Author's Note: The obligatory warnings that this is a side fic of "When Harry Met Tom" and if you haven't read that you'll be rather confused. Also, NOT CANON

"You know, it's amazing how things don't change."

Harry didn't know exactly how it had happened, but somewhere between the new Tom Riddle emerging from his cocoon like a beautiful caustic butterfly and Harry still being stuck in good old 1942 soon to be 1943 they'd settled into a routine of sorts. Maybe Harry just got tired of avoiding him, just as he lost all shame in approaching her, and so when Hogsmeade weekend finally approached she found herself walking alongside Tom Riddle.

Strike that, found was an exaggeration.

Harry, being a poor orphan pretending not to be a poor orphan, naturally didn't have the parental signature necessary to visit Hogsmeade. So, she'd done the reasonable thing that morning of sneaking out of the castle, only to immediately get caught by a very dubious Tom Riddle, who promised not to give her detention forever if she spent the day with him.

Well, not quite, they'd negotiated down from Harry showing him how she'd escaped Hogwarts. Harry had decided that even spending a day with the devil himself was preferable to giving him that kind of power.

With Alphard nowhere in sight, Riddle blandly stating he was stuck playing nursemaid to his cousins, it really was just Harry and Tom Riddle in their own little bubble. He looked good, somehow, not necessarily more handsome (in fact, he often looked like he wasn't trying at all these days) but much more natural than Harry had ever seen him. When he smiled these days, since Halloween, you knew he meant it.

Point being, it wasn't as terrible as Harry would have thought, walking down the street with the dark lord to be. Even if it was surreal to be on what essentially was a date in Hogsmeade with Tom Marvolo Riddle.

Which brought her to that first, idly spoken, thought she'd had. That it wasn't just a Hogsmeade, an unfamiliar place divorced from Harry's time, it was nearly identical to the Hogsmeade she knew. The rooftops still decorated with Christmas lights out of season and the lightest dusting of false magical snow, there was Honeydukes, the Three Broomsticks, and even that sleazy dive the Hogshead that Hermione had scoped out for that first DA meeting ages ago.

Even fifty years ago it had apparently been a dump.

Harry couldn't help but smile over at her confused and pensive companion, "I bet you in fifty years it will all look the same. Hogsmeade, Diagon Alley, hardly a brick displaced."

Even when muggle London turned upside down in fifty years' time wizards would still only just be catching up to radio. It'd never struck Harry before, it'd always been so new and magical and full of wonder, but the wizarding world really was timeless.

Harry's father and mother, she now suddenly knew, would walk down these same streets in twenty years as Harry would walk down them in fifty.

"What makes you say all that?" Riddle asked, apparently not quite willing to indulge Harry.

"Oh, I don't know, just a feeling," Harry said with a shrug as she peeked through Honeydukes' shop window, at all those jumping, swirling, magical pieces of candy that had seemed straight out of Willy Wonka's factory to her the first time she'd seen them.

Mr. Wonka, Harry always thought, would have been a wizard.

"And that doesn't depress you?"

"Depress me?" Harry blinked, looked away from the candy to Tom Riddle's grim expression. She wondered if he knew, how expressive his eyes sometimes were, that stark crystal blue that she'd never seen anywhere else.

"I don't want to live in a world, Harry, that never changes," he said softly, this time turning his head to look at her, "A place that will be the same before and after we leave it. After all, such a place doesn't need us at all, does it?"

Harry felt her smile dim as she took in his words and her own, as she realized it wasn't entirely true. Hogsmeade had stayed the same, but Diagon Alley, Tom Marvolo Riddle and his followers had once torched Diagon Alley.

And she'd never realized, never thought, that maybe this had been part of the point. Not so much all those pureblood ideals, things Tom Riddle didn't even seem to believe in, but just so that they would remember his name but never speak it.

(Harry didn't like the idea of sympathizing with Voldemort. She didn't like it all. Even if, against her own will, she found herself sympathizing with the Tom she liked to believe he'd never been.)

"Well," Harry said slowly, something caught in her throat as she looked at him, "It's nice, I think, not be needed."

Since she was eleven years old, and introduced not only to the wizarding world but to a world where Harry had the world's expectations dumped on her shoulders, she'd wondered how nice it might be not to be the girl-who-lived for a change.

And of all the strange moments in 1992, the good and the bad, she didn't regret to see the world before Harry Potter had been needed.

She motioned around them, to Hogsmeade in all its faux Christmas splendor, "Look at this place, Riddle. Sure, it was here before us and it'll be here after but that means that you, that I, that no one can really mess it up no matter how they try. Whatever mistakes we make, whatever we end up doing, it'll all work out in the end."

He smirked, that crooked smile that made him look unbearably roguishly handsome, "And that reassures you, Harry?"

"Well, sure, I mess things up all the bloody time," Harry started walking, hooking her arm in his and ignoring the way he started at the contact as she guided him along, "I mean, look at me, I'm a mess and barely keeping my life together."

"Now, that's not quite true, your History grades have improved from abysmal to tolerable," Riddle say, witty as always even when he was still wallowing in his depressed pit after his Halloween mental breakdown.

"You're hilarious, shut up," Harry said, ignoring his dull look of amused confusion at the phrase, and continued, "What I mean is that it's nice, knowing that things can and go on without you, even when it feels like the world's crashing down on your head. It makes me think that any mistake, no matter how catastrophic it seems, is fixable or at least tolerable. It means that the end is never really the end, and that no matter where I go or what I do, I can still look for that rainbow connection."

"The rainbow connection again," Riddle scoffed, like he'd even heard The Rainbow Connection and could afford to blow it off. Harry thought everyone had a thing or two to learn from Kermit the Frog.

"Laugh all you want," Harry said, "But it means that even if you tell Slughorn that he's stupid and you've always hated his mustache, even if you tell Malfoy that he's the toe-headed grandfather of a ferret, and even if you point out that maybe Lucretia Black could afford to show a little less cleavage from time to time you'll recover from it just like Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley will recover."

He smiled, almost unwillingly Harry thought, as if he could hardly contain it, "You're assuming I regret my choices."

"Well," Harry said, "I'm not saying that it wasn't a memorable moment, Riddle, but you did kind of shoot yourself in the foot in front of everyone."

"Not everyone," Riddle corrected, "Just everyone with money and you."

Why did Harry feel like that "and you" was so tacked on?

"Very funny," Harry said drily in turn, "What I'm saying is even if you did something unbelievably stupid, universe destroying stupid, like you accidentally go back fifty years in time while leaving all your friends to die at the hands of magical terrorists, and then end up sort-of-but-not-really friends with your arch nemesis who suddenly goes from being an evil dick to just being a normal weirdly charming dick, that it'll all work out."

That, at least, was what Harry chose to take from Hogsmeade staying as it was. Sure, it might mean that she couldn't change Tom Riddle for the better, she couldn't save him, but then she had never tried to do anything like that. Harry wasn't that arrogant, to believe she could make that much of a difference in someone like him. What it really meant, was that the future was still waiting for her in 1996, she just had to reach it.

"That was an oddly specific and detailed example," he said after a beat, brow furrowed, and looking at her like he'd never seen anything like her and that this was too Harry even for Harry.

Well, hell, maybe Harry shouldn't have dumped her own problems on him hypothetically. Harry had to remember that Tom Riddle was much smarter than she was, smarter than Hermione, even, and that made him bloody terrifying.

"I'm full of oddly specific and detailed examples," Harry said, blanching, but this just seemed to make him more dubious.

"Why the magical terrorists?"

Well, he could tell her that one. Harry honestly had no idea why anyone would want to bring a bunch of Malfoy equivalents together and call themselves the Death Eaters. Harry always thought it sounded like some subpar heavy metal band.

And that was back when Tom Riddle had been the faceless, enigmatic, Lord Voldemort. Trying to picture Tom Riddle, as he was now, leaving Hogwarts to start this pointless campaign of racism and destruction…

It was harder and harder to believe that he was the faceless, senseless, terribly clever evil Harry had assumed he was. He was a man with motives, with a whole swath of feelings beyond bottomless ambition, and even if he was the greatest actor in the world, he had sabotaged his own cause too many times for Harry to believe that it was entirely an act. She wasn't saying he was good, not at all, but he wasn't the Lord Voldemort he was destined to become.

What had made Tom Riddle, this Tom Riddle who had had the potential for a patronus, who was so witty and alone, and so disgusted with the world he lived in want to become Lord Voldemort?

What had happened to him, really?

She couldn't ask that though, couldn't dare for the future she still hoped to see, and said instead, "Well, every good story needs a magical terrorist or two."

"Does it though?"

"Sure, and their leader has to look like an evil snake-man," Harry said with a grin, unable to help herself, if only for the expression on his face, "And he and I do epic battle every year in May, except that one time he took a break for a year so I could mistakenly do battle with my godfather."

As much as Harry loved Sirius, she wished they had met under different circumstances, and that she'd gotten to enjoy her year of Voldemort free vacation.

"Right," Tom said, "And how, exactly, does the time travel figure into this, Harry?"

"Well, naturally, when we were engaging in epic battle in the future we were in the Department of Mysteries—"

"Was Hogwarts not mysterious or glamorous enough for this battle of yours?"

"—Shut up, Riddle. Anyways, while I was running for my life from his evil minions, I stumbled into the room filled with time machines—"

"I often find myself stumbling into rooms filled with time machines."

"—And of course, I managed to break the whole lot of them, I mean, after having managed to break everything else in the place and get nearly strangled by magical floating brains—"

"I too, often find myself nearly strangled by magical floating brains."

"—Seriously, Riddle, shut up. But point being, even if you did all of this, the world will abide so you can too. Also, it means that your problems of throwing a fit in the Slug Club are just kind of sad."

He looked at her for a moment, critically, and Harry suddenly realized she'd said entirely too much.

"Harry, you realize if you attempted time travel of that magnitude you'd be turned into paste."

"… That's it, I'm not talking to you anymore."

Author's Note: Written for the 1000th review (my god) of "When Harry Met Tom" where Sc17 asked for a fic where Harry and Tom go to Hogwarts together but not necessarily on a date. So we have this short clip thing.

Thank you to readers, reviews are much appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter