Between Hope and Fear

--

Sometime in the year 1999

Grooms Lake, Nellins Air Force Base, New Mexico

--

Here arises a quest of time-travel within one's own lifetime.

Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and vanished.

He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own. His only guide on this journey is an observer named Al, a hologram from his own time that only Sam can see and hear.

And so, Dr. Becket leaps from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, hoping that each time his next leap...

...will be the leap home.

---

October 30, 2007

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Faculty Housing

---

It was always the same.

It started with the green flash of light.

Harry Potter heard his mother's voice pleading, begging Voldemort to spare him. Then he saw his father as he remembered from the wedding pictures with Sirius and his mother, coming towards him. Only there wasn't joy in his eyes now. There was fear, sadness. and something else Harry couldn't quite define.

James Potter was leading him down a hallway. Harry was aware of nothing but the fact that it was a cold place, and that it was very dark--that Dementors could not be far. He was bitterly sure that this was a dream, for Harry's parents had both been murdered before he was one year old. Even now, as an adult, he desperately wanted it to be real.

Harry didn't know how long they walked down this hallway--the sense of time passing was at once poignant and absent here--he only knew that they came to a door.

"It's your turn, Harry," his father said.

Slowly, afraid of what was behind the door, he turned the knob.

It opened to what appeared to be a gazebo in a pristine, misty lake. They were standing on what Harry realized was a dock. Tied to the dock was what appeared to be a weathered boat with a deep nave fashioned from birch. The end of the boat opened onto a dock with a rope that was frayed and worn. The mist floated away, and revealed that the boat carried Albus Dumbledore, Harry's headmaster. He was with another wizard. Dumbledore's companion was a much older wizard. This wizard almost blinded you to look at him directly he dazzled so much.

"Merlin!" Harry thought, panic lurching his heart into his throat.

"NO!" He tried to scream, but the sounds weren't coming from his mouth.

Snap! The rope was down to a few feeble strands. A few more pops, and the boat was drifting away. Without a moment's hesitation, Harry jumped off the dock to try and retrieve the boat, but he felt strong arms pulling him out.

"Be the Man-who-Lived, Harry," his father pleaded.

"What if I can't?" Harry whispered.

"Come, I'll show you," James answered.

They walked down the hallway again.

Walking with him, Harry wanted to say everything he'd ever wanted to say to his father--but words weren't necessary. Harry realized as they approached a very bright red door, his father knew all along.

Then he opened the door.

There was no light in the room, but he could very clearly make the outlines of a four-post bed.

Someone--definitely a female someone--was lying very still on it.

Then he saw a flash of carrot-red hair on the pillow, and suddenly felt sick.

"Ginny!" He fought down a sob.

"Dad...no..." he begged, "No...not her..."

"You see now? See what will come if you can't stop it, don't you?"

"I'm supposed to stop it!?" Images of the school he loved so much, of his friend's home at the Burrow, of Diagon Alley, all in complete ruins floated in front of him.

"I'm not saying you have to, but if somebody doesn't, there will be nothing between hope and fear, Harry. There will be only fear."

His father was gone. The hallway was gone. He was in his own bed. He bolted upright, soaked to the bone in his own sweat and his lightening-bolt scar scalding hot.

"But then," Harry thought in a half-hearted attempt to push the dream out of his mind, "what would the beginning of a year at Hogwarts be without someone telling me I'm going to die? It's practically tradition."

Even still, he didn't sleep much in the weeks approaching his third year as a faculty member of Hogwarts.