Title: Old Souls

Rated T/M

Disclaimer: I (regretfully) do not own Harry Potter in any way, shape or form. If you recognize any other influence (Tv, book, radio, etc.) I will gladly admit it's not mine either.

Summary

He died trying to save the universe... thousands of years in the future. Now he's back in his reincarnation of 1926. Meet Charles, one of the many reincarnations of Harry Potter. He comes to 1930 with Big Plans, none that involved Tom Riddle.

Chapter 1: Being Dead

"I died. At least, I'm pretty sure I died." He murmured into the nothingness. The fact that he could murmur was the unsettling part.

"You did, my friend." A voice he recognized told him.

"Jake? You died? ... So I was not successful?"

"You were. Thanks to your sacrifice we lived five years before everything we ever knew was destroyed. There was no way to stop it, that plan was made more than 4,000 years ago. You manage to give us some time, enough to manage this." Jake said

"What is this exactly?" He concentrated and realized that he could see. He was on the Grand Hall, the meeting place of all sentient beings back home. But it wasn't the busy, colorful and nosy place of his childhood or the destroyed place from adulthood after the last Great War. Instead it was in all its former greatness but eerie white, silent and apparently empty, with the exception of him and Jake.

"Where are we? And why are we here? If this is the afterlife the ancient mortals used to preach, it's not living up to its reputation... No offense Jake."

Jake smiled "None taken. To answer you, I have no idea where we are. Really. Don't look at me that way. I have seen this place only in books; it was destroyed before I was born. You chose this place, I suppose, because it's familiar to you and it's associated to good, safe, memories. Why are we here... is more complicated. A year after you...left."

He interrupted, "You can say it Jake, after I died. I'm proud of what I did. It gave the others more time to live, even if it was useless in the end." He said bitterly.

"Well" Jake continued, "after you died we figured anything and everything we did would be useless. Everything was set in motion and we couldn't stop it, the energy was too great and the momentum was set. We would have needed a source of energy bigger to counter it or a way to suck its energy. Both options were impossible, as you know. The people, if you can call them that, that did it knew what they were doing and used the wars to divert the attention so that when we noticed something was terribly wrong, it would have been way too late to do something other than wait for the final moment."

"So everything was useless then? All died?" He asked uncertain.

"No. Everything was not useless. You should know better than to think your daughter would have let your sacrifice be in vain," Jake said with a fond smile

"You loved her didn't you?" He gave him a knowing and suspicious look.

"Everyone loved her, she made it difficult not to," Jake said with a shrug, "It was her brilliance and love of history that manage to make a 'if everything else fails plan'. The year after you died she buried herself in books, we thought it was her way of coping, and in a way, it also was. It was not a strange sight to see her at all hours on a random table or floor with four books and her journal. After a successful break in of the Archianova library on the planet Earth she found a book that change everything." Jake explained.

"Wait! You went to Earth? How in the stars did you manage that?" he said, shock clearly on his voice.

"We found some old maps on a destroyed ship and the years, and lack of human population, were kind to her. We found only 60% of polluted air and only 40% of the waters dead. If the universe would have lasted longer we might have been able to go back..." Jake stayed in silence for a moment in contemplation.

"We strayed off topic, go back to the book"

"Ah, yes, the book. To tell you the truth I did not believed a word of it but we were so desperate that any plan, any idea that gave hope was given a chance... and I couldn't deny Sophie. If she though it could work it was good enough for the rest of us. And given that we are talking, I guess she was right after all."

"W-why is she not here?"

Jake looked at him sadly and said, "She couldn't, she didn't qualify. Apparently some souls, spirits, whatever you want to call it, are re-born again and again. The book called them Old Souls and they, apparently, are usually responsible for mayor history events. They are people who are strong or powerful or charismatic or something that makes them stand out, be heard and influence history in some way or another. The earthling that wrote the book remembered every life that he had lived and some of the people he suspected to also be an old soul." Jake looked down and had a pained expression, took a deep breath and continued "Sophie, being the brilliant girl she is, managed to track in history all of our past lifetimes and ..."

"Jake, What are you not telling me? ... What did she do?"

_flashback_

"Sophie has gone missing, Sir." a tall blond man in a dark gray uniform said.

"Are you sure? Have you cheeked all her usual places? The kitchen?" Jake responded with a tired voice. This was not the first time Sophie left her duties unattended because she lost track of time because one of her 'discoveries'. He could almost hear her voice saying 'But Jake this could change everything! Maybe this is the answer' and of course he would look at her big hopeful eyes and forgive her.

"I have done so, sir. The last place someone saw her was close to the Demon Ritual Chambers of Sector five, but of course nobody can enter there without your permission."

Jake suddenly looked alert "Thanks soldier, get back to your duties, I'm sure she is in some corner reading a book and just forgot to check the panel."

"All right, sir."

Jake calmly walked off the main control center and took off running after he was far from anyone else. 'No need to panic the people, I'm sure she is ok and there is nothing to worry about.'

When he got near the ritual chambers he saw one door open and warily approached it hoping to whatever might hear him that Sophie will not be there. She was a smart girl; she knows how dangerous it is. She will not be there. She will not.

When he got to the door he saw her. On the floor. Covered with blood. On a rune circle.

"Sophie... What have you done?"

_end of flashback_

"She did a demon rune circle. Traded her magic for the knowledge of all our lifetimes. After that she only lived two more years. You know one cannot live long without your magic, the body is too used to it, it doesn't know how to survive without it anymore." Jake stopped, took a deep breath and continued.

"She lived long enough to determine which lifetime could have made the more difference. Out of the 50,000 of the last sentient beings, only 14 were considered 'old souls'. Out of those 14 only 8 had potential to change the outcome. Surprisingly those 8 were born in a time where a small change could have been enough to stop the end. Unsurprisingly those 8 died young. We think they were murdered to ensure they could not change anything, which included you and me. She calculated that by 'going back' in a sense, we could stop it. Of course one cannot go back that far in time and inhabit a body that is currently occupied, even if it is by yourself. She died before we manage to figure something out. One of the eight, I'm sure you remember, Nathan, the weird son of your second ex-wife, figured the last part. As it turns out, he was not weird for the sake of being weird like you and Afron always thought. He remembered some of his past lives and sometimes confused his current life with some past one. His method was actually really simple, so simple that... I actually thought that this was really the end. Each of us, pardon the expression, is a freak of nature. For some reason we do not follow the 'rules' and instead of following the normal order and become part of the universe after we die, we come back intact, whole, in a new body. With our past experiences buried but not lost." Jake explained

He mourned the death of his beautiful daughter, but he could not deal with that now, it was best to not think about it. He tried to understand all the information and all it's consequences "I'm trying to follow you, I really am..."

"I do not judge you in the least, I still don't understand it and I'm only beginning to believe it and I had some years to study it and become somewhat used to it" Jake said.

"So what do we do now? What can be done? And where are the others?" He said in one breath.

"I'm guessing the others are already there, waiting for us. I was in charge of telling you and guiding you. For some odd reason they thought I would be better for the job. I tried to tell them you would prefer a beautiful mortal woman with a bottle of alcohol in her arms. But they thought I was joking." Jake said

He smiled a little, Jake knew him well "You should at least brought the alcohol, so... what do I have to do? And where are we going?"

"We are going somewhere around 1930 of the ancient calendar; it depends when you were born in that lifetime and" Here Jake paused for dramatic effect "we are going to Earth!"

For all his trouble he got an unimpressed look, Jake sighted, "This place is an in-between place, if your here is because you can choose to come back. You have been stuck here for some time because there's no new body to go back to. There's no life being born. There's nothing to go back to. But by me coming here you gained your 'self'. Nathan told us that he had to die first, somehow manage to gain his self, don't really know how he managed it, and appear to the next person that died. That was Carol and so on so forth with the eight. I am coming here for you. You are the last. Now you need to remember all your past lives in the order from your last birth to your first. This is the hard part, because you'll have to remember things you might have wished not to. I had to suffer my every childhood, puberty, being in love, and then remembering how they died, the pain of every betrayal. It was brutal. Once you finish this part you have to concentrate on the life you want to go back to and the time. We will all be arriving in different times and parts of the world because some have to be early to prevent their death and some don't want to arrive at an inconvenient moment in that life. The only thing that we will be actually doing is having all of our memories of the future lifetimes with us and the only reason we can do that is because there's no place right now to go back to. And the 'nothing can be created or destroyed' rule works in our favor." Jake said

"So how we will recognize each other? By the way, apart from you, Nathan and Carol who else is going?"

"Our best bet is our auras because we will all have different names, faces and ages. I will be somewhere in Benito Mussolini's Italy with republican parents and you will be in Nazi Germany with a Jew father. No one got it easy, let me tell you. Nathan and Carol will be in the Spanish civil war. The rest, except Afron, you did not know a lot about. Alanna, Cassandra and Dante are the other three. The good news is that they know all about you and have a sad case of hero worship, but then, everyone that knew you had a case of hero worship. Sad times we were living in. Even I admit that I missed your particular brand of sarcasm and grouchy personality in the mornings" Jake joked "I'm not sure of Cassandra or Dante, but Alanna will be in China around that time and Afron will be in France. Sophie speculated that if we stay where we are born we will die in the conflicts because chances are that no matter how hard we try we will either be pulled in to politics, be noticed by our intergalactic enemy or both. Remember they murdered us, no matter how it appears you died; they put the pieces there so that we all end up dead. The safest place we can go is London; we have a 12% probability that if we make it to London we will be relatively safe. Thing is, getting to London has a high chance of getting us killed on the way."

"Sounds optimistic... Afron is going? That's great! Dante? …The name sounds familiar." He tried to remember, he has vague memory of someone with that name "Was Dante the new recruit that spilled juice on my carpet and then trying to fix it almost burned the office? That Dante?"

Jake laughed, "Yes! that Dante. To be fair you scared the brains out of him, but later on he manage to gain everyone's respect with his genius in mechanics."

"So to be clear, the plan once we get there, to London, keep your head down and survive? Do we have to kill someone or do something more specific to change the time?"

"You have to understand that in our history is extremely rare for two of the 14 to be born some years apart. To have eight of us in the same time period, in the same galaxy, let alone the same planet, each of us capable of changing history in a dramatic way, will change everything. For some reason that time in Earth is extremely important to the bastards, that is why we think there were so many of us, why they killed us before we could ruin their plans, and why they created so many conflicts between the earth mortals. Don't get me wrong if I happen to see one of those bastards, I'll happily kill them. I'm sure most of us will, after all they caused us. I'm sorry my friend but it appears our time here is coming to an end."

He looked around and saw the edges around the Grand Hall fading. For a moment he panicked, but then remembered he already died so what more can he worry about?

"What do I have to do to remember?" He asked quickly. And for the first time Jake came closer and with his hand touched his forehead. The last he heard from Jake was "Don't fight it" and all was black again.

It all started to play like a recording. My life. At least the last one. Born Dartamian Marcus Liander of the galaxy Alpha in sector 14. Son to the Chief Commander and a cleaning inspector, neither had permission to procreate and my birth was kept a secret. My father sent my mother to some desolate place in the galaxy, where ship thieves and human/creature selling were high. My childhood was hard, but I learned, adapted and survived. Mother was not so lucky and was killed on my tenth birthday.

On went the memories of my childhood, learning how to fight and defend myself. Then killing the five that were responsible for my mother's death and the 70 that were part of the particular band. Best not leave potential enemies behind was a lesson you learned early on. The stories that told of how that particular adventure went made some important people look at me and years later I was the youngest High Chief Commander.

My first marriage, Sophie...beautiful, baby Sophie, the wars, the deaths, the destruction, the panic, the blood, and finally knowing the universe as we know it will end. Knowing it's too late but also refusing to admit defeat and let my daughter, my people, down. The Plan. The plan that could save us. The plan that needed someone to be there until the last explosion and that it will be impossible for that person to survive it.

I was the leader, the only leader actually. The rest of the leaders and government of different galaxies did not survive the attacks and even if there were supposed to be other people higher than me or that I was relatively young I was made leader. By that time it did not matter if you're skin is blue, you have no skin or eat fire, it was a common enemy and old wars were forgotten. My people loved me, the rest respected me, but all trusted me with their lives so it was my responsibility, my honor and pleasure to make the last stand. At least I'll go with a bang. And finally my death on the 12 cycle of the moon on the 5783 of the turn of the star named sun following the ancient Earth calendar.

And on went the lives I had lived. Hundreds of lives. In most I was a mortal man living in space, in a few I was a women, in rare cases I was another race, in another planet, in some distant corner of the universe were they didn't even know of mortals.

Something I learned is that being some great hero is not so great for the hero. Almost all of the lives where I am some kind of 'hero' it means I had a really crappy childhood, die young, alone and without ever really experiencing life and everyone trying to manipulate me in some way. And in the ones were I am some kind of dark lord/king/dictator/ruler I live a long full life. Such are the ironies of life... of course the assassination attempts do get old and tiring. To be fair I was never really evil. Ruthless, bloody and short tempered, maybe. But the victors write history as they say, so after I won and the people were happy, healthy, wealthy and safe, I was remembered as the greatest thing that could have happened to the planet or sometimes galaxy. If I lost I was the worst thing that almost happened but the good people of the government saved the people.

I get to live on Earth, but it's polluted, there's no water and radiation is killing us. Those that had the money went to live on space. My family was middle class. Further back I get to re-experience the star they call sun and to look up and see blue, look down and feel grass, trees that are not for food, forests, snow, vampires, goblins, werewolf's, so many things that were lost in the future.

Getting to a lifetime that is close to the intended date I pay extra attention. Harry James Potter, 1980, no, is still too far. Jake said around 1930's.

My life as Harry starts bad, with an assassination attempt even before I can make full sentences. Lily Evans reminds me of my Sophie she did a demon rune blood circle and traded her life for my survival. When I see her soul leaving the body of Lily, I know I will see my daughter again after all. Even if I have to wait some 30 years. This life keeps getting worse with my mother's sister. Is not the worse childhood I had, but it stills sucks. After that with a self-called 'Dark lord' terrorizing a small community of magical people things don't get easier.

After seeing some of my lifetimes of being Supreme Ruler, King, Overlord or Dictator, I am not impressed. The so called 'magical world' that was really just a small community with illusions of grandeur hiding behind my underfed and skinny ass was really not warming me up to them either. With the supposed grandfatherly figure planning my death, hiding facts, and generally being a manipulative and stupid old man was really irritating. Got to give him my grudging respect for being a master planer but still, he leaves much to be desired as a leader. His black and white frame of mind would have caused him a lot of trouble in my time. But sadly, I can't blame it all on other people, even him. I should have studied more, practiced more, and generally learned more about the world I was living.

In one of the memories something about the red cat eyes and insane manner of Riddle makes me think that the bastards infested him. I have seen it done before after all and the way the prophecy conveniently points at me makes me think the bastards created (or guided) a mad dog and then pointed at my general direction. Have to think on it later, maybe there was some important clue about the time or place.

I could have done so many things, change so much if only. But that's the story about most of my lives. If only I would have. If only I wouldn't have. I like to think that with each lifetime I'm more competent, more decisive, make better choices, but that's just my personal opinion. Some would be of the opinion that ruling your own planet and/or galaxy is a big no-no. Being a hero is overrated anyway.

As Harry I didn't even get to see a different country or have sex until I was married. Things don't get better in my next lifetime. I was born Louis Pierr to a poor French family in 1956 and died of an infection in 1961. Five years. I only lived five years.

Well there goes the theory that I'm some super powerful, all knowing and indestructible being. I can die just as easily as the next baby. The fact that I have the potential to do something apparently doesn't mean I will. The only difference is that I will not be part of the natural flow of energy after I 'die'.

That's...disappointing to tell you the truth, I was kind of hopping for some extra especial advantage over the bloody bastards that planned the end of the universe. And just to have enough energy out of the destruction to build their own universe. Selfish bloody bastards. Considering that epiphany I guess I did a pretty good job as Harry. I was a normal kid after all.

Next is my intended life. Charles Gustav, no last name, born in Germany 1926. Second child of a one fourths veela mother that was disinherited by her family for being 'ugly with no magical powers' and a squib Jew father. Abigael or Abby as we called her, my older sister by two years. She got more of the veela heritage. With my mother's blonde hair, perfect skin and my father's soft brown eyes, she made a beautiful picture. Not veela perfect, but in a sea of normal's she was breath taking. She also had slight mental problems, nothing incapacitating, she just acted a few years younger than she was.

I think that being part veela helped her a little. My family lived in the country, mostly because of necessity. My sister could not control her allure and did not understand that people wanted to harm her. My mother also had panic attacks when in public. My mother, Annabelle, was cast out of her family at 16. Being 1/4 veela meant she had plain blonde hair, weak allure, her father's green eyes, could not change and overall was fairly normal to them. This made her a target to the others. Of course this still meant she was beautiful, even more so if you ask me.

It was her imperfections that I loved. Her dimples, beauty marks, slightly round face, petite frame, really curly hair and her too plumb limps that made her stand out, be unique. Her parents mostly shielded her from the others cruelness. After her fall out with her family that came with the death of her parents, she moved to Germany. Shortly after her arrival a band of boys tried or did rape her; I was never told exactly what happened. My father's mother saved her. Grandma told me she never really got over the experience.

My father had to be her friend for two years before she could be in a room alone with him. Three years dating before she consented to marry him and four before my sister was born. I have always though my father would have calmly waited his whole life for her. He was a good man and better father. Frank, he was the son of a squib and a squib himself. They never saw the need to invent a last name for themselves.

We had a pretty good life until I was about eight. I'm guessing we lasted that long because we were pretty far away from most towns and not many people knew about us. My father and me were sent to concentration camps. I now understand Jake, I would have preferred more than anything not to remember. My father died and I escaped using luck and magic. Traumatized, I when looking for the rest of my family. Years later I found out that when they tried to use my mother and sister as prostitutes my mother killed Abby and then killed herself. Not before setting the place on fire, killing hundreds.

When I started to get into politics, naively thinking I could prevent this from ever happening, someone broke into my apartment and killed me. Last thing I saw was red eyes and blond hair.

Without mercy the memories continue. I have not reached the first. Curiously my first life was as a Spartan. A good hardworking life of a warrior. I died when I lead a few hundred to an ambush of an army before they could reach our land.

Now the next part. I want to be Charles in the summer of 1931, four years before everything went downhill. I was four, Abby was celebrating her seventh birthday and mother was teaching us to play the piano and the violin. The summer Abby tried to 'save' a baby horse and father got hurt trying to get her out of the mother's way.

That summer.

Anytime now.

Maybe I have to do something else? Try harder? Be more specific? Ok then. The day early summer where mother asked me what second language I wanted to learn.

Edited by Timewhisper, March 1, 2012