Harry shook his head slightly in bemusement as he made his way forward and nudged open the door. He froze the minute he stepped inside. He barely stopped himself from blurting out a loud "What the fuck?" A phrase he'd been thinking repeatedly since he woke a little while ago.
It wasn't the familiar burnt out husk he of a bar that he was expecting. The inside had been restored, or rather it was nearly the same as his memory of it before the war. Not only that, but there were people there.
People sitting down and reading books or papers at tables, people chatting in excited tones, and more than once his ears picked up the words, "Quidditch", "Ireland", "Bulgaria", and "Krum."
That wasn't the biggest shock to him though.
Behind the bar, wiping out a glass, was Tom, the bartender. Harry stopped and stared. Because Harry knew for a fact that Tom had died.
He had refused to leave the Leaky Cauldron during one of the early battles in Diagon Alley, when the building had been partially destroyed by fiendfyre. It had been a very early battle so they were still occasionally burying their dead rather than vanishing them or burning them. Harry remembered Hermione asking people what Tom's last name was, to put something on the tombstone. They never end up finding anyone who knew. He was just "Tom the bartender" to everyone.
Harry didn't know how long he stood there staring, but it wasn't until another customer walked in behind him, jostling him in the process, that he broke out of his stupor. He stepped away from the entrance to muggle London, and decided to enter Diagon Alley proper. He needed to get information. He needed to figure out what was going on.
Harry got to the brick wall stopping him from entering Diagon Alley. He took a moment to cast a quick glamour on himself. It wasn't the strongest glamour; that took a bit of time to cast, this one was just quick and simple. In place of a lithe teenager of average height appearing about 15 or 16, with dark hair there was a teenager with slightly heavyset features, a plain unremarkable face, and dirty blond hair. It was a person most people wouldn't look twice at, nor remember two minutes after he passed.
It wouldn't hold back someone who was determined to see through both, or had special enhancements to do so. He didn't need anyone who happened to see through the notice-me-not charm to start shouting out about the "boy who lived." Harry was honestly a little surprised that no one had seen through the notice-me-not charm at the bar, since him opening the door would have drawn attention to himself. The fact that he looked like one of Dudley's old friend was entirely coincidental.
His first suspicion was that some how he got blown to the past. It was like something out of a bad television show. However the headline of the paper being the Daily Herald instead of the Daily Prophet had given him just enough caution not to jump to conclusions. He wanted to be careful. Hermione had always said that terrible things happened to people who mucked with time. For just a moment he had a horrible vision of him coming face to face with himself and the entire universe blowing up.
Then again, maybe he'd just make his earlier self go insane a few years ahead of schedule.
He tapped his wand quickly on the bricks in front of him, opening the entrance, only to freeze once again. In front of him, wasn't the ruins and collections of barely there buildings he was used to. While he had half expected it after seeing the restored state of The Leaky Cauldron; expecting it and actually coming face to face with it were two entirely different matters.
There in front of him was everything he had thought gone forever. He stepped slowly into Diagon Alley. After a moment he realized he must have been just as wide eyed as he was when Hagrid had brought him the first time. He heard a flutter of wings as Hedwig came and landed on his shoulder again.
"We're not in Kansas anymore Hedwig." Harry stated as his head rotated slowly, looking at all the activity of the Alley. He began a slow sedate walk as he tried to process the things around him. His eyes traced the shops that had all been destroyed in his time.
Once again his eye was caught by something on the front of one of the stores. It was a wanted poster featuring a cackling Bellatrix Lestrange, featured on the front of it. Harry scowled instinctively seeing the picture in front of him.
A surge of memories overtook Harry as he looked at the face in the picture, the happy insanity glittering in the woman's eyes.
The flash of her dueling Sirius in the Department of Mysteries with the Veil of Death as a backdrop. A stunner from Bellatrix's wand hitting Sirius and then him falling backward, almost as if in slow motion into the Veil.
The memory of Harry chasing her and attempting to cast the Cruciatus curse for the first time on her, only for her to laugh at his pitiful attempts to hurt her.
Flash forward a few years. Harry remembered the pain of the three bone-shattering hexes she used on him in quick succession in an impromptu ambush the Death Eaters had set up.
Harry remembered vividly Hermione stepping forward with a look of pure rage that he'd never seen on her face before. Harry watched helplessly as she dueled the insane witch, each of them taking curses and injuries in the fight between arguably two of the most brilliant witches of their respective generations. In the end Hermione finally managed to take Bellatrix's head off with a simple reductor curse.
Hermione had won the fight and had ended Bellatrix, but the damage had been done. One of the curses Bellatrix had used had slipped through and hit Hermione. It was a very dark curse; one that caused her to collapse next to him. He didn't realize anything was wrong at first until she began to cough blood.