The Future Lies in the Past, part three: Making a Living in the Past

This concerns question #'s 2, 3, 4, and 5.

2] Can he confide in anyone from the past that he's from the future? Only if the person he confides in either gets charmed (Fidelius Charm, Memory Charm, etc.) or is about to die. This is why I think Harry could show himself to Regulus Black; we all know Regulus dies soon after finding the real locket horcrux, Harry cannot save him - it's already happened, so he can reveal himself to Regulus.

3] Will he take on a fake identity and interact with people, or will he have to stay physically hidden and isolate himself completely? I think he will show himself to at least one person, and he'll be himself. Otherwise he will probably keep himself hidden. I really don't think he'd pull a Barty Crouch Jr. on us and take Polyjuice Potion, at least not for an extended amount of time.

4] Where will he live and how will he provide for himself? As hard as it might be, he might first have to stay in the cave that Sirius was during GoF, or he might stay in the Shrieking Shack. Of course he wouldn't stay in that cave or in the shack while anyone else was there, so he'd have to move out before the events of PoA. Within days after Harry's parents are killed, Sirius gets arrested for Wormtail's supposed murder. At that point he might be able to use the place Sirius bought with his inheritance from Uncle Alphard...as long as he can gain access to it. Update 6/14/06: What if the reason the locked chamber in the Department of Mysteries is locked is because Harry is living and studying in there? We think that room is where love is being studied. Didn't Dumbledore (or maybe it was JKR?) say that Harry needs to learn about love, in all its forms?? Where better to learn more about it than where you can study it, especially if you have gone back in time and can't study out in the "real world"?
Money is an easier issue, actually. According to the notice at Gringotts, access to his vault would only be denied if the money "never" belonged to him. Remember that never means "not in the past, not at present, and not in the future". We know that it does belong to him because it "will" belong to him as soon as his parents die. We also know that Sirius's money (the Black family vault) belongs to him because it "will" belong to him after Sirius dies. He might have to be careful about accessing the Black family vault, though, until Mrs. Black dies. Most likely, Harry will make a trip to Gringotts before setting off on his temporal journey anyway. This will tide him over until he figures out he has access to the bank accounts.

5] How long must he stay in the past? I mean, once he's in the past and has accomplished what he intended can he speed up time to return to the present, having barely aged, or does he have to spend roughly 16 years in temporal isolation from those left behind, making him much older than his peers when he comes back? Though he will have aged some by the time he returns to the present, I don't think he'll be stuck in the past for nearly 16 years. As we move from one book to the next, the narrator comments how time seems to be speeding up. I think this is a clue that Harry is able to wind the time-turner (or whatever he uses this time) forward in order catch back up to the present. The one situation we've seen so far of time travel has Harry and Hermione going back in time for only three hours, and they use every bit of that time completing their tasks. What happens if you go years back in time to do something that takes merely minutes, hours, or days?

I think of a time-turner this way:
1] Before use it is completely unwound.
2] Winding it up sets its coordinates and transports you back to that chosen time period.
3] Once you are in the past the turner starts to unwind again.
4] Left alone it will unwind at a regular pace. You will move in time at the same pace as everything else around you.
5] Forcing it to unwind faster causes time to speed up.
6] Once you have returned to the present the time-turner is completely unwound again.
7] Any attempt to speed ahead into the future might cause the time-turner to break.

If Harry uses anything other than a time-turner, it will probably work in a similar fashion -- able to go back in time and fast-forward to the present, but unable to go into the future.