Back to Beginning
This story is a work of fiction. All the characters, names and places belong to their respective owners.
Synopsis
It was a small, seemingly insignificant thing, but it altered the course of history and the sequence of the events to come. With the last battle lost, everyone he ever knew and cherished perished – killed. It was all because he had failed to return in time; failed to fulfill his prophecy. But was it the case? Let's return to the beginning. Maybe it was the end?
– [Back to Beginning] –
Footsteps clattered casually down the hall, approaching his position.
His weary and dull green eyes slowly opened when the footsteps had stopped. The gloomy and murky darkness surrounded him remained unchanged. No light had touched his flesh for many years in this unholy place, and the cold and dampness of the floor below spread over his paled, malnourished body told him this was not a nightmare.
As much as he'd tried, he could not be awakened from this reality.
How long had it been? The daily scratches and scribbles upon the floor had stopped when no room was left to carve with his fingernails. It did not matter anymore. And even if he could somehow see daylight again, there wasn't anything left to fight for – to live for. Everyone was gone and buried.
He was alone, isolated and likely forgotten.
The usual howling beyond the enchanted iron bars came like clockwork, invading his ears throughout his unending imprisonment. But their monstrous owners had left him be a decade or two earlier. There was nothing else they could be sucked from his psych, and he could not die because of what he had become.
"Horcux," a calm voice commented outside his cage when the howling vanished down the corridor like whispering winds. The void told him what was on his mind, and it was right. He became a living Horcux from that night. Since then, he was no longer mortal. "How are you feeling today? Did you not sleep? It is required each day from what I understand."
He did not response.
"Today is the day that the Great Lord triumphed over evil," the young man with silvery eyes and hair continued. "Everywhere in the Wizarding World celebrated this monumental day. Everywhere except here, Harry." The man paused. "It is the day that your friends stood up to the Great Lord, isn't it?"
Harry remained silence.
"Where were you when the Great Lord strikes you friends down for the insolences? I've heard that you went to fight the Great Lord alone and lost before the great purge," the young man said. "I've heard he left you there in the wood, far from those you're supposed to help."
Harry did not make any comment.
"The Great Lord believed you had died in the duel, but he was wrong, so wrong. You survived, you still lived. You're the boy who lived – twice. An impressive feat considering no one had survived a duel with him to this very day."
Harry remained unresponsive. Long ago, the moniker brought him great awe and fame. Now, it was a reminder of his failure. He had failed at the simplest thing imaginable. The consequences that followed broke his will.
Harry replayed the event from those many years ago again like it was yesterday. After he was defeated – seemingly killed – Voldemort left him where he had fell and continued the assault on Hogwarts. The vile wizard and his Death Eaters slaughtered everyone at school without a shred of mercy. And by the time he dragged himself back to Hogwarts despite his injuries, it was already too late.
"If you didn't give up and fought to your last breath despite the odds stacked against you," the young man continued. "Perhaps they would be cheering for you now. It's strange that how a single, seemingly unimportant decision changed the course of the world."
The young man smiled. He leaned closer to the iron bar. "Maybe I shouldn't have told the Great Lord to leave you there to rot like all those that fought him deserved. He wanted to show everyone your body if I did not advised him. To me, it seemed unnecessary to do since they would defy him regardless of the evidence presented. Even if they saw your mangled body, they would fight in your memory, and they did to a bitter end even if you're not there to witness it."
Harry looked up. The young man matched his gaze.
"I still remember choking the life out of your friend," the young man said and raised his hand. He then closed his palm and clenched it tightly. "She cried for your name. They all did, one after another at the end. You never showed up in their last moment."
Harry glared at the man. Anger and regret swirled in his eyes. Those green colors regained their vigor, even if slightly while being surrounded by darkness.
"Don't look at me that way, Harry. I am not the cause of this," the young man asserted. He stepped back from the iron bars. "You were. And if you could go back then, would you do thing differently? Would you still go after the Great Lord so he could kill you knowing full well that you're a Horcrux?"
Harry knew that he would. He was willing to die for the cause just like everyone else in the war. If he did not do what was required, Voldemort could not be defeated. Sadly, he could not be killed. Death did not take him. Death refused to take him.
The young man tossed something golden into the cell. "Or perhaps you went further than that, stopping everything before the tragedy even started? This special item was once given to your friend to help her in her study. I supposed it only right to give it to you after all these years."
Harry slowly reached out and picked up the object near his leg. The item was a small circular pendant. It felt familiar in his hand. He had held it once before when he was still attending Hogwarts. He had used it to save his godfather from a certain fate.
"Why…?" Harry asked and gripped the pendant tightly. He looked up at the young man who had been his only human company for so many years. "Nexus…! Tell me why!?"
"It's boring," Nexus said and waved his hand dismissively. "The reason I'm not out there and celebrating like the rest because a hero needs an equally powerful villain. How I miss the struggle between good and evil. To fight and die for what they believed in."
Nexus sighed. "No one dared to stand up and challenged the Great Lord after the last war, fearing that he would slaughter their family and make them watch. They had given up the hope for freedom. Even if they did not know it, they are more of a slave than the people they subjugated. At least, the mud-blood still struggle on to live no matter how harsh their lives had become."
"Harry," Nexus continued. "You're the last person to openly defy him, but he will not kill you. As long as you're still alive, he could never die. And you can't die naturally because of what you had become when you became the owner of three very special items. There is no simply solution to this unless you go back to the time before he truly becomes an immortal."
Harry wondered why he could not die for many years. The answer seemed to elude him. "What do you mean what I had become…?"
"You might not realize it, but more than a century had passed, Harry," Nexus said and turned away from the cell. He walked away casually. "Besides your facial hair, you looked the same as always. Immortality is a curse. You don't age. You don't die. And without death, you're not living."
"Wait, Nexus!" Harry called out, but Nexus was gone. He reached his hand out, but a Dementor stopped him. The foul creature hovered over him, sucking out the last drop of happiness dwelling within his soul before hovering away.
Harry collapsed on the floor, gasping. His spirit was drained, but his will was not. His hand gripped the time-turner tightly. He would use this given chance. He would change the past. "A century… one turn per hour…"
The longest period anyone could travel back without serious chance of disrupting the timeline itself was approximately five hours. Five hours was too short. He needed to rewind years, decades, and if Nexus was forthcoming, century!
A million turn was not an impossible task. All Harry had left was time; an eternity worth.
Harry turned the hour glass held within the pendant's circular rings. He continued to turn without break, without sleep, without eating or drinking. He slowly lost track of the number of turn he had completed, but he didn't stop. He kept turning and turning and turning until he ran out of energy.
The hour glass began to rotate on its own, undoing history. The golden rings spun faster and faster with each completed revolution to the point that they began to warp from magical stresses. His surrounding remained unchanged as far as he could see. The dementers zoomed back and forth outside his cage an alarming speed, and eventually, the cage itself vanished like an illusion.
The prison he was incarcerated for so long disappeared as it was built years after the war to contain him and suppressed his magical power for an eternity. For the first time in more than a century, Harry was finally free, unbounded and unchained. His bottled up magic erupted and washed over the area while the warm sunlight bathed him in its sincerity. He sucked in the fresh air.
His green eyes regained its vigor. He was no longer the boy who lived. He was the man who could not die. He was the Master of Death.
– Back to Beginning –
With his magic unrestricted, Harry reached out his hand and called his wand. The elder wand manifested within his fingers from wherever it was in this time and place. Dumbledore was dumbfounded when his wand switched allegiance in his grasp and disappeared. The wand recognized Harry as its current master even if he was from another time and place. With the wand in his hand, Harry instantly warped to where Voldemort was.
Harry had made up his mind at the beginning his unending imprisonment. He would kill Voldemort the first instant he was free. And he would continue to do so for each time Voldemort was resurrected until every single Death Eaters were eradicated from the face of the planet. There would be no hesitation on his part. He would wage a one man war against the world even if he had to.
The place Harry teleported to was an old house in a simple neighborhood. He immediately scanned his surrounding for the object of his hatred, the Dark Lord. Voldemort was nowhere to be seen. Unable to use magic for century had made Harry rusty. The knowledge did not dissuade him from taking the fight to Voldemort, however.
Harry had waited for so long for this moment that it consumed him. And with every shred of happiness sapped from his mind and spirit by the Dementers for many years, the desire of vengeance burned ever brighter. "Where are you? Where are you, you coward!?"
His wand gripped tightly as magic flowed through it. It was so much that the elder wand began to crack and glowed within the opened seam.
When Harry heard an anguish scream, he snapped towards the staircase. Without hesitation, he rushed up the stair and saw a body unmoving on the ground. It was a man staring at the ceiling with a wand in his hand, and the man looked oddly familiar.
Harry blinked and touched the man's face. His hand trembled. "Dad…?"
The dead man before him was James Potter, his father. His father had died right before him again, and despite the amount of magic dwelling within him, he remained powerless to stop it.
"Voldemort!" Harry roared and charged down the hallway. He would not allow history to repeat itself on his younger self no matter the price he had to pay. He burst through the doorway and into his room the moment Voldemort raised the wand at his mother.
"Avada Kedavra!" The cloak man called out. He fired a greenish magical bolt at a young woman who was shielding her child with her body.
Without hesitation, Harry leaped between them and took the brunt of the killing curse while unleashing a spell at Voldemort, powerful enough to send the dark wizard flying against the wall. The killing curse knocked the wind out of Harry's lungs and sent him spiraling on the ground. He had forgotten how much it hurt when the curse tried to rip his soul from his body. The pain would stop eventually.
"Voldemort!" Harry roared and pulled himself off the ground while magic flowed into his elder wand in volume and potency. Before Voldemort could reorient himself from the shock, Harry lashed out once more. Voldemort was sent through the wall with another magical blast.
"Stay here," Harry told his mother, who was speechless. Without paying her any more attention, Harry jumped through the hole and landed onto the grass.
"Avada Kedavra!" Voldemort roared. The green bolt impacted against Harry, pushing him back. "Avada Kedavra!"
"Is that the only spell you ever used?" Harry growled and shook off the blast like it was nothing. Another slammed into him, pushing him a step back. The fourth one that came was caught in his bare hand and crushed out of existence. Greenish flames oozed out between his fingers when he did.
"What are you!?" Voldemort was utterly shock. No one had survived a killing curse before. That was the reason why it was called a killing curse. It could kill without fail.
"I am your death, Tom Riddle," Harry responded and casted Expelliarmus, disarming the dark lord in his surprise. He then blasted Voldemort with Sectum Sempra and Incendio, slashing and burning the young man simultaneously. The agony did not last since Voldemort quickly healed himself without resorting to his wand which was lying on the grass.
Voldemort roared angrily afterwards. And knowing the opponent he faced was stronger than he could imagine, he tried to escape by the turning into black mist and flying away. If he still had his wand in his hand, he would have use a teleportation spell instead.
"Gravitos," Harry casted and Voldemort was slammed into the ground with an invisible force. His body felt like they weight several thousand tons. He could barely move a finger. "Where are you going, Dark Lord? Wingardium Leviosa!"
"Ah!" Voldemort was pulled to Harry, but before he got anywhere close, Harry blasted him away with the simplest spell he learned in Hogwarts – Stupefy.
"How dare you do something like this to me? Me!?" Voldemort shouted vexingly as he pulled himself up. "I am the most powerful wizard that ever lived!"
"Shut up!" Harry flicked his wand, slashing Voldemort throat.
Voldemort gurgled and tried to heal himself, but his arms were severed with two more slashes. He fell to the ground on his knee while bleeding profusely. He could not believe he was defeated so easily. He who was the most powerful wizard of his generation on par with Dumbledore lost to someone he had never seen before. "Who are you!?"
"I told you. I am your death. You created me on this night many, many years ago."
"Impossible!" Voldemort was confused. How could he create someone so powerful without knowing it?
"And you're not the strongest, Tom," Harry responded as he raised his wand towards the dark lord. The elder wand glowed majestically with incredible magic. Magic that Voldemort would kill for. "You're just a big bully! And bully need to be teach a lesson."
Harry flexed his wand, slashing pieces of flesh off Voldemort, causing him to scream in agony. "You think death is the worst thing ever? Let me show you how wrong that is," he added as he unleashed a barrage of slashes. It was to the point that the ground around Voldemort was dyed with red.
"Inferius," Harry said and turned what remained of Voldemort into cinder along with much of the lawn.
It felt good to finally killed Voldemort, but knowing that Death could not claim Vodemort without all the pieces including himself, he would have to do it again and again. He was willing to do that even if he was condemned to purgatory.
Harry turned towards the small house and saw his mother cradling his younger self – a baby – through the opening in the wall. A mixture of relief, awe and fear was plastered on her face.
Harry smiled at her before falling forwards and onto the ground. Since he was an immortal Horcrux, he felt Voldemort's demise at his own hand. Adding onto his own fatigue and years of malnourishment, he was at his limit.
"I think I'm going to sleep for a while," Harry muttered softly and finally earned the peaceful sleep he had been wanting for so long.
– End –
Ideas are great. Ideas are intriguing. Ideas should be expanded upon, spanning thousands and thousands of pages. Hopefully someone will because I'm not that creative, apparently. Good job guys, ^^b. This is a challenge of sort. You can take this idea and run with it in your own way.
And yes to my supporter and sponsors, this is a smutty fiction starting from next chapter with Harry kicking everyone's asses with some tortures here and there. The pairing is just Harry(older)xLily. You know it was coming the moment James was killed off!