An Unconventional Family Structure
“Fine. We’ll trust you. But we only want to be gone for the duration of this — whatever this is that your future self won’t tell you or us about. And we want to be back after the equal amount of time. The girls are only babies now, heaven knows what Molly Weasley will think if we disappear for five months and come back with ten year olds.”
There are some sentences that Hermione really, really needs to stay away from.
Author’s Note: While this fic is part of the Lunar Harmony Through Time and Space series it takes place in the relative future after all of the currently published fics, and can be read alone. I know I should be working on one of the main fics, BUT this idea would not get out of my brain, it was like an earworm. I spent all of my lunch break at work writing this, and started again as soon as I was officially off the clock. I hope you like it, it’s a bit of a mish-mash, but I had so much fun! Thanks to cyborg_goddess my beta reader & the #1 fan of this series
An Unconventional Family Structure
Luna had gotten used to the Doctor having a permanent presence on Earth. It was really nice, to just have a steady voice to check in with, a Doctor who knew most of the adventures they had thus far, a Doctor they could take the children to see, who cooed over them like a grandfather, in a prickly way like he wasn’t cooing when really he was. But she could tell when he was starting to get the itch to leave. When he took on Bill as his student, started to be her “private tutor,” that’s when Luna saw the writing on the wall, the Doctor had found a new companion, and no matter what Nardole tried, he wouldn’t be able to stop the Doctor, because no one was able to stop the Doctor, not for long.
Soon, the Doctor started to go on adventures again, and this was more like the other Doctors Lunas had known, that Luna hadn’t realized she had lost, when she had grown more accustomed to this Doctor that had become more sedentary — though if his students had heard her describe the eccentric lecturer who lectured on anything and everything as sedentary they would have thought her mad — but nevertheless. And one day, she knew the Doctor wouldn’t come back. But that day had yet to come. What did come, was a bit more of a surprise, though not really, since they had been expecting at least one aspect of it.
“What is all that knocking?” Hermione shouted from the upstairs bathroom, where she was just stepping out of the shower. “Harry, can you get that?”
“Sorry love, I’m a bit busy!” Harry called from the twins’ room, where Martha was wailing and Donna was screaming as he tried to calm them down and get them dressed for the day. “Luna, can you get the door?” he hollered down the stairs at Luna, who was staring in panic at the kitchen, which was filled with various pots and pans that were supposed to be making breakfast by themselves, but the automated spells had gone haywire, and she was at the end of her rope trying to contain the mess of sizzling bacon, blackening pancakes, a shrieking kettle, and oatmeal that was bubbling out of its pot, along with a dishwasher that was oozing soap all over the floor.
“Ah, in a minute, bit busy!”
“Nevermind that, we let ourselves in!” and here was the Doctor, the one with the bow tie.
“Doctor, you can’t just let yourself into someone’s house! Where are we anyway? Oh dear!” and with him was Clara, a young Clara if Luna wasn’t mistaken, but she didn’t have time for that because the toaster was now on fire and it had caught one of the cabinets.
“Ah yes, let me help you with thaaaat!”
And now the Doctor was on the floor covered in dishwashing soap.
Luna blew her long hair out of her face, took a deep breath, and flicked her wand, silently putting out the fire and reversing the visible damage done to the cabinet.
“Hi, Clara. I thought you’d be meeting us soon.”
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Later, when everyone is conscious, dry, and no longer screaming, with nothing on fire, and nothing exploding, they all sit down for a nice cup of tea.
“You see, Clara, Harry, Hermione and I have known you for years. Let’s see, you’re very early on, so he must have plucked you from about 2014, yeah? It’s 2017 now, we’ve been mates for ages,” Luna gave Clara a warm smile, and she returned the favor
“Are all your friends like this, Doctor?” Clara asked, bemused.
“The trio are a… special case. So, how’ve you been? The girls are bigger than I remembered, or are they smaller, I can never keep track, you humans, always changing shapes and sizes,” the Doctor rubbed his hands together, and Harry scoffed.
“You’re one to talk, Doctor.”
“Oh you know what I mean. Still! The girls are what, three now? I thought I might take you all on a trip. Somewhere nice, somewhere safe ,” he stressed.
“Doctor, with all that we get up to are kids really —” but Clara was cut off by Hermione.
“Doctor, what aren’t you telling us?”
“Fine. I was always going to tell you. I got a message on the psychic paper. From one of my future selves. Very bootstrap paradox if you ask me. He said that earth won’t be safe for the five of you for the next few months. That you need to be taken off world while he handles things here. That is to say, you were taken off world while he handled things here, and he’s telling me to do it because he knows I did it. It’s annoying, and I can’t do anything about it because I did it. I’m annoying myself, I will annoy myself, I annoyed myself. And in the future he is, I am probably happy about it because it’s as right clever as it is infuriating.”
“He does this with you too?” Clara mouthed at the trio as the Doctor continued on.
“All the time.” Harry mouthed back at her, the Doctor seemingly oblivious.
“OK, Doctor, if we leave, though, if we left, will our family and friends be safe?”
“No idea. Probably. Maybe, yes, no, I don’t know, please come with me. I’ll take you somewhere nice, I’ll convince the TARDIS, no monsters, she’ll be very careful about the no monsters with kids on board. And Clara’s a nanny, she’s great with kids, you know she is.”
“Fine. We’ll trust you. But we only want to be gone for the duration of this — whatever this is that your future self won’t tell you or us about. And we want to be back after the equal amount of time. The girls are only babies now, heaven knows what Molly Weasley will think if we disappear for five months and come back with ten year olds.”
There are some sentences that Hermione really, really needs to stay away from.
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The thing was, that the Doctor kept to his promise, he only took them for five months, to a spa planet in the 31st century, and then he dropped them off right where they started at their townhouse in London, before he and Clara cheerily waved goodbye and went back in the TARDIS.
There is, however, a reason why a designated driver often waits until they see their friend/family member successfully get inside the house before they leave the driveway, and it’s not to be creepy; it’s to make sure that they’re safe. If Clara and the Doctor had waited just a little longer, paid a little more attention, they would have realized that a few things were off about the street they had left the trio on. Mostly they had chalked the differences up to 5 months of whatever had been happening to the world. But what was most off putting was that the townhouse looked fairly lived in for someplace that shouldn’t have been lived in for the past five months. And they were downright startled when, upon starting to unlock the door, they instead had it opened for them, and were greeted by none other than another Harry himself.
“Won’t you all come in?”
Confused, and increasingly filled with dread, the family of five settled down on what looked to be a new couch. In fact, a lot of the house looked different.
“You’ve redecorated,” Harry wrinkled his nose. “I don’t like it.”
The other Harry chuckled. “Well I do, and I’m the one who lives here. By the gods, you all look so young. Especially the girls. Well, I suppose there’s no use beating around the bush. The Doctor fucked up again. You’re not in 2017.”
Hermione groaned, and as the only adult among the three of them not holding a baby, was free to cradle her head in her hands. “When are we now?” Despite her love of history and knowledge, of the three of them, Hermione had always hated the time travelling the most. It was the inconsistency that bothered her.
“2051.”
Hermione’s head snapped up. “You don’t look seventy years old. You barely look thirty years old, even now. And the street outside —”
“I knew you were coming,” the older Harry shrugged. “I remembered them leaving you, and I knew they had to think it was 2017, so I magiced up the street in a facsimile. It was easy enough. As for my looks, what can I say? Wizards age slowly. To say nothing of the fact that I am the Master of Death.” Harry clapped his hands, interrupting any further questions. “But that’s enough for today, you five have places to be. I can’t go spoiling your future for you.” He stood up and gestured for them to follow, going out the front steps again.
“When did they build an American diner in London?” Harry asked Harry, still confused.
“That’s not a diner, myself. That’s a broken chameleon circuit.” Harry led them all inside.
“We’re closed, but we can make exceptions for old friends.”
“Clara? Why are you….” Luna trailed off.
“Why am I without a heartbeat? I’m not surprised you can hear that. Especially you. It’s a long story. But we’ve got time. Come, meet my partner. Let’s get you settled in our TARDIS. The diner’s just an entryway, though it does have a fully functioning kitchen.We sometimes have a problem with people thinking that the console room is a bathroom, but if we adjust the configuration it really can be, and actually, I should tell you about this one time we were doing an undercover op where this was a diner and we did need to turn this into a bathroom, and pre-tty fast, let me tell you….”
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As it turned out, life on Clara and Me’s TARDIS wasn’t that bad. It was different from the Doctor’s TARDIS, certainly, the navigation system was much more consistent about getting the group of them where they wanted to go, and their exploration was much safer, and much less chaotic than anything the Doctor ever got up to. For Martha and Donna it was an educational dream, as they got to learn about and experience an incredible breadth of the universe from the earliest age they could remember. Clara and Me explained that, to their knowledge, the five of them had returned to Earth in August 2018, and Martha and Donna had enrolled in Hogwarts that fall. It would be a bit of an adjustment for all of their friends and family that the children they expected to be two years old would suddenly be eleven years old, but magic was magic, and the wizarding world had long since given up on expecting the usual from Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Luna Lovegood.
In the meantime, before they went to Hogwarts and while they still had free run of the universe, the five of them investigated a variety of different schooling programs, before settling in the 51st century. The trio remembered how Jack had spoken fondly of growing up there, and given that it was one of the most sexually liberal times in history, they figured it would be one of the more accepting of their unconventional family structure.
Harry, however, had an additional motive in that he wanted to keep an eye on a young Jack Harkness, or Javic Thane as he was known then, as well as his younger brother, Gray. Harry hadn’t known for a long time what it meant to be the Master of Death, not until he caught a glimpse of the time vortex, and the visions started. From then on, he started to see the points upon which worlds turned. And one of those points was the day when a fearsome alien race attacked the Boeshane Peninsula and in the havoc Javic lost his grip on Gray’s hand. And there is a world in which that lost grip lead to endless torture that turned Gray into a sick and twisted shell, which caused him to torture and murder in return, for as much as Javic had searched, he never found him.
Harry didn’t much care for this world. But he also knew that the search for Gray is what drove Javic to the time agency, is what turned him into Captain Jack Harkness, who became a fixed point in his own right. So Harry did the sensible thing, and brought Gray home.
“Harry, you can’t kidnap a child.” Hermione couldn’t believe she was having to explain this to her husband.
“If I give him back Javic won’t turn into Jack and the universe will explode!”
“Harry, you have stolen a child from his family, he wants to go home!”
“Sorry, to intrude, but if I could make a suggestion?” Me interjected.
Harry and Hermione, both exasperated turned to look at her.
“We do have a time machine. Can’t we just give him back… later? After Javic has already gone about his business? Or better yet, if the parents are dead, why don’t we just give him to Jack. The man is immortal. Just pick a point in his timeline where he’s got free time to raise a mortal and watch it die, place them in a safe era and boom! Everyone wins.”
“Aside from your slightly callous view on mortal life and reference to a small boy as ‘it’ that’s not a bad idea, Me,” Hermione said thoughtfully.
Me shrugged and went back to eating her sandwich. She was long past caring what people thought of her, though she was slightly miffed, because she was only trying to be helpful, and it was mildly annoying to be rebuffed for something as silly as word choice and tone. Humans were so sensitive. But that is why she liked them, so she supposed she shouldn’t complain.
“How about, then” said Luna, interjecting for the first time “we pop back to the 21st century and pick up Jack, bring him here, and keep Gray with us, and schedule visits with his parents, and keep Javic in the dark? So that he grows up with that experience, still, but his parents aren’t in mourning?”
“That… that is a really messed up thing to do to Jack, Luna. Why would we do that?” Hermione asked, horrified.
“Because we already did? Probably? We at the very least kept Gray from Javic, in the current timeline, this way, we don’t have to keep him from his parents too, if we can get Jack on board.” Harry said hesitantly.
“Ugh, you’re all going to outvote me on this aren’t you?” Hermione moaned.
“That’s not how this works hon, it’s gotta be unanimous,” said Harry, rubbing her arm in comfort.
Hermione bit her lip. “I’d ask you to let me sleep on it, but we currently have a kidnapped child that Clara is trying to soothe, so I say we go to the 21st century and pick ourselves up a modern-day Jack Harkness.”
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They make a successful run to just before the Doctor and a younger Clara picked up the family of five and scoop up both Jack and Ianto, who didn’t exactly want to be left behind if Jack was going to be gone for five years in the future. Despite the warning that it may be longer than just five years, and that there was every chance Jack might spend Gray’s lifetime in the future, Ianto simply pointed out how easily he could have died in the whole 456 mess if it weren’t for the wizards and the Torchwood life expectancy, and so Ianto came along anyway.
Despite his rather traumatic experience, Gray makes fast friends with Martha and Donna, and soon the twins are calling him their brother and Gray calling them his sisters. Jack, by association, is now Martha and Donna’s older brother, but the trio and Jack draw the line at extrapolating the familial relationship any further than that, given past history.
It was an unconventional family structure in those years, Harry, Hermione, Luna, Clara, Me, Jack, and Ianto, raising Jack’s little brother and the trio’s twin witch daughters in the 51st century. But they wouldn’t have it any other way.