Hey all,

After eight years, I still occasionally get messages about this fic. I've made the choice to retire from HP fic, since JKR's actions the past year and a half have achieved what I'd never thought possible and dimmed my love for the series. But I did have an outline for this fic that I'd always meant to come back to someday, so I figured I'd post it as a kind of final chapter in case anyone was wondering what eventually might have happened, or possibly what the hell was going on. Both valid questions.

It's a shame. Things were finally about to start becoming less confusing. Ah well.

Ch 15: 2102, pt 2.
Very brief chapter. The first kiss scene, and the aftermath: Bansherwold finds out about their entanglement and is furious and frustrated for reasons he refuses to explain. We move again to Bansherwold's point of view, full of inarticulate anger and worry, in preparation for:

Ch 16: 1880, Elsewhere.
The first of a long series of flashback chapters. In another universe, let's call it Earth v2, another Alen and another Hermione are born in the same time, and in 1880, they fall in love. That universe's Alen invents the Timeglass, but other!Hermione realizes its potential for evil and begs him to get rid of it. He refuses, and she leaves him. Furious with his own choices, other!Alen renounces the Timeglass … but he still can't bear to destroy it entirely. So he travels through universes randomly and gifts the Timeglass to our Alen, a young Alen in his last year at Hogwarts (thus what Alen said about having his fate 'thrust upon him'). He also gives Alen a small vial with a lock of his hair in it, telling him to use it to find him if he has questions.

Ch 17: 2349.
Upon leaving Hogwarts, our Alen uses the Timeglass to jump between universes. He's fascinated by what he sees. But when he returns to our universe and decides to jump forward several centuries, he discovers that in the year 2349, Earth is invaded by a magical alien force called the Horde, which subjugates all humanity. Alen is terrified, but doesn't know whether he can change the timeline or stop this from happening. So, using the variant of the New Apotheosis Theorem to track people through universes (which he also uses in Chapter 13), he uses the lock of hair that other!Alen gave him to find the Timeglass's creator and get some answers about time.

Ch. 18: 1880, Elsewhere.
Alen gets to Earth v2 and finds his other self, who says that he may be able to change the timeline of his own universe if he changes a significant enough event. But while Alen is on Earth v2, he also meets Hermione, the one who used to be with his other self, and falls in love with her. And she falls in love with him in return, since unlike other!Alen, he didn't develop the Timeglass for his own gain, but, having it thrust upon him, wants to use it to help the world. She gives him a memento, a photo of herself in a frame.

Other!Alen discovers that they've fallen in love, and is furious. He forcibly sends our Alen back to our Earth with the Timeglass, also destroying the vial of hair he gave him, leaving him no way of getting back to Earth v2, and to the Hermione he loves.

Ch. 19: 1913.
Alen, in despair, turns back toward his mission. He still wants to save Earth from the Horde, and as he goes through the timeline as it exists, he realizes that humanity exists in cycles of despotism and revolt, and that's unavoidable ... but if he can angle these cycles of violence toward an end where Muggles and Wizards band together productively, the Horde might not be able to defeat the combined might of humanity, and Earth will be saved. So, Alen begins to go in and make changes. First is the battle to end Pureblood supremacy, starting with Grindelwald's campaign. His mission is to accelerate the rise and fall of these despots in order to help humanity progress more quickly before the invasion. Throughout, he turns to the memento Hermione gave him for solace.

When he starts out trying to meddle behind the scenes with Grindelwald, he's still young and inexperienced. He makes a mistake that draws attention to himself and his time magic, and Grindelwald hails him as a great wizard and pressures him to join him. Like Dumbledore once was, Alen is drawn in by Grindelwald's charisma, and starts to wonder whether he could defeat the Horde by altering the timeline toward wizarding supremacy instead, guaranteeing Grindelwald's success. He hesitates to join the cause, but as this friendship grows, he makes the mistake of telling Grindelwald the origins of the Timeglass, and about Hermione. Grindelwald seems sympathetic and tells Alen that maybe if they promote wizard supremacy, the advancement of Wizarding power could produce a way to find Hermione. Alen, more tempted than ever, turns to the memento Hermione gave him for comfort and guidance. He decides to open the photo frame to see if she might have written anything on the back ... and discovers a single one of her hairs caught in the mat.

Ch. 20: 1880.
Ecstatic, Alen has gone back to 1880, in our universe, to start setting up a New Apotheosis tracker to find other!Hermione again. But, partially feeling that Grindelwald is responsible for this breakthrough, he goes back to Grindelwald's time to tell him what's happened. He apologizes and says he won't be joining Grindelwald after all, because he's going back to Earth v2. Grindelwald seems to celebrate with him, but then makes a public announcement to his forces that he's naming Alen one of his chief lieutenants. Alen, not understanding, wants to confront Grindelwald, but spends a crucial half-hour trying to extricate himself from the forces' celebrations.

When he reaches Grindelwald's quarters to confront him, he finds two people there. One is his older self. The other is Grindelwald, holding the Timeglass; Grindelwald used the lieutenant announcement to sidetrack Alen and steal it. As revenge for slighting his offer, Grindelwald has gone back to 1878 and destroyed the hair he found, and the last chance Alen ever had at finding other!Hermione. (This is foreshadowed in Ch. 9: "I was never in league with Grindelwald. He invented that to distract me so he could ... so I'd lose...")

Alen rages at his older self, who prevents him from attacking Grindelwald. His older self says this had to be done, and that someday he will understand. Grindelwald extends his offer to join him again, now that there are no distractions left. Alen says he would rather die before joining him and leaves.

Ch. 21: 1880, Elsewhere, Elsewhere, Elsewhere.
Alen goes to other universes to find other Hermiones, and learns all about her, tries to make himself love another version of her, but it's never the same, because he can't be honest. So, he abandons any hope of happiness and devotes himself to his purpose: returning to his own universe and stopping the Horde.

He accelerates the destruction of the Statute of Secrecy as much as he can. This has basically been the plot of the fic so far. He's hand-picked Hermione and Riddle for their talents to help him win the war against the Horde. But he also knows that Hermione is vital to the downfall of Voldemort's reign, and she must eventually go back to her own time. So, he's planned to make her slowly fall in love with him, and then break her heart in the future, causing her to want to go back to her own time and thereby ensure her long term happiness, even if she loathes him forever.

But things aren't happening emotionally as he'd planned. Sometimes he thinks he's falling in love with this Hermione. Also, she kisses him in 2075/chapter 10, long before he'd intended her to feel anything for him: the sentence he cut off was meant to be "No, it's not supposed to be yet." And most bizarrely, she seems to be developing feelings for Tom Riddle, too. In their bizarre interpersonal dynamics, we start to see the limits of Bansherwold's ability to pre-plan and orchestrate crucial details of the timeline.

This essentially gets us up to speed as to where the fic leaves off, in:

Ch. 22: 2202.
We're moving into the final stage of setting up for the war with the Horde. Now that Riddle has changed into a slightly better person and Hermione isn't just hellbent on getting back to her time, Alen reveals large parts of the above information, and they start preparing for war.

Ch. 23-25(?): 2202-2360
Pre-war and wartime chapters, set over the course of two real-time years, meant to be intuitively written. The strange, uncertain development of the Riddle/Hermione relationship, which neither of them completely understands, but which neither of them wants to give up; they challenge, provoke, and improve each other in unexpected ways. We see the final shaking and ultimate breakage of the foundations of Riddle's desire for domination, because after seeing the same thing for centuries, it simply doesn't interest him anymore; it seems small and human, and being alive over this span of time has made all three of them a little bit leftward of human, psychologically. In the 2300s, Hermione engages with future political & social structures, becomes a fighter to rival Riddle and Bansherwold, and all three work together to orchestrate humanity's defense. Details of the Horde & its nature still murky, but probably an extractive magical force, tying back to the "magical harvesting" elements in Ch 7-9.

This time, when the Horde arrives, the forces of humanity win, although the results are still catastrophic. Tom is grievously injured, but survives, and he and Hermione confess their love to each other. But when Alen reminds Hermione of her duty, she can't shirk it. She leaves Tom and goes back to her own time.

Ch. 26: 1998.
The aftermath of Voldemort's defeat: another postwar era. We see connective tissue between the postwar mood far in the future and this time. It should be idyllic, but Hermione is existentially miserable. She misses Tom like a missing eye and misses the future, where she doesn't know what the future is, and doesn't know all the conflicts that are resolved in her lifetime. But she also feels it's her responsibility not to ruin any of her friends' lives with the knowledge of the Timeglass et al.

Ch. 27: 2002.
Then, one night, after four years, Alen visits her, and she tells him all this. That night, while she's asleep, he kidnaps a Hermione from a virtually identical universe, knowing he's doomed an entire universe of Hermione-loving people to misery, and deposits her in Hermione's place; kidnapped!Hermione will, unsettlingly, never know the difference. Then Alen takes our Hermione back to 2361, and to Tom, who, being Tom, can't actually articulate how overjoyed he is to see her.

Ch. 28: Onward.
Over the course of the coming years, the world rebuilds from the war with the Horde. Hermione travels to chapter 13 to give Alen the Timeglass, to chapter 14 to give herself the memory of the fight in Parliament, and finally, at the end of a long, happy life, she travels back to 12:47 on that day in 2036 in Chapter 5 to die.

As for Alen: he lives a long time, the band on his wrist measuring the slow trickle of his mortality. When he is ready, he returns to 2065, and the Parliament invasion. There's a mention in chapter 13 of a blood-based Polyjuice variant that can make a person look like someone else for the rest of their lives. As the memory in chapter 14 shows, the older Alen didn't actually die in the Lords Chamber. Instead, he permanently transformed himself into Tom Riddle, then jumped in time to the day in Chapter 5 when, as a copy of Riddle, he took them both to Piazza San Pietro and dealt the first blow to the Statute of Secrecy.

Finally, he returns to 2361 and entrusts the Timeglass to Hermione. She drops him back in 1945, where he lives out the rest of his life as Lord Voldemort, including the creation of Horcruxes, the attempted murder of Harry Potter, and all the original events of canon. Hermione occasionally uses the Timeglass to come back and see him throughout the years. But he's been alive a long time, and he welcomes death when the Battle of Hogwarts arrives in 1998.

In an epilogue, Hermione goes back to Alen's childhood, curious about the life he once described to her. She realizes no one is coming to give him his Hogwarts letter. Then she realizes she's the one who does it. She conjures the envelope, places it into his hand, and walks away.

So, there's the truth. A bit shaggy, and some minor details would probably have been ironed out in the writing, but these were always the bones. If you read this story back in the day, thanks and I hope this gives you some closure.

hugs and goodbye,

speechwriter