feet. Three and a half feet, you may think, is not very long. It was nearly not long enough, but nearly not long enough is still long enough. So those three and a half feet James Potter was redirected with was just long enough to alter the course of his fall so that when James started to wave his arms in a ridiculous attempt to stop his face from hastily meeting the ground, he succeeded to grab the Monster-under-the-bed-device and crush it.

Two other very important things happened at the same moment as the creepy device broke.

One. The naked girl turned out to have very good reflexes and cursed him.

Two. James himself turned out to have very good reflexes - for once - and Disapparated.

And so it came to pass that James Potter II showed up, dressed only in his boxers, in the Atrium of the Ministry of Magic in the year 1980 only moments after a Death Eater attack.

James came to the conclusion that it was the naked girl's fault.

That was also what he told the Aurors when they arrested him.

A/N: Hello, my friends. I'm currently touching up some of the early chapters (correcting grammar and such), so there will be some minor changes - I'll do the bigger ones once I'm done with the whole story. I orginally thought that the story would be three - maybe four - chapters long, but the story kind of took a life of it's own and I have no bloody idea how long it's gonna be now. I keep coming up with different plotlines and shit, so if I keep going in this direction it's probably gonna be around 20 chapters (I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to have time to write that much).

Hope to update soon / A.C